Qatar is set to kick off the much-awaited local honey and dates festival at Al Mazrouah Yard, one of the seasonal vegetable markets next to Umm Salal Central Market. ⁠
⁠The festival is expected to take place every day from 7am to 2pm from 29 December to 5 January 2023.⁠

Date: December 29, 2022

Time: 7am - 2pm

Location: Al-Mazroua Square

Free for all

What to expect

The festival eyes to promote local agricultural produce, attracting a large number of visitors and shoppers at seasonal vegetable markets.

Local farms have been receiving tremendous supports by the Ministry of Municipality to enhance their products to raise self-sufficiency rate of the country in vegetables, dates and honey

Three types of honey is produced in Qatar – Sidr, Samur and Al Rabi according to the seasonal flowers. Sidr honey, which is being produced in large quantity in Qatar, has the highest demand locally.

The Agricultural Affairs Department is running a programme to develop beekeeping activity in the country within the national project for honey bees, to help farms increase and diversify their income.

The department has been working since 2016 to localise and multiply the breeding of queen bees in the country to produce a strain that lives in harmony with the Qatari environment after undergoing natural selection and adaptation to the environment. With the support of the national project for beekeeping, the local honey production increased over 10.4 tonnes in 2018 from over 6.3 tonnes in 2017. The project helped produce about 31 tonnes of honey of the nectar of flowering plants of Sidr, Al Rabi and Al Samur from 2013 to 2018.

There are two honey harvesting seasons in Qatar. Sidr honey is harvested in November and Al Rabi and Al Samur honey is harvested in May. The Agricultural Affairs Department provides beehives with all the other necessary accessories to the farmers.  They are also provided training on latest techniques of bee-farming. The farms were also provided by the ministry special packaging material to market their products so as to attract the customers.

A local beekeeper said the Ministry has distributed complete tools and equipment for bee keeping and has provided various platforms for marketing the products.

He added that all local farms interested in beekeeping were provided beehives, dresses, containers for storing and other necessary things free of cost, to encourage them to launch the business.  There are hundreds of local bee farms. Many of them have doubled their production with the support of the Ministry.