Thank you again for your support of bees—together we’ve been able to accomplish so much! We’d like to finish the year with some good news about what we’ve done in 2019 and share some of our plans for 2020.
Accomplishments in 2019
- In the face of one of the most difficult winters yet for bees nationwide, 55.6% of our colonies survived the season.
- This spring we installed 216 new beehives, bringing our total to just shy of 1,000.
- We reared and introduced 86 healthy queens.
- This year we harvested 4.5 tons of honey—that’s the equivalent of two full-grown hippos!
- In the course of the year, our beekeepers spent more than 280,000 hours servicing hives
- We’ve tested and rolled-out three promising new treatments:
- Hopguard: A natural treatment derived from hops that helps control varroa mite levels.
- Formic strips: A mid-season treatment to prevent varroa throughout the spring and summer.
- Oxalic dribble: A winter treatment where we dribble oxalic acid on a cluster of bees to target mites that are on the bodies of bees in the cluster (also known as phoretic mites)
Plans for 2020
- With New York and Washington DC experiencing amazing growth this year, we plan to increase the number of regions we operate in.
- To serve all our new customers, we’ll be adding staff at our headquarters and in the field.
- We’ll be working with our corporate clients on creative ways to promote bees to their customers, such as co-branded lines of honey.
- To improve the overall health of our hives, we’ll be diversifying the genetics of our bees.
- We hope to add 250+ new hives this year, bringing our total to more than 1,200 hives served in 15 metropolitan regions across the nation.
