To Bee, or Not

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LOOKING AT RAY OLIVAREZ’S honeybee enterprise, you would have no idea the beekeeping industry faces upheaval. Bees are everywhere, doing just what they should — zipping through the air, clustering on water spigots and feeding cans and crawling in and out of the wooden boxes that house them.

Yet beekeepers throughout the country, Olivarez included, face losses ranging from 30 percent to 75 percent of their bees as they perish for reasons unexplained. The problem has gotten serious enough to prompt its own term, “Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD),” and it’s beginning to change the way California farms.

With a dwindling bee supply, farmers have seen the cost of pollinating their crops skyrocket. Nowhere has that been more dramatic than in the state’s almond orchards. According to Olivarez, 43, there was a time when California beekeepers would bring their honeybees to almond farmers free of charge. All they wanted was a good place to let their bees roam and collect nectar and pollen.

“My dad started off at, I think, 50 cents for a colony,” says Olivarez, a second-generation beekeeper. Almond growers typically require two colonies per acre for pollination. “Now we’re getting as much as $150 per colony.”

Almonds Love Honeybees

When it comes to cash crops, it’s hard to beat California’s almond industry. It is here that almost 80 percent of the world’s supply is grown. (For more on California’s almond industry, see page 88). Without more than a million bees buzzing among the almond blossoms early each spring, this flourishing industry would be out of business.

Consecutive years of record-breaking bumper crops, however, have given almond farmers the means to pay for the increasingly scarce honeybees, over half of which were trucked in from as far away as Florida last year. Those higher prices are changing the nature of beekeeping.

“I always made more from honey production than any other aspect of my business,” says Gene Brandi, who has been beekeeping for 30 years. Brandi, based in Los Banos, has 2,000 colonies, 800 of which were recently lost to CCD. “In 2006, I made more off pollination income than honey, and that’s the first time, ever, since I’ve been in business.”

In 2005, rent on a single colony in California jumped from an average of $50 to $72 as CCD decimated bees. By 2006, prices were more than $130. This year’s prices averaged $150. Pollinating the almond bloom, which lasts little more than a month, now provides the bulk of most beekeepers’ annual income.

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