Welcome, welcome to Be Love Beekeeping presented by our good friends at Man Lake. In this episode, we're skipping some of the fun stuff up front and jumping right into a really important topic. Last week I touched on the scary news about massive bee die-offs, especially with commercial beekeepers. And I promised to report back with new info as soon as it was made available.
Today we're presenting a discussion with Chris Hyatt, the recent past president of the AHA American Honey Producers Association. He will give his personal take on what's going on. Then just a couple of hours ago, the Honey Bee Health Coalition emailed some new updated numbers of colony losses and the associated economic impact. So after we hear from Chris, we'll wrap up with that information, which is even more fresh than what we had when we spoke with Chris a couple of days ago.
So let's get right to it. I'd like to welcome our very special guest today, Chris Hyatt from California. How are you, Chris? I'm good, I'm good. Good. I want to jump right into the big excitement, fear, everything that's going on that's been in the news with huge amounts of honey bee losses. And you're in a good position to talk about it because you are the recent past president of the American Honey Producers Association. Did I get that right? Yep, correct.
And a lifelong beekeeper going back generations and you're a commercial beekeeper. You have bees in the almonds right now. So before we get into everything that you can teach us, what do you know about the quote crisis that's going on with honey bees right now? Well, it does look like it might be the worst year since, you know, CCD 2007, 2008. There's a lot of operations that have lost 60, 70, 80 percent and it's not one location.
I've heard guys from North Dakota, Texas, Washington state, it's all over the map. So unfortunately for us, we didn't have big losses this winter. We get one of our best winters last five years. But the previous two were pretty bad for us. So to me, it seems like it's Varroa mites with the viruses in the middle of the winter, the mites, you'll get them under control in the fall, but the virus is already there. And it's a ticking time bomb.
When the cold weather comes, you try to overwinter them, then you lose. And I've even some beards that I overwinter here in California. And there's some that just lost two, three frames of bees between Christmas and just after New Year's for no reason. And there's other yards that gained two, three frames of bees for no reason. So it's just kind of random. So do you have any idea what the, I mean, you mentioned viruses, but why would it be worse this year than last year or the year before?
Well, you know, the price of honey is coming down after our dumping suit. And so some guys skimped on input cost and then even I was ahead of below honey, I was below average this year for our honey crops. So some people were maybe skimped a little bit and didn't get the mite treatments on in time and they got hurt by it. And there's all, well, there's all sorts of factors, but I mean, in every operations different and every geographic area is different.
And there could be some pesticide mixed into that doesn't help. There's so many variables. But from what I'm hearing, there's a pretty good commonality that there was viruses built up and maybe they didn't get some of these guys didn't get the broa under control soon. They got them under control, but it might have been too late. What is soon enough, September? Yeah, or August.
We start in August, but one of the former bee informed partnership, you know, inspectors who went on his own, we still have him continuing to inspect our bees. And he mentioned in North Dakota, he was surprised how high the mite counts were mid-September. And luckily we have a lot of zeros and ones and twos. When you do a, you know, 300 bees, you do the alcohol wash, we had low counts, but there's a lot of guys that had, he said five, seven, nine, 10s, 15s. In my mind, that's too late.
Yeah, you could get them under control, but the virus is the deformed wing virus, like cyanide is really B for Alice's virus. They're there and they're waiting to take the hive, the bees out when the cool weather hits and you got no, no, no floral activity and nothing. So I know the USDA and others are studying this right now and it's going to be quite a while before they have enough data to really come out with what's going on and specific numbers.
But just from what you're observing, are you finding that the worst cases are from Florida, from North Dakota, from where? It's, there's definitely some from South Dakota. The buddy runs a big operation in South Dakota, North Dakota, Texas. I know some Washington state beekeepers that have lost a ton, 60, 70% of their operation. But then there's other guys that in that same area, Washington state, he said, just like I did, one of his best winners last 10 years.
So I mean, that to me, that does point more to viruses, Boromite, because if it was a widespread pesticide issue, it wouldn't be across all these geographical areas. If you could talk to hobby and sidelineers beekeepers for a minute, give them an idea of what they should be doing to get on top of Varroa and when. And I know that's a huge, huge topic. Yeah. But you just talked about timing, which I don't hear talked about a lot. So get into that.
