About 40,000 bees touched down safely in Ras Al Khaimah airport on a flight from Egypt last week. The bees were then distributed to various apiaries across the country. It was the first large consignment of bees to be delivered this year, on-board an Egypt Air cargo plane. The shipment of packaged bees for Al Najeh Honey farms was protectively covered in nets and stacked in boxes inside the cargo plane before being handed over to beekeepers across the country. Sanjay Khanna, chief executive of Ras Al Khaimah airport, said detailed planning was required to handle the sensitive cargo that landed from Cairo last Thursday. “The entire team at RAK Airport put in immense effort to join all the dots. A lot of planning has gone behind this to achieve the final goal of handling and delivering live bees. Our airport is perfectly suited to handle the delicate and time sensitive cargo,” he said. One of the largest bee suppliers in the world using airfreight, Al Najeh Honey has transported about 4.8 billion bees between Egypt, UAE, Oman, Sudan and Saudi Arabia. Mohammed Al Najeh started the company as a small trading business 26 years ago and has since been raising and exporting queen bees and equipment related to the apiary business. The company owns and operates more than 100 farms in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. In the UAE, the hives are stored under trees in remote desert properties mainly in the Northern Emirates. Al Najeh Honey made headlines in 2016 when it imported a mass shipment of 60 million honeybees into the UAE on a cargo plane from Egypt. The farms are known for turning global attention to the Emirates for bee trading of live honeybees and for raising the hardiest queen bees in a tough desert environment.