What State Beekeeping Associations Should Know About USDA NASS Reporting

The USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) runs the federal government's official data collection on honey bee colonies — separate from, and complementary to, the Bee Informed Partnership's voluntary survey. If your state association has commercial or sideline beekeepers among its members, understanding how this works helps you support accurate reporting rather than duplicate effort.

What NASS actually collects

NASS's honey bee data collection has two main pieces:

• The annual Honey report, covering production, average price, and stocks held by producers with 5+ colonies.
• The quarterly colony survey program, which tracks the number of colonies, colonies lost, and the reported causes of loss (varroa mites, pesticides, other pests, disease, and other/unknown causes) across the year.

Unlike the BIP survey, NASS's colony data collection is a federal statistical survey — operations that meet the reporting threshold (commonly cited as 5 or more colonies) can be selected to receive a survey directly from NASS, and response is generally mandatory for those specifically contacted, under the same statistical-confidentiality protections NASS applies to all its agricultural surveys. Individual response data is confidential; NASS publishes only aggregated statistics.

What this means for your association

Your state association isn't typically a data-collection intermediary for NASS the way it might informally coordinate BIP survey participation — NASS surveys specific operations directly based on its own sampling frame, not through associations. Where a state association's role actually matters is different:

Making sure members who get surveyed know it's legitimate. A commercial or sideline beekeeper who's never received a NASS survey before may not recognize it and could set it aside. A brief note in your newsletter each survey season — "if you receive a NASS colony survey, it's real, and accurate responses from beekeepers in our state directly affect regional loss estimates" — genuinely helps response rates.

Understanding what the published data means for advocacy. NASS's state-level and national colony loss estimates are public data your association can cite when talking to state agriculture departments, applying for grants, or making the case for pollinator health funding. Knowing where that data comes from (and that it undercounts small hobbyist operations below the colony threshold) helps you use it accurately.

Encouraging good individual record-keeping generally. A member who logs inspections, treatments, and losses consistently throughout the year has an easier time responding accurately to any survey — NASS, BIP, or otherwise — than someone reconstructing a year from memory when a survey shows up.

Where ApiaryBase fits

ApiaryBase's Research API produces aggregate exports formatted to align with how BIP and USDA APHIS structure colony loss and management data — useful for your own association's internal reporting and grant applications, independent of whether individual members are separately selected for NASS's federal survey. It isn't a channel for submitting to NASS itself; NASS's survey process is separate and direct. What it does solve is the underlying problem both programs depend on: members having real inspection and loss data on hand instead of guessing when any survey — federal or voluntary — comes due.

For the voluntary-survey side of this, see our guide to the BIP Loss & Management Survey for associations.