Region 2 - 2025 season - #12 of 29 by fee
Cantaloupe has a public USDA/NASS benchmark in Region 2; one pollination contract is 0.5x a national honey-season value per colony.
Source: USDA/NASS Cost of Pollination - public aggregate benchmark.
hivelinks.app/data/crops/cantaloupe
Among the 29 pollination crops USDA tracks in this benchmark bundle, Cantaloupe ranks #12 by the fee a beekeeper earns per colony. This page keeps its pollination economics, peak bloom demand, growing states, and colony-health context tied to public USDA/NASS aggregate rows.
Cantaloupe carries a benchmark pollination fee of $79 per colony, ranking #12 of 29 tracked crops and -46% against a full honey-season baseline of $146.
Cantaloupe is highlighted against the benchmark list, with a dashed honey-season baseline marked in the plot.
Pollinating cantaloupe at scale pulls in 48,394 colonies at peak bloom. The gap is bridged by the local producer-state colony base and migratory beekeepers who follow bloom windows.
Public crop-demand acres times benchmark stocking rate estimates peak demand against colonies kept in the producer states.
Peak bloom demand is below the colonies already kept in producer states, so this crop is less dependent on long-haul colony movement.
Cantaloupe pollination clusters in producer states. Open any of them for its full honey-and-colony profile, or jump to a neighboring crop.
States with public crop-demand acreage rows for this crop.
Closest per-colony benchmarks for quick comparison.
Moving colonies into cantaloupe bloom means moving them into the pest pressure reported by its growing states. This section compares those producer-state stressors with the U.S. colony-health baseline.
Producer-state stressor averages are colony-weighted, then compared with the latest national Honey Bee Colonies baseline.
How this is derived: colony-weighted average of 1 cantaloupe producer state with USDA stressor rows for the same reporting period.