Ethiopia Honey: When the Bees Went Silent

They are building that case in the aftermath of a catastrophe.

The silence that fell on Tigray

Two hundred and thirty-one thousand beehives destroyed. The bees did not come back for harvest.

On November 4, 2020 — harvest season, when beekeepers climb trees at night to extract comb from traditional log hives — war reached the highlands of northern Ethiopia. Over the next two years, the Tigray conflict displaced 1.8 million people and inflicted damage measured not only in human suffering but in a specific, peer-reviewed unit of apicultural destruction: 231,985 beehives, looted, burned, or abandoned across the region.

A COLOSS colony monitoring survey published in Insects in 2024 confirmed what the beekeepers already knew. Colony losses in Tigray reached 66.4 percent — nearly three times the rate in Oromia to the south. Eighty-two percent of those losses were attributed directly to the war itself: not drought, not disease, not the varroa mite, but soldiers who stripped factories, cut trees for firewood during an electricity blockade, and scattered the bees that had fed families for generations.

The premium white honey of Tigray — derived from Hypoestes forskaolii, a sage-family plant that produces a creamy, granular honey priced at 1,600 birr per kilogram — had earned Slow Food Presidium recognition. Italian importers had discovered it. The sixteen-member Selam Association in Wukro had built a multi-purpose extraction workshop with Italian technical support. All of this sat in the devastation zone. The silence was literal: the hives were empty.

What grew in the ruin’s shadow

Ethiopia’s honey sector predates the war by millennia. Traditional beekeeping is documented in highland communities as early as the first millennium. Tej — the honey wine that is the country’s national drink — appears in the Kebra Nagast, the thirteenth-century sacred text. The Amharic word for wine is t’ej; grape wine must be specified separately as wayn t’ej. The very name Lalibela — Ethiopia’s most sacred pilgrimage site — means “he eats honey” in the Agew language.

But heritage alone built nothing that the world could find. Africa’s largest honey producer — fifty to eighty-six thousand tonnes annually by international estimates, though Ethiopian government sources now claim production approaching 326,000 tonnes — exported less than two percent of its output in any year before the war. The paradox is structural: domestic prices consistently exceed international prices, the unbranded tej economy absorbs fifty to eighty percent of marketed honey, and there is no internationally accredited testing laboratory anywhere in the country. Exporters must ship samples to Germany or Uganda at prohibitive cost.

The branded layer that exists today is thin, recent, and almost entirely driven by outsiders who arrived with frameworks from other industries.

Four regions, four characters

Oromia accounts for the largest share of national production — its southwestern forests in Kaffa, Sheka, and Gera contain more than half of Ethiopia’s remaining montane woodland and are the birthplace of wild Coffea arabica. Here, beekeepers climb thirty to ninety feet into the canopy to place traditional log hives, and conservation creates a feedback loop: forest supports bees, honey income protects forest. The UNESCO-designated Kaffa Biosphere Reserve alone spans 760,000 hectares. Participatory forest management cooperatives have driven deforestation rates down to 0.5 percent in managed areas versus 2.6 percent outside them.

Tigray, before the war, produced about eight percent of national volume but commanded outsized cultural and commercial significance through its white honey. Recovery programmes since the November 2022 ceasefire — run by UNDP, CARE, and a Czech-funded initiative — have distributed modern hives yielding twenty kilograms per harvest versus five from traditional designs. Individual beekeepers document the math precisely: one prominent producer saw output fall from six hundred kilograms per year to one hundred — a ninety-five percent income collapse — before slowly rebuilding. The Tigray Bureau of Agriculture estimates three to five years for meaningful restoration, and that estimate assumes the trees grow back. Much of the forage base was cut for firewood during a two-year electricity blockade. Recovery of the hives is a faster problem to solve than recovery of the forest.

The Bale Mountains in the southeast harbour a different tradition. In the Harenna Forest, customary law governs territorial rights — each beekeeper maintains a designated forest zone, creating de facto conservation areas. Rira Honey, a Slow Food heritage product from Arsi-Oromo communities, has a pale hazelnut colour with fruity and malt notes.

Addis Ababa and the nearby city of Adama form the commercial nerve centre. Processing, packaging, branding, export — the infrastructure sits here, even if the honey does not grow here.

What the databases miss

The Ethiopian honey sector is invisible to institutional capital for reasons that compound rather than cancel each other out.

The language barrier is the first. The richest business press coverage exists in Amharic, on platforms and in Telegram channels that no English-language industry monitor indexes. The founders with the strongest stories — the processors in Adigrat and Mekelle whose factories sat in the war zone — have no English-language web presence whatsoever. Their names do not appear in any international directory.

The analytical barrier is the second. Honey occupies an awkward position between agriculture and consumer goods. Agricultural analysts track commodity flows — tonnes, tariffs, phytosanitary compliance. Consumer brand analysts track revenues, distribution channels, brand equity. Ethiopian honey falls between both desks. The result: neither discipline documents the founders who are turning bulk commodity into branded, terroir-identified products.

