Nature Nurtures
This time of year beekeepers in our northern region are discovering if honeybees they attempted to overwinter survived. It’s also when honeybees are congregated in California almond fields by the billions are collected, divided and redistributed across the country. There is a mass migration of beehives throughout the growing season where thousands of colonies are loaded onto semi-trucks and brought to fields all over the country. Almond pollination is the largest of these, with over 1.5 million acres of almond fields in California, and it takes two healthy colonies of honeybees to pollinate one acre of almond trees. Most of these almond fields are monocultures, meaning only almond trees are growing there and honeybees must be supplemented with sugar syrup and pollen substitutes when the almonds aren’t blooming.
