During a cool fall sunset in North Dakota, forklifts buzz around the base of a flatbed trailer, loading pallets. Their cargo, multicolored boxes that look like filing cabinets, buzzes, too.
Each box houses tens of thousands of honey bees. The trailer holds about 1.2 million in all.
The bees have already traveled the nation this year, pollinating almonds in California, apples in Washington and cranberries in Wisconsin, among other crops. In October, they head to Florida for a much-deserved winter break.
The break isn’t all rest and relaxation.
The Sunshine State’s warm winter temperatures keep the bees active, allowing them to continue to forage. So-called “migratory beekeepers” rely on this three-month sojourn to build up their colonies’ strength for next year’s pollination duties, often more of a moneymaker than honey or other products.
Come January, crews will load up the trailers again, set their sights on California and drive off into the night with colonies as cargo.
“A great place for snowbirds and snow bees”
Pollination wasn’t always beekeepers’ big moneymaker.
Early commercial apiarists raised honey bees mostly for their namesake product. The practice of renting colonies to farmers for pollination began in the 1910s to boost agricultural yields, according to the USDA Economic Research Service. By 2016, U.S. beekeepers generated more revenue from pollination services than from honey sales. Farmers spent more than $400 million to rent bees to pollinate their crops, about 1.7 million acres of them, in 2024.
Beekeepers manage roughly 2.5 million bee colonies in the U.S. About a third of those show up in Florida in any given year.
While some Florida farmers may rent hives to improve their blueberry or watermelon yields in the spring and summer, the bees that overwinter in Florida aren’t here to pollinate crops.
“What you can do in Florida that you can't do, say in the Dakotas, is you can address problems during the winter,” said Jamie Ellis, a professor of entomology at the University of Florida and creator of the university’s Bee College and Master Beekeeper program.
When temperatures drop below 50 or 60 degrees Fahrenheit, colonies form “balls of bees” known as clusters, Ellis explained. “They will shiver their flight muscles to generate heat and collectively, this cluster, this ball of bees can keep a warm enough temperature to keep that colony alive.”
“Individual honey bees as insects are cold-blooded, so they are at the mercy of the temperature around them,” he said. “But when you get a bunch of honey bees together, that colony is warm blooded.”
Clustering keeps bees safe from freezing temperatures up north, but prevents them from foraging for nectar. The queen bee, the only reproductive female, stops laying eggs.
South of Orlando, where winter temperatures rarely drop below 60 F, honey bees stay active.
Native Florida plants including the Red Maple and Flat-Topped Goldenrod provide nectar sources well into the fall while warmer conditions allow bees to expend less energy. Commercial beekeepers say keeping the bees active over the winter allows them to arrive in California with a truckload of bees bouncing off the walls instead of just awoken from a nap.
While producers pay for pollination services in growing seasons, Florida farmers lend their land to commercial beekeepers in the off season for free or modest amounts of money or honey.
“It really is a very small tight-knit community,” said Amy Vu, an apiculture extension specialist at UF. “[Beekeepers] will find properties just by building those relationships with landowners, farmers and cattlemen.”
Once the bees settle into their winter home, they forage, reproduce and clean the hive as normal.
“Florida is just a great place for snowbirds and snow bees,” Ellis said.
The bees’ risky roadtrips
In mid-January, honey bees bid goodbye to Florida and hit the road to California.
Preparing hives for transit starts with corralling the bees. Commercial beekeepers tend to spread the hives out to four per acre and typically round up 400 to 500 hives to fill a truckload.
“These beekeepers are out all day and night gathering these hives that are basically scattered all over whatever city they're in that day,” said Annu Deol, president and owner of Bee Hauling USA and nonprofit Save the Bloom.
When the sun goes down, crews decked out in veils, long sleeves and gloves stack the hives onto pallets in a loading yard and forklift them onto flatbed trailers. They squeeze handheld smokers that look like kettle-accordian hybrids to interfere with bees’ communication.
The key to a successful loading is to prevent the bees from leaving the hive. Haulers do that with light or temperature.
“We load the bees either really, really early in the morning or in the evening when it's dark out because bees won't take flight when they don't have the sun to help them navigate,” Deol said. Honey bees don’t fly when temperatures dip below 50 Fahrenheit, either, so crews can load trucks in daylight in wintery conditions.
Haulers cover the hives with a breathable mesh tarp, then it’s go, go, go to reach the delivery point. The airflow generated by driving is the only thing that keeps bees inside their hives. “It's almost kind of mimicking a tornado,” Deol said. “A honey bee would never come out of its hive if there were wind gusts that strong.”
If the truck stops for more than 20 minutes, duty-driven bees begin to venture out of the hive. They get trapped between the tarp and the hive and, once the truck starts moving again, often die from the tarp’s impact.
Keeping the hives moving is so important to the bees’ survival that the U.S. Department of Transportation exempts bee haulers from their required 30-minute break.
Deol said haulers could lose up to 30% of their bees from the stress of travel in a typical trip. If traffic or other road trip woes stop the truck for 30 to 40 minutes, she said, “we go release those nets and it’s just dead bees all along the outline of the trailer and it's really devastating and sad to see that.”
The financial impact matches the emotional one. Deol estimated one truck of hives is worth $200,000 to $250,000. Her company completed over 1000 hauls in 2023, but fewer last year because of widespread colony losses.
Drivers take other precautions to protect their buzzing cargo, too.
Casey Barrett, an employee at Frasier Transport and daughter of a driver, said the company, which also transports concrete, lumber and building materials, puts its “veteran guys” on bees. Deol trains every driver before every drive, “if they've hauled for us one time or if they’ve hauled for us 30 times.” She reminds drivers to avoid daytime pit stops, plan around metropolitan rush hours and spend the night far away from rest stop lights that bees could perceive as the sun.
Beekeepers unload their hives in the dark. The bees are back to work foraging and pollinating as soon as the next day.
Weathering the stress
Many commercial beekeepers brave the risks of interstate hauling because pollination pays the bills.
Beekeepers bring about 80 to 90% of all commercial honey bee colonies to California to pollinate the state’s almond crop. “Almond pollination is actually one of the highest revenue making crops for beekeepers,” said Vu. “That basically is what pays their entire salary for the year.”
Commercial beekeepers reported losing more than half of their colonies between April 2024 and April 2025, a hit of about $600 million. USDA analysts attributed the record colony collapses to virus-transmitting mites but noted the bees already faced “long known challenges” to the places they live and foods they eat.
Humans drive most of these challenges by paving over bee habitat, growing monoculture crops that don’t provide all the nutrients bees need and spraying fields with herbicides.
Honey bees are “the backbone of our agricultural system,” Deol said. “Without bees, we don’t have those yields. If you want your fruit and vegetables, you have to support your beekeepers.”
