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Nerdy Jobs: Beekeeping, College

I WAS A BEEKEEPER for a day!

Dr. Raven Baxter spends a day as a beekeeper at Bee Country, a family bee farm in New York. She and her co-host, Annika Salzberg, look inside the hives with the Werner family. The episode shows how bees make honey and beeswax, how beekeepers check a hive, and how people can help honey bees and native bees.

A beekeeper in protective gear tending bees in an apiary in Indiana

Meet the scientist

The beekeepers at Bee Country

  • JobBeekeeper, also called an apiarist (AY-pee-uh-rist).
  • A workdayBee Country is a family-owned bee farm in Darien Center, New York. Its beekeepers graft and raise their own queens and make hundreds of nucleus colonies, or nucs, each spring. A nuc is a starter colony with two frames of honey and pollen and three frames of brood. The farm also harvests raw honey. Its bees stay in New York year-round and are not trucked south for crop pollination.
  • TrainingBeekeepers learn on the job and in courses. Cornell University offers a beginner program for people with 0 to 2 years of beekeeping. Its Master Beekeeping Program takes 15 months, asks for at least 3 years of experience and ends with exams at Cornell’s Dyce Lab for Honey Bee Studies.
Beehives in an apiary, with an electric fence around them to keep bears out
A library and an apiary share the -ary ending. Library comes from Latin librārius, “of books.”

Your word of the day is

AY-pee-er-ee

api-beefrom Latin apis
-arya place forfrom Latin -ārium

A place where bees are kept in hives.

Fresh produce and flowers for sale at a farmers market in Washington, D.C.

In the episode, a Bee Country beekeeper says bees are “responsible for a third of our food.” Alexandra-Maria Klein’s team checked the leading food crops grown around the world.

Make a prediction before you read the paper. If every bee disappeared, what would happen to world food production by weight? Would it fall by about a third, by more than a third or by less? Give your reasoning in one sentence.

Hint

Think about wheat, rice and corn. Then think about crops that still make some fruit or seed without bees.

An almond orchard in bloom in Arvin, California

Read the paper

Klein and others, “Importance of pollinators in changing landscapes for world crops,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2007. The paper is free to read.

Klein’s team used crop data for 2004 from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. The team counted a crop as dependent on animal pollinators if its production rises when animals can visit its flowers, by any amount. By production volume, 60% of global food came from crops that do not depend on animal pollination, 35% from crops that depend on pollinators, and 5% went unevaluated. The pollinators include honey bees, wild bees and other insects, and birds or bats for a few crops. The team also reviewed experiments that compared crop flowers with and without access to pollinators. They sorted 107 crops that people eat directly into levels, by how much production drops without animal pollinators. The counts below come from Figure 3 and the abstract of the paper.

LevelProduction drop without animal pollinatorsNumber of cropsPercent of the 107 crops
Essential90% or more13
High40% to under 90%30
Modest10% to under 40%27
Littlemore than 0% to under 10%21
No increasenone7
Unknownstudies missing9
Total107
A variety of fresh fruits at a market stall

In Klein’s Figure 3, 13 crops are essential and 30 crops are high.

In Klein’s Figure 3, ____ of the 107 crops lose 40% or more of their production without animal pollinators.

See the table
LevelProduction drop without animal pollinatorsNumber of cropsPercent of the 107 crops
Essential90% or more13
High40% to under 90%30
Modest10% to under 40%27
Littlemore than 0% to under 10%21
No increasenone7
Unknownstudies missing9
Total107
Bee scientists and a beekeeper inspect honey bee colonies at a research lab in Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Klein’s 35% counts the entire harvest of every crop whose production rises with animal pollinators.

Suppose a field of a crop in the modest level makes 100 tonnes with pollinators and 75 tonnes without them. Of the 100 tonnes counted in the 35%, pollinators account for ____.

See the table
LevelProduction drop without animal pollinatorsNumber of cropsPercent of the 107 crops
Essential90% or more13
High40% to under 90%30
Modest10% to under 40%27
Littlemore than 0% to under 10%21
No increasenone7
Unknownstudies missing9
Total107
Honey bees pollinating watermelon flowers in Boise, Idaho

Which statement best describes what Klein’s 35% counts?

See the table
LevelProduction drop without animal pollinatorsNumber of cropsPercent of the 107 crops
Essential90% or more13
High40% to under 90%30
Modest10% to under 40%27
Littlemore than 0% to under 10%21
No increasenone7
Unknownstudies missing9
Total107
A wheat field near Eugene, Oregon

Klein’s team found 87 of the 115 leading crops make more food with animal pollinators, yet crops that need no animal pollination make about 60% of global food by weight.

