First, available colonies in the US have declined markedly in the past 50 years.  This decrease has occurred at a time when almond acreage has increased significantly.  In general terms, we have about half the 5 million colonies we had 50 years ago.  The almond bloom requires a little more than half of those currently available colonies. 

The job of tracking honey bee colonies in the US is done by the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS).  NASS surveys honey-producing colonies, a counting mechanism rapidly becoming obsolete now that there are beekeepers who may be focusing on either pollination or honey-production. 

A more recent survey that indicates overall health of US honey bee colonies is a survey conducted by the Apiary Inspectors of America (AIA) together with the USDA-ARS Beltsville Honey Bee Lab.  Three years ago, the AIA began a survey of winter losses.  This survey coincided with the onset of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), the mysterious current phenomenon of disappearing bees.  Whereas we have yet to find the cause of CCD, we do have data indicating potential problems for pollinated crops.  Results from this last season’s survey were just released and results do not differ significantly from the previous two years where about a third of colonies were lost.  

Again, in general terms, prior to CCD beekeepers would lose about one in every 10 over-wintering colonies.  Now they lose about one in every three colonies just prior to our almond bloom.   These losses are not sustainable and point to the dire need to conduct more research on CCD and honey bee health. 

A second change that has occurred in beekeeping is the dependence on pollination services as a portion of a beekeeper’s income.  In better days, beekeepers often derived some income from honey production and some from pollination contracts.  Factors including the importation of cheaper foreign honey and increased rental fees from almond contracts have facilitated the differentiation among beekeepers as honey-producers vs. crop pollinators.  Many other considerations including available bee forage, nectar flow, transportation costs, state border inspections, etc., insure this dynamic is not static, but in a continual state of flux. 

Managing bees for pollination services has emerged as a somewhat different business than managing bees for honey production.  Managing for pollination still entails keeping ahead of pests and diseases, but additionally, beekeepers strive for sufficient frame coverage for the early almond bloom.  Nowadays this entails proper timing of supplemental feeding regimes and trying to minimize those winter losses.   Supplemental feeding, especially of a good protein source in the fall, has become almost mandatory for bees moving into almonds.  Ask your beekeeper what he spent on bee feed even five years ago and what he spends on bee feed now, and you’ll begin to get a good picture of how beekeeping has changed since the onset of CCD and the focus on good pollination contracts.   A beekeeper’s investment in protein supplementation is necessary and is expensive. 

Beekeeping is changing.  Beekeepers’ businesses are changing.  Keep in contact with your beekeeper to insure you have not only the number of colonies you need, but the quality of bees you desire.

Chris Heintz is Executive Director for Project Apis m. a non-profit bee research organization.  Should you have questions about bees, they can be answered via this column for the benefit of other Blue Diamond almond growers.   Submit your questions to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .