Video: Pakistan beekeepers widen pursuit of flowers

Under a dry, smoggy sky, a beekeeper in Pakistan's Punjab province carefully loads boxes filled with tens of thousands of bees onto the back of a truck.

Together they will travel 500 kilometres (around 300 miles) in an increasingly desperate chase to find flowering plants, clean air and moderate temperatures for honey production as climate change and pollution threaten the industry.

"We move the boxes according to where the weather is good and the flowers bloom," Malik Hussain Khan told AFP, standing in a field of orange trees whose blossoms arrived weeks late in February and lasted only for a few weeks.

Pakistan's beekeepers typically move seasonally to spare their charges stifling heat or freezing cold.