​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:

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.

     1. 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.

​    2. 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.

​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.

​Ah, fall. The leaves are changing, the weather’s getting chilly, and the bees are wrapping up their last few jobs before the winter.
 
Back in the office though, beekeepers and growers aren’t slowing down. Yep, it’s that lovely time of year when everyone starts to worry about almond pollination.

​For those of us who are sending bees to California for the first time, there are a lot of things to consider before loading the trucks. First, I strongly recommend you review Joe Traynor’s articles on almond pollination. Joe’s been brokering hives for decades, and he’s the best resource out there on the topic.
 
When it comes down to negotiating price, now is the best time to reach an agreement with your grower. Don’t wait until it’s time to cut a check to haggle on price.
 
If you agree to do an inspection, figure out who’s paying for it, who’s actually doing it (either a state inspector or a private company), and when you want it done (early season hive strength results will be different from late season).

Keep in mind that while almond pollination is a pivotal time of year for you, your grower has a different perspective. They don’t care so much about the details—they just want the job done right and done on time. These are the top items on your grower’s mind:
 

1. Did I rent enough hives?
2. Are the hives I rented strong enough?
3. Will the hives arrive on time for bloom?

 
Communication is absolutely essential. You need to tell your grower ASAP if you’re concerned about meeting one or more of those above items. That said, you don’t want to burden your grower with issues that aren’t related to the above items. If your trucker falls through or you choose a different overwinter yard, these are problems you should resolve on your own.
 
Over-communication can cause growers to think you’re too high-maintenance to work with. The name of the game is long-term value. Your goal should be to show that you’re trustworthy and capable—this is how you secure contracts year over year.
 
On that note, you should plan to check in with your grower at least once a month to let them know how the bees are looking. Are you still on track to hit your quota? Do you still expect to hit the 8-frame average? Is there any reason they should worry about on-time delivery? Lining up more bees at the last second is a major headache, so help your grower out by giving them a clear idea of what to expect.

​Almond pollination is not an easy job, otherwise it wouldn’t pay so well. The best way to avoid conflict is to set clear expectations and communicate well.
 
Finally, give your grower a few ways to get in touch. Repeatedly getting sent to voicemail is the fastest way to lose your contract next year.

Here at The Bee Corp, we try to see eye-to-eye with everyone we work with. More often than not, that's easier said than done. Especially when it comes to our bees.

Human eyes transform 2D images into a 3D images much like the way an artist would paint a scene. When you look at Leonardo da Vinci’s infamous Mona Lisa, you can tell Mona is up close relative to the background. But the painting is in 2 dimensions on a single piece of flat canvas, how can that be? As it turns out, our brain infers depth and distance by literally tricking itself into seeing depth, which is why optical illusions work so well.

However, what’s more interesting is that bees are capable of being tricked by the very same things we can get tricked by. Recently, scientists found that a bee’s vision functions much like a human’s, and they are able to infer depth based on their brains tricking them as well. However, our fuzzy little friends have one small advantage over humans: their vision works in the ultraviolet spectrum.

What does it mean to view ultraviolet light? This image gives an idea of how bees see a yellow flower.

A. Shows how humans see a yellow flower

B. Same flower through UV light

C. Captured through an array of straws to simulate insect compound vision
​
D. Shows a merge of the pictures processed on the computer and gives an idea of how a bee might see a flower. 

Putting an ultraviolet light to a flower reveals certain parts that you normally wouldn’t see. For example, certain flowers are white in visible light, but become dark under ultraviolet. This same mechanism helps attract bees to certain flowers, by having a blue/Ultra-violet halo around the center of the flower, usually where the pistil and stamen are located for pollination. These concepts allow bees to maximize honey production by prioritizing which flowers to visit.

For humans to gain a better understanding of issues facing bees, perhaps we should view their issues in a different light. Research into flowers under ultraviolet light taught us many things, like which flowers to plant in pollinator gardens to attract bees.

But what about the other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum? Learning more about bees through other light wavelengths like infrared light, X-ray and radio waves could yield valuable findings about how these complex creatures interact with the world around them.

