Migrating to Anatolia

A beekeeper's reverse migration plan along the Anatolia–Mecsek route, in which the hives stay put and the landscape sets off.

A beekeeper is a migratory creature. In spring we head for the acacia groves, in early summer we visit the linden forests, and then we look for a shady spot at the edge of the sunflower fields. The hives are always on the move, because honey is made where flowers bloom. We know this genre well. What we are only now beginning to understand is that, driven by climate change, the whole country set off some time ago, and according to the map it has set its course for Anatolia.

First stop: an interview that stuck in my head

In an interview with Telex, climate scientist Balázs Nagy explains that Hungary's changing climate is not exactly heading for the pleasant, predictable Mediterranean type, but for the dry continental, Anatolian one. Around the Mediterranean there are few surprises: winters are mild and wet, summers hot and dry, and if it gets too hot, the sea is there to cool you down. In Anatolia, winter may not come at all, or it may strike with enormous snowstorms, while summer is mercilessly dry and hot, but a violent thunderstorm or even a flash flood can arrive at any moment. Spring and autumn exist only as samples.

As a beekeeper, I stopped reading for a moment at this point. This year followed the scenario in the article uncannily closely. After a biting January, spring arrived early and the plants raced ahead, and then, by the time all the fruit trees had burst into bloom almost at once, the frosts suddenly returned. The acacia flowered ten days earlier than usual, but we escaped the "Ice Saints", the late frosts of mid-May, and the honey flow turned out relatively well. May and the first half of June passed quietly, then a heatwave set in suddenly and peaked in a heat dome. Even so, the linden and the sunflower yielded quite well. After the sunflower bloom the heat came back, with an even crueller heat dome and severe drought. In fact, from mid-June to the end of September barely a drop of rain fell: streams and ponds dried up, the flowers burned, and for weeks pollen foraging almost stopped. It is now early November, and the drought has hardly eased. October's 30 mm of rain made no real difference. The colonies have gone into winter several seams of bees slimmer than usual. Is this Anatolia already?

We can survive the odd bad year, but we have no ready script for years this extreme and unpredictable. A colony, you see, works ahead. Prompted by mild February sunshine, it starts raising brood and grows at a furious pace, from 20,000 to 60,000 bees in barely three months. If frost returns in April, the populous colony, which reaches its peak just in time for the acacia, finds only frozen acacia blossoms in May, and instead of full honey drums we get to count the swarms hanging in the trees. The scientist's advice is simple: instead of lamenting, we must start adapting. Fine. But adapting to what, exactly?

Second stop: the land of flowers

To see where we are heading, I travelled to Anatolia, at least in my mind, on the wings of the internet. Anatolia, the Asian part of Turkey, is one of the world's richest regions in plant life. Roughly 12,000 plant species live on this area, eight times the size of Hungary, about as many as in the whole of Europe, and nearly a third of them grow nowhere else on Earth. Three great floristic regions meet here: the Mediterranean vegetation of the southern and western coasts, the drought-tolerant Irano-Turanian steppe of the inner plateaus with its cushion-forming milkvetches, and the humid beech and chestnut forests along the Black Sea. During the ice ages the mountains gave plants refuge, and in the isolated valleys new species kept emerging. The ancestors of the tulips, crocuses and hyacinths in our gardens also came to us from here. These plants have made this journey once already, and now it is our turn.

Third stop: even a Turkish migratory beekeeper's lorry gets a flat tyre

Turkey is one of the world's largest honey producers. According to Turkish beekeepers, about three quarters of the world's honey plants can be found there. I take this as a lovely round beekeeper's tall tale, but I don't dispute its direction. The secret lies in a bloom stretched out in space and time. When the flow ends on the southern coasts, it is just beginning on the inner plateaus or the Black Sea highlands, so a migratory beekeeper can follow the bloom from early spring to late autumn.

In the south-west, around Muğla, pine honey is made from the sweet secretion of a scale insect living on the Calabrian pine, and it accounts for about 92% of the world's pine honey production. There is also chestnut, citrus, sunflower, cotton and thyme honey, and with them two native bee races, the Anatolian and the Caucasian, which cope equally well with hot summers and frosty winters.

Still, it is not all a bed of roses there either. In the interior, drought often dries up nectar secretion, the pine forests are ravaged by wildfires that break out regularly, and early warmth and late frost can badly tangle the bloom. The most important lesson, though, is that the plants there evolved over millions of years and, since the ice age, settled into this climate over some ten thousand years. Here, sadly, we have only a few decades for that, and there is no point dreaming that by then abundant chestnut groves and endless fields of cotton and thyme will be pouring out nectar; nor, presumably, will vast pine forests have sprung from the ground by then.

Fourth stop: coming home to a migrating country

According to Hungarian foresters' measurements, in 1961 19% of the country belonged to the driest, forest-steppe climate; by now it is more than 25%, and by the middle of the century it may reach 80%. Models reckon with a transition of roughly 60–80 years, and we are now somewhere in the middle of it, perhaps in its most extreme stage. Trees thirsting from drought weaken, pests wipe them out in patches, and seedlings dry out in their very first drought summer. Yuccas and cacti already survive on the sands of the Great Plain, while our mountain beech forests are dying en masse.

