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Georgia’s Bee Industry is Buzzing
Chuck Hester, owner of Georgia Bee Supply, has a long family history with bees. His great-great-grandfather, P.W. Hester, owned hives in the early 1960s and his dad, Terry Hester, took up beekeeping in the 1990s while living in the hills of Tennessee.
After his father’s health began to deteriorate, Hester and his wife bought the bee business. Today the company operates under the name of Georgia Bee Supply LLC, and with the help of their children, nephews and close friends, the business produces package bees, queens, honey and supplies for other beekeepers all over the U.S. Hester is among several commercial beekeepers who produce bees and queen bees for sale in Georgia.
Because of the state’s mild climate, Georgia has traditionally been a high producer of queen bees. And while the industry has been in flux recently, the queen and package industry in Georgia is going strong with the demand often wildly exceeding the supply. One reason businesses like Hester’s have become increasingly important: Honeybees are the No. 1 source for crop pollination, and honeybee pollination accounts for more than 30 percent of the fruits and vegetables produced in Georgia. Pollination from honeybees and other pollinators adds more than $15 billion dollars to the U.S. economy per year in production of fruits, nuts and vegetables, and accounts for some $336 million per year of Georgia’s economy.
But Hester says since the mid 1940s, the number of live bee colonies in the U.S. has declined from 5 million to approximately 2 million. That statistic encouraged the University of Georgia and the Georgia Department of Agriculture to develop a pollinator stewardship plan to serve as a guide for both commercial and backyard beekeepers in an effort to protect the state’s vital pollinators.
“Whether you’re a backyard, urban Georgia citizen, or if you farm 10,000 acres, you’ll be able to pick up this document and get something practical out of it – something you can turn right around and immediately put to use for helping our pollinators,” says Keith Delaplane, director of the Honey Bee Program at the University of Georgia.
The university’s Beekeeping Institute, a partnership with Young Harris College, is also working to improve the plight of pollinators by educating beekeepers through classes, workshops and seminars. The Institute is also the home of the Georgia Master Beekeeper Program, a four-step graded program loosely modeled after the Master Gardener Program.
“[The Institute] is the high watermark of our extension activities here at UGA; I call it the Harvard of bee schools,” Delaplane says. “We make it a point to bring in the best and most knowledgeable speakers in the English-speaking world. So the people who come to the Young Harris Institute are hearing the best and the most timely bee science that is available.”
For his part, Hester is helping sustain the industry by hosting queen rearing classes and providing instructional DVDs to novice keepers.
“Introducing more people to beekeeping will help revive the honey bee population and bring awareness to people about how important bees are to our environment,” Hester says.
Delaplane agrees and adds that sustaining the industry is also vital to sustaining a big part of the state’s history and heritage.
“There’s an element of tradition to this,” he says. “You get families who have set up these businesses and they tend to persist – some of them are multigenerational. These things take on a culture of their own and become a tradition in our state. It’s hard to be a beekeeper these days, so we need to value these producers.”