FRANKFORT, Ky. — Much attention has been focused on the plight faced by honeybees, mostly from an issue known as colony collapse disorder (CCD). The situation has made the general public aware of the importance of bees and the ailment that has been killing so many of them.

But in Kentucky, bees seem to be faring well despite these issues.

State Apiarist Tammy Horn has three priorities in doing her job; making sure healthy hives are coming into and leaving the state, making sure businesses and corporations are supporting Kentucky beekeepers and working with organizations through extension as an outreach part of the industry.

Horn wears many hats, including looking for diseases such as American foulbrood, which tends to be spread through bee equipment. She wants to keep beginning beekeepers from buying diseased bees and putting other peoples’ bees at risk.

While CCD gets most of the attention, Horn said in Kentucky she is not seeing a lot of the specifics associated with it. “CCD generally tends to impact the migratory beekeepers more so than the hobbyist beekeepers I inspect, and those people who keep their bees stationary,” she said. “What I am seeing around the state has been some starvation this year.”

This could be caused by hobbyists who took more honey than should have been taken last summer. Horn is also seeing smaller winter clusters of worker bees.

“Last October we had a two-week rainy period and it seems as if the queen bees quit laying eggs during that period, and so there were fewer bees going into the winter,” she explained. “What I saw in January was that if the bees were weak at all, they went through their honey stores pretty quickly and now they’re starting to starve.”

Horn added there are other reasons for bee losses in the winter, such as not treating them for mites. But losing bees in the winter is expected to a certain extent. She emphasized while there are several reasons for losses, there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic in Kentucky.

“For once, in 2014 we didn’t have losses at 30 percent. We had losses at 22 percent, which is still high in agricultural industries. This would be unaccepted in the cattle industry, for instance, but for beekeepers the fact that more bees came through the winter was a good thing.”

Another reason for optimism in the bee industry is a presidential memorandum asking all federal departments to start incorporating pollinator habitat.

“We think that nutrition is one of the big reasons why we’re losing bees; the fact that we have less nutrition than what was available even 15 years ago, and we have less diverse nutrition,” said Horn.

With this move on the part of the federal government, there is much acreage that can be converted to support bees nutritionally such as with meadow flowers, she explained. Keeping those bees healthy is important to farmers, in that many crops depend on them for pollination. Even cover crops are somewhat bee-dependent.

“If marginal areas are planted with flower seeds, the seed set for cover crops increases exponentially,” she said. This helps keep plants blooming continuously and therefore helps keep pollinators alive through the seasons.

Bee products are continuing to grow in popularity as the local food movement grows. Horn said the United States is the largest honey-consuming country, creating a demand beekeepers cannot keep up with, which leads to a lot of honey being imported.

Her concerns with imported honey from places like China, is that she said the honey is often adulterated with chemicals.

“There’s cause for concern that our country still does not have a honey standard that would protect our domestic beekeepers, but on the flip side, at least in Kentucky, people love Kentucky honey and beekeepers,” she said. “There are 300 varietals of honey in the U.S., and Kentucky has about 30 unique ones to the region.”

What this means is state beekeepers can do well selling their honey; they just can’t make enough of it. That creates more opportunities in the industry and is another reason, as Horn put it, to be optimistic.