Well I was on, I'm on the steering committee for the Honey Bee Health Coalition and their Varroa mite guide is the number one guide, literally in the world, I think most down go to most red and it's very accurate. I mean, you have to do spring treatments before your honey float treatments, as soon as you can post honey harvest treatments and then you got to follow up and follow up and follow up.
And I think that's my biggest advice, probably for hobbyists and sidelineers, you got to follow up to make sure that my treatment worked and what your mite levels are. You might have to do repeated and rotate, for mac acid to amatraz, to oxalic acid glycerin to, and you got to keep changing it up and stay on top of it. I mean, that's the biggest advice I'd give. And by follow up, you mean testing. Yeah, doing your mite counts.
That's the most common thing that I hear from people asking me questions. Why didn't my bees make it over winter? And if I ask, well, what was your mite load in the fall? Oh, yeah, that's usually they don't know. That's got to be number one now. I mean, people don't realize it, but that's your room on 30 years almost, the borough might hear. Yeah, you got to know your mite levels. Got to know it. Okay. So should we be panicked about what's going on with bee losses right now?
Well, I want to be sensitive. I don't want to say panic, but it was hard for me and my brothers to rebuild the last two years and expensive. And it will be expensive and hard for some of these guys that have lost a lot of bees this year. And there's some that I've heard maybe don't even have enough money to rebuild. So we'll come through it just like we have had in the past.
There'll be, you know, the, I'm seeing on Facebook, there's hives already for sale here for next month when the almonds are done. The prices aren't astronomical, but we'll recover. But I do feel for the operations that lost so much because I think Trump had froze some of the ELAP payments and they might have to wait for them. So it's just a lot of uncertainty right now. So yeah, it's definitely newsworthy. And we want the news. We want the attention.
We're, you know, we're so important to commercial beekeepers for the national food supply, pollinating all these crops. Besides the honey we make, I mean, it's keeping all this food domestically here, not having to import food. So we need to stay in business. And that's a good message to get across to all media across, you know, across the country. All right. Well, you got the biggest one here. There we go. Just kidding. One of these days.
Hey, tell us what it's like to be a commercial beekeeper. We've had a lot of hobbyists on this show, but what's an average day and year and calendar like for you and your family? Well, almost all days are different to be honest, like sometimes I'm meeting farmers, sometimes I'm moving bees, sometimes I'm feeding bees, sometimes I'm doing yard rent to farmers, sometimes I'm doing bills and paperwork. But calendar year, let's, we start right here.
I'm in California, which I live, you know, eight months of the year, we're putting bees into almonds. We got them ready the last month of January feeding in one last time, one more pollen patty. We move them into almonds. We also do a little bit of plums and blueberries and cherries, but after this big pollination event, we start rebuilding all those deadouts, making nooks off of our good surviving hives. And we get queens from Hawaii and start building three, four or 5,000 nooks.
And we put those into oranges to build up here in the central valley. And we sent about 9,000 hives to Washington state, to two brothers that I have up there. And they pollinate apples in Washington state. And then meanwhile, we'll be making a little bit of orange honey and the nooks will top box them and they'll be full blown hives ready to go to North Dakota for the summer. So we'll continue, you know, April, May, my treatment, serve where needed.
And then we start stockpiling and moving bees to North Dakota. And we've done that for 70 something. My dad used to go to Alberta, Canada in the late 60s, early 70s. And then so everybody go, the families go and we start harvesting honey. And then, you know, the kids go back to school. And so I'm a bachelor or month or two of the year in North Dakota. And it's just a lot of hard work.
Luckily we have forklifts and pallets, but I mean, it's my hands are sore, back sore, shoulder, lifting all this honey, putting them on pallets. I love pulling honey. That's the fun, rewarding being outdoor, turn a podcast on or radio station on and you're outdoor working all day. And then you bring now that honey back to the shop. And I have a brother that runs the extract crew. We extracts and spins all the honey out.
And then we start with the my treatments again in August and feeding again, pollen patties. We probably do buy pollen patties between September 1st, January 15th, because you just don't want any of the, you just don't, you try not to get these bees any chance to go downhill to lose population. It doesn't always work. Then we start shipping back here to California.
