Family farms are so important! In fact, according to the National Institute of Food and Agriculture of the USDA, more than 90% of farms in the U.S. are classified as small family farms. That’s a lot of family love grown into our food supply. But due to factors that include climate change, giant agribusiness and […]
The almonds are in full bloom and that means the bees are here, too! Yay! Almonds and honeybees have a very important relationship with each other. You can’t have almonds unless the trees are pollinated—they don’t pollinate themselves! And honeybees love delicious almond flower nectar, especially since almonds are one of the first flowers to […]
National Honey Bee Day is Saturday, August 17. The USDA designated the third Saturday in August an official “awareness” day about 10 years ago to recognize the importance of our bees and the beekeepers who tend them. What’s the buzz all about? Well, did you know that, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, these […]
It’s Bloom season here in Chico. It’s been raining more this year than most, but our bees did find a break in the weather to help pollinate the trees. Time will tell how well they were able to do. In the meantime, it is always glorious to see the almond trees burst into bloom. Locals […]
Meet one of our biggest business partners: the honeybees! The importance of bees for almonds is so valuable that the relationships between almond growers and the beekeepers we work with go back for years. Almonds, like many crops, are not self-pollinating. So between January and March we depend on bees coming into our orchards to do […]
This morning as I sat eating breakfast next to a wonderful Crepe Myrtle tree in full flower and buzzing with bees, I realized that a person could find it hard to believe that bees might be an endangered species. After all, I reported here myself last March about how Colony Collapse Disorder in honey bees […]
Saturday, August 18th is National Honey Bee Day! Honey bees are the almond grower’s best friend so we need to celebrate! We bring honey bees into our almond orchards every year because every almond you eat exists only because some sweet bee pollinated an almond blossom. And the bees benefit, too! Almond blossom nectar provides […]
One of the nice things about living in Chico, CA is how closely connected almost the entire community is to the lifecycles of our local produce. Nuts, of course, are a big deal in this area and the almond orchards draw people out to the countryside throughout the year. One of my favorite times is […]
Guess what? Yesterday was the first annual World Bee Day! The holiday is about spreading awareness of the significance of bees and came about as the result of a recently adopted UN resolution. It will be on May 20th every year which is also the birthday of Anton Janša, a teacher of apiculture and pioneer of […]
About 10 years ago beekeepers began to report unusually high losses of 30-90 percent of their hives. Worker bees would suddenly leave the hive, leaving the queen and the young behind, and without the workers the rest of the hive would eventually die. The phenomenon was called Colony Collapse Disorder and it became a very troubling […]
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