Est. 2024
The Apiary Project
We document. We analyze. We advocate. We don't tell anyone what to do.
Why This Exists
Here's a number that should bother you: the United States loses between 30% and 45% of its managed honey bee colonies every year. That's not a blip. That's been the baseline for over a decade.
And here's the thing - the conversations around those losses are scattered across academic journals nobody reads, USDA reports that get filed and forgotten, state regulatory frameworks that contradict each other, and social media posts that confuse anecdote with data. The beekeeping world has an information problem. Not a shortage of information - a coherence problem. The data exists. The research exists. Nobody's stitching it together in a way that's actually useful to the people who need it.
The Apiary Project started because that gap seemed fixable. Not by producing more content - the internet has plenty - but by building something that functions more like an institution than a publication. An organization that tracks issues over time, takes evidence-based positions, publishes research, and maintains the kind of reference material that journalists, policymakers, and beekeepers can actually cite.
Think of it this way: the beekeeping world has excellent blogs, active forums, and a handful of good academic programs. What it doesn't have is its own Pew Research Center. That's the gap.
What We Actually Do
Document
We maintain a growing library of research-backed analysis on every dimension of beekeeping and pollinator health - from bee anatomy to industry economics, from treatment timelines to honey fraud. Every piece cites sources, quantifies claims, and distinguishes between what the data shows and what we interpret from it.
Analyze
Raw data is useless without context. Our annual reports, equipment analyses, and conservation assessments synthesize federal data, academic research, and field observations into something a beekeeper in Georgia can actually apply to their operation - or a legislator in Oregon can use to inform policy.
Advocate
We take organizational positions on the issues that shape pollinator health - pesticide regulation, habitat conservation, food labeling standards, research funding. These are institutional positions backed by evidence, not personal opinions. There's a difference between "The Apiary Project supports neonicotinoid use restrictions in pollinator zones" and "you should stop spraying." We live in the former space.
Equip
We build tools that solve real problems - varroa treatment calculators, IPM schedulers, bloom calendars, harvest estimators. Every tool is grounded in university extension data and field-tested methodology. No guesswork, no vibes - just numbers that work when you're standing in front of a hive at 7am wondering what to do.
How We Think
Evidence over ideology
The treatment-free vs. treatment debate generates more heat than light. The organic vs. conventional argument is similar. We follow the data wherever it leads, even when it's inconvenient for our priors. If a position we hold is contradicted by new research, we update the position, not the research.
Positions, not advice
We take organizational stances on policy and conservation. We do not tell individual beekeepers how to manage their colonies. The distinction matters - legally, ethically, and practically. An organization can support pesticide regulation without telling a farmer what to spray. We can document treatment efficacy data without prescribing a treatment plan for your apiary.
Managed and wild
The beekeeping conversation focuses overwhelmingly on Apis mellifera - the managed European honey bee. But the US hosts roughly 4,000 native bee species, most of which are more efficient pollinators than honeybees for specific crops and ecosystems. Our work covers both managed colony health and native pollinator conservation, because the issues overlap more than the funding suggests.
Transparent uncertainty
Colony Collapse Disorder still doesn't have a single confirmed cause. Neonicotinoid sublethal effects are dose-dependent in ways we're still mapping. Native pollinator population data is incomplete for over half of known species. When we don't know something, we say so. Confident uncertainty is more useful than false certainty.