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Field and Garden: Beekeeper uses grant to boost honey industry

Highly productive. Disease resistant. Cold tolerant.

This may sound like a description of a new corn variety, but it’s not.

It’s actually a list of desirable traits that Jamestown resident Megan Mahoney hopes to see among our nation’s honey bees.

To achieve her goal, Mahoney is using advanced techniques to produce high quality and genetically consistent queen bees that will be sold to commercial producers.

That’s important for us who live in our nation’s number one honey-producing state.

In 2021, North Dakota bees produced 28.3 million pounds of honey valued at over $62 million.

I, along with several others, recently had the opportunity to visit with Mahoney about her bee-breeding business.

Mahoney told us that commercial beekeepers primarily utilize two subspecies of western honey bees: Italian bees and Carniolan bees.

Carniolan bees are blackish-grey in color and economically valuable for both pollination and honey production.

Several years ago, Mahoney observed that beekeepers were having difficulty obtaining consistent and sustainable Carniolan breeding stock.

So in 2019, she founded her company, MaHoney Bees and Queens. The company specializes in honey bee-breeding and instrumental insemination.

Bee-breeding is complicated because queen bees mate far from the hive, in mid-air with multiple males. There is no way to control which males the queens encounter.

To overcome this problem, Mahoney collects semen from desirable males and then instrumentally inseminates queens under a microscope.

The offspring are evaluated and the best individuals are retained for future breeding.

There are now 106 queens in Mahoney’s breeding program, and some of their progenies have been sold to other beekeepers.

Mahoney’s work to develop this bee-breeding program was supported by a grant from the North Central Region of the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program.

SARE is a USDA-funded program that offers grants and educational opportunities to farmers, ranchers, researchers and educators.

Mahoney successfully applied for a Farmer/Rancher Grant from SARE in 2020.

The award, which helped cover the costs of labor and specialized equipment, was key to the development of Mahoney’s bee-breeding program.

North Central SARE is currently accepting proposals for Farmer/Rancher grants to be awarded next year.

If you have an idea that you’d like to try, I’d encourage you to apply.

The first step in the application process is to clearly define the problem and propose a solution that will work for other farmers and ranchers.

The solution should be ecologically sound, economically viable and socially responsible.

The application deadline for Farmer/Rancher grants is Dec. 1. About 40 proposals will be funded.

The maximum grant award for individuals is $15,000. Recipients have 23 months to complete their projects.

Additional information about Farmer/Ranchers grants is given on the website of North Central SARE (https://northcentral.sare.org/grants/ ).

If you have questions about SARE or its grant programs, please contact me in the Foster County Extension Office (652-2581, [email protected]).