So all the bees come back here to California over winter here in October, November, December, we're feeding, pulling off deadouts, even replacing Queens. Man, we get Queens probably 10 months of the year, almost 11 months of the year. We always have Queens in our side boxes or in our cabs of our trucks, replacing Queens. Cause you know, the only last year, year and a half, I mean, we were more than a quarter million weight beyond that actually on Queens spent every year.
So you got to have it because you got to have those viable hives and the queen, anything suspect you want to kill her because you don't want to lose that $200 or high for almonds that I've dying during the winter. And that's pretty much a typical year. Wow. You have a good way of summarizing that. I've done it a few times. A few times. How many hives is your family running? We're running about 17,000. We used to be 20. We've kind of downsized just a little bit.
Some of that is just because of not getting back up to the number we want from how many last two winners, not this one, but the two before, but yeah, 17 to 19,000 usually. And my dad started it like 58 years ago and he freighter Washington bought out a commercial bee guy. He, he was teaching school, grew, you know, born raised on a farm, going back, not making any money.
He's working with his brother on the farm and decided to work for a beekeeper a couple of summers, Don Greg, it used to, it doesn't exist anymore, Silverville Honey Company, they closed up. We used to have all the Safeway contracts in the specific Northwest and he loved it. And then he bought out a small beekeeper and kind of the rest is history. He took the big chance. I didn't take much. He took the big loan out and then all my brothers, we just kind of all went into it.
So. Well, hopefully y'all get along well. For the most part. We have family business. I've seen a million of them over the years. It's not an easy thing. It is not. And then we're right now on the third generation. There's a nephew that wants to join in. And so it's, yep, it's, yeah, for the, it's rewarding for the most part because we can step in if someone has, you know, death in the family or something like that, where we all help and we all do it the way my dad taught us.
So we're all, you know, running bees the same way and there's, we have a lot of oversight. I guess we were with our crews. Some of us, we divide up all summer and spring. So there's usually a brother on every crew, not all the time, but most of the time. So it was good oversight versus just sending higher guys out. Just a quick break here to thank our presenting sponsor, Man Lake. Hey, if your weather is anything like mine, it is freezing out.
So let's put our creative brains together and visualize spring. Birds chirping, flowers blooming and bees buzzing. Now let's visualize you enjoying beekeeping so much more with some new gear. Or if you're new to beekeeping and not sure what you need, give Man Lake a call and their experienced beekeepers will help every step of the way. Protective gear, hives and tools, even packaged bees, nukes and queens, Man Lake has it all.
And don't forget your discount code MLBLOV10, it's in the show notes, for $10 off your first $100 purchase. I'm feeling better already. Now, back to the guest. So how many employees does it take? Oh boy, in the summer, we're probably 25, you know, right there. And then in the winter, we're heavy, just like a lot of commercial bee guys, we're heavily dependent on H2A visa program. So we have beekeepers from Mexico and Mexico that come up and help us.
And then we have some full-time guys here in California that stay all winter. I also have almonds, so some of them stay and run the almonds while I go North Dakota. And then a few guys go to tomato harvest and stuff and then they come back and help us after the summer. So we do have some full-time guys here locally, but a lot of it is H2A visa program. On a whole other subject, you mentioned when we were speaking earlier about beekeepers generationally in your family going back.
Can you trace how far back you had beekeepers in your family? Yeah, I could be fourth generation beekeeper, but my grandfather just farmed. He didn't have any bees, but my great grandfather, Isaac Samuel Hyatt had bees in late 1870s in Pace in Utah. He's one of the first beekeepers in Utah. So there, I know there was some before the Cox family had some before we were there, but pretty one of the earliest ones.
But it's just too bad my grandfather just didn't have a couple of highest way I can say them before generation. Yeah. Well, you skip a generation. You'll get a couple more in now. Yeah, skip. All right. This is your opportunity, Chris. We're going to get into a wild and crazy story in just a minute, but I want to ask you something else first. This is going to be, I asked a lot of hobbyists this, what brings you joy about beekeeping? And for you, it's such a business and your whole life.
