Someone told my boyfriend that he can get an agricultural tax exemption of his land if he keeps a bee habitat? He has an exemption now but he wants to get rid of them and let me plant all my native Texas plants that bees love. Any idea??
Bee exemption?
This link states Wildlife Ag Exemptions need to be for human use so your boyfriend would have to go into the beekeeping business. With bees dying left and right, I would thing it would be a risky business. Also in a blog I ran across, I read Ag expemptions vary by county. Your best bet, before you get rid of whatever he is growing or the livestock, would be to contact the Texas Department of Agriculture.
http://www.noble.org/Ag/Wildlife/TaxExempt/index.html
http://www.agr.state.tx.us/agr/main_render/0,1968,1848_1939_0_0,00.html?channelId=1939
THANK YOU!!!! We actually have healthy wild bees at the moment. I plant purely organic and only Texas superstars. I heard about that colonization problem with the bees. That is really scary :(
According to that Nobel website, you will need to harvest the honey. Are those bees a domestic bee population or an Africanized one? When we first moved to the ranch, one of our large live oak trees, had a huge domestic bee colony in one of its hollow side branches. When they were out foraging, their drone could be heard for several hundred feet. Within two years, they were gone. In fact, we haven't seen many bees lately.
These are domestic according to the extension service. I first noticed a few here and there on the crape myrtles, so I started planting lantana and bee bombs. Now were have maybe a hundred or a little less. We even quit using chemical sprays in the house, holding out hope they will stay.
That's good to know. I would hate to try to harvest honey from an Africanized hive.