Abuzzzzzz in business
County bees ready to work West Coast fields
By BARRY HALVORSON news@leader-news.com

L-N Photo by Barry Halvorson Live Cargo Workers load bee hives from English Honey Farms for a trip to California's almond fields. With the bees help, the fields should be far more productive. The key to the process, owner A.J. Fucik said, is to get the bees across the country quickly and without pests.

NEW TAITON - If there is going to be an almond crop this year in California, it's going to take bees from Wharton County to make at least part of it possible.

Local businessman A.J. Fucik is combining 1,500 of his about 2,200 hives with other bee keepers to ship to what he says is California's second largest almond orchard for the upcoming growing season.

"It is a 10,000 acre orchard and they need around 18,000 colonies of bees to pollinate the trees," Fucik said. "No one can come up with that many colonies. There's a few hive owners that can do about 5,000 around the country, but they have to fill in with other suppliers to meet their needs."

Fucik's business is known as English Honey Farms and he has colonies of bees spread across seven counties and as far away as LaPorte. This week he was loading up the hives on flatbed trucks for transport to the West Coast where the almond pollination season starts around Feb. 2-3.

Under the lease agreement, the bees will be released for return around March 10. Rather than bring them back immediately, Fucik has arranged a second pollination contract for melons in the Rio Grande Valley before his hives are returned to their home locations for the start of the honey production season.

Fucik said there are several advantages to leasing his bees. First and foremost is the revenue it brings in following an off year for honey production in 2007.

"It was a very wet year so the bees didn't do well and we had virtually no honey production," he said. "Usually, we pack around 200,000 pounds of honey in a year for distribution through various supermarket chains in Texas and other states. The lease revenue is what's keeping a lot of bee keepers in business right now."

A second benefit is getting a significant increase in the number of bees. When active during the honey production season, a colony of bees ranges from 30,000 to 60,000 in a hive. This time of year, the numbers are down, but waiting to explode.

"Almond pollen is real high protein," he said. "When the hives are returned, they'll be boiling with bees at just the right time for Texas pollination."

While the bee owners are benefiting from the arrangement, so are the almond growers. He said without bees to assist in pollination, a typical orchard will produce between 600 and 800 pounds per acre in a growing season. With the insect assistance, those numbers jump to 2,500 to 4,000 pounds per acre.

"Right now, there is probably 800,000 acres in almond production and they're planting up to an additional 100,000 acres per year," Fucik said. "The only thing limiting them is getting new seedlings to plant. And getting bees. This year, the estimate is that 70 percent of all the country's bees will be sent to California."

And getting bees is getting to be a challenge due to colony collapse, which results in all the bees in a colony dying off at the same time. And while it has hit the East and West Coasts hard, Fucik said it's also becoming a problem along the Gulf Coast area.

"The number of colonies in the country has gone from 5.25 million down to 2.25 million in just a few years," he said.

"No one is exactly sure what the cause is - they think it's a virus - but right now the almond growers are actually spending more money to research the problem than bee keepers are. That shows how important the bees are to their growing season."