Honey bees are big money makers for U.S. agriculture. These social and hardworking insects produce six hive products – honey, pollen, royal jelly, beeswax, propolis, and venom – all collected and used by people for various nutritional and medicinal purposes.

Honey, of course, is the most well-known and economically important hive product. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agriculture Statistics Service, honey bees made 157 million pounds of honey in 2019. With the cost of honey at $1.97 per pound, that’s a value of a little over $339 million.

After honey, beeswax is the second most important hive product from an economic standpoint. The beeswax trade dates to ancient Greece and Rome, and in Medieval Europe, the substance was a unit of trade for taxes and other purposes. The market remains strong today. Beeswax is popular for making candles and as an ingredient in artists’ materials and in leather and wood polishes. The pharmaceutical industry uses the substance as a binding agent, time-release mechanism, and drug carrier. Beeswax is also one of the most commonly used waxes in cosmetics. The U.S. is a major producer of raw beeswax, as well as a worldwide supplier of refined beeswax.

But the greatest importance of honey bees to agriculture isn’t a product of the hive at all. It’s their work as crop pollinators. This agricultural benefit of honey bees is estimated to be between 10 and 20 times the total value of honey and beeswax. In fact, bee pollination accounts for about $15 billion in added crop value. Honey bees are like flying dollar bills buzzing over U.S. crops.

Unfortunately, a widespread bacterial disease called American foulbrood is destroying entire colonies of honey bees. But fortunately for the honey bees and the many crops that depend on them for pollination, FDA has approved three antibiotics to control this devastating honey bee disease.

Honey bees are not native to North America. They were originally imported from Europe in the 17th century. Honey bees now help pollinate many U.S. crops like fruits and nuts. In a single year, one honey bee colony can gather about 40 pounds of pollen and 265 pounds of nectar. Honey bees increase our nation's crop values each year by more than 15 billion dollars.

Critical honey bee populations in the United States have been declining in recent years due to many factors, creating concern about the future security of pollination services in the United States. USGS researchers are looking into the effects of factors like land use change and chemical use on honey bee habitat to better understand how to conserve bees on the landscape.

While important in the pollination of some crops, honey bees are also significant competitors of native bees and should not be introduced in conservation areas, parks, or areas where you want to foster the conservation of native plants and native bees.

There are over 20,000 known bee species in the world, and 4,000 of them are native to the United States. They range from the tiny (2 mm) and solitary Perdita minima, known as the world’s smallest bee, to kumquat-sized species of carpenter bees. Our bees come in as many sizes, shapes, and colors as the flowers they pollinate. There is still much that we don't know about native bees—many are smaller than a grain of rice and about 10% of bees in the United States have yet to be named or described—but all of these bees have jobs as pollinators.

Native bees are the primary insect pollinator of agricultural plants in most of the country. Crops that they pollinate include squash, tomatoes, cherries, blueberries, and cranberries. Native bees were here long before European honeybees were brought to the country by settlers (honeybees are not native to North America). Honeybees are key to a few crops such as almonds and lemons, but native bees like the blue orchard bees are better and more efficient pollinators of many crops, including those plants that evolved in the Americas. Native bees are estimated to pollinate 80 percent of flowering plants around the world.

Many of our native wild and crop plants have sets of bees that are so specialized that they restrict their visits to those plants alone. The most important facet of bee conservation is the encouragement and retention of all of our flowering native plants.

About 75% of North American plant species require an insect—mostly bees—to move their pollen from one plant to another to effect pollination.

Unlike the well-known behavior of the non-native honeybees, there is much that we don’t know about native bees. Many native bees are smaller in size than a grain of rice. Of approximately 4,000 native bee species in the United States, 10% have not been named or described.

About 20%-45% of native bees are pollen specialists, meaning that they use only pollen from one species (or genus) of plants. If that plant is removed, the bee goes away. If bees are removed, the plant doesn't reproduce. Some of the native bees are specialists on the very plants that we use for food, including squashes, pumpkins, gourds, and the annual sunflower.

In almost all crops, native bees are the primary pollinator or they significantly supplement the activity of honey bees. Even crops like cotton, soybeans, and peppers that don’t need a pollinator have a higher yield if they’re visited by bees.

Do you enjoy a hot cup of coffee, a juicy peach, an-apple-a-day, almonds, rich and creamy dates, a handful of plump cashews, or vine-ripened tomatoes? Do you enjoy seeing the native flowers and plants that surround you?