Give me some ideas. Why do you like it? You could be out doing some other job. Yeah. I really enjoy being self-employed. Like I've coached baseball for my son, softball for my girls. I'm currently helping coach the varsity wrestling team. I love having time to do what I want to do. And beekeeping, a lot of what you put into it, you get out of it. You take care of those bees for the most part, they'll take care of you. It was way more so in the 70s, 80s and 90s with my dad.
I mean, we had 5% loss usually every winter. But I love having time to do what I want to do, like helping and coaching, helping with my church and scouts over the years and going backpacking and stuff. I can't take much time off in the summer. Because we're just so busy, but when I can in the winter, I take more time off. I do love being self-employed. I love being outdoors and having things being different. I mean, sometimes it's office work. Sometimes it's talking to farmers.
I mean, I like that it's something different every day. And then it's been really enjoyable the last 10 years being more little politically active, I guess, being part of the honey producers going to Washington, DC, meeting a lot of senators and congressmen and talking about the bee issues and representing the bee industry. I mean, I've spoken at Appamondia and Chile and Montreal. And I've spoken at the Australian beekeeping.
I've spoken via Zoom to the Peruvians, Croatians, and probably a dozen different states. And so I've met so many people. I love talking to beekeepers and hearing their backstory. That's been enjoyable and fun for me over the years. So that's the business side. What about the bees themselves? Do you enjoy working with them? Oh, I do. Yeah. No, I love seeing and it's kind of like a math problem, right? Like, is this be yard? Is it should I make it smaller or higher?
Should we go 48 hives at 64 this summer? Should I not use it? Should I? I mean, it's kind of like a baseball team. You're managing and moving pieces here and there. And I do enjoy that part. And I do enjoy talking to the farmers that every time they always light up, I bring them a box of almonds and a box of honey that's made by us. And you talk to them and their issues and problem. That's always fun. I do enjoy that.
So as far as the honey producers, what kinds of issues are you working with Washington on? Some of our biggest things that we do is the ELAP program. We got that going some years ago and got the program on cap. And that's the emergency livestock assistance program that beyond whatever, 24% in the number fluctuates. If you lose highs beyond the percentage, the high mortality, you get payments. So I mean, we really don't have like crop insurance like other row crop farmers.
So this is the one thing that we've I think it's really help keep the business of many of our members and the industry as a whole afloat. And that's taken it takes maintenance. I mean, it takes work on Capitol Hill and have champions, Senator Tester, Senator Hogan, Senator Thune, another congressman to keep this funded. Our other big success was the dumping suit we won recently. The honey producers 20, 25 years ago, in 2001, won the China dumping suit. And that got doubled the price of honey.
Same thing just four years ago when we won this latest dumping suit against Vietnam, India, Brazil and Argentina, the price of honey doubled. It's softened now, which we know the dumping suits are expensive band-aids, but we're working on some legislation or something known as the high back to we're probably going to re submit it here soon with Senator, I mean, Congressman Stubey out of Florida. So we just want a level playing field for us. We want the legitimate honey. We want some testing.
We do know there's a lot of fake honey coming in and being mixed with our honey and calling it any kind of sticky stuff. I mean, it's coming in at 70, 80 cents from Vietnam, India. I mean, such a low price. I mean, how can you compete that level? And is it legitimate honey? And some of it isn't legitimate honey. So we're trying to help the consumer and plus keep ourselves in business. Cuz I mean, we only produce about a quarter of what the domestic production consumption is.
We used to be way higher. But with all the bee loss and all the habitat loss, the CRP acres going away or corn and soy, our honey production just keeps going down. So we, the honey producers, yeah, we're trying to get more habitat. We're access like in Utah was an epicenter of the Xerces society trying to prevent beekeepers going on national forest service land. We've been very involved with that.
But yeah, the honey price is really our focus as of now and what we're gonna do to try to keep beekeepers in business get a fair price. But there's always a problem going on, it seems like it. But yeah, we have a pretty good presence in DC. Well, we appreciate all the work you're doing there. Tell me about the Honey Bee Health Coalition. I think I have a pretty good idea, but why should people get to know it? Well, it's a good group of trade groups like corn, soy, canola guys.
