Florida beekeepers feel the sting from dead bees, less honey money

Keith Seifert Jr. is calm surrounded by bees.

While he wears protective gear over his head, the 34-year-old beekeeper leaves his arms exposed in a T-shirt as he opens up a hive under the sand pines on his property in Lake County.

It’s when he starts talking about the onslaught of trouble his Sweet Bee Company has faced over the last year that Seifert gets tense. It’s been one sting after another since Hurricane Ian flooded hundreds of his bee hives last year and damaged the trees, flowers and plants the bees need to make honey and keep him in business.

“When I’m out working my bees, that’s like my zen time. It’s just me and the bees and that’s what I love,” Seifert said. “This is my passion. It’s relaxing for me, but when I have to sit in here in the office and think about how am I actually going to continue this company and this business with this model, that’s where it gets really stressful.”

Across the country, honey beekeepers lost 48.2% of their colonies over the 12 months ending this past April, up from last year’s loss of 39% and approaching the record 50.8% loss from 2020-2021, a survey by Auburn University and University of Maryland researchers found.

Still, the total number of colonies has stayed “relatively stable” for the past two decades, the survey said, while acknowledging that beekeepers are under “substantial pressure” to make new colonies to replace the losses.

Replacing hives is expensive for commercial beekeepers such as Seifert, whose 1,500 colonies and tens of millions of bees pollinate crops nationwide, from Florida citrus to California almonds. A new queen alone costs $30, he said.

“It can really, really get expensive quickly,” he said. “Every component of the hive is valuable. If we lose it, we have to replace it, and that costs money.”

Just replacing one hive could carry a cost of $60 to $80 for Seifert.

This year has been especially difficult because bad weather has led to less honey production and less income for Seifert’s business.

“We’re always dealing with dead bees, but now on top of that, we’re dealing with we don’t even have the money to fix the problem,” he said. “We’re not creating revenue like we used to. The bees aren’t making the honey that they used to.”

The main culprit killing bees remains Varroa mites, which arrived in Florida in the 1980s and spreads viruses to bees while feeding on their fat, said Amy Vu, a University of Florida state extension specialist with expertise in apiculture, the technical term for beekeeping.

Hurricane Ian, meanwhile, not only drowned bees but ripped leaves and flowers off the trees the insects need to survive and make honey. This meant Seifert lost potential honey earnings at that time of about $100,000, he said, all while having to feed his bees sugar water to keep them alive.

About 380,000 bee colonies were in the path of Hurricane Ian that could have been affected by the storm, Vu said. It was just one of the blows from Ian to Florida agriculture, with UF estimating in February that agricultural losses from the storm were $1.03 billion.

Seifert also suffered more bee deaths than normal between Thanksgiving and mid-January when he said hives often dwindle.

“Basically, we were going into the colonies in January when they were supposed to be really starting to grow and they were still continuing to decline,” Seifert said. “We don’t know [why]. We have no idea. We lost a lot of them.”

On top of those losses, Seifert said almond farmers in California were paying less to use his bees for pollination this year and more problems followed from there.

“We get our hives back (from California). We send them to the orange blossoms [in Florida] for the pollination of the orange groves. Complete failure. We didn’t make any honey,” Seifert said. “That was another huge amount of income that we rely on in the early spring to just keep this business operating.”

Vu said the beekeepers she has heard from say they experienced bad or lower citrus honey crops this year. Without knowing an exact cause, Vu said bad weather as well as fewer orange groves because of citrus greening disease could have been factors.

Seifert’s bees also produced less honey during their wildflower season. He said his business typically produces an average of 65 pounds of honey per colony from wildflowers, but this year that number fell to 35 pounds.

“It’s just been all the wrong things at the wrong time,” he said. “Like right when the bloom [is] about to open, we’ll get crazy hail and thunderstorms. We had this happen in the spring in the wildflower crop, just crazy hail, extreme thunderstorms. These trees, these plants, they can only take so much abuse.”

If it sounds like a lot, here’s how Seifert summed it up: “We were dealing with a really bad storm, really high mortality rates, really expensive production costs, really low honey production, really low pollination rental costs,” he said. “So everything is just down in our industry right now.”

Seifert started beekeeping as a teenager in Lake County and formed his company in 2011. He said his business has always been able to grow and be profitable.

He wants to think this is just one bad year, but adds he “can’t work on hope anymore.”

“When I get my mind on thinking about the future of our company and everything, this is my life’s work,” he said. “I’ve poured everything I have into this company. I don’t have anything else to rely on. I don’t have a fallback plan. This was my career choice. This was my future. So right now, that’s at stake and I don’t know what that looks like.”

Seifert sells bulk honey to other companies that rebrand and distribute it but also sells directly to customers online, where the business also sells shirts with a simple message on the back: “Save the Bees.”

A few Lake County stores such as the Health Basket in Mount Dora also carry his honey.

Seifert warns that a dwindling beekeeping business could have a big effect on prices and offerings at grocery stores. Bees not only pollinate almonds and oranges, but blueberries in Maine and cranberries in Wisconsin, among other crops, he said.

“If we lose the bees, our diets are going to become a lot more bland,” Seifert said. “Bees pollinate alfalfa, cows eat alfalfa hay. There’s all these vegetables and things that if the bees aren’t producing, they’re just going to go down.”

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency