Hard Working Honey Bees
Honey bees are essential to our survival because they pollinate huge quantities of our food supply. Commercial beekeepers are classified as such because of the many thousands of hives that they are responsible for. One such commercial beekeeper, Dave Hackenberg, owns an apiary company called “Hackenberg Apiaries”, which he runs with his son Davey Hackenberg. The Hackenbergs have been in business for fifty years and manage around 3,000 hives (Burns, 2010 pp. 11-12; Rotner & Woodhull, 2010 pp. 1-2).
The Hackenbergs rent out their “beehives to fruit and vegetable farmers” (Burns, 2010 pp. 11-12; Rotner & Woodhull, 2010 pp. 1-2). Honey bees are “efficient pollinators, and moving millions of them into a crop field while the plants are blooming” allows farmers to get “plentiful crops” (Burns, 2010, p, 12). Dave Hackenberg explains, “’the biggest thing about bees is not honey, it’s that your food supply depends on them” (p. 14). They move all over the country pollinating many different crops.