Billions of Bees

Scientific American recently published an interesting and troubling story about migratory beekeeping and almond tree pollination in California. In a nutshell, each February over 1 million beehives are set up in California almond orchards. Collectively, these hives contain more than 31 billion honeybees. The bees then fan out over California's central valley where they visit many of the 2.5 trillion blossoms produced by 90 million almond trees. These honeybee visits result in approximately 700 billion pollinated flowers, which then produce almonds. This annual mobilization of billions of bees has some negative consequences, which may be contributing to colony collapse disorder. Some of the tupelo honey we sell is produced by honeybees that were shipped to our area of Florida at the end of the almond pollination season, so we are following these issues closely. For the complete article, see: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=migratory-beekeeping-mind-boggling-math