Warm days of spring and summer shine with blooming flowers, full trees, chattering birds, chirping insects, and most importantly, buzzing bees. Without bees, eighty percent of all flowering plants wouldn’t be pollinated, and many ecosystems wouldn’t have enough food and variety to sustain a diverse array of wildlife. And since one in three bites of food is thanks to the pollination of bees, that means humans, too.

While bees naturally make their hives in rock crevices, hollow trees, and other cavities above and below ground, their populations need some outside help to sustain the amount of pollination required to feed the planet. And the delicious side-effect of pollinating bee colonies is nature’s natural sweetener, honey. 

Generations of cultures have been practicing beekeeping, or apiculture, for centuries. From the Latin word “apis” meaning “bee”, apiculture is quite literally the culturing, management, and care of honeybees, specifically for the purposes of production and collection of honey and wax. Apiculture provides farmers and hobbyists with a variety of other bee products, crop pollination services, and the opportunity to sell bees to other beekeepers. The honeybee itself has played an important role in the development of human traditions, society, and agriculture. From prehistoric cave drawings depicting honey gatherers in Asia, Europe, Australia, and Africa, we now know that civilizations relied on the honeybee for crop pollination and honey production. In fact, the earliest record of honey gathering is a 15,000-year-old painting in the Cave of the Spider near Valencia, Spain. This painting shows a woman on a cliffside gathering honey from a bee’s nest using a rope ladder. Other similar paintings show people gathering wild honey, often from nests in high cavities including trees and rock cliffs. 

Today, beekeeping is big business. 

Bees are commercially bred in apiaries—an area in which a lot of beehives can be placed. Usually this means apiaries are established in pastures with a multitude of flowering plants. The most prolific beehive design is the Langstroth hive which is made up of wooden boxes and individual wooden frames that can be easily removed to harvest wax and honey. This type of hive can also be inspected to ensure the colony is happy and healthy, and it can be moved to other locations with relative ease.

Because the U.S is home to massive fruit, nut, and berry farms, migratory beekeeping and its pollination services are apiculture’s most profitable branches. Over the course of a region’s main growing season, hundreds of thousands of hives are transported to large agricultural centers via transport trucks. Since the U.S is home to so many large-scale monoculture operations, it’s impossible to keep up with native pollinating insects alone. Each February, over 800,000 acres of Californian almond groves are pollinated by honeybees, which is necessary since California is responsible for producing eighty percent of the world’s almonds. This means that about half of the total honeybee population in the U.S—more than a million colonies of honeybees—is brought to Californian almond fields! Thanks to these bees, the U.S produces about 2.3 billion dollars in almond crops, yielding an average of 1.5 billion pounds of nuts per year. This particular crop is entirely dependent on honeybee pollination, so remember that next time you have some almond milk or chocolate covered almonds! 

Other major seasons for commercial beekeepers include the pollination of the alfalfa crop in the mid-west, berries in the north-east, and the citrus market in Florida. The U.S is also the world’s second-largest apple producer, producing 2.7 billion dollars each year. For apples, pollination is the most critical event in their yearly production cycle, necessary to transition apple flowers into fruit. The pollen produced on one apple tree must be transferred to the flower of another tree, and while many insects are pollinators, including wasps, butterflies, flies, and beetles, ninety-seven percent of apple blossom pollinators are bees! Without them, most of the flowers would die without a chance to produce an apple. 

When it comes to avocados, the U.S is the world’s largest market, with California producing about ninety percent of the nation’s crop. Even though avocados are a partially self-pollinating crop, a report from the National Agricultural Statistics Service has indicated that honeybees are responsible for ninety percent of an average avocado crop. Blueberries follow this trend, with ninety-five percent of blueberry plant pollination occurring thanks to honeybees—pretty impressive for a 593-million-dollar business. 

For many of today’s beekeepers, pollination contracts with large agricultural operations serve as a major source of income, with the resulting honey as a secondary product. In Canada, thanks to massive farmlands in the central provinces, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba produce eighty percent of Canada’s honey crop. Most exported Canadian honey goes to Japan and the U.S, and if the demand necessitates, Canada imports the most honey from New Zealand and Brazil. 

To supplement domestic supplies of bees each spring, Canadian beekeepers import queen bees and package bees—a few pounds of worker bees and a mated queen. These imported bees rapidly replace over-winter queen and hive losses to ensure beekeeping operations can operate at full capacity during the warm months. Most imported queen bees come from California and Hawaii, although Italy, New Zealand, Australia, and Chile have all been certified safe as well. Package bees, however, only come from Australia, New Zealand, and Chile.

Aside from commercial beekeeping for honey and pollination contracts, apiculture produces an important secondary product: beeswax. Beeswax is used in many industries, including cosmetics, polishing, and pharmaceuticals. It is also a coating for cheese, a food additive, and an ingredient in candles. Honeybee venom can also be commoditized as it contains a mixture of proteins that can potentially be used as a prophylactic to combat HIV in humans. While some farms primarily produce honey or are sustained by bee contracts, other produce or flower farms opt to have their own apiary to pollinate crops. In doing so, they harvest and sell the honey, wax, and other hive-products as a source of secondary income. 

Even though these natural workers truly never stop, they always have time for visitors! Many honey farms offer seasonal bee agritourism, where guests can get up-close and personal with the hives. As a visitor, you can sample and buy local products, including terroir honey, artisanal honey vinegars, mead varietals, raw and creamed honey, soaps, royal jelly, candles, and bee pollen.

