**Abstract**

This chapter presents the results of a survey conducted in spring 2019 within the beekeepers who rent their colonies for the pollination of apple orchards in Val di Non, an alpine area in North Italy. The commercial pollination of apple orchards in this area is managed in an associated form by their cooperatives. The survey, carried out in collaboration with the local farmer cooperatives, submitted to the beekeepers a questionnaire containing questions on the economic and apidological aspects of their migratory beekeeping. The answers, referring to 43 questionnaires, show that beekeepers mostly: plan the migration itinerary at the beginning of the year; proceed to balance the colonies of honey bees before the pollination of the apple orchards; believe that the strength of the colonies must affect the pollination fee paid by the farmers and that the concentration of the colonies for the pollination of crops is not a relevant factor in the spread of bee diseases. The winter losses of honey bee colonies suffered by the responding beekeepers are on average 11.9%. The average cost of feeding the honey bee colony amounts to 19.1 €/colony. Finally, there is a wide interest in beekeepers to ensure the honey bee colonies.

**Keywords:** commercial pollination service, apple orchards, Val di Non, cooperative management of pollination service, survey, economic and apidological results, sustainability

### **1. Introduction**

The use of managed western honey bee (*Apis mellifera* Linnaeus, 1758) colonies for commercial pollination of crops is redesigning modern beekeeping. Farmers must use managed honey bee colonies for generalized loss or reduction of not managed pollinator biodiversity in intensively cultivated areas [1, 2] and to support crop yield and/or to improve crop quality [3, 4]. Conversely, beekeepers are interested in hiring their bee colonies to farmers to cash colony rental fees and in addition, if the pollinated crop produces valuable nectar, to obtain honey productions. The matching between the demand of farmers and the supply of beekeepers has given rise to markets in the world of commercial pollination services [5–9] with very heterogeneous economic and apidological characteristics. The possibility of sequentially integrating the production of honey and commercial pollination services during the year has led beekeepers to undertake the migration management of honey bee colonies. The movements of the honey bee colonies follow privileged itineraries [10–13], and according to some authors [14], these itineraries are designed by the beekeepers before the start of the migration itinerary. The commercial pollination of crops is posing some new economic issues. Traditionally, the pollination fee per hive

was contracted by the beekeeper without taking into account the robustness of the honey bee colony [15]. However, some research has shown that robustness significantly affects the productivity of the bees [16–19]. Consequently, farmers should choose the stocking density on the basis of their robustness to obtain the optimal pollination. In reality, the inhomogeneity of colony-to-colony robustness reflects the effects on the pollination of the crop. For this reason, balancing of honey bee colonies before the start of pollination service is to be counted among the good beekeeping practices [20]. The migratory management of modern beekeeping offers advantages but also involves risks: the concentration of numerous honey bee colonies coming from the most disparate places in a restricted area to be pollinated can facilitate the spread of honey bee diseases [21, 22]; displacement of honey bee colonies over long distances can affect their health [23, 24] and also the percentage of winter losses [25]. Moreover, when the supply of the commercial pollination service involves the movement of bees of a subspecies of not managed *Apis mellifera* within the natural range of another subspecies, or when honey bees belonging to the so-called commercial hybrids are handled, damage can be created both to the not managed populations of *Apis mellifera* of the other local subspecies and to honey bees managed by local beekeepers [26].

Even the intensive cultivation of the apple trees shows some problems from the point of view of pollination [27]. The intensification of cultivation has made the survival of local not managed pollinators difficult, especially where the cultivations reach great extents, while at the edge of the cultivated area, near the natural vegetation (woods or grasslands), not managed pollinators can easily satisfy the residual pollination needs. To support the pollination provided by wild pollinators in areas where these do not constitute stable and conspicuous populations, apple producers use the pollination service provided in general by the managed honey bee colonies. We used honey bee colony and beehive as synonyms even if this latter is formed by the colony of honey bees and the hive (box) that contains it.

Commercial pollination is a consolidated practice in Val di Non (North Italy), an alpine area specialized in intensive apple cultivation. In this area the pollination contract with the beekeepers is stipulated by the cooperatives to which the farmers confer apples for storage, processing, and marketing. The combined management of the pollination service allows to overcome the technical-economic limit deriving from the typical pulverization of the land structure of the local farms. In order to gather information about beekeepers who support the pollination of the apple orchards in Val di Non, a survey was conducted through a questionnaire. The survey was filled anonymously. Participants were asked questions about some technicaleconomic and apidological questions concerning mainly migratory beekeeping. The objective of the survey is twofold: on the one hand to verify if there are differences between the answers provided by small- and large-scale beekeeping operations on quantitative aspects, such as the level of bee colony losses in winter and the number of kilometers traveled annually, but also on qualitative aspects such as balancing of bee colonies and the propensity to ensure bee colonies, and on the other hand, to compare the results obtained with those of other surveys on beekeeping. Unfortunately, this comparison will remain confined to a few aspects because many questions we submit to beekeepers are lacking terms of comparison.

The structure of this chapter is the following. After the presentation in Section 2 of the materials and methods of investigation, in Section 3 five economic and five apidological aspects considered worthy of attention will be briefly discussed, not all those considered in the questionnaire, to avoid that the analysis becomes too dispersive. The results obtained will be shown and briefly discussed in Section 4. Section 5 will present some proposals for the future of migratory beekeeping in Val di Non (but not only).

**37**

**Table 1.**

**Section 3**

*Beekeepers replies to the questionnaire.*

*Commercial Pollination of Apple Orchards: Val di Non Case Study*

The exploratory survey on beekeepers supporting apple pollination in Val di Non was conducted during the spring 2019 using a special questionnaire. Submitting questionnaires to the beekeepers to collect business information is a fairly common practice. The winter losses of bee colonies [28, 29], the pollination fees [30, 31], and the movement of bee colonies during the year [32, 33] have been surveyed with this

The associated management of the pollination service in Val di Non facilitated the investigation; in fact, the cooperative managers contacted beekeepers to interview, distribute, and collect questionnaires. Beekeepers filled in a questionnaire with 20 questions: in some cases, the interviewee was asked to provide a dichotomous answer (yes/no) as shown in **Table 1**, Section 1; in other cases, the questions

> Yes (%)

Irrelevant 34.5 46.2 38.1 Low 41.4 46.2 42.9 Significant 24.1 7.7 19.0

<5% 92.8 74.6 90.3 5–10% 3.6 15.4 7.3 >10% 3.6 0.0 2.4

No 10.0 8.3 9.5 Low 30.0 25.0 28.6 High 60.0 66.7 61.9

No 43.3 38.5 41.9 Yes 10.0 30.7 16.3 Do not know 47.7 30.8 41.8

Cost of feeding honey bees (€/colony) 21.1 14.7 19.1 Kilometers traveled per year 3538 13,592 6650 Winter honey bee colony losses (%) 12.5 10.3 11.9

*Disease spread risk* %

*Honey bee colony losses in summer* %

*Honey bee robustness vs pollination fee* %

*Commercial hybrids are an opportunity?* %

Plans honey bee colony movements? 93.1 6.9 100. 0 0.0 95.2 4.8 Interest in ensuring honey bee colonies? 63.3 36. 7 92.3 7.7 72.1 27.9 Balance honey bee colonies? 93.3 6.7 100.0 0.0 95.3 4.7

**Number of honey bee colonies**

No (%)

**1–80 >80 All**

No (%)

Yes (%)

No (%)

Yes (%)

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.90429*

**2. Materials and methods**

instrument.

**Section 1**

**Section 2**
