Bee keeping help to raise the economic status of the rural people especially marginalized sects.

However, productive beekeeping depends on good colony management and richness of the
foraging areas, and in order to promote it as a profitable agricultural occupation, areas with a
good potential for beekeeping must be located and evaluated (FAO, 1987). Furthermore, its
sustainability as a livelihood must also be considered to ensure long-term benefits (Ronald C
Estoque, 2011).

Naturally, Bees are critical to the stability and persistence of many ecosystems, and these
therefore, must be understood and protected. Their pollination services are responsible for global
biodiversity and maintenance of human food supplies (Allen-Wardell et al., 1998). But due to
various environmental problems, they are invariably exposed to various risks and hazard in their
health. Biressaw Serda (2015) studied the bee keeping practice in Ethiopia and stated that the
practices are commonly traditional which is very highly characterized with very low production
and producing only for home consumption. Thus this show how the sector still in unscientifically
sphere of production. Despite being traditional, the sector has a lot of problem which stand
against the bee keeping activity. The problems were indicated by Tessega that beekeeping highly
affected by insecticide usage, bird and disease followed by misuse of pesticides. This is mainly
due to expansion in agricultural production which uses heavy application of pesticides that
adversely affect the beekeeping practices.
The constraints of honey production in Ethiopia vary across a country but major constraints that
hinder beekeeping development in Ethiopia can be stringent rules and conditions set by honey
importing countries, very limited domestic market, only basic knowledge of honey production
and limited access to market information and technologies, unreliable transport, poor storage of
products, lack of quality monitoring and control plan in place and inadequate laboratory facilities
and poor institutional set-up for assuring quality (Biressaw Serda, 2015).

Smart et al. (2016) assessed how land use affects the health and survivability of commercial
honey bee colonies, or apiaries, in the Prairie Pothole Region of North Dakota. Specifically, this
research considered the colony population size, pollen and honey stores, queen status, and the
level of parasites and diseases as measures of colony health. Results suggest that the greater the
area of uncultivated land near an apiary, the greater the level of apiary survival.
The existence of honey bee colony favors the honey production in a given area to great extent.
However honey bee colony may be influenced by numerous factors which may vary from place
to place. Honey bee colonies are impacted by many factors including; temperature, precipitation,
slope, land cover and distance from plants (e.g. Amiri et al. 2011; Amiri & Shariff 2012; Abou-
Shaara et al. 2013b) and those factors play a huge role in determining the suitability for honey
production in the area. Moreover, these factors have special importance to honey bees because
they can greatly impact all the activities of honey bee colonies. For example, temperature is very
important for brood rearing and development (Petz et al. 2004 & Tautz et al. 2003) and foraging
activity (Blazyte-Cereskiene et al. 2010) while vegetation is very important as source of food to
honey bee colonies even at desert areas (Zaitoun & Vorwohl 2003). According to ( Hossam F.
Abou-Shaara, 2015), absence of cultivated areas (vegetation) is one of the predominant factor in
restricting the area that couldn’t help in suitability for honey bee keeping practice in the area.

Some studies on bee keeping suggested that the type of bee keeping practiced would affect the
productivity of the production, for instance, Hossam(2018) studied that migratory bee keeping
can cause for problems such as hybridization between bee colonies, over crowdedness of hives
in a given area and prevalence of diseases. Especially, some diseases can be transported from bee
to another by contact and during foraging activity.

Casey N. Bartoe() revealed that the geographical areas that contain the necessary resources for a
colony to thrive and be productive and therefore shed light on habitats those are suitable for the
insects to colonize. Likewise, areas that are not included in these “suitable habitats” are an
indication of areas requiring additional conservation or restoration efforts to increase honeybee
productivity through resource availability in order to prevent their decline. These findings were
established by an investigation of colony productivity based on hive weight paralleled with land
use and cover, water availability, elevation, sun orientation and aspect ratio, and distance from
power and electrical infrastructure.

Paolo Zoccali assessed the bee keeping suitability in the Mediterranean island without relying on
Analytical hierarchy process- Multi creriteria Decision Making which ignored the influence of
decision maker and expert knowledge on the overall suitability analysis of the study and
produced the result which was based consideration of. Ronald C. Estoque evaluating the bee
keeping suitability in the La Nano, Philippines with the result that has high degree of correlation
between suitability index and honey yield considering

Again Hossam F. Abou-Shaara studied the current and future bee keeping suitability in Egypt
with GIS and multi criteria decision making tool and investigated the overall suitability with
consideration of temperature, rainfall, distance from plan and land use.

According to my investigation, in my study area there was little or no research done on bee
keeping and what is more, to best of my knowledge, suitability analysis for bee keeping using
GIS is non studied. For instance, (_________) studied the opportunity and constraint of honey
production whose result show that the existence of natural forest was as an opportunity and lack
of knowledge and traditional system of production labeled as constraint but it didn’t identify the
potential area where production could be effective. This study, therefore, qualitative and didn’t
identify the extent of suitability just the opportunity and constraint was focused aspect. The
Thus, the aim of this research is mapping and identifying the suitability of the study area for
honey bee keeping in the sheka zone by using GIS and multi criteria decision making.