If so, you depend on pollinators.

Wherever flowering plants flourish, pollinating bees, birds, butterflies, bats and other animals are hard at work, providing vital but often-unnoticed services. About three-fourths of all native plants in the world require pollination by an animal, most often an insect, and most often a native bee. Pollinators are also responsible for one in every three bites of food you take, and increase our nation’s crop values each year by more than 15 billion dollars.

Loss of pollinators threatens agricultural production, the maintenance of natural plant communities, and the important services provided by those ecosystems, such as carbon cycling, flood and erosion control, and recreation. Without pollinators providing the transportation of pollen from flower to flower, about 75 percent of all native North American plants could gradually become extinct as they lose the ability to reproduce.

Since bees are so small and accommodating, we can all do our own part by eliminating non-native weeds and shrubs and encouraging wildflowers to grow on our properties. Adding native flowering plants to even the smallest yard can help. The pollen and nectar from only about 5 flowers supports the food needs of a bee from egg to adulthood.

Pollination is vital to the approximately 250,000 species of flowering plants that depend on the transfer of pollen from flower anther to stigma to reproduce. The anther is the top-most part of the stamen, the flower’s male reproductive portion. Normally made up of four pollen sacs, the anther produces and releases pollen. The stigma, the top of the flower’s female reproductive part, is covered in a sticky substance that catches and traps the pollen grains.

Depending on the specific plant species, the transfer of pollen from anther to stigma is achieved by wind, gravity, water, birds, bats, or insects. Some plants, such as pine trees and corn, produce light pollen that’s easily blown by wind. Other plants make heavy, sticky pollen that’s not easily blown from flower to flower. These plants rely on other agents, insects for example, to transfer the pollen.

Upon entering a flower, an insect such as a honey bee, brushes against the pollen on the outside of the anther and carries it to the stigma. Sometimes, the pollen grains only need to reach the stigma of the same flower or another flower on the same plant. But often, the pollen must travel to the stigma of a flower on a different plant (but same plant species).

Honey bees are vegetarians. Nectar and pollen collected from flowering plants are the entrees on their dinner plates. Bees harvest the nectar and convert the sugary liquid to honey, the insects’ primary source of carbohydrates. Honey provides the bees with the energy for flight, colony maintenance, and general daily activities.

Pollen, often called “bee bread,” is the bees’ main source of protein. Pollen also provides the bees with fatty acids, minerals, and vitamins. The protein in pollen is necessary for hive growth and young bee development.

Depending on the season, weather, and availability of nectar- and pollen-bearing blossoms, the size of a honey bee colony varies from 10,000 to 100,000 bees. A typical size colony, made up of about 20,000 bees, collects about 125 pounds of pollen per year.¹ Bees carry the pollen in specialized structures on their hind legs called “pollen baskets,” or corbiculae (meaning “little baskets” in Latin). A honey bee can bring back to the colony a pollen load that weighs about 35 percent of its body weight.

In a single day, one worker bee makes 12 or more trips from the hive, visiting several thousand flowers. On these foraging trips, the bee can travel as far as two to five miles from the hive. Although honey bees collect pollen from a variety of flowers, a bee limits itself to one plant species per trip, gathering one kind of pollen.

Honey bees are not native to the New World. Most crops grown in the U.S. aren’t New World natives either. Both the crops and the bees evolved together in other areas of the globe, and were brought here by European settlers. Information suggests that the first honey bee colonies arrived in the Colony of Virginia from England early in 1622.

Today, the commercial production of more than 90 crops relies on bee pollination. Of the approximately 3,600 bee species that live in the U.S., the European honey bee² (scientific name Apis mellifera) is the most common pollinator, making it the most important bee to domestic agriculture. About one-third of the food eaten by Americans comes from crops pollinated by honey bees, including apples, melons, cranberries, pumpkins, squash, broccoli, and almonds, to name just a few. Without the industrious honey bee, American dinner plates would look quite bare.

A honey bee colony is a highly organized society made up of three kinds of adult bees – workers, drones, and a single queen – each with specific roles. Worker bees are sexually undeveloped females and under normal hive conditions don’t lay eggs. As suggested by their name, worker bees are the hive’s laborers, performing all the tasks needed to maintain and protect the colony and rear the young bees. Despite being the smallest physically, they are by far the largest in number, making up nearly all the bees in a colony. A worker bee’s life span ranges from six weeks in the busy summer to four to nine months during the winter.

