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By HELEN W. SMITH
Kxtrminn Af*nt. Horn* Economic*
Sweeten your knowledge of Virginia agriculture with a few “buzz” words in honor of National Honey Month. According to State Apiarist Frank Fulgham, some 4,000 hobbyist and commercial beekeepers in the Commonwealth maintain about 66,000 colonies of bees that produce four million pounds of honey. Virginia’s largest beekeeper has between three and four thousand colonies.
Mr. Fulgham says the demand for both honey and pollination is increasing. “People are more healthconscious, and honey is considered a healthy food,” he says. In addition to apples and cucumbers, use of bees for pollination is becoming more diversified, he adds, with expansion into crops such as cantaloupe, watermelon, blueberries, and strawberries.
About one-third of the human diet is derived directly or indirectly from crops pollinated by bees. Hence, a healthy beekeeping industry is important to a healthy agricultural economy, says a proclamation by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Edward Madigan.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that about 3.5 million U.S. acres of fruits, vegetables, oilseeds and legume seed crops depend
75.9%