New Law Allows Montana Beekeepers To Own More Hives

Maybe you’ve never heard of it, but this past weekend, some insect-infatuated communities around the country celebrated National Honey Bee Day. Originally established as “Honey Bee Awareness Day” by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2009, the holiday recognizes the crucial role that more than 2.99 million bee colonies in the U.S. play in pollinating more than $15 billion worth of crops, in addition to producing honey and beeswax.

In Montana, this year’s Honey Bee Day is a little extra special following a new law expanding opportunities for everyday Montanans to engage in beekeeping. House Bill 624, introduced by Rep. Eric Tilleman, R-Cascade, doubled the number of hives that a hobbyist beekeeper may own to 10, and also increased the number of apiary sites per registration from one to five.

“This bill, at the core, promotes the fundamental values of Montana, conservation, agriculture and self-sufficiency,” Tilleman said during a House Agriculture Committee hearing on the legislation early this year. “Allowing hobbyist apiaries more beehives per person not only produces clean and cheap, delicious honey for their toast, but also for their wild game dishes. It also augments the pollination of the gardens and their neighbor’s gardens.”

According to the Montana Department of Agriculture, the state typically ranks in the top five in the nation for honey production and has a robust commercial pollinating industry.

The department maintains a registry of all apiary sites in the state with more than 6,700 apiaries, though there are likely even more hives that aren’t registered, according to the state entomologist.

Beekeepers in the state fall under one of four classifications — commercial yards; landowners; hobbyists; and pollination yards.

While a vast majority of beehives in the state are commercial hives, there is a growing number of landowner and hobbyist beekeepers. Landowners can register any number of hives as long as they manage the hives themselves, while hobbyists, who can now own 10 hives, can locate them at different properties.

“Small-scale beekeepers, I think, are one of the big pieces that’s helpful for the state because they form these great communities,” Amy Savage, the state entomologist, told the Daily Montanan. “Most counties have a hobbyist group or club that meets and shares information about beekeeping and the best way to keep bees happy and healthy. They’re also key to helping share information about diseases and controlling pests, which keeps all beehives in Montana safer.”

In the Missoula area, the Big Sky Beekeepers Club boasts roughly 55 active members representing more than 100 apiaries in the area.

Club president Mike Guess got his start beekeeping more than a decade ago, with two hives on Finley Point on Flathead Lake. His bees didn’t do well in his first two seasons, and he came to the realization that despite robust cherry orchards around the lake, there just weren’t enough resources to provide for his beekeeping operation.

He ended up donating his hives to the PEAS Farm in Missoula, a community-run farm, that’s the “perfect environment for bees.” He has worked as the volunteer beekeeper of that apiary ever since.

“The insect is just such an interesting creature, to look at, to recognize it’s worth to the plants it’s foraging among, and just evolutionarily — it’s just an incredible creature,” Guess said. “The hive mechanics — one queen, thousands of workers, most which only live for five to six weeks — but just this interspecies knowledge that gets transferred genetically to the next generation… it’s amazing to observe that up close.”

Guess took a certification course at the University of Montana to become a master beekeeper and has been helping manage the local club’s mentorship program.

The biggest barrier for new beekeepers is the cost, Guess said. Two hives, which is the recommended number to start with, can run $1,000.

“This is not an inexpensive hobby. Of course, many hobbies have expenses — golf clubs or skis, or tennis rackets and memberships,” Guess said. “But you have to put serious thought into maintaining beehives.”

Another expense barrier all beekeepers deal with is replacing hives after colony deaths.

Guess said that a critical step to successful beekeeping is treating hives for mites and working with other local beekeepers to track and ward off diseases that threaten the colonies.

Since the mid-2000s, there has been a well-documented and well-publicized decline of bee colonies, highlighted by “colony collapse disorder.” Many beekeepers reported large-scale losses, including as many as 90% of hives, which were attributed to myriad sources including mites, pesticides, diseases and changes in habitat.

While the year-to-year loss of bee colonies has varied, the last year was “catastrophic” nationwide, according to Project Apis m., a honey bee health research nonprofit.

According to an April press release, data showed that more than 1.6 million bee colonies were lost. Commercial beekeepers lost an average of 62 percent of colonies from summer 2024 to spring 2025.

“In January 2025, beekeepers across the country began reporting unexpected largescale honey bee losses - we now know the largest ever recorded in the U.S.,” said Danielle Downey, executive director of Project Apis m.

Beekeepers saw similar losses in Montana during the last year, according to Michelle Flenniken, a virologist at Montana State University who specializes in bees. Project Apis m. data shows large- and medium-sized commercial operations in the state lost roughly 60 percent of beehives.

Guess said that in the Missoula club, losses were close to 50 percent — another reason he recommends hobbyist beekeepers have at least two hives. If you lose one, you can split your hive the next year to recover. But losing a single hive each year can quickly boost expenses and increased colony deaths could limit the expansion of hobbyist apiaries.

“The consensus is that this is another honeybee collapse period,” Guess said. “Lots of people agree that if the western honeybee were to disappear from our environment, it could lead to the collapse of the human food supply.”

With such high stakes, there’s a concerted effort by scientists in independent labs and within the USDA to understand what’s behind the latest die-offs and what could be done to prevent them.

Flenniken said that research by the USDA that has been submitted for peer review identified high levels of two viruses responsible for colony losses across the U.S. which are spread through parasitic mites.

“That doesn’t mean it’s the only factor, but viruses and mites are a huge problem for bee colonies and that’s what we study here in our lab using federal grant money,” Flenniken said.

One recent study Flenniken’s lab published this month looked at viruses that do not always have visible symptoms in adult bees, and therefore are hard to detect, including one which was identified in the USDA research as contributing to the national colony loss. Her lab studied the flight speed and duration of infected bees on a “flight mill” (the equivalent of a treadmill, but for bees) and found that different viruses affect the speed and distance the honey bees flew.

Studies like those conducted in Flenniken’s lab are key to understanding bee health on a large scale and finding ways to control and prevent the spread of diseases.

“To understand what’s killing the bee colonies, it takes science, it takes federal scientific funding and experts in the fields who can understand the role of pesticides, mites, and other risks to colonies,” Flenniken said. “That’s your federal taxpayer dollars at work, and it’s important to local communities and to commercial agriculture around the country.”

Flenniken said that while adding new beekeepers and expanded opportunities for owning hives can be great for pollinating local communities, hobbyist beekeepers bear a lot of responsibility to understand colony health and how to protect their hives.

“If new beekeepers don’t control their mites, that can be bad for neighboring operations,” Flenniken said. “It’s not that just more colonies are good; more well-managed colonies are good.”

Flenniken also noted that the number of hobbyist apiaries, even with additional hives, pales in comparison to the state’s commercial operations and can’t make up for large-scale losses. Department of Agriculture data shows that while 88 percent of registered beekeepers are hobbyists or landowners, they make up less than 4 percent of bee colonies statewide.

Guess said that while he’s seen a growing interest in individuals around Missoula ooking to pursue beekeeping as a hobby, he isn’t sure that the new Montana law will boost existing hobbyist apiary numbers.

“Most of our beekeepers in the club have 2-3 hives and even folks who have five, might not need an incremental increase of one or two more,” he said. “Ten hives is a strong hobby, in my opinion, almost becoming a small business. I don’t know how many hobbyist beekeepers have the time, energy and money to keep that up.”

Montanans can help the state’s bee population without owning hives — including by growing flowers and pollinator-friendly plants.

To learn more about honey bees in Montana or to register hives, visit the Department of Agriculture’s pollinator page.