I am actually quite familiar with Yemeni Beekeeping. I know it to be the finest honey in the world, and the price it fetches proves it. The winter honey can sell for $100/kg.
You are blessed with your own adapted bee. I believe its reddish yellow in color, known as the Apis mellifera yemenitica. It is smaller than a European honeybee, and due to that it has an innate resistance to the varroa mite as well as adapted to the climate of Yemen. Stick with that bee, even though the European bees produce a bit more.
I believe sometimes a simple sun cover is placed over the hives to keep them from direct sun, too.
If I recall, much of Yemeni larger beekeepers follow the bloom and migrate a bit from wadi to wadi. They use to use camels, but know they use trucks. If you will be getting more hives and start doing that, you may want to go with the more modern langstroth box hive because it travels well.
However, It is my opinion from my knowledge of Yemeni beekeeping that for you, Top Bar hives would be much more appropriate than the traditional Yemeni hive. Top Bar Hives will produce more honey than the Yemeni hive as well. Also, it will produce more honey per hive $ than both the Yemini and the Langstroth. Yes, a langstroth will produce more honey per hive, but $250 for a hive that makes 30kg vs $30 for a Top Bar that makes 20kg -- its obvious which one makes more sense for small scale production. The Top Bar will make more honey per hive $, and it will be very similar and easy to use for a typical Yemeni beekeeper. Simple point, do you want 1 Langstroth or 8 Kenyan Top Bar Hives for your $250? Oh and you'd have to buy a $300 extractor if you wanted to use the Langstroth properly. Top Bar Hive is the same harvest technique as the Yemeni hive.
I believe comb honey is more desired than extracted honey and sells at a premium in the middle east. The Top Bar hive will produce more and it is easy to harvest. But I don't know if that's a factor here.
Migrating to a Langstroth Hive will be covered by other people. Migrating to a Kenyan Top Bar Hive is also easy once you build your Top Bar Hive - Attach Hair Clips to the top bars, then cut out the combs and clip them in the clips for the bees to reattached. There is a great webpage on it by a polish fellow, but I can't post links yet.
I live and raise bees in Yemen. Its a wonderful climate for beekeeping - its pretty much summer all year long and there is surprisingly a lot of vegetation for a desert. We have a lot less downtime than areas that have an actual winter so a little more work and a slightly larger yield are the end results.
The reason that I am writing is that I am not overly experienced and I need help with a lingering problem from my beginning. When I started keeping here in Yemen the only option that was readily available was the Yemen-style box. Its basically I rectangle that about 3 feet long and 1 foot high with a door on the front and back.
The most you can do with the boxes is watch them for when the bees swarm which they will because there is no way to control the population, add space, etc. You can hardly find the queen cells without a major disruption to the bees. There are of course no frames. The bees just build to the box so you can rarely see past the next to last comb.
Currently I have about 8 of these boxes in addition to modern style boxes. I would like to eliminate the Yemeni boxes completely. I am reticent to just open the door and start shaking bees into a modern box - I can see several possible downsides to this aside from a few thousand highly annoyed bees.
If anyone has experience with this style box or anything remotely similar and has a method for migrating from them it would be appreciated greatly.