Long time no see, Bee Word readers! If you couldn’t tell from the radio silence on our end, we’ve been extraordinarily busy the past few months. To catch you up in one sentence: we’ve been wrapping up the finishing touches for Verifli, our new digital hive grading product, in preparation for launch next month. I’ll start by wishing you a happy 2019! The stage is set for another year of record growth at The Bee Corp. We hope you tag along for an exciting ride! Onto the good stuff:
2019 ALMOND POLLINATION PRICE PER HIVE
It’s that scary time of year once again, folks. That’s right, it’s almond pollination season. The time when one question lingers on everyone’s mind: what will go wrong this year? Usually followed by this question: am I paying/charging a fair price for pollination?
We polled a handful of almond growers. Here’s what they're paying per hive:
Low: $150
High: $220
Average: $192.27
Just for reference, we know that Joe Traynor is charging $240 this year. Rule of thumb: if you’re paying more than this and you’re not 100% certain that you’ve got the best bees on the planet, you’re doing something wrong.
Two things to keep in mind here. First, don’t take this information as gospel—this is only meant to be a useful reference. There’s a good chance our data is not representative of industry-wide data. So please don’t dial up your beekeeper or your grower and ask for a better rate because of what you read here.
Second (and most importantly), you get what you pay for when it comes to pollination. You might feel envious of your buddy down the street who’s only paying $150 per hive until it’s the 20th of February and he’s complaining that only a quarter of his bees have been placed. If you want to avoid a stressful pollination season, give your beekeeper an incentive to deliver excellent bees.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Average price per hive is almost $200. That’s a big deal. As rates continue to climb above $200 and growers begin look for new places to trim expenses, we’ll start to see consequences. Big growers will begin to rip out trees in favor of planting Independence, Shastas or an entirely different crop. Small growers will stop renting bees altogether and poach their neighbors’ bees by blasting their trees with attractants. Growers with middle-aged Nonpareil orchards will scramble to cut costs and explore alternatives to honeybee pollination.
Almond growers will rent more than 2 million hives for the first time ever. This is also a big deal. The U.S. bee population—roughly 2.7 million hives—will not grow any time soon. I’m willing to bet it’ll be the same, if not lower, ten years from now. If you think you’re paying too much for pollination now, wait until almonds surpass 1.3 million bearing acres.
Something else is going on here that’s worth noting. As much as I hate to admit, beekeepers aren’t getting any younger. Here’s what I fear might happen in the next decade:
As major beekeepers begin to retire, many will struggle to find a young family member willing to take on the business.
Desperate to offload their hives before another season of taxing manual labor, these retirees-to-be will sell their operation to younger beekeepers for pennies on the dollar.
The handful of young beekeepers who take over family businesses will rapidly grow in scale thanks to cheap acquisitions of retirees’ hives.
With the majority of commercial beehives owned by a small handful of beekeepers, the market for pollination becomes an oligopoly and prices skyrocket.
With these market forces in mind, it’s clear that the market for pollination will undergo a drastic facelift in the next decade. If one thing can be said about almond growers, they're a resilient and opportunistic bunch. Although the same can be said about beekeepers, their path forward is a bit more challenging. Almond growers own land in one of the most fertile regions on the planet. Beekeepers own wooden boxes filled with high-maintenance insects that aren’t very versatile in terms of economic production.
If the almond industry collapsed tomorrow, who would be hurt the most: almond growers or beekeepers? The answer should be crystal clear.
FINAL THOUGHTS
2019 is a big year for almond pollination. And not just because I want to bestow a false sense of grandeur to this blog post. This is the year we zoom past 1 million bearing acres and 2 million rented hives. In my opinion, the market for almond pollination is on the verge of a radical inflection point.
P.S. If you haven't done so yet, please check out the latest version of Almond Board's handy guide: Honeybee Best Management Practices.