Drones are male bees that are on standby for mating with a virgin queen, should the need arise. For the drones, death instantly follows mating. They number from a few to several thousand and are usually present only during late spring and summer.

As the lone sexually developed female in the colony, the queen’s only function is to lay eggs. She mates only once with several drones and remains fertile for life. The queen can live for several years, with an average productive life span of two to three years. When she dies or her productivity declines, worker bees raise a new queen.

Derived from the Latin word apis meaning “bee,” apiculture is the raising and caring of honey bee colonies by people. Beekeepers, or apiarists, house their domesticated honey bee colonies in man-made hives kept in an apiary, or “bee yard.”

The basic structural component of the hive is a wax comb suspended within a plastic or wooden frame. Worker bees construct the comb using beeswax, a substance produced by four pairs of glands located on the underside of their abdomens. These eight special glands convert sugar from honey into the waxy substance and secrete it as a liquid, which hardens into flat wax scales once exposed to air. Using spines located on their middle legs, the bees remove the wax scales from their abdomens. The bees transfer the scales to their mouthparts, and while chewing the wax, they add salivary secretions to soften it. The bees then use the now pliable wax to build the hexagon-shaped cells of the comb.

Within the six-sided cells of the wax comb, the bees store honey and pollen and rear the bee brood, a collective term encompassing the three developmental stages of bees – egg, larval, and pupal. In the first stage, the queen deposits one egg in each cell. At peak production in spring and early summer, she may lay up to 1,500 eggs3 per day. Fertilized eggs develop into female worker bees. Unfertilized eggs become male drones.

The egg hatches in three days to become a larva, a legless white grub. Sometimes called the feeding stage, the larval stage is one of rapid growth. While still inside its beeswax cell, the larva is fed by nurse worker bees. When the larva is a few days old, worker bees cap the cell with a beeswax cover. A healthy larva is plump and pearly white with a glistening appearance.

During the pupal, or transformation, stage, the grub-like larva changes into an adult bee. This metamorphosis occurs within the capped cell. A healthy pupa remains white and glistening during the early period of development, even though it’s beginning to take on adult features. Depending on the kind of bee (worker, drone, or queen), it emerges from the cell 7½ to 14½ days after capping.

Beekeepers can assess the health of the bee brood by looking at brood patterns. The pattern of healthy capped worker brood is solid and compact with few empty cells. The cell cappings are medium brown and convex, with no punctures. Drone brood is normally in patches around the comb’s margins.

Unfortunately, healthy brood patterns are becoming less common. Faced with several threats, honey bee populations in the U.S. are declining. These threats include parasites like the Varroa mite, pesticide exposure, Colony Collapse Disorder, and bacterial diseases such as American foulbrood.

When beekeepers utter the three-letter acronym “AFB,” they’re not referring to the closest air force base. Rather, they’re talking about American foulbrood, a serious infectious disease of honey bees. Caused by the spore-forming bacteria Paenibacillus larvae⁴ and found worldwide, AFB is one of the most widespread diseases affecting honey bee brood, and the most destructive. The disease does not pose any health risks to people, but it wreaks havoc among bees. Severe outbreaks can weaken or kill entire colonies.

American foulbrood affects the larval and pupal stages of brood development, leaving adult bees safe from infection. Young larvae may die quickly when they are curled at the base of their uncapped cells. Worker bees remove these dead larvae, leaving empty cells. Most often, death occurs after the cell has been capped. By this time, the older larvae or young pupae have stretched out lengthwise and are upright, filling most of their cell.

The capping of a cell that contains a diseased larva is moist and dark. As the larva shrinks, the capping is drawn into the mouth of the cell, causing the normally convex capping to become concave. When they find an infected larva in a sealed cell, worker bees puncture the sunken capping and remove it, along with the sick or dead larva.

If death occurs in the pupal stage, the dead pupa’s threadlike proboscis, or tongue, protrudes from the pupal head and extends across the cell. A protruding tongue can be seen even after the rest of the pupa’s body has decayed. Though rarely seen, the formation of the pupal tongue is one of the most characteristic signs of American foulbrood.

