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Big Aspirations In A Small Industry
By: Ross Conrad
Who owns the largest commercial beekeeping operation in the USA? For decades it’s been the Adee family, owner of Adee Honey Farms that typically run 80,000-100,000 hives. Apparently Adee Honey Farms was recently eclipsed by Sweet Harvest Foods, the parent company of Nate’s Hives, with some 120,000 colonies, although Nate’s is a collective of numerous beekeepers and not a single operator. However, rumors are circulating that now the largest beekeeper in the USA today is the GeoCure Global Hive Cooperative.
I first heard about GeoCure through a podcast by Dr. Humberto Boncristiani. He claimed that an organization called GeoCure was quietly looking to buy up the majority of commercially managed hives in the United States. The implication being there was some kind of conspiracy afoot.
Then I read a couple articles by Charles Linder that pointed out some red flags suggesting that the GeoCure plan to “save” beekeeping is likely nothing more than a get-rich-quick scheme. The GeoCure “solution” to our current bee problems as spelled out on their website appeared so obviously flawed that I found it hard to believe that many people would fall for such a far-fetched plan.
Terracura
For those of you who like me, had not been paying much attention to this situation up until now, allow me to explain. The GeoCure Global Hive Cooperative is closely associated with two other groups, Trillionbees Earth and Terracura. Terracura is the arm looking to buy up as many commercially managed colonies as possible to be part of the GeoCure Cooperative.
David Hackenberg of Hackenberg Apiaries/Buffy Bee, and Richard and Seth Homer of Homer Honeybees are the public contacts helping to lead this effort. According to their website in collaboration with GeoCure, “Terracura plans to establish 20+ million acres of pesticide-free bee habitat, including 2+ million acres of bee-friendly forage, by 2030. An additional 56 million acres will be secured through leases with Native American tribes” across all 50 states.
These areas of pesticide-free, non-GMO bee habitat to be created in the U.S. within the next decade will be known as “BeeHab Reserves (BRS).” The Terracura website goes on to say “The initiative includes creating and nurturing a strategic reserve of approximately 6.5 million non-GMO beehives for preservation purposes on these lands.”
Trillionbees Earth
Trillionbees Earth is Geocure’s fundraising arm. Their website promotes tax deductible donations to Trillion Bees Earth (TBE) that come with free bee hives as a thank you gift (one free nucleus colony for every $1000 donated). They promote potential returns from these beehives through honey production and the growth potential of the hives. They are fully insured revenue producing assets (100% insured investment through the government Emergency Livestock Assistance Program (ELAP) and Pasture, Rangeland, Forage Insurance (PRF) programs).
Trillionbees Earth advertises “asset value growth” where beehives are projected to be worth $1000-$2000 each in five years. Interestingly, their language conflates donations with an investment opportunity. Returns on investment through honey production, which when sold, “generates 100% return on the donation in six years” and in year 5, 10%-15% long-term returns “for as long as they own the hives in the BSRs. A unique opportunity for donors to see returns on their charitable contributions through honey production.”
At first glance this all sounds wonderful: Beekeepers working together to form a cooperative; increasing the number of hives in the U.S. back up to the historic levels they used to be at during the mid-20th century; providing a clean environment for bees to prosper and at the same time economic benefits flow to everyone involved, even to our indigenous population. And the whole effort is fully insured by the U.S. government. Meanwhile, beekeepers receive a large payout per hive, a new pickup truck, a regular income, paid vacation and they still get to do what they love; work with bees, only without the current financial risks.
What could go wrong?
There are numerous problems with the GeoCure plan as it is laid out on the web. For example, if keeping bees was such a great “investment”, the beekeeping industry would not be struggling like it is today. The whole point is that bees are in trouble and honeybee colony growth and survival has never been more of a challenge. The GeoCure pitch plays off this fact in an effort to take advantage of the naïve public’s desire to want to help ‘save the bees.’ Estimates are that today there are roughly 2.7 million managed colonies in the entire U.S. To think that in five years GeoCure can more than double this number seems entirely unrealistic.
With the exception perhaps of our tribal lands and reservations, the pesticide- and GMO-free BeeHab Reserves that are the key to establishing the healthy thriving hives GeoCure envisions are not going to materialize. How will GeoCure convince all the independent landowners and farmers in and around the proposed BeeHab Reserves to stop using pesticides and GMOs?
While in theory large tracts of pesticide- and GMO-free lands is a fantastic goal, realistically it is not going to happen without getting all farmers within the reserve areas to convert to ecological farming. Remember, this is the age when most farmers are convinced that they can’t farm without chemicals. Banks and government agencies will not provide loans or emergency assistance to farmers that don’t follow recommended agricultural practices which fully embrace chemical use. The wholesale switch over to ecological agriculture across any significant area in the USA is simply not supported by our current social, government, and economic systems.