Some communities, like Simcoe County in Ontario, Canada, have created honey trails—a winding exploration of community producers, markets, gift shops, and even resorts, that showcase the proliferation of the region’s sweetest treat. One of these Simcoe County communities is Beeton—a small hamlet named after the “Bee King'' of Canada, D.A. Jones. Jones established a thriving honey business in 1880 and produced 70,000 pounds of honey from four hundred colonies that year. He became the first commercial honey producer in Canada, and his legacy lives on in the county’s continued connection to apiculture. 

It's no secret that bees are critical to the health of environmental ecosystems and to the agriculture industry. However, since the second half of the twentieth century, agricultural bee pollinators have faced mounting threats from ecological disturbance and pan-global transmission of pathogens and parasites. Concurrently, to meet global food demand, the number of pollinator-dependent crops is increasing. Unfortunately, a widespread bacterial disease called American foulbrood is destroying entire colonies of bees. But thanks to three FDA approved antibiotics, apiaries are beginning to get this devastating honeybee disease under control. Even still, because of vanishing environmental supports, prolific use of herbicides and pesticides, and the emergence of harmful hive diseases, scientists have estimated that one in six bee species is regionally extinct, and more than forty percent are vulnerable to extinction. 

In fact, Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is now something all apiarists are aware of and are working to prevent. Since the initial detection of CCD in 2006, honeybee keepers have been losing approximately thirty percent of their hives every year. Although it’s not yet fully understood, CCD appears to be a destructive amalgamation of several drivers of collapse, including parasitic mites, increased viral levels, and pesticides. CCD can be diagnosed if there is a sudden loss of a colony’s worker bee population with very few dead bees found near the colony. When this happens, the queen and brood young remain, and the colony has abundant honey and pollen reserves. However, without the worker bees, the remaining colony members eventually die, and the bee colony collapses. 

While this paints a picture of a bleak future for our bees, crops, and ecosystems, science is working hard to restore a healthful balance to our planet’s most important pollinators. Researchers like Paul Stamets—an American mycologist and author of nine books on mushrooms—have discovered some natural solutions to bees’ biggest threats. Due to an increase in monocultured landscapes and a decrease in biodiversity, bees have lost access to many sources of nutrition that benefited them in the past. Because of this, the immune systems of bees seem to be too low to ward of CCD by themselves. Stamets has found that extracts from mushroom mycelium—the vegetative or root structure of mushrooms—may prove to be a powerful support to bees as they face more environmental challenges. In 2015, researchers had honeybees drink an assortment of mushroom mycelium extracts. The results indicated that the extracts provided essential nutrition that had an immune benefit for the bees. When the colony was nutritionally supported, hive-health improved. 

So, scientists and apiarists aside, what can the average person do to help bee colonies? Stamets has created a patent pending BeeMushroomed FeederTM; a delivery system for the mushroom mycelium extract. This easy-to-hang feeder will make the nutritive food easily available to bees in your yard and neighbourhood and will help to sustain their health in a natural way. You can also plant a bee garden with pollen and nectar-rich flowers in a range of shapes, colours, sizes, and bloom times. These can be in larger beds, flowerpots, window boxes, and even mixed into vegetable gardens. Look for native plants as often as possible since many bee species have evolved to feed on native flowers.

No matter what you plant in your home garden, avoid using pesticides and herbicides. If you must use a pesticide, choose a targeted organic product, and do your best to avoid applying it when flowers are blooming. You can also join a global movement to help collect data on bees, as regular people are now being recruited to participate in data-driven activities for scientific research. For instance, you can help to document the species found in your community by using an app like iNaturalist to upload photos of bees for scientists to identify and map. And because bees get most of their nectar from tree blossoms, be sure to care for and plant trees in your yard and community.

Trees are also an essential bee habitat as resin and leaves provide nesting materials for the colonies, and wood cavities make superb shelters. 

After all that foraging for nectar, pollinating, and honey-making, bees work up quite a thirst! Help them find a drink by filling a shallow bird bath or bowl with clean water and arrange pebbles and small stones inside so that they break the surface tension. Bees will land on the rocks to take a refreshing drink! And since many bees, including bumblebees, live in nests underground, consider leaving a bare, mulch-free, well-drained, sunny, and protected section of your yard for bees to create and access any underground nests. Bees also live in hollow plant stems, so wait until the spring to cut back dead flower stalks, leaving stems eight to twenty-four inches high to provide overwintering homes for cavity-nesting bees. Teachers and community groups can even access free resources including guides, lessons, and activities to help the next generation become bee stewards and learn about the importance of nature and bee preservation.

Finally, because local beekeepers work hard to nurture their bees and support local farmers’ crops, the easiest way to show your appreciation is to buy locally! Find a honey farm near you and explore the honey varieties, beeswax items, soaps, lotions, and other apiary products right outside your door. And since local honey is made from local flora, eating it may help with any seasonal allergies that come knocking in the spring and fall—even more reason to find your friendly neighbourhood beekeeper!

While the microscopic work of pollination is something we can’t easily see, every full orchard and farmer’s field should serve as an obvious reminder that bees are working hard for our benefit every day. And even if we can’t have our own backyard apiary, we can all do our part to use our yards, garden beds, and flowerpots to help support local bee populations. Just like bees in a hive, we can work together to make a big difference with our small actions. We might not have any honey to show for our efforts, but knowing we’re helping to ensure a bountiful planet for generations to come sure is sweet.