Reader's Choice Award runner-up for JEE: The economics of honey bee (Hymenoptera: Apidae) management and overwintering strategies for colonies used to pollinate almonds

Commercial honey bee colonies are significant contributors to agricultural productivity through the pollination of crops. Almonds need the greatest number of colonies because the nearly one million acres of bearing trees require cross pollination for nut set. For more than a decade, beekeepers have experienced colony losses in excess of 30%, mostly during the winter. With the costs of managing and transporting honey bee colonies to California, combined with the colony losses beekeepers routinely experience, we asked if renting colonies for almond pollination was a profitable venture. To address this question, we conducted a longitudinal study on 190 colonies from when they were established in April until they were placed in almond orchards 10 months later. Two overwintering methods were compared. Colonies were placed either in cold storage (CS) facilities or in outdoor apiaries for the winter. We recorded all costs incurred by the beekeeper throughout the study and added them to the costs of the two overwintering methods. The cost of overwintering in CS was lower than in apiaries, but fewer CS colonies were large enough for almond pollination rental. The cost of maintaining colonies from September to almond bloom exceeded colony rental fees whether colonies were in CS or apiaries. We propose alternative management strategies that could lower costs and make almond pollination profitable, but they rely on placing colonies in CS earlier in the fall, lowering Varroa populations and increasing forage availability.