The life of a migratory beekeeper is VERY different from the life we lead as small-scale backyard beekeepers. We’re able to keep our bees in one place and accomplish everything we want to do with them. We teach about honeybees, collect and sell a few pounds of honey and wax, produce a few new bee colonies for sale, and have our crops – and everyone’s in a two-mile radius around our apiary – pollinated. We’re blessed.
A large 5,000-20,000 honeybee colony operation cannot keep all their bees in one place. Commercial beekeepers do the same things as we do, just on a larger scale, and that means they have to move their bees. They move them to winter food sources in Florida and south Texas. Following the growing seasons, they move them to pollinate blueberries in Oregon, peaches in Georgia, watermelons and cotton throughout the south, rape seed in Montana, and almonds in California.
Almonds are nearly 100% pollinated by honeybees. For six weeks, during the almond bloom from late January to early March, migratory beekeepers take their bees to central California. There, in the fertile valleys, growers produce 80-90% of the world’s almond production on approximately 1.3 million acres. To ensure proper pollination, almond growers need two colonies of honeybees per acre. If you’re quick with mathematics, there are approximately 3 million managed bee colonies in the United States, which equates to 2.6 million honeybee colonies, or about 85% of the US managed colonies which must make the California trek each year! The picture, from Project Apism., shows honeybee colonies placed in a California almond orchard.
