**TESTIMONY OF**

**STEVE GODLIN**

**S.P. GODLIN APIARIES**

**VISALIA, CALIFORNIA**

**FOR THE COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE**

**SUBCOMMITTEE ON**

**HORTRICULTURE AND ORGANIC AGRICULTURE**

**Hearing on the Status of Research on Pollinator Health**

**Including Colony Collapse Disorder in Honey Bee Colonies**

**U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES**

**JUNE 26, 2008**

**Chairman Cardoza and Members of the Subcommittee:**

My name is Steve Godlin; I am a commercial beekeeper from Tulare County
in the middle of California's central valley by the western foothills of
the Sierra Nevada. I am here today to give an update on the condition of
the honey bee industry right now.

Our bees look good. We have over 5,000 hives alive and well in the field
today. We are coming off a surprisingly good desert buckwheat honeyflow
considering the dry spring we had. I am very encouraged by the honey
prices and the pollination season ahead in 2009.

This is about where we were last year at this time. Things started to
unravel in the middle of July. By the time October mercifully arrived we
were down to 2,500 hives, and not the strongest hives at that. But like
all good farmers, we took what money we made and dumped it back into
bees.

We traveled to South Dakota and bought \$100,000 worth of bees from
another beekeeper and put them into our empty equipment and shipped
three semi loads of bees across the country. We arranged to buy another
semi load of bees from a man in Minnesota. We arranged to lease another
5,000 hives from beekeepers in North and South Dakota, Minnesota and
Texas. We were up and running.

We took a fifty percent hit and survived because we are fortunate to
have our operation based in the best place in the world for making money
with bees, the heart of the almond industry. In case you haven't heard,
cotton is no longer king in the San Joaquin. Almond acreage is at an all
time high and is an economic juggernaut for California agriculture.

Currently there are 660,000 acres producing and would be more if not for
the water crisis in our state. This requires about 1,300,000 hives of
bees to pollinate them. The number of managed hives in California has
dropped to around 400,000 hives despite beekeepers' efforts to meet
growers' demands. Bees are now being shipped into California from
everywhere in the U.S.; even Australia is trying to get in the game. Now
I have to go to national bee conventions and defend my state as
beekeepers from New York or Montana disparage us and call us a gutter
for bees.

We have created the biggest experiment ever performed on the honey bee.
Take bees from all over the continent and stick them in the valley to
mingle and forage together with mites and diseases and apparently a list
of viruses as long as your arm and see what happens. Or maybe this isn't
what is wrong \-- haven't we been hearing that bees around the world are
having a problem? And beekeepers here in the U. S., who do not ship bees
to California are losing hives as well.

We began to notice these losses in recent years. We have had rough years
from time to time with higher than usual losses, and in history there
have been a few epidemics in the bee world. But nothing has been on the
levels we are facing now. This is why there has been all this attention
on us. People now realize that the \$15 billion dollars worth of food
that requires pollination to exist is a lot of pretty delicious stuff.

We appreciate this attention and have been encouraged by the
legislations actions. At home, the Bee Lab at U.C. Davis is up and
running again thanks to generous contributions by beekeepers, almond
growers, and companies like Haagen Daz Ice Cream who donated \$250,000
to honey bee research and is running a priceless "save the bee" ad
campaign.

Researchers across the country have been collaborating on projects in an
attempt to find answers. Beekeepers themselves have put aside their
differences and are working with the scientific and governmental
communities as well as each other on an unprecedented level. I know the
fact that our two national organizations had a shared conference this
year speaks volumes to the importance of this issue.

I am here today to ask that you would vote to continue helping to fund
honey bee research. There are some very important projects just getting
up and started, and we really haven't time to waste, or money. We need
results. We need a united effort by all and shared knowledge from a
variety of fields.

I hope we are getting there; the middle of July is looming and I am more
than a little worried. We are providing our bees all the supplemental
nutrition and fresh queens we can. We are treating for nosema ceranae
aggressively and hope for a better fall than this last one.

Beekeeping is more challenging now than it has ever been and you dare
not walk very far away from them if you expect them to survive. My old
mentor always told me to "take care of the bees and they will take care
of you." Well, Mr. Littlefield, I wish I knew what to do.

Of critical importance is bee pasture. Like any other animals, bees need
forage. No farmer grows crops just for bees; they grow crops to make
money. Recently there has been a lot of discussion about bee farms where
forage is planted specifically for bees. CRP land in the Midwest is a
perfect example of this, but as you all know this is going away fast
with the pressure to grow more corn and soybeans. Feedlot beekeeping is
not working. I have seen areas in California where literally thousands
of hives are gathered in a few square miles with disastrous results. It
is a very unnatural situation for the bees when all they have to feed on
is each other.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't talk about pesticides. Thirty to
forty percent of our honey and pollen sources are wild such as the
Sierras, the Mojave and the coast range, all based on rainfall. All the
rest comes from irrigated crops where we are guests, and a good guest
doesn't complain about the smell on his food while he is eating at his
host's table. It has been a very delicate task to make what little
headway we have, and I would hope that progress is being made, thanks in
part to public awareness and everyone's desire for a cleaner world. All
farmers bear a tremendous responsibility and burden to produce food that
is safe and still make a profit.

I am proud to be a part of the greatest agricultural powerhouse in the
world and I know that the honey bee industry is a little, odd,
hard-to-fit gear in the machine. We need help right now, and we need the
average person to understand that food doesn't magically appear at our
grocery stores, which, by the way, need to step up and help with this
education.

Thank you for your time. I am a producer. I believe that hard work is
the cure for everything, but I know we all need to work smarter not
harder, please be smart.

Thank you and good luck to us all.

**Steve Godlin**

**S.P. Godlin Apiaries**

**34015 Rd. 140**

**Visalia, CA 93292**