I think we are all grossly under-estimating the explosion in beekeeping that is occurring in the US and elsewhere.  Its certainly a global trend.

I've two examples in my own area of big changes.  First, my state (Montana) has been mainly commercial beekeepers throughout my career of 40+ years - history indicates the same was true far earlier than my involvement in beekeeping.  The number of small scale, hobby, sideliner beekeepers was SMALL, with  only one bee club other than the State Association, and that club was small and short-lived.  then varroa mites hit the state and took out our small scale beekeepers - without clubs, subscriptions to bee mags, etc.; they didn't know what happened - it hit all of our small  scale folks in one winter -they  went into the winter with bees, came out with severe losses.  Not knowing what happened, they quit.

In past three years, we've been swamped with folks wanting to take bee courses from across the state, and we now have BEE CLUBS in many town and regions - Missoula, BitterRoot, Flathead, Columbia Falls, Great Falls, Helena, Billings, Bozeman, and elsewhere.  Great Falls and Helena recently put in place urban beekeeping ordinances.

I have to scramble just to keep up with the clubs as they pop up.  We've gone from hardly any small scale beekeepers to almost more clubs than we had small scale beekeepers, each club with a growing membership.

This resurgence, and the shift from almost exclusively commercial to a broad mix  of beekeepers, is happening in all of the 'inland' western states.  The coastal states in the west have a history of clubs and beekeepers of many scales from backyard to side-liner (few hundred) to commercial, so I'm not considering whether they've more beekeepers now - I haven't got any data.  But the inland states - they've all changed rapidly.  As an example, Boise, Idaho went from a hand-full of beekeeper to over 200.

My second example, Western Bee.  Forty years ago, Western Bee in Polson, the company that makes the wooden ware for Dadant AND sells independently to area beekeepers, ran three shifts per day, most every day of the  year.  Then it slowly dropped down, until some years ago it was running one shift per day while making wooden toys in addition to bee frames, boxes, etc.  Now its back up to two shifts per days and is some times back-ordered.  I've never had to worry about back-orders before.  Their main product is hive components.  Thus, I'm guessing that going back to two shifts implies mainly an increase of the product they produce - wood from trees from NW mills comes in the  door, goes back out as beehive parts.  They stock a small amount of bee suits, etc.  -  but they produce hives.

Jerry
    





J.J. Bromenshenk
Bee Alert
Missoula, Mt

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