Whew! Almond Pollination Going OK

That collective sigh of relief you hear is coming all the way from the Central Valley in California, starting in Bakersfield stretching all the way to San Francisco.

Part of it is from the almond growers there who have pretty much found enough bees to pollinate all the trees they need pollinated, and the rest of it is from the beekeepers there who have been able to provide the bees they promised, and finally got all those hives moved from holding yards into orchards. Some 1.2 to 1.4 million hives have been moved in the last 6 – 10 days, so there has been a lot of truck traffic between the middle of no where (where they keep the bees in holding yards) to the middle of those almond orchards, where they’ll sit for another 2 – 4 weeks, depending on the weather.

Early on the weather was working against everybody ... cool, cloudy and rainy. But that broke early the week of the 20th and the sun came out, the wind died down and temperatures warmed up ... at least during the day. The night time temperatures have been in the upper 30s, which makes the bees form tight clusters inside to keep warm, but early in the day the sun is out and the temperatures climb to the mid 60s and even lower 70s in the central part of the state ... that’s great flying weather if you’re a hungry honey bee looking for nectar and pollen.

Now that the weather has settled almond bloom is progressing at a predictable rate according to the growers. Since almonds need to be cross-pollinated (that is, pollen from the flower of one variety of almond tree needs to be transferred to a flower on another variety of almond tree, in the next row over, to produce an almond), growers plant several varieties so that some begin bloom very early in the season and some don’t start blooming until much later in the bloom cycle. This ensures that there are always three or four varieties in bloom at the same time so those hard working honey bees can do all that pollen exchanging needed to set a good almond crop. And of course now you can see why honey bees are absolutely critical for this crop. With nearly 600,000 acres of almonds, getting pollen from one tree to another, billions of times, would be impossible without a dedicated, mobile workforce like honey bees.

By the middle of the week of the 20th the earliest blooming varieties were between 65% and 73% in bloom (depending on a southern, central or northern location), and the latest bloomers were just getting warmed up at 0% – 3% in bloom. With no rain and sunny skies the growers reported that the bees were "aggressively" visiting and pollinating those existing blossoms. That constant buzz in the orchards is a sweet song indeed to the people on both sides of the almond blossom, and it is, as one grower put it, the sound of money.

Though still not complete, the affect of colony collapse disorder on the bees that went to California is a little clearer now that nearly all of the colonies have been inspected and moved. Again this season there were some beekeepers that found they had significant losses that did not appear until just the last minute. The colonies had seemed fine when they moved out there, but in a very short time (but after a delay due to the weather, with little food and unable to fly) they experienced the now well-defined collapse ... in a week’s time or sometimes less ... the bees just disappeared. And there is no good reason this has occurred. Or so it seems.

One broker I talked to said for the life of him he couldn’t figure it out. They seemed fine, then ... poof ... gone.

(A broker is most often a beekeeper, or someone with beekeeping experience, who uses his own colonies, plus colonies of other beekeepers that do not travel to California but send their bees there, to work with large almond growers. That way the beekeeper has enough colonies to do a large pollinating job, while neither the beekeeper nor the grower have to put all their eggs in one basket, as it were. If the colonies from a particular beekeeping operation have a problem, there are others that the broker has that can fill any holes left by those missing colonies).

Yet another broker, one who has been in the business quite awhile, says that he’s beginning to see a pattern when it comes to bees that arrive in good shape and stay in good shape, bees that arrive in good shape and then begin to crash, and those that arrive in poor shape and never recover. That insight perhaps would be useful to researchers looking for answers ... what are some beekeepers and their bees experiencing that is causing them to not be in top shape when it comes to almond pollination time ... but better ... what are some doing that keeps them in tip top shape? We’d all like to know.