For argument’s sake however, let’s assume that through some miraculous effort 76 thousand acres of BeeHab Reserves are somehow able to be created. GeoCure is then able to fill these acres with all the additional bee hives that are to be established due to the incredible growth potential described on the GeoCure and Terracura websites. This sounds like a lot, but roughly 12 acres per hive is not enough to feed the 6.5 million hives projected to be created by the GeoCure plan let alone create any kind of harvestable honey crop. This would mean LOTS of feeding of sugar syrup and protein patties, neither of which lead to hives being as healthy as they would be if they lived on a diet of real honey and pollen.
The requirement for honeybee supplied pollination services on today’s chemically-drenched mega farms means that these non-GMO beehives will not be able to remain safely in the Bee Reserves for long. A good portion of them will have to be moved out annually to fulfill the nation’s pollination needs. Thus, many, if not most, of the hives will still be exposed to toxic pesticide residues making it unrealistic that these colonies will be any healthier than today’s commercially managed hives.
Never mind that expecting to profit off your tax-deductible donations is illegal under current federal law. IRS guidelines dictate that tax-deductible contributions are to be used for charitable purposes and not for profit making. Contributions to individuals or organizations that provide goods or services in exchange for donations are not considered deductible.
While I’m not a lawyer, it also appears to me that confidence in this entire scheme is undermined by the fact that one of the primary people who is apparently behind GeoCure, Christopher G. Glynn (aka Christian J. Hemmann (“Glynn”)) has a legal history involving fraud (Seabright, 2023).
Best-case scenario
While it is obvious that GeoCure will inevitably come up short in its vision to manifest 20 million acres of pesticide and GMO-free land, it may possibly convince enough commercial beekeepers to sell out so that it will become the nation’s largest beekeeping outfit and control a large percentage of hives in the U.S. This would allow it to drive up contract pollination fees paid by farmers and orchardists so it can cover the very generous promises being made to its beekeeper partners, and investor/donors.
Such monopolization of honeybee colonies would lead to an increase in the value of hives. This would mean higher costs for packages, queens, and nucs for everyone not able to create increases from their own survivors. It will also likely increase the cost of American made honey and much of the food in our grocery stores. While this would be welcome news to the beekeeping industry, it would aggravate our nation’s current inflationary pressures, and the hunger issues that our country is struggling with.
This is no conspiracy theory. This is just the way that our capitalist economy is designed to work. Corporations are incentivized to try to control as much of the market as possible. The more control you have the more money you can make, and any damage to society is just accepted as collateral damage.
Reality Check
Not being one to take rumors and conspiracy theories at face value I contacted Dave Hackenburg in March and asked him what was going on. According to Dave, “…they (GeoCure) don’t have any hives right now. The whole idea was for the beekeepers to keep their businesses but join a co-op where they kept their name and were backed by the co-op and the cooperative took care of the fuel, trucks, the labor, and things like that. The beekeeper just manages his own operation and whatever number of hives they wanted to run. This would give them power by numbers. If you controlled the bees, you could control the almond prices and things like that…Out of the first 20 guys I called, only one guy, a young kid just getting into the business said ‘Nah, I’ll be alright.’ Everybody else said ‘Sign me up. Take my bees.’”
Dave went on to explain, “The idea behind the whole thing was to use green energy tax credits and the almond industry to help fund it…but right now the almond industry (since Covid) doesn’t have much money and the green energy tax credits have ended so everything is on hold right now…When they first started talking about this, they had all these ideas and I said ‘This isn’t like a regular business. This is a bee business and things change every minute around here.’ I mean the beekeepers definitely need the money. We’re all barely surviving and ELAP is keeping everyone in business but once that’s gone we’re all out of business, there’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it.”
Don’t get me wrong, the basic idea of creating a cooperative is a sound one. Like the bees, we are stronger and more resilient when we work together toward common goals. Cooperatives in general have proven themselves to be more economically resilient than privately held companies. Because they are democratically run, cooperatives tend to give greater consideration to community and environmental health. Their wages tend to be better and they provide better benefits to their employees than private firms operating in the same industry.
I can understand the temptation for individuals to want to believe in GeoCure’s grand promises and sell them their bees. But I hate to see hardworking, desperate beekeepers who have been barely hanging on, being taken advantage of with exaggerated promises of a new golden age of beekeeping. And while I appreciate the public’s concern over the current plight of the honey bee, it is troubling how easily people can apparently be separated from their hard-earned cash under the pretext of saving the bees.
We all should have learned the morals of this story a long time ago: rumors are not necessarily true; the internet is not always a reliable source of good information; and if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Ross Conrad is the author of Natural Beekeeping, Expanded and Revised 2nd Edition and co-author of The Land of Milk and Honey: A history of beekeeping in Vermont.
Reference
Seabright, J. Michael (2023) Baldwin vs. Wilson, United States District Court, District of Hawaii