And then there's the registrants, Bear and Sagenta along with beekeepers and researchers and we're trying to solve problems of bee health. And it's a good coalition that when we write letters and visit and talk to people on Capitol Hill about our problems, it has a lot more weight than it's just one beekeeping group. We have agribusinesses and researchers and other people behind us and trade groups. So this group has been valuable over the last whatever, 10 years.
And like I mentioned, the Borough and Might Guide is good. They have best management practices for many crops, from corn to soy to blueberries and now apples for farmers to know what to do and when not to spray. So they're not killing bees when the hives are near their crops. So it's been a valuable group. Explain the Borough and Might Guide.
The Borough and Might Guide, there was many different experts you could say and some commercial beekeepers that we all had our input on just the basic, this is a guide of what you win and when and what you should treat with in different regions of the country. And it's just a good blueprint for any new beekeeper to know how to keep your mites down. And it is the most downloaded guide, I think, in the world for Borough and Mites. So it's been a valuable resource especially for new beekeepers.
Well, one thing I like about it is it doesn't just say, here's what you do. Yeah. It asks questions like, how organic do you want to be? What kind of temperatures are you having? Where are your colonies at at this point right now? And then it gives you a handful of options on treatments from there. And I find that very, very helpful for to help me make good decisions for my beekeeping. It gives you multiple. Some guys are a little more or muc acids, some are more oxalic acids.
And yeah, it gives you different options and different ideas. And it must be pretty good for how many, when we see how many downloads it has. And something along those lines that you touched on just a little bit earlier was that one treatment may work this year and may not work next year. Can you explain why that is and where people go after that? Well, amitrized resistance is a real thing. And just like with Roundup, there's resistance.
If you keep using the same product year after year, the same thing with amitrized, same thing that happened with cumafose years ago, we use cumafose like it's a pyrethroid. We use it like twice. And the third year, it's just like we had big, 60% loss because the miticide didn't kill the mites. It had already gotten resistance. But we're finding finally after all these years amitrized, there's amitrized resistance. And so that's why rotating is so important.
So you just can't put in those strips every year and just say, hey, I think I'm good, but you need to rotate and keep up with the latest science and the latest products because you got to rotate between three, four different chemicals probably. I think that is super good advice. All right, give us a wild and crazy beekeeping story that you have had, Chris. Let's see. 20 years ago, we used to run bees kind of near Fargo, North Dakota, Valley Cities, the name of the town, Eastern North Dakota.
And it was like end of October. And I was there over a weekend to get to wherever three loads, I think, 1500 livestock piled and shipped. And the snow, we had this crazy blizzard. And I remember the chains on my semi, my 24 foot bed freight liner, I did not take them off all weekend. Didn't matter where you went. You just left the chains on perky lots, side roads, main highways, freeway. It was just nuts. Freezing our rear ends off.
And I can remember there was even one yard I came and did the turn. I did it probably at 25 miles an hour because if I knew if I stopped, I would have been stuck in the deep snow. So it's just crazy that I've had that experience. And then I can remember one farmer, we couldn't get to the bee yard. It was that bad. His name was Robert E. Lee. Kind of crazy that that was his name. And I called him and he said, I'll clean it out for you.
And he, with his big John Deere scraped the whole path, like almost like a freeway around the B.R. I could get in and get out. I sent him a check and he never cashed it. He was a really cool guy, really cool guy. But that was a crazy weekend of getting bees out of the snow miserable. But we ended up getting stuck two, three times getting farmers to pull us out. But boy, that was just like a crazy adventure. I won't forget.
Yeah. And something that only a commercial beekeeper is going to run into. Yeah. What other kinds of issues are commercial beekeepers dealing with? Kind of like I mentioned, the access to public lands is becoming a big issue. The Xerces is this nonprofit that has become like the lone consultant for NRCS on habitat issues. And they do some good work, but they've chosen to kind of go after us.
The low hanging fruit, even though like livestock on the forest service is way harder on native bees with the ground dwelling bees than we are. And Diana Cox Foster at the Logan lab, she's about ready to publish her paper. She did three years study in the Wasatch Mountains and didn't really see the competition or native impact. But that is a big talking point they are using and they're hitting us over the head on it.
