Bees Better

The latest Agriculture Department survey of beekeepers just out leads to this conclusion. The industry continues to move in a positive direction. Travis Averil with the AG Department Statistics Service says, if you look at the number of colonies we had January 1st of 2020 versus January 2021, the number Of honeybee colonies is up two percent. The rise in colonies was mainly because of a lot more work by beekeepers in adding more new colonies to make up for the lost ones and so… it looks like there's more bee operations now. We'll have to see how it plays out throughout the season. That's Kyle Grubbs with the USDA Bee Research Laboratory in Maryland. He says there are multiple factors causing problems for bees, pesticides, climate change, less natural habitat, poor nutrition, pests, parasites, all working against bees. And so… I think if we can just put a focus on improving all of those aspects, then we can get a total increase in bee health and then everybody's happy. And at the Maryland lab, for example,… we're working on a lot of natural products to help with some parasites and some viruses that we've been dealing with, still working on nutrition to increase the health of the bees through nutritional supplementation. And there's hope Consumers are much more aware of the importance of bees and other pollinators. That goes a long way in helping out the bees.