Which fact lets both of Klein’s findings be true at once?

See the table
LevelProduction drop without animal pollinatorsNumber of cropsPercent of the 107 crops
Essential90% or more13
High40% to under 90%30
Modest10% to under 40%27
Littlemore than 0% to under 10%21
No increasenone7
Unknownstudies missing9
Total107
Fruits and vegetables on an outdoor market stall in Turin, Italy

What would a steep drop in pollinators change about the world’s food supply?

See the table
LevelProduction drop without animal pollinatorsNumber of cropsPercent of the 107 crops
Essential90% or more13
High40% to under 90%30
Modest10% to under 40%27
Littlemore than 0% to under 10%21
No increasenone7
Unknownstudies missing9
Total107
Flowers planted to draw pollinators to the crops at a farm in Caldwell, Idaho

Klein’s team writes that honey bees “remain the most economically valuable pollinators of crop monocultures worldwide,” and that honey bees and wild pollinators are both valuable for 35 crops. The abstract warns that “agricultural intensification jeopardizes wild bee communities.” In the episode, Annika says honey bees aren’t native to the US, and New York State has over 400 species of native bees.

Which rewrite of “they’re responsible for a third of our food” best matches Klein’s 2007 paper?

See the table
LevelProduction drop without animal pollinatorsNumber of cropsPercent of the 107 crops
Essential90% or more13
High40% to under 90%30
Modest10% to under 40%27
Littlemore than 0% to under 10%21
No increasenone7
Unknownstudies missing9
Total107
A western bumble bee, a wild bee native to the western United States

Klein’s abstract warns that “agricultural intensification jeopardizes wild bee communities.”

Why should a rewrite of the beekeeper’s line name more pollinators than honey bees?

See the table
LevelProduction drop without animal pollinatorsNumber of cropsPercent of the 107 crops
Essential90% or more13
High40% to under 90%30
Modest10% to under 40%27
Littlemore than 0% to under 10%21
No increasenone7
Unknownstudies missing9
Total107
Close-up of a honeycomb filled with honey

Figure 3 of Klein’s 2007 paper sorts 107 crops by how much the crops depend on animal pollinators.

Which summary fits Figure 3 of Klein’s 2007 paper?

A beekeeper holding a hive frame covered in bees

Which question is out of reach for Figure 3 of Klein’s paper?

A honey bee drinking nectar from a flower in a garden in Washington, D.C.

Lesson complete

Today’s word

apiary

AY-pee-er-ee

A place where colonies of bees are kept in hives.

Back to the lessonStart over
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Sources
  1. Alexandra-Maria Klein, Bernard Vaissière, James Cane, Ingolf Steffan-Dewenter, Saul Cunningham, Claire Kremen and Teja Tscharntke, led from the University of Göttingen in Germany, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2007
  2. Ashley Mortensen, Daniel Schmehl and Jamie Ellis, University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS), “European Honey Bee, Apis mellifera Linnaeus and subspecies,” EDIS fact sheet EENY568
  3. The Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium (MAAREC), a group of university beekeeping extension programs hosted by the University of Delaware, “The Colony and Its Organization”
  4. Shelby Kittle, Louise Lynch-O’Brien, Autumn Smart and Judy Wu-Smart, University of Nebraska–Lincoln Department of Entomology, “Beekeepers’ Guide to Comb Honey Production,” Nebraska Extension NebGuide G2362, March 2025
  5. Susan Nicolson, Hannelie Human and Christian Pirk, University of Pretoria in South Africa, Scientific Reports, 2022
  6. Kenya Fernandes, Dee Carter and four co-authors, University of Sydney in Australia, Frontiers in Nutrition, 2022
  7. Adam Siegel, Kim Fondrk, Gro Amdam and Robert Page, Arizona State University, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 2013
  8. The European Commission’s food fraud team and its Joint Research Centre, EU coordinated action “From the hives”, results published 2023
  9. The 6-to-8-pound range for honey per pound of wax: Kevin Palmer and Paula Rogers Huff, “Hand-Rolled Beeswax Candle,” University of Wisconsin-Extension, 2012
  10. Vision and Change core concepts and competencies, as summarized in Brownell and others, CBE Life Sciences Education, 2014
  11. Bee Country pages: home, About Us, contact, why a guarantee
  12. Beekeeper training from Cornell CALS, Beekeeping Courses & Certifications
  13. Word origins from Dictionary.com: apiary, apiarist, -ary, nucleus, library, binary, melliferous, mellifluous
  14. Spanish and French words from Wiktionary: abeja, abeille, apicula