Bees clung to the frame of their hive as Derrick Maness lifted it with one hand, using the other to puff plumes of smoke over the colony to get them to retreat into the safety of the wooden box.
Maness held the frame over the hive and let the bees crawl off, revealing the thick layer of fresh honeycomb they’d been making. It’s the routine he’s done thousands of times — the core of both his Silt-based business, Colorado Mountain Honey, and his passion. But he’s not sure how long he’ll be able to sustain either.
This year has been one of the tightest financially he’s faced in his over three decades of beekeeping, he said, in large part due to monthslong delays in payment for pollinating work done in March.
Beekeepers across the country are facing similar delays, waiting to be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars from California-based tech startup Beewise. The company, which launched in 2018 out of Israel looking to use AI to manage and care for bee colonies, has in recent years acted as a broker between beekeepers and Californian almond orchards. The almond growers rely on beekeepers like Maness to haul in their hives from across the country and pollinate the state’s over 1.4 million acres of almond trees as they bloom.
Typically, beekeepers would get paid for their services in March or April, but Beewise has reportedly struggled to collect payments from the almond growers. That has rendered the company unable to pay its contracted beekeepers in full, many of whom rely on the pollinating money for cash flow.
“We don’t know if we’re going to be able to make it through this one,” Maness said.
Maness maintains about 3,500 beehives throughout Colorado’s Western Slope. His local wildflower honey fills shelves in specialty grocery stores across the region, as well as in his well-trafficked, unstaffed Honey Hut, which runs on an honor system that trusts buyers to pay for their honey by dropping money in a box or sending it virtually.
Maness said this year’s almond pollination contract with Beewise was worth about $480,000. In the past two months, he’s received a majority of that, but he’s still waiting on around $200,000 — cash he needs for fuel, six full-time wages and syrup to keep the bees from starving in drought months.
The Aspen Daily News spoke to beekeepers from states including South Dakota, Texas, Oklahoma and Minnesota. All reported receiving some funds from Beewise but still being owed hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“I sold equipment because I needed the money,” said Shannon Wallace, owner of Wallace Apiaries, based in Claremore, Oklahoma. “You start parting with stuff that you don’t need to part with to cover.”
Wallace, who maintains about 5,000 hives, said he’s received about 55% of what Beewise owes him — roughly the same as Maness and others. He relies significantly on money from pollination, although he wants to focus his business more on honey production.
Beewise says almond orchards delay payments
It is unclear how many beekeepers have been affected by the payment delays. Beewise officials declined to specify how many were contracted for almond pollination.
Beewise CEO Saar Safra told the Aspen Daily News that the delays stem from multiple almond growers failing to pay what they contractually owe his company. If the growers don’t pay Beewise, his company cannot pay beekeepers, he said.
“When a grower doesn’t pay, there’s a lot of frustration towards us,” Safra said. “I understand that for sure, and we talk to our beekeepers every day. But we’re not the ones who actually have the funds or decide whether to pay or not.”
Typically, beekeepers are paid in two installments for pollinating: half at the start of the job — after the health and strength of the bee colonies is verified — and the other half a month or two later, once the bees are finished pollinating. This timeline aligns with contracts between Beewise and almond growers obtained by the Aspen Daily News through court records, which often see almond orchards agree to pay half the total cost in February and the rest in March or April.
“We were naive enough to assume [almond growers] will pay after the service has been rendered,” Safra said. “The problem is that once the service is done, there are no more levers to actually motivate growers to pay. None whatsoever.”
Beewise has filed lawsuits against at least three almond growers in the past three months, seeking a total of about $520,000 that they alleged have gone unpaid.
Most of those suits seek money for pollination services rendered in 2026. The largest lawsuit, against Friends Farm Inc., seeks $380,000 allegedly owed from a pollinating contract created in 2024.
Friends Farm is closely related to two other almond growers being sued, SVAG Farms LLC, and GK Orchards LLC. The separate entities operate within a collaborative network that shares investment backing, local contractors and water supply infrastructure in California’s Central Valley.
Friends Farm did not respond to phone calls, and the Aspen Daily News was unable to reach the other growers.
Safra declined to specify how many other growers Beewise was pursuing litigation against, as well as how many growers haven’t yet fulfilled their contracts. Litigation is lengthy and expensive, he said, so they’re only going down that route with some growers. Hearings for the four lawsuits are scheduled across next December, January and March.
There are other growers that Beewise hasn’t sued, despite their contracts remaining unfulfilled. Safra said his company is repeatedly asking these growers to pay.
He is optimistic the payments will be resolved within a few months, he said. Almond orchards harvest in August through October, then make most of their money in the fall. As the almond growers turn profits, Beewise hopes they’ll settle up their outstanding debts.
“Every time a beekeeper isn’t getting paid, we’re not getting paid,” Safra said. “We’re taking a similar hit, but at a larger scale.”
Industry grapples with low revenue
Wallace said this is the first year he’s seen pollination payments delayed through the summer. To keep afloat, he’s needed to sell a forklift and work out transportation partnerships with other beekeepers, as his business is built on shipping bees across the country for year-round pollination.