The structural barrier is the third. Ninety-six percent of Ethiopian beekeeping uses traditional hives. The sector looks, from the outside, like subsistence agriculture. The branded layer — the processors with ISO certification, the diaspora founders with DTC e-commerce, the conservation entrepreneurs linking reforestation to honey income — is invisible not because it is hidden but because the analytical frame through which outsiders view the sector cannot resolve it.

The intelligence exists, scattered across peer-reviewed journals in Heliyon and Insects, across UNDP project reports and Slow Food Presidia filings, across Amharic-language Telegram channels and Ethiopian business press. It has not been assembled anywhere.

Those who stayed, those who arrived

The first commercial processors emerged two decades ago. Beza Mar Agro-Industry in Adama built a thousand-tonne processing facility, achieved organic certification and ISO 22000, and scaled honey exports from five to one hundred and fifty tonnes in three years — catalysing the sector’s EU market access in the process. Apinec, a Dutch-Ethiopian joint venture in the Kaffa zone, put five hundred modern hives alongside two thousand outgrower farmers and secured Fairtrade certification. A processor in Adigrat built four hundred and fifty tonnes of capacity in Tigray’s eastern zone — then watched the war arrive at its doorstep.

The terroir wave came later, and it came from the outside.

The pharmacist who read the label

Seble Makonnen trained at Butler University in Indiana as a pharmacist. She returned to Addis Ababa not to practise pharmacy but to answer a question that had been forming since she left: why was honey from different parts of Ethiopia so different in texture, colour, and taste — and why did no one sell it that way?

In 2016 she founded Lal The Honey Company. The name is Amharic for “above” or “superior” — a deliberate statement about where Ethiopian honey should be positioned in the global market. She began sourcing from four distinct regions: Tigray White, with its creamy granular texture from Hypoestes forskaolii; Bale Dark, the amber honey from the Harenna Forest in the southeast; Gera, a lighter variety from the southwestern montane forests; and Gambella, from the western lowlands near the Sudanese border. Each variety is sold by named origin, at prices three to five times the commodity rate. The product line reads like a coffee roaster’s menu — because that is exactly the model she had in mind.

The pharmacy training was not incidental. Makonnen applied the same analytical precision that a pharmacist brings to compound formulations: pollen analysis to verify botanical provenance, moisture content testing to ensure stability, label claims that can withstand scrutiny. She sells through Amazon and her own direct-to-consumer site, with packaging designed to sit beside premium specialty food products rather than alongside bulk honey in the baking aisle.

Then the war disrupted her primary sourcing region. Tigray White — her most distinctive variety, the one most clearly differentiated from anything available elsewhere — came from the very highlands where 231,985 beehives were destroyed. Navigating that disruption without an internationally accredited testing laboratory inside Ethiopia, without a functioning supply chain in a conflict zone, while trying to maintain price points that justify the terroir premium: this is the operational reality behind what appears, from the outside, to be a straightforward import brand.

The coffee consultant who stayed for the honey

Ariana Day Yuen arrived in Ethiopia as a TechnoServe Fellow working on coffee. She grew up in Hong Kong, completed her education in the United States, and came to Ethiopia’s southwestern highlands — the Kaffa, Gera, and Majang forests — expecting to spend her fellowship analysing coffee value chains. She noticed something the coffee world had overlooked: the same forest canopy that sheltered wild Coffea arabica also supported extraordinary honey.

Nobody was naming it. Nobody was differentiating a Gera forest honey from a Kaffa forest honey, the way a coffee buyer distinguishes Yirgacheffe from Sidamo. The entire premium tier was absent.

Yuen built what the coffee industry had built over decades: a sensory analysis framework. Her Honey Sensory Analysis Wheel contains nearly one hundred flavour descriptors — modelled explicitly on the Specialty Coffee Association’s flavour wheel and the Wine Aroma Wheel. Her varieties have names that place them precisely in the landscape: Geteme (light, floral, from Schefflera abyssinica), Grawa (dark, buckwheat-like), Bissana (golden, with rose and citrus notes). Pollen analysis at the Holeta Bee Research Center outside Addis verifies botanical provenance. The result is a honey product that a sommelier can describe with the same vocabulary used for wine.

The brand — Forested Foods, sold under the Maryiza label — operates on an explicit conservation logic. The forest must remain intact for the honey to exist; the honey income provides the economic justification for keeping the forest intact. This feedback loop is the same one that sustainable coffee certification programmes have attempted to engineer, but here it is structural rather than certified: without old-growth forest, there is no Geteme honey, period. Products have appeared on the menu at The Modern in New York, one of the first high-end American restaurants to treat Ethiopian honey the way it treats Ethiopian coffee.

The limo driver and the seven-month permit

Gize Negussie drove a limousine in Virginia and ran a teff beer business on the side. When COVID arrived in 2020, the beer business collapsed. He had time, a family recipe his mother had taught him, and a calculation: honey wine required no grain supply chain, no brewing equipment calibrated for teff, and no distribution network that depended on bars and restaurants that were all closed.

