Getachew Netsere and his wife Meaza are getting ready to harvest honey at their home in Addis Ababa. Using a smoke gun they will be able to evict the bees from their hives.

Getachew started out by keeping a bee hive in his backyard as a hobby, but the results were encouraging and he soon realized that this could be a good source of income, apart from his journalism career.

Today he has 120 bee hives in his backyard and another 80 at a nearby farm. He produces between 15 to 45 kilos of honey from a single beehive.

"Bee keeping has been on my mind for a long time. So I started it as a hobby by putting two to three traditional beehives in our backyard. When I saw the harvest from those small traditional beehives, I said to myself, if one can harvest this much from these hives, may be it can be a good source of income if I can expand this on a bigger scale, " said Getachew.

The collected honey combs are inspected and loaded into a machine called a centrifuge, which helps extract honey by continuously spinning the frames.

Honey syrup is later connected and processed to remove impurities. Honey has various health and nutritional benefits and is also used as a beauty product. Getachew sells a kilo of honey for about 6 dollars.

"When there are a lot of flowers, for example between May and July when we have a lot of eucalyptus flowers, we can harvest twice or three times from one beehive, " said Getachew.

Bee keeping is attracting many farmers and giving carpenters like Mintamir Degifie an opportunity to make hives for sale.

He says he and his workers spend most of the day making beehives and he sells up to 60 beehives per week.

Most of his clients are youth associations and NGOs who distribute hives to farmers. Traders also buy them for resale in rural areas.

"I entered the business of producing beehives because I started noticing the growing demand for them. There are a lot of beehives imported from Kenya that are called German Type. So, we started the production by imitating the design. Also, there are a lot of people joining the beekeeping sector and it makes our business profitable," said Degifie.

Ethiopia is the biggest producer of honey in Africa according to the Ethiopian Apiculture association, contributing about 23 percent of the continent's output.

Though honey has been produced here for centuries, many farmers still use traditional hives and lack modern technology to improve the quality of their produce.

Negash Bekena, manager of the Ethiopian Apiculture Board, says the country is yet to exploit available opportunities to market to honey.

"Really the potential of the country is huge because we have a lot, 10 million bee colonies, you may not find this anywhere in the globe. With this potential, we can produce like 500,000 tons of honey with full state of the art production and 50,000 tons of beeswax," he said.

Much of the country's honey is sold on the local market, and about 11 percent is exported abroad to Europe and parts of the world.

Ethiopia is also the 4th biggest Beeswax producer in the world.