By Jason Miller, Placer County Beekeeper
Permission from the California Farm Bureau Federation

We’re getting ready to pollinate the almond crop. We started shipping bees into the state last week, and every week we’re going to bring in 10 semi loads of bees and start placing them and going through them. We keep our bees in an indoor wintering facility in North Dakota, so our bees have been in a dormant state for the past three months. There are more trucks available, but the cost of trucking bees to California is still very high. We’re spending more than $5 per mile to bring bees to the state. When you’re looking at 2,000 miles at $5 a mile, it is expensive. What makes trucking bees into the state quicker and more seamless is a pre-inspection program created a few years ago by the California Department of Food and Agriculture. One of the big issues we had waiting at the border pest inspection station was the semitrucks would get backed up. It would be warm, and there wasn’t water available, and there would be massive delays.

Many California almond orchards have been pushed out, but there is more than enough demand for bees for pollination with new plantings coming into production. We have not found any softening of demand. Last year, there was a shortage of bees, and already this year it looks like it’s going to be really tight. I’ve heard a number of beekeepers are calling and seeing who has extra bees because they’re a little short. Almond prices have softened, so there was a fear of: Can almond growers pay for pollination? Where are they going to cut costs? I feel their pain, but the prices on pollination have not fallen in any of our contracts.

Last year, we had really good forage for the bees. One issue hitting commercial beekeepers in the Midwest is they had record honey production this past summer, but the Varroa mite, our No. 1 enemy, was difficult to treat. Most treatments are not available when you have honey on the hives, so a lot of beekeeping operations lost bees due to a high mite load in the late summer and fall.

Permission from the California Farm Bureau Federation