“I’ll make it through the year, because I’ll take it out of my life savings if I have to,” Wallace said.
Corey Behlke, who maintains about 9,000 hives for his Minnesota-based Homestead Honey Farm, said that before 2026, he’d had good experiences with pollinating through Beewise. This year, his contract with the company was worth $1.2 million, and he’s so far received about half.
“There’s been times in this almond-pollination game that we play as commercial beekeepers that payments are late and people are slow to pay,” Behlke said. “For some reason this time just feels a little bit different.”
He said he feels that beekeepers are “at the bottom of the pole” to almond growers, and he wasn’t surprised by the notion that the payment delays might ultimately fall on them.
“They know they cannot pay us,” he said. “They know we can be last to be paid.”
The impact that the payment delays are having on beekeepers underscores the challenges of being a beekeeper in the United States, said Andy Strehlow, owner of Strehlow Bees Inc. With about 70,000 hives, Strehlow’s South Dakota-based business is one of the largest beekeeping operations in the country.
Many beekeepers run on lean, month-to-month budgets caused by rising operating costs, dwindling honey prices and the constant threat of parasites and viruses.
That vulnerability is one of the central issues that Beewise, with its slogan of “saving bee lives to improve human lives,” is intent on tackling, Safra said.
Beewise seeks to innovate, ‘save bees’
Since its launch, Beewise has steadily built out an arsenal of metal, solar-powered robotic beehomes, seeking to innovate an industry that dates to the 1800s and has widely relied on the same wooden-box hive design. Beewise’s beehomes come equipped with complex internal sensors and microphones that the company says can constantly monitor the health and size of a bee colony.
Using artificial intelligence to analyze a colony’s data, Beewise hopes to catch any breakouts of parasites or disease before they destroy the hive. Since the company’s launch, it’s reportedly raised over $160 million from private investors.
The company entered the Californian almond industry in hopes of using its beehomes in the orchards year-round, so that beekeepers no longer need to haul from across the country, Safra said.
Currently, California’s over 1.4 million acres of almond orchards create a vast monoculture that only blooms for a few weeks out of the year. Pollinators can’t naturally survive in that environment year-round, giving reason for the orchards’ cross-country work with beekeepers.
Beewise wants its beehomes to eventually feed and maintain colonies in the orchards for the majority of the year that the trees aren’t in bloom.
As a tech startup, Safra said Beewise is constantly looking for beekeepers who will act as “early adopters” and use their beehomes. The past few years have seen the company offer its beehives to keepers and growers for free, he said. He emphasized that the company is not looking to get into the practice of raising bees itself.
“We can’t assume we know much about taking care of an apiary at scale,” he said. “We know how to build technology that can take care of a colony. This is our expertise.”
Several beekeepers, including Strehlow and Wallace, said they’re skeptical of Beewise’s technology and its ability to take care of bees. Strehlow said he’s concerned the metal boxes could unintentionally kill his colonies, and he’s declined working with Beewise for that reason.
But Safra said he’s patient toward that skepticism. He’s confident that, in time, the beekeeping industry will warm up to the technology. In the company’s 2025 impact report, Beewise reports that its technology saved over 197 million bees throughout the year.
“This industry hasn’t innovated in 107 years,” Safra said. “Most of agriculture has mechanized itself; look at what’s going on — tractors, combines, self-driving robots in the fields — but in the beekeeping industry, we’re still working with wooden boxes. So it’s a big leap.”
In recent years, Maness has had his own struggles against Colorado’s environment. In 2023, he lost over 70% of his hives to a parasite known as the Varroa destructor. The invasive mite entered the country in the 1980s, and it can carry bee viruses that cause swift destruction to a hive.
Maness has spent the past two years rebuilding his colonies, and he was almost back at full capacity entering this year.
“We were pretty excited to keep moving forward,” he said. “Then, the weather didn’t cooperate, and then this issue that we’re dealing with with Beewise, it’s just devastated us.”
Colorado’s unprecedented drought has led to less forage, so his bees have yielded less than half the honey they would on a lush year. Starving bears have also broken through the electric fences at more than 20 of his hive locations, destroying colonies for their larvae in search for food.
On Tuesday, shortly after first talking to the Aspen Daily News, Maness received a payment of about $50,000 from Beewise. He’s still owed $200,000, but he expects to have enough to keep operating through the winter.
Standing across the street from his Honey Hut, Maness put the roof back on the beehive. “I’m raising a lot of life,” he said as he did so, musing that the single hive — one of his 3,500 — likely held around 60,000 bees.
“Not everybody loves what they do, and I won’t lie, I don’t love all the things that happen within the job,” Maness said. “But really, it’s a lot of fun.”
Around him, the cool air smelled of wild Rabbitbrush, which colored its borders yellow in late-summer bloom. The wildflower is one of the region’s last to bloom before the winter, marking the end of bee season.
Like those resilient flowers, the bees had, despite the region’s drought, found ways to continue their lives through 2026.
And after the year Maness has gone through, he could relate to both.
Drew Shaw is a Report for America corps member covering public lands and Garfield County for the Aspen Daily News.
