Honeybee_ Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper - C. Marina Marchese [8]
One-third of the food produced in the world—or one out of three bites of anything we humans eat—depends, to some degree, on honeybees. Healthy bees mean not only more honey but also a wide variety of food on our tables. Without honeybees, our supply of fresh food would be severely limited.
Beekeepers hire out honeybee populations to farmers around the country who rely on their honeybees to facilitate the pollination of their crops. Farmers secure this service through pollination contracts. Beekeepers are hired annually and are paid per hive. In 2008, they were paid $135 to $190 per hive. They often make more money renting out their colonies for pollination than they do selling their own honey. You can feel good about purchasing honey, because you know that the bottle represents not only all the work the honeybees put into making it but also the work they have done for agriculture, farmers, and the food we eat every day.
It’s estimated that there are nearly 2.4 million colonies of honeybees in the United States, and each year two-thirds of these are trucked around the country to pollinate crops for farmers. A typical season might begin in California, where 580,000 acres of almond groves completely depend on honeybees for pollination. (California supplies 100 percent of the nation’s almonds and 80 percent of the world’s almonds.) Each February, migratory beekeepers load 1.5 million honeybee colonies onto trailer trucks just to pollinate the state’s almond crop. This huge operation is the largest pollination event in the world, requiring more than half of all beehives in the United States! The bees are then trucked to the Northeast to work on the cherry and apple blossoms. New York State, for example, needs 30,000 hives to pollinate its apple crops. Next stop is the orange groves in Florida, followed by the cranberry bogs in New Jersey and Massachusetts. The bees will then journey to the clover fields of North Dakota and finally to Maine, which needs about 50,000 hives for its blueberries.
Honeybee pollination adds $15 billion to $20 billion a year to the agriculture output of the United States, but its value to the economy cannot be underestimated. Almond producers estimate that by 2012, 2 million beehives will be needed to pollinate the expected 800,000 acres of almonds. Other crops—like melons, avocados, watermelons, cantaloupe, all varieties of citrus fruits, and cucumbers—also require several visits by a honeybee before they can bear fruit.
Honeybees also play a very important part in our supply of beef, milk, cheese, and other dairy products. Farmers rely heavily on honeybees to pollinate a large part of the alfalfa and clover crops. Both are rich in protein and make up about one-third of the diet of cows. Cows can be fed grasses and grains, but these foods don’t have as much protein. Well-fed cattle means tastier meat, milk, and cheese. Häagen Dazs claims that 40 percent of the ingredients in its ice cream flavors are dependent upon honeybees.
Coconuts, olives, peanuts, rape, soybeans, and sunflowers also require honeybee pollination to produce the fats and oils we require in our diets. Eighty percent of the cotton that makes up the clothes we wear, not to mention our other household items, like rugs, bedsheets, and furniture fabrics, relies upon honeybees, as cotton crops need to be pollinated, too. Breakfast cereals, nut mixes, cookies, fruit pies, and juices, not to mention ketchup and salsa, are also dependent upon bees because honeybees pollinate many of the ingredients that go into them, such as cashews, walnuts, prunes, grapefruits, peaches, cherries, cinnamon, tomatoes, and onions.
THE DWINDLING U.S. HONEYBEE POPULATION
Where do all the bees come from?