On BEEing Important...

I found this article in Bee Culture. Makes me want to go play with the girls in the hive...
[n.b. : my bolds]
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"For many years now, my job has been to work with people who keep bees and with the bees themselves, but I actually spend more time with bee people than with bees. Don’t take this next statement as anything but positive, but I must admit that we are an eccentric lot. After all, we keep bees intentionally. Most people do all they can to get away from bees. In my experienced and confident state, I long ago embraced the fact that, as a group, we are different. So just as I was mentally recovering from the reevaluation of the hobby designation, I was shocked a second time when one of the reviewers bluntly said, 'Yep, beekeeping has an image problem.'

The reviewer continued her thought by saying that her take on our industry was that beekeepers and their bees were contributing to a vital pollination need but we kept referring to the process being a hobby. The public then, too often, sees our hobby as being the harboring of dangerous stinging insects more than the culturing of valuable pollinating insects. While so much media energy has been given to the issue of disappearing bees, presently, two Ohio communities are considering ordinances against beekeeping. Alternatively, Winnie the Pooh and the ambience that beekeeping provides is the opposing 'warm, fuzzy' aspect of beekeeping. Bees adorn nearly everything from nursery room toys to crafts and pottery. Honey is used in innumerable food and cosmetic items. The question is begged, 'Does the public generally see bees as ally or pest?'

Beekeepers are part of the problem. We consistently use the terms honey and pollination in the same breath as though somehow they are similar. Honey is only a small byproduct of pollination. If we strip away all the trappings, pollination is the fundamental relationship between bees and flowers – not honey production. The problem is that honey is so easy to quantify. We can price it per pound. We measure the sucess of a bee season by our honey crop. We invest in complicated honey processing machinery. We have a National Honey Board, but we don’t have a National Pollination Board so honey must be more important. It is as though we admire a row boat (honey) while standing by an ocean-going cruise ship (pollination).

Pollination phenomena are simply not as visually fulfilling as full honey supers. No one ever says, 'My bees pollinated over 300,000 blossoms today!' but some of us put our colonies on scales to monitor our incoming honey production. When doing pollination work, we can’t say that we charge by the apple or even the apple tree. We know pollination is important, but it is so vague – so innocuous – so difficult to measure.

The numbers I am about to present are truly general estimations, but the numbers do show the scope of the pollination value that bees provide. It has been estimated that the value of commercial crops requiring pollination in Ohio to be about $86 million dollars. Ohio currently has about 3300 registered beekeepers; therefore, each Ohio beekeeper is unintentionally contributing about $26,000 per beekeeper to commercial fruit and vegetable production1. Each Ohio colony (50,000 – 70,000) is contributing about $1200-$2400 per colony toward the production of commercial fruit and vegetables. Ohio honey production is about 50# per colony or about $150 per colony (@ $3.00 per pound)2. Importantly, these estimations don’t reflect any backyard garden pollination value, ornamental flower pollination, or pollination value ascribed to non-commercial plants of ecological importance. It could be argued that the pollination value of a 'hobby' beekeeper’s single hive equals the honey value of 10-15 hives. While I have used Ohio numbers available to me, similar estimations would be expected from any other U.S. state."

From : "The Passing Of The Hobby Beekeeper", Bee Culture, September 01, 2007
Dr. James E. Tew, State Specialist, Beekeeping, The Ohio State University, Wooster, OH 44691