He pivoted to tej. The product existed. The market existed — in the diaspora and increasingly beyond it. What did not exist was a legal category.

What followed took seven months. Federal permit. Virginia state license. Local Alexandria approvals. The regulatory framework for honey wine in the United States is not designed for tej — it is designed for grape wine or mead, categories that do not map cleanly onto an Ethiopian fermented honey beverage made with gesho, the native Ethiopian buckthorn that gives tej its distinctive bitter finish. Negussie navigated each layer of the bureaucracy that had no box for what he was making.

Negus Winery opened in Alexandria, Virginia in October 2023. It is America’s first Ethiopian honey wine tasting room. It ships to all fifty states. The name — Negus — is the Amharic title for king, a word that carries the full weight of Ethiopian imperial history and, in the diaspora context, a deliberate act of cultural pride.

He is not alone in the diaspora tej renaissance. In Frankfurt, a woman whose great-grandmother taught her the recipe adapted it into Europe’s first commercially distributed tej, selling to Ethiopian restaurants across Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. In Sonoma, a Berkeley graduate named Ayele Solomon built Bee D’Vine, a conservation-linked honey wine designed to save the Kaffa rainforest: four Shark Tank sharks offered him $750,000. The deal never closed. The brand persists, selling on Ethiopian Airlines and through a direct-to-consumer site. In the Bay Area, in Tucson, in Minneapolis — a diaspora generation is bottling a two-thousand-year-old drink for modern palates.

The drink that predates the nation

Tej (ጠጅ) is not merely a beverage. Its roots are traceable to the Aksumite Empire two thousand years ago. Court tej-makers held official positions; the quality of a nobleman’s honey wine was a marker of wealth. Today, tej bets (ጠጅ ቤት) — honey wine houses — are ubiquitous social institutions, recognisable by the flask-shaped berele (ብርሌ) vessels in their windows. Most are owned by women. Inside, azmaris sing improvised double entendres to the masenqo and krar.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church mandates one hundred and eighty fasting days per year — among the strictest of any Christian tradition. During fasts, adherents abstain from all animal products. But honey is permitted. This religious dimension ensures stable year-round demand regardless of economic conditions, and binds honey to Ethiopian identity at a depth that no branding exercise can replicate.

The tej economy absorbs the majority of Ethiopian honey production — and it does so invisibly, in an unbranded, untaxed, informal market that outbids exporters. Any institutional assessment that ignores this absorption channel will fundamentally misunderstand why Africa’s largest producer exports almost nothing.

The window and what it means

Between October 2023 and May 2025, more institutional infrastructure was created for Ethiopian honey than in the previous two decades combined. The Ethiopian Apiculture Development Association formed from three predecessor bodies, giving the sector a unified voice for the first time. UNIDO launched a 1.8-million-euro quality-compliance programme targeting EU and Norwegian market access. icipe’s MaYEA programme began enrolling one million young people — eighty percent of them women — into commercial beekeeping across seven regions.

Most consequentially, the Institute of Ethiopian Standards launched a comprehensive revision of honey standards in 2025, pushing for international recognition of Ethiopian high-moisture honeys — particularly those derived from Schefflera species — comparable to the regulatory exception that transformed New Zealand’s Manuka honey from a niche curiosity into a multi-billion-dollar premium category. A “Wild Origin Ethiopia” umbrella brand has been proposed, with mono-floral sub-brands and QR-code traceability.

The coffee parallel is instructive. Ethiopian beans followed an arc from anonymous commodity to globally recognised origins — Yirgacheffe, Sidamo, Harrar — over roughly fifteen years. Honey is at the very beginning of that arc. The terroir language is in place. The founders have arrived. The institutional scaffolding is being erected.

But the window is specific. The MOYESH programme — icipe’s first youth beekeeping initiative — enrolled 245,071 young people across five years and generated $62 million in honey and silk enterprise revenue, creating 13,063 enterprises. Its successor, MaYEA, targets one million. The scale of that pipeline will reshape the competitive landscape by 2028 in ways that are not yet visible to any external analyst.

Climate-change modelling projects up to nineteen percent habitat reduction for the white honey source plant Hypoestes forskaolii by 2090. The war recovery is fragile — three to five years minimum, with no guarantee. And a slower-burning threat compounds both: pesticide imports nearly tripled between 2001 and 2013, driving colony losses so severe in the Central Rift Valley that half of beekeepers abandoned the practice entirely. Organochlorine residues in honey samples now threaten the country’s de facto organic positioning — and its EU export eligibility. The founders who survived the silence — who rebuilt hives from the ashes of war, who applied coffee protocols to honey, who bottled their mothers’ recipes in strip-mall tasting rooms — are building the brands now. The market for intelligence about them does not yet exist.

It will.

The brands have been here all along. The window to name an origin story closes when someone else finishes writing it.

Last updated: April 5, 2026