Tracking Honey Bee Colonies

Tracking Honey Bee Colonies

The National Agriculture Statistics Service has been benchmarking the number of honey bee colonies and other related statistics for the past five quarters and the first report was just earlier this week. NASS Mountain Region Director Bill Meyer says
Meyer: “There is such a concern for honey bees in general and they are so important as a pollinator, that the department started this initiative and had us conduct these quarterly surveys to see how many were lost, how many were added back in etc. Just to get a benchmark of where we are at. So I think that for the honey industry this is a well received report.”
According to the report released, honey bee colonies for operations with five or more colonies in the United States as of the first of this year totaled 2.59 million. This was 8 percent below the previous year.
Honey bee colonies lost for operations with five or more colonies during the quarter of January through March of this year was 429,000 colonies or 17 percent lost.
In case you were wondering how many bees are in one colony. Honey bee colonies consist of a single queen, hundreds of male drones and 20,000 to 80,000 female worker bees.
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