Did you know…

A single pound of clover honey represents the distilled nectar of some 8.7 million flowers. In a week, a productive hive can add seventy pounds of honey to its stores.

And did you know…

Almonds, in particular, have extremely high pollination requirements—nearly all the flowers in an orchard must be cross-pollinated to produce a commercial crop—and so California’s increasingly large (and lucrative) almond industry is almost entirely honeybee-dependent; it is estimated that to service the state’s two billion dollars’ worth of almonds next year will require nearly 1.5 million hives, or roughly two-thirds of all the colonies that existed in this country before colony-collapse disorder. (The price of renting a hive during the almond bloom, which starts in late February, rose from fifty-five dollars three years ago to a hundred and thirty-five dollars this year, and next year will likely reach a hundred and seventy dollars.) Five years from now, as more acreage goes into production, it is expected that almonds will require 2.1 million colonies, or nearly all the hives that are currently being kept, both by commercial beekeepers and by hobbyists.