​We learned from conversations with growers and beekeepers that timing is crucial for almond pollination. Bees need to arrive in the orchards just in time to start pollinating the almond blooms. As soon as blooms have been stripped of pollen, the bees need to leave the orchards to find the next food source. Growers need to treat their trees, but sprays must wait until the bees are on their way out. 

All this talk about timing begs the question: what's the rush? It's all about food.

California's Central Valley is a unique place. Consistent weather and reliable sunlight makes for an ideal agriculture climate. Wyatt describes it as America's true breadbasket. 

The Central Valley produces an insane amount of food. More than half the country's fruits and vegetables are grown in this sun-kissed corridor. ​So why is this fertile oasis such a hostile ecosystem for bees? 

​​Simply put, the food grown there is made to feed humans, not bees. Bees forage on plants that provide a steady source of pollen and nectar. Although almond blooms offer highly nutritious pollen for bees, there isn't much for bees to eat after pollination season.

We often get asked by outsiders, "why don't almond growers just manage their own hives?"

This was my roundabout way of illustrating one of the key reasons why not. It takes a lot of work to keep hives going through the year—even with an abundance of local forage sources. If a grower needs to send someone out every couple days to feed the bees, it's probably not worth the value of not needing to rent hives every February.

​Well...ok...the drones are not ‘killing’ the pollination business just yet. But, since my last post on drone pollination, I’ve found some other alternative pollinators that are trying to find a place in the pollination market. Perhaps these drones will help alleviate bee supply issues some growers are facing.

In North Carolina, Thomas Parish IV and his team have built the Poli-X2 drone, which pollinates more similarly to bees (unlike the Pollinator Bot, referenced in my previous blog post). The Poli-X2 has been testing in local gardens since 2017. One of the biggest challenges they faced in developing their model was inhibiting the device from lurching forward when flying in for flower pollination. From what I can see in the video footage, it looks like they’ve done a pretty good job with this.

Their model is not designed to replace bees, but to supplement the pollination done by existing bees. The drone uses artificial intelligence to scan for pre-programmed species of flowers, including tree flowers. At this time, the images being collected from the device are being sent via WiFi to a nearby PC where decisions are made regarding which plants to pollinate. Later development plans are to install this decision-making software within the device... that’s what we call edge computing, good ol' IoT (internet of things).

The Bee Corp is headed to the Forbes AgTech Summit next month in Indianapolis, and fellow attendee and panelist Anna Haldewang has been working on her own pollination drone, Plan Bee, which she first devised for a product design course at the Savannah College of Art & Design in Georgia.

​The drone is controlled by a smart device and has six sections on its underside that suck pollen from the flowers it hovers over. The pollen is later expelled for cross-pollination. It’s innovative…and, yes, I’m going to say it...it’s so darn cute! Art and Engineering combined!

Now, there are other ways of getting flowering crops pollinated... such as literally dropping a whole mess of pollen from the sky. Dropcopter, the aptly-named startup with offices in New York & San Francisco, has developed a drone to do just that. Some test results show that the Dropcopter drones can increase "pollination rates" between 25-60% in almonds & cherries, depending on weather conditions. 

​It's unclear how they measure pollination rate—perhaps it's the number of times each flower is visited by bees? Regardless, I applaud this no-frills approach.

Bu​t if you want to get REALLY heavy-handed with the pollination, you can give the guys from Pollen-Tech a call. This Arizona-based AgTech startup doesn’t use drones in its operation, but an electrostatic spray technology to mist almond trees during pollination season. Initial field test results showed a 6.55% increase in crop yield over untreated control-group trees. The electrostatic charge helps the pollen become attracted to the stigma of the flowers, increasing the efficiency of the process, without significant pollen loss.

It’s great to see all of these technological innovations in the works. For the near future, these methods are only equipped to supplement what the busy bees are doing in their pollination efforts. And they could help give growers some peace of mind when aren’t able to book the bevy of bees they need to get their crops pollinated. Exciting times for AgTech!