The presence of honey bees in Dubai has declined.

I remember a time when a huge colony of bees occupied a section of a first-floor veranda in a Karama apartment. The municipality’s pest control department would be called in to remove many such colonies from private compounds.

Today they are found sparingly in some farms and orchards. But recently, I sighted a honeycomb on an ironwood tree at Safa Park. The bees were collecting honey from the blooms of exotic Australian Conocarpus and other flowering plants.

One summer I was walking through a patch of desert near Dubai’s border with Al Ain.

I came across a camel shed. There I saw a huge beetle wrestling with a ball-like thing, similar in size, rolling over an undulating mini-dune. It was a dung beetle or scarab beetle (also called just scarab).

The beetle got its name from its habit of surviving on the dung of herbivores such as camel, cattle, sheep, goat, gazelle, deer, donkey, horse, hare, etc.

Whenever I pass through a hilly area in the UAE, I look out for the dwarf palm (Nannorrhops ritchieana), a rare plant found only in the hills of the Emirates or Oman in the Arabian Peninsula.

Known as Doom Sagir, the plant is unique due to its size: two metres in height. Its leaves look different from those of date palms and are more like palmyra palms found in the Indian subcontinent.

In June 2005, I noticed a dwarf palm on the Wadi Shawka-Wadi Huweilat Road just budding into flower. When I returned by the end of July, the tree was in full bloom. I never expected such a small plant could have thousands of flowers from just one stalk. I could see hundreds of bees, butterflies, moths, etc humming and drinking nectar from the tiny, flat, 2-3mm wide pinkish flowers.

In some countries, one can tell the presence of dangerous animals such as snakes, jackals, wild cats and predatory birds in the neighbourhood from the commotion created by the birds in the area.

I was amazed to see the desert birds present in Dubai and other parts of the UAE respond in the same way as their counterparts in Bangladesh, India or Pakistan do.

I was busy observing flowering plants in an abandoned section of a Dubai desert park when I heard alarm calls of some birds 50 metres away from me.