At death, the normally pearly white and glistening bee brood changes to a dull white. The color gradually darkens to light creamy brown, then coffee brown, and finally dark brown or almost black. The consistency of the decaying brood is soft and glutinous. One symptom of American foulbrood seen only in decayed brood is “ropiness.” When a probe is inserted into the body of a decayed larva and withdrawn gently and slowly, the glue-like larval remains will adhere to the tip of the probe and can be pulled out of the cell as a stringy, brown mass or rope. This technique used by beekeepers to assess ropiness is called the “match-stick” or “stretch” test. It’s probably the best-known way to diagnosis AFB in the field. In some cases, however, the larval remains are rather watery, causing a negative test result.

One month or more after the larva becomes ropy, its remains dry out and shrivel to form hard, dark brown to black scales. These characteristic scales are brittle, stick tightly to the lower sides of the cell, and contain billions of spores that spread easily. The bacteria can produce over one billion spores in each infected larva. Only the spores are pathogenic (disease-causing), and unfortunately, they are very resistant to heat and chemicals. The spores of P. larvae can survive for many years in the dry scales, as well as in honey, beeswax, and hive equipment.

Nurse worker bees transmit American foulbrood by feeding spore-laden honey or bee bread to young larvae. Larvae can also become infected by P. larvae spores remaining at the base of their cells. “House” worker bees spread the spores throughout the hive when they clean out the cells of dead larvae.

The disease spreads quickly to other colonies in the apiary by:

• Robber bees. Weak, AFB-infected colonies make good targets for robber bees from nearby strong colonies. The robbers steal the contaminated honey or bee bread from the infected colony and bring the P. larvae spores back to their home colony.
• Beekeepers. While working with their hives, beekeepers may expose other colonies in the apiary to contaminated honey or equipment.
• Drifting worker bees or swarms. These bees are in the process of leaving their parent colony to start their own colony in a new location. If the parent colony is infected, the swarm will bring the spores with them to the new location.

A colony infected with American foulbrood has a patchy brood pattern. This irregular, mottled appearance is due to the mixture of healthy, diseased, and empty brood cells within the same wax comb. The healthy cells have slightly protruding and fully closed cappings. The diseased cells may be uncapped and contain larval remains, or still be sealed but have sunken and punctured cappings. The empty cells are a result of worker bees chewing away the cappings of diseased cells and removing the dead larvae. The brood pattern is also patchy because the larval remains vary from the initial state of moist ropiness to the final state of dry scales adhered to the lower sides of open cells. A patchy brood pattern alerts the beekeeper that the colony is unhealthy, and while not diagnostic for American foulbrood, it raises the suspicion for this disease.

The traditional control measure for American foulbrood is to kill all bees in an infected colony and then burn the dead bees and hive materials belonging to the colony. Destroying the wax comb is critical because, apart from the bees, combs are the main carriers of P. larvae spores. Burning entire honey bee colonies and their hive materials is expensive, especially considering the high cost of beekeeping equipment.

Instead of killing and burning their bee colonies, beekeepers can turn to their veterinarian for help to control American foulbrood with antibiotics. While the antibiotics don’t kill the spores, they do prevent the bacteria from multiplying. A veterinarian’s supervision is required for administering antibiotics to bee colonies infected with AFB.

For decades, oxytetracyline was the only FDA-approved antibiotic to control American foulbrood. In October 2005, FDA approved a second antibiotic, tylosin tartrate, to control the disease. The approval was due in large part to the work of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's bee research laboratories (which are part of USDA’s Agricultural Research Service) and the NRSP-7 programExternal Link Disclaimer run by USDA.

Approved in March 2012, the most recent antibiotic to be added to the arsenal against American foulbrood is lincomycin hydrochloride. Studies to support the drug’s approval were done by two of USDA's bee research laboratories - one in Maryland and one in Texas - in cooperation with the NRSP-7 program.

The labeling for each product approved to treat AFB in honey bees includes specific directions for how to mix and administer the drug to bee colonies. In general, the antibiotic is mixed with a certain amount of sugar or confectioners/powdered sugar and then fed as a sugar solution or dusted onto the hive. Beekeepers should discuss the details of treatment with their veterinarian. The bees consume the sugar-antibiotic mixture and the nurse worker bees pass the drug to the larvae during feeding. The drug is given in the spring or fall before the main honey flow begins to avoid contamination of production honey. Depending on the specific antibiotic used, the treatment should be completed at least 4-6 weeks before the start of the main honey flow.