The Industry of Honeybees Today

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Humanity has long since had a relationship with bees, mainly those that produce honey, and honey has been used as a food, cosmetic product, and more since the time of the ancient Egyptians. Today, bees are still an essential insect for both the natural world and human foodstuffs, and they pollinate flowers as well as produce honey. In fact, large swaths of crops or flowers would be in serious peril without the pollinating labor of bees. This translates into a large vested interest in creating beehives and maintaining populations of honeybees around the world, and beekeeping is a substantial industry today. Bulk honey and fermented honey are major products of beehives, and organic bee pollen powder is another product that many consumers take an interest in. How might organic bee pollen powder be harvested, and how big is the honeybee industry today?

Organic Bee Pollen Powder and MoreHumanity has long since had a relationship with bees, mainly those that produce honey, and honey has been used as a food, cosmetic product, and more since the time of the ancient Egyptians. Today, bees are still an essential insect for both the natural world and human foodstuffs, and they pollinate flowers as well as produce honey. In fact, large swaths of crops or flowers would be in serious peril without the pollinating labor of bees. This translates into a large vested interest in creating beehives and maintaining populations of honeybees around the world, and beekeeping is a substantial industry today. Bulk honey and fermented honey are major products of beehives, and organic bee pollen powder is another product that many consumers take an interest in. How might organic bee pollen powder be harvested, and how big is the honeybee industry today?

Organic Bee Pollen Powder and More

Organic bee pollen powder, bulk honey, and more are major products of honeybees today, and many man-made beehives can be found across the United States to keep up production. On top of that, bees are vital for plant pollination, as mentioned above, acting as a natural part of most plants’ reproductive cycle. As of 2014, for a recent example, nearly 2.7 million honeybee colonies were being managed by human beekeepers, and that represented a 20-year peak number. And as of 2013, the state of North Dakota led the nation in beekeeping, and that state produced some 33 million pounds of honey that year. Beehives may also be kept for producing organic bee pollen powder, which many consumers add to their food such as cereal or others.

These bees are hard at work, and honey is not easily made. An average, single honeybee will produce 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime. That does not sound like much, but then again, a single bee has a short lifetime, and even a small hive will have many thousands of bees hard at work around the clock. A single bee would have to travel some 90,000 miles to make a single pound of honey, and that total distance circles the globe three times. Bees often travel far to find flowers to land on, and it is well known that bees have devised a sort of dancing method for explaining to other bees the location of ideal flowers to visit. Bee steps have been studied to determine how bees communicate geospatial data.

This makes for a vigorous industry, both for honey production and pollination. Every single year, honeybees and bumblebees pollinate $15 billion worth of crops in the United States, making them a natural and essential part of agriculture. They perform a job that cannot be easily replicated, although there are some efforts to create swarms of robotic bees that can pollinate plants. But for the time being, natural bees are the standard for this work. And there is plenty of demand for honey, which is used in a lot of cooking around the world. In the United States, for example, Americans on average consume 1.3 pounds of honey per year, even though the price of this food has doubled since 2006.

Beehives

Many bees belong to a natural hive, which are often found hanging from trees, but beekeepers build and maintain box-shaped hives for their charges. These artificial hives are much more useful for beekeeping since they are much tougher than regular hives, and can endure winds, rain, and animal attacks. What is more, these wooden hives are built with harvesting in mind, and they have drawers that slide out. These drawers make for easy access to honeycomb for the beekeeper to harvest from.

But even bees in a wooden hive are defensive, and bees, en masse, sting intruders. For this reason, beekeepers are known for wearing full body suits and specialized hats with mesh screens to protect the head, along with thick gloves. This makes for safer work and shields the worker from bee stings. Besides, bees die when they pull their stinger out of a victim, so a suit prevents bees from killing themselves by the hundreds when they attack the beekeeper. Thus, the suit protects the bees as well as the person.