Edmunds Central hosts Pollination Institute in California

by Spencer Cody

Edmunds Central Science teacher

Ten teachers from nine school districts joined Edmunds Central students in a Pollination Institute hosted by the Edmunds Central School District and Adee Honey which was made possible by funding through a Specialty Crop Block Grant from the USDA.

Pollination Institute participants left Roscoe on a bus on February 14 and picked up teachers at stops along the way as they traveled to the institute site location in Bakersfield, Calif.

During the three-day institute in Southern California, teachers and students learned about how honey bees impact our food supply from Bret Adee. The institute participants benefitted greatly from Bret’s many years in the pollination contracting business as part of Adee Honey Farms and from all of the remarkable site visits throughout the Bakersfield area learning about everything from almonds to onions and the role South Dakota bees play in it.

The institute was onsite in Bakersfield during the “Super Bowl of Pollination.” During the month of February, nearly all of America’s available bee colonies are in California pollinating almonds. The numbers are staggering: 1.7 million acres of Californian almonds need to be pollinated with approximately two hives per acre of almonds within a window of a couple of weeks. The problem is that there are fewer than three million hives in the entire country making providing enough pollination for our nation’s food supply needs nearly impossible. This is an area where Bret and Adee Honey Farms excel in learning how to maximize pollination by precise placement of hives to increase pollination time for bees each day by keeping their hive environment warmer for their metabolism along with careful monitoring and controlling of diseases and developing an understanding of how bees are impacted by both natural and human-made issues.

It can also be easy to only think of almonds when thinking about bee pollination, but bees are needed to make new seed crosses for new varieties of onions, leafy greens, and carrots, to name a few. Bees are critical for providing a controlled means of crossing genetics for varieties. Bret was instrumental in connecting it all together for our institute by highlighting the reality of how susceptible our nation’s bees are to localized issues associated with the almond pollination when all of the country’s bees are in a very small portion of the country at the same time when all our bees cross paths in Southern California.

Participating teachers in the institute are tasked with developing curriculum for their classroom incorporating the commercial impact of South Dakota’s bees into curriculum. Once the curriculum is assembled across multiple cohort years, it will be made available to a wide audience to encourage education on issues that face our honey bees. We extend our sincere thanks to Bret Adee and Adee Honey Farms who helped make this institute possible through hosting our visit to Bakersfield.