This 1,500-mile running of the bees brings 21 million workers to Maine’s blueberry barrens

MAINE SUNDAY TELEGRAM • May 24, 2026

After spending the winter in Florida, millions of bees from Maya’s Apiary join the snowbirds journeying to Maine, to pollinate the state’s wild blueberry crop. Wild blueberries are the only crop in Maine that depend on non-resident honeybees. The state has native wild bees, which are perfectly capable of pollinating the low-bush berries as they have for millennia. But over the last 50 years, the state’s wild blueberry growers have increasingly relied on traveling honeybees working in tandem with the native pollinators for much higher yields. “In most fields, there are not enough background native bees to fully turn every one of those wild berry blossoms into a fruit, which, of course, is our producers’ goal,” said Eric Venturini, executive director of the Wild Blueberry Commission of Maine. “A bee has to hit every one of those blossoms.”