IN YOUR ORCHARD
THE BEE BOX
Preparing Your Orchard for February’s Busy Bees For most of us, the beginning of the year brings with it a welcome hiatus from the busy holiday season and marks the start of our ambitious New Year’s resolutions. For California’s almonds, the frenzied arrival of honey bee colonies from around the country hails in the New Year, with beekeepers and growers alike preparing for the fast-approaching almond bloom. These bees are responsible for pollinating around 80% of the world’s supply of almonds¹ — an impressive feat for both the humans and bees involved in growing almonds! This article provides a brief overview of our almonds’ dedicated pollinators, the many challenges facing commercial honey bees, and what growers can do right now to keep their hive rentals happy and productive during almond bloom.
Ensuring Healthy Honey Bees For Pollination Pollinators are essential to our food system and environment. Due to a combination of factors, there has been a notable decline in pollinator
populations across the United States. Commercial beekeepers continue to experience winter hive losses of around 40% each year. (Or an average of $200 million in economic losses for the beekeeping industry every year!)³ The lengthy list of challenges facing our nation’s pollinators includes disease pressure, pesticide exposure, parasites, and lack of forage — just to name a few. Other environmental conditions, such as extreme weather events and biodiversity losses caused by climate change, amplify these existing constraints, complicating our understanding and ability to manage these issues. Fluctuating winter conditions significantly impact a colony's health. Honey bees spend much of the fall collecting and storing nectar in preparation for winter hibernation. Warm winters and temperature fluctuations cause bees to break their winter cluster and consume their stored food. This requires beekeepers to keep up costly feedings and other interventions to conserve the colonies' health throughout the chilly winter months. To manage these issues and keep colonies as healthy and almond-ready as possible, beekeepers employ several strategies to care for their bees over winter. Some beekeepers chose to overwinter their hives in states with warmer winter climates Figure 1: The almond bloom prompts the largest “pollination migration” on the planet, bringing up to 90% of the country’s honeybees into California’s almond orchards. In 2010, honey bees contributed $19.2 billion to the U.S. economy through pollination services. ² Credit: Project Apis m. (based on National Geographic’s “Bees on the Move.”)
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ALMOND FACTS
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