"beekeepers" news and stories

Photo: Justusthane, Flickr.

Florida's honeymakers, already adept at catching flies, have lately been buttonholing politicians, successfully pressing for new legislation that experts say should save the state's honey industry.

The Florida legislature this month approved a bill prohibiting the production and sale of adulterated honey -- a racy-sounding term that encompasses the honey-fructose blends and chemically treated honeys that have flooded the market over the past decade. While Florida is the first state to issue an official honey standard, Nancy Gentry, who chairs the Florida Honey Bee Technical Council, says as many as 28 states are contemplating similar legislation.

"We're already seeing significant changes," Gentry reports. "We're going to take blended honey products off the shelf in Florida."

The American honey industry was decimated in the 1980s by the Varroa mite, which took down more than 20 percent of hives nationwide.

Commercial beekeeping is a huge industry, though the component parts are very small. Bees are directly responsible for $15 billion worth of agriculture every year because they are needed to pollinate fields of all types of crops, as well as to produce honey. Farmers could rely on wild bees, but there just aren't enough of them to be reliable. The problem is, that there really aren't enough beekeepers, either.

There are roughly 125,000 beekeepers in the US and only 600 are commercial keepers. Almost three-quarters of all the beekeepers in the US are over 45 and most of them are retired, having embarked into beekeeping as a hobby. This means, in effect, that $15 billion worth of industry and agriculture "depend[s] on a bunch of retired hobbyists."

The issues that surround beekeeping, from fighting the mites that destroy the bees to shipping them out to farmers season after season so that crops can be pollinated, are actually more complicated and more interesting than you might expect. It's a hard industry that is getting harder to sustain every year - and yet so much depends on it. Reading the whole Plight of the Humble Beekeeper at eGullet will give you a new perspective on what is - and isn't - a buzzing industry.

[thanks, Elise]

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