When it comes to bees, possibly the only things people agree on are the importance of these tiny winged workers to our very existence on this planet and the magical alchemy of their delicious honey.
Beyond those basics lies chaos.
To sum up the players in what in recent years has become a sticky mess, let’s just say the U.S. honey industry is disorder on a grand scale.
Honey prices have more than doubled in the past decade, though the honey yield has increased. But commercial beekeepers have seen their profits drop dramatically. As a matter of course, industry farmers contend with a complexity of issues and sometimes unsolvable problems.
Whether harvesting their bees’ honey or farming out their stocks for pollinating commercial crops, these growers must withstand perils ranging from Varroa mites and dangerous pesticides to limited bee food sources and changing weather.
Undercutting their efforts are the roughly 275 million tons of mostly substandard, often dubious and sometimes tainted honey imported every year into the U.S., as regulatory agencies either pass the buck or do little to fix the problem.
Backyard beekeepers buzz with some of the same issues — adequate land space that offers plentiful water and nutrients, the dearth of quality queen bees, the threats posed by parasites and the means used to try to control them in a sustainable, eco-friendly way.
“Put seven or eight beekeepers in a room, and it’ll get heated up pretty fast,” says John Coldwell of the Urban Beekeepers, a Broward County-based nonprofit with micro apiaries throughout South Florida. “Probably it won’t take long before someone gets up and walks out.”
Exacerbating the conflict have been misleading media reports about mass bee die-offs and colony collapses that began appearing more than a decade ago.
Widespread public misperception adds to the concerns about bees
and environmental sustainability, and questions the ethics, even the morality, of the use of bees in farming and even human honey consumption.
And where ethics and morality over non- human living beings comes into play, also entering the fray will be activists of various stripes and PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
To turn the cliché on its head, suddenly honey is everyone’s beeswax.
Bee-less honey has fast become one of the trendy fixes for the “Beepocalypse,” much like paper straws became a global “solution” in 2015, after a gruesome video clip went viral showing a plastic straw being extracted from the snout of a giant sea turtle.
Never mind that according to USDA survey data, honey-producing bees and colony numbers have risen steadily since 2006, when reports of what became known as Colony Collapse Disorder first emerged.
Many Americans continue to believe we are one bad winter away from Beemageddon, where the mass extinction of honey bees leads to the breakdown of commercial crop production and the ultimate starvation of the human race.
Reality doesn’t have the same dramatic flair.
Turns out, honey bees die in masses as a matter of course — it’s not unusual. The Washington Post, among the only national media outlets to correct the record, found that while Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) did affect bee numbers from 2006 to 2008, seasonal die-offs account for
the loss of roughly 14 percent of colonies every year.
Agricultural economists Randal R. Tucker and Walter N. Thurman, cited by The
Post from a 2012 working paper, found that beekeepers themselves quickly adapted to the losses caused by CCD with basic bee husbandry methods, including splitting healthy colonies up and introducing quality queens to the new hives.
A single honey bee colony can consist of anywhere from 10,000 to well over 60,000 bees. The hive functions as a single organism with most of its family made up of female worker bees that are all often offspring of the same queen.
What comprises a season for honey production varies with location. Florida, for example, has more growing, thus pollinating seasons, than North Dakota.
The process of laying one egg takes only a few seconds, and a queen is capable
of laying up to 2,000 eggs within a single day — then, four days later, baby bees. Lifespans of honey bees vary. While the pampered queen can live up to two years on average, the lifespan of workers is roughly a third as long during the winter and a short 15–38 days in summer, when they’re busiest and most under stress simply from doing what they do best.
Asked recently about bee-less honey during a visit to the Coral Springs Apiary at the Rotary Community Gardens in Coral Springs, Coldwell looks out from his protective netting and, after a beat, says,
“What’s that?”
His wife and Urban Beekeeper partner, Teresa Coldwell, grimaces.
“It’s not honey. It’s sweetener maybe,” she said, “but it’s not honey — and shouldn’t be called honey.”
A stinging condemnation, perhaps, but not a fatal one.
Faux honey, bee-free honey, harmless hunny, vegan honey — whatever it’s called — is a thriving, if fraught, business these days.
Bee-less honey proponents — almost always from the ranks of its makers, vegans, and yes, PETA — argue that the product, often made from apples, beet sugar, and lemon juice, saves bees’ lives.
“PETA encourages everyone to go vegan, which means rejecting anything that’s taken from any animal or for which an animal suffered or was killed — and that includes honey,” PETA executive vice president Tracy Reiman said in a statement.
According to this world view, honey is “made by bees for bees,” but “is taken by corporations and small vendors alike.”
“Apiarists can do great work for bees without stealing their honey,” Reiman said.
Quite a statement for faux honey sellers, although it doesn’t appear to have worked well for the business partners who in 2016 became the face of the product.
Katie Sanchez and Melissa Elms introduced their Bee Free Honee on “Shark Tank” in 2016. Pitching the product as bee-friendly, environmentally sustainable, and best of all, deliciously honey-like, Bee Free Honee was made from apples, beet sugar, and lemon juice, and could be used in most of the ways we enjoy the real thing.
Born amid news reports of mass bee deaths and Colony Collapse Disorder, threatening the existence not only of bees and all of the produce they pollinate, but possibly human existence itself, Bee Free Honee took off.
Sales quadrupled within the first year after Sanchez and Elms won financial backing from “Shark Tank” judges, and began to develop new products.
But then, in 2019, seemingly out of nowhere, Bee Free Honee went bust.
Sanchez, who misguidedly believes honey bee populations are declining, told ExploreVeg.org that Bee Free Honee got swept up in the Beepocalyse.
“I didn’t realize the depth of the honey controversy,” Sanchez said. “I was not in any way prepared.”
While she did not provide details about the reasons the business failed, Sanchez acknowledged Bee Free Honee faced criticism from all corners, in ways that revealed how the business was out of its depth; in fact, it was failing to meet the expectations of its small but vociferous vegan and activist market, while also criticizing and alienating a powerful and vocal U.S. agricultural industry.
Honey production in the U.S. totaled 157 million pounds in 2019, according to the most recent figures available from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That’s up nearly 3 percent from 2018, amounting to roughly 1.69 pounds of American- produced honey per person. (Americans consumed nearly 610 million pounds of honey in 2019, with 68 percent of that total from imports.)
There are nearly 5,000 registered beekeepers in the state of Florida (as
of September 2019), according to a University of Florida report. Nearly
85 percent of these are considered “backyard” beekeepers (0–40 colonies), while the remaining 15 percent are “sideline” (41–100 colonies), or “commercial” beekeepers (100+ colonies). In total there are over 650,000 managed colonies in the state that produced more than 10 million pounds of honey in 2018.
The U.S. market totaled an estimated $2.3 billion (of the global $8.6 billion) in 2020, according to Research & Markets annual honey report, released in July.
The demand for honey — but not necessarily sweetener — seems, as ever, insatiable.