Commercial migratory beekeeping outfits move thousands of hives by truck between pollination contracts and honey flows over the course of a year — almond bloom in late winter, package installs in spring, clover and canola in early summer, sunflower and honey harvest in late summer, then requeening and winterizing in the fall. Each stop needs its own trained crew, on a schedule that rarely lines up with when workers are available.
Large migratory operations report that seasonal labour shortages and staff churn — not colony losses — are often their single biggest constraint on how many pollination contracts they can take on in a given year.
A truck hauls hive pallets around a six-stop annual migratory loop — almond pollination, package installs, clover, sunflower, honey harvest and fall winterizing — while each site's seasonal crew is staffed, trained and turned over in real time.
Each site's staffing bar rises and falls on a seasonal curve; the solid green portion is filled positions, the red gap is turnover-driven vacancy. Amber workers are first-year hires, green workers are certified veterans, and thin lines show who's mentoring whom.
Scrub the season slider to watch the truck migrate between sites and staffing rise and fall with demand. Raise turnover to see vacancies and new-hire density grow at every stop, or raise base crew size to see how much labour a fully-staffed operation actually needs.
Migratory outfits often re-hire barely half their seasonal crew year over year, meaning much of each season's early weeks are effectively an onboarding and re-certification exercise before full productivity returns.