How Texas became nation’s top beekeeping state

San Antonio—Some tips that entomologist Molly Keck recently gave 26 aspiring beekeepers: Beetles might eat the pollen patties meant to feed their bees. Bees might get cranky when it’s overcast. If people drive too long with bees that aren’t properly sealed, the bees might escape into the car.

A student giggled nervously.

Keck, 42, has tight, blonde curls and an upbeat personality and works for the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service in San Antonio. She started teaching Beekeeping 101 around a dozen years ago when a new Texas law made it possible for people with relatively small tracts of land to get big property tax cuts if they kept bees. After that, interest in beekeeping “really kind of exploded,” Keck said.

The Texas beekeeping boom was the result of a chance meeting between a hobbyist beekeeper and a legislative aide for a rookie state lawmaker. That conversation led to the “bee bill,” which in 2012 created the tax break that sent landowners scrambling to beekeeping classes like Keck’s.

The bill garnered limited attention at the time, as lawmakers in Austin were having higher-profile fights over state budget cuts, abortion laws, and immigration policies. But it shows how with an interested lawmaker and the right support, a regular person can, on occasion, influence major change in the Capitol on an issue they care about.

“This has changed everything from a business perspective because now we have people calling us all the time, like, ‘Hey, want to put bees on our land,’” Blake Shook, a 34-year-old commercial beekeeper, said. “It solved one of the biggest issues from a business standpoint because now we have plenty of places to put our bees, and that’s unusual, or people want to raise bees themselves.”

A Washington Post data columnist digging through the latest Census of Agriculture found that the number of Texas beekeeping operations shot up from 1,851 in 2012, when the policy took effect, to 8,939 by 2022. That was more than the bottom 21 states combined.

The uptick in interest came at a time when honey bees were suffering nationwide, said Juliana Rangel, a Texas A&M University apiculture professor (apiculture is another word for beekeeping). Development paved over their habitat, pesticides harmed them and climate change fueled damaging storms that washed away colonies and rinsed pollen from flowers and droughts that reduced how much nectar plants produced. A hard-to-abate parasite called the varroa mite fed on bees and transmitted all sorts of viruses.

A staggering 30 to 45 percent of honey bee colonies still die on average in the country every year, Rangel said. Beekeepers have responded by dividing their surviving hives to make up for the losses.

The Texas tax break brought a boost of needed hope. More beekeeping operations possibly meant more bees, which are critical for pollinating plants that produce fruit and vegetables from South Texas watermelons to North Texas cucumbers.

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