Temperature Anomalies and Structural Change in Global and Mediterranean Apiculture Systems

While climate change is a significant pressure point for pollinators and honeybees, its long-term relationship with managed honeybee colonies and honey production remains unclear and context sensitive. This study, using FAOSTAT data from 1961 to 2024, examined the relationships between land surface temperature anomalies and the number of registered beehives, the constant-price honey production value, and the normalized honey production value per colony, both globally and specifically for 18 Mediterranean countries. To differentiate between long-term structural trends and short-term temperature relationships, correlation, regression, bootstrap confidence interval, temperature series sensitivity analysis, cross-correlation function, and normalized index analyses were used together. The study results show strong long-term co-movement between temperature anomalies and recorded beekeeping indicators at the global and Mediterranean scale in the level series; however, first-differenced (year-to-year) analyses show this association weakens substantially and, for Mediterranean honey production value, reverses sign, indicating that the level-series correlations are driven largely by common long-term trends. The relationship between temperature anomalies and beekeeping indicators shows a context-dependent structure among Mediterranean countries. The findings show that the increase in colony size does not always coincide with the increase in the constant-price honey production value per colony; in some cases, these two indicators can move in different directions. This indicates the need for an analytical decomposition of the dynamics of quantitative growth and economic production value per colony in the beekeeping sector.