So this migration is not a pleasant spring walk in a violet-scented wood, but rather a forced march, in which the old residents leave before the new ones move in. For a beekeeper, this in-between period is the bumpiest.

“When summer is already Anatolian but the landscape is still Hungarian, our old plants burn out while the new ones have not even settled, so the bees go short of pollen and nectar already during the summer.”

At such times the colony switches into emergency-reserve mode and stops raising brood, just when it should be rearing the generation that will see it through the winter.

Fifth stop: what becomes of the nation's favourite, the acacia, and of the healing linden?

The acacia came from North America; it tolerates sand and heat, and copes with moderate drought too. The tree will very likely survive climate change, and will even spread where forests are dying. The nectar may grow on the tree, but it does not depend on the tree. If spring comes early and bursts in suddenly, the acacia blooms earlier too, right in the season of the April frosts and cold snaps that have lately become as regular as a timetable. If it somehow still escapes the frosts, but the air is too dry at flowering, it secretes no nectar, and the bees find the blossoms empty.

“So our acacia honey, a registered Hungarikum, comes from an American newcomer of a tree that copes splendidly with climate change, only it keeps its honey to itself.”

The linden's prospects are even more tragic. It prefers a cool, humid, well-watered forest microclimate, and in prolonged heat of 35–40 °C its leaves and new shoots are scorched and damaged as early as July. Forecasts say it may survive only in the sheltered valleys of our hill ranges, as a token presence. So linden honey, one of our most distinctive honeys in scent and flavour, which folk medicine recommends for colds and for restful sleep, may become a real rarity. As a beekeeper in the Mecsek, I feel this especially keenly. A little hope comes from the fact that the Mecsek is dominated by silver linden, itself a southern species that tolerates heat better than its relatives. If any linden can hold out, it is this one.

Sixth stop: new plants conquer the fields

The honey plants of arable land fare no better. Rapeseed needs a cool, wet autumn and a moist spring. In a hot spring its three-to-four-week bloom can shrink to a few days. Phacelia's shallow roots find too little moisture in the drying topsoil. The sunflower still holds out with its deep taproot, but the water-saving, early-flowering modern hybrids give less nectar, and beekeepers already complain that their bees bring in hardly anything from some fields.

Their place may be taken by plants seen today mostly in Central Anatolia: yellow sweet clover, which yields nectar even on dry, saline soil; sainfoin, even more drought-tolerant than lucerne; lavender and clary sage fields on the Great Plain, following the example of Tihany; and almond and apricot orchards, whose pollen helps the colonies build up in spring, if the March frosts spare them. On land left fallow, wild thyme and globe thistle may take over. If our southern regions reach the level of southern Anatolia, even irrigated cotton might come into play. Cotton honey from Baranya: it has an interesting taste, at least the words do.

Arrival, or just a short rest?

Beekeeping will not disappear, but it will change considerably. The era of monofloral honeys built on mass flows seems to be ending. The future may belong to special wildflower and herbal honeys that take more work to produce, just as is happening in Inner Anatolia today.

Meanwhile the beekeeper's dilemmas multiply. Which traits should we select for: high yield, or the toughness to survive heat and hunger? Should we keep migrating to the forage sites that have served us well for thirty years, or look for a cooler valley where the tree roots still reach some water? How do we shade and water the bees when the nearby stream dries up by August? Nature's unpredictability has always been part of the trade. Now, however, unpredictability itself has become the new climate.

Migration used to mean that the beekeeper loaded up the hives, followed the bloom and extracted the honey. By now it is no longer clear who is following whom, or whether there will be anything to extract. Is this Anatolia already? Not yet. But after this summer, I think it is within sight.

What do you think the Hungarian landscape will look like in 10–15 years?

If you know someone who cares about the future of nature, or who worries about the effects of climate change themselves, send them this post!

Sources

1. Telex: Hogy milyen lesz a jövőben Magyarország időjárása? Anatólia klímája egy kiváló előkép (interview with climate scientist Balázs Nagy, 1 November 2026, in Hungarian)
2. Arovela: Anatolian Endemic Plants: 12,000 Species Catalog
3. Wikipedia: Flora of Turkey
4. ResearchGate: Traditional Honey Beekeeping in Turkey
5. USDA FAS: The Turkish Beekeeping and Honey Sector (2015)
6. Hungarian Forestry Association: Változó környezet (in Hungarian)
7. Kormany.hu: Megalakult az Erdészeti Klímaadaptációs Fórum (in Hungarian)
8. National Geographic Hungary: Szárazabb magyarországi erdők (in Hungarian)
9. Greenfo: Az erdők jövője a klímaváltozás korában (in Hungarian)
10. Hungarikum: Hungarian acacia
11. Pilis Park Forest: Az akácról: szeressük vagy gyűlöljük?
12. Mezőhír: Öt év alatt megváltozott a magyar nyár (in Hungarian)
13. Portfolio: Megdőltek a hazai klímamodellek előrejelzései (in Hungarian)

Photos: Havva Zorlu / We Animals (gallery). Cover image: hives at an apiary in Kozluk, Batman Province, south-eastern Anatolia (2023).