And we've had numbers of lost permits to run bee yards in Washington state, Arizona. And now California looks like it's also. So it's disappointing because I think it's like 55 million acres of forest service ground. Beekeepers have like 0.01%. What kind of damage could that actually happen to so little honeybees? But they just want to keep going to this. And it just kind of seems like it's a fundraising environmental group that wants to use it.
But we just want to make people, they're aware of it because we hear it all the time. Like there's teachers in elementary school now saying, honeybees bad for native bees. Keep them away. And it's just, it's terrible. But that's one issue that we've kind of confronted. They've been good about getting a lot of news coverage. Yeah, they have been. Yes, they're funded. They're well funded. Yeah, we've seen it all over the place. And I get asked about it all the time. You probably do too.
Because European honeybees technically are not native here. When do we get naturalized? Right? I mean, they've been here three, what, 300 years for? Yeah. Yeah. But there's fossil records. They found some apis mellifora in like the desert of Arizona and it had some, they think, DNA proving that no honeybees have been here the whole time. So, yeah. That wouldn't surprise me one bit. The other thing that my logical mind goes to is whatever is good for honeybees is also good for the native bees.
In other words, if we're figuring out how to not use too many pesticides, that's good for the native bees. If we have clean water and good forage and things like that. I mean, even on my property here, I'm on a five acre lot and we plant so many things for the honeybees. But a lot of times I can go out and look at something closely and I'm going, wow, it is covered with all of these pollinators, these little bees that look kind of like flies that I know are a native bee here.
And my honeybees aren't even on these plants right now. And in a couple of weeks that may shift a little bit or I see them working together on the same plants. And so I know that, for example, just in my particular situation, things that we do for the honeybees helps the other bees. It's not running them out of town. Yeah. A really good guy that I know from the pollinator partnership used to always say, rising tide raises all boats. We need habitat across the board. We're working on it.
But yeah, just more concern and try to combat this would help, I think. Any other issues? Well, the last thing I would say is with President Trump, there's a lot of good things going on. We always think there's been a lot of waste, fraud and abuse in the government.
But unfortunately, when he's cut some of the researchers, like Friday night, I talked to one of the researchers at the Baton Rouge ARS lab and he was very down and sad that some of his colleagues have already got axed or took the buyout. And we're just like, no, we're needed for national food supply and we're having these record losses. There's no other livestock group even close to the losses that we are suffering from. So even with the bird flu, it's not even close.
So it's like, we need this money. We need this research. We hope they can be restored. That's probably my other take, I guess. Well, Chris, I appreciate it so very much. Thank you for being a friend of the show. We need to have you back on from time to time. No problem. We'll do. Thanks, Eric. Now, as promised, the headline from the Honey Bee Health Coalition reads, Survey Reveals Over 1.1 Million Honey Bee Colonies Lost, Raising Alarm for Pollination and Agriculture.
To summarize a few key points from the survey, and this is for the number of colonies lost between June of 2024 and February 2025, hobby beekeepers lost an average of 50% of their colonies, side liners, an average of 54%, and commercial operations, which usually have significantly fewer losses than hobbyists and side liners. Here's the alarming thing. Right now, their number is actually 62% colony losses this year. So here's the predicted impact.
The colony losses at $200 per colony equals $224.8 million. Total economic impact to beekeepers, including pollination contracts, colonies not accounted for in the survey, et cetera, totals $634.7 million. And that's not even taking into account lost honey sales from those colonies.
And the thing that I find almost mind-boggling is no one yet has even started adding up the total economic impact that will be felt when all men's and so many other crops have lower yields due to insufficient pollination. I'll conclude with this quote from Zach Browning, a fourth generation commercial beekeeper and board chair of Project APIS-M. Quote, the scale of these losses is completely unsustainable. Honeybees are the backbone of our food system, pollinating the crops that feed our nation.
If we continue to see losses at this rate, we simply won't be able to sustain current food production levels. The industry must look inward and outward for solutions to chronic bee health failure. Project APIS-M will be holding a free public webinar on February 28th, and you can find the link to that in today's show notes. Thanks again for joining us here on Bee Love Beekeeping, presented by Man Lake.
Another great place for more information on everything related to this podcast is in our email newsletter. You can sign up for it for free at belovebekeeping.com. And remember, if you're not just in it for the honey or the money, you're in it for the love. See you next week.