“After almost two decades of relentless colony collapse coverage …. America’s honeybee population has rocketed to an all-time high. We’ve added almost a million bee colonies in the past five years. We now have 3.8 million, the census shows,” reports the Washington Post.
This isn’t mainly due to honey production. Indeed, honey production is stagnant, falling by 1% from 2021 to 2022. The number of farms
with any bee colonies has ascended far faster than honey production or bee-colony counts — about 160 percent since 2007. Much of the explosion of small producers came in just one state: Texas. The Lone Star State has gone from having the sixth-most bee operations in the country to being so far ahead of anyone else that it out-bees the bottom 21 states combined…Texas beekeepers all pointed to one clear reason for the bee boom … a [2012 state tax] law: Your plot of five to 20 acres now qualifies for agriculture tax breaks if you keep [a sufficient number of bee hives] on it for five years…..But even with its army of small producers, Texas still ranks only sixth in the number of actual bee colonies. To find the true core of the bee boom, we had to go west.
When the census was taken in December 2022, California had more than four times as many bees as any other state. We emailed pollination expert Brittney Goodrich at the University of California at Davis, who explained that pollinating the California almond crop “demands most of the honeybee colonies in the U.S. each year.”
Every February and March, something like 170 million almond trees unite in one of Earth’s great synchronized acts of sexual reproduction — made possible by the migration of the bees….
Pollination — not honey prices — has been the true rocket booster strapped to the back of the modern beekeeping industry. And almond pollination is responsible for $4 of every $5 spent on bee fertility assistance in the United States, according to NASS.
America’s almond acreage has more than doubled since 2007 as increasing numbers of almonds are being added to nut butter and milk substitutes — whose markets have grown faster than inflation — and to granola mixes. The U.S. honeybee population has doubled along with it, because most almond trees aren’t self-pollinating.
