Beekeeper
Robotic hive technology is real and commercially deployed, but nowhere near the scale needed to threaten this occupation broadly.
In real usage data, AI shows up in this job about as often as the average occupation: not high, not negligible.
Technical detail
Based on Microsoft's "Working with AI" study of real Copilot conversations mapped to O*NET tasks (arXiv 2507.07935): Farmworkers, Farm, Ranch, and Aquacultural Animals scored 0.144 on AI applicability, within one standard deviation of the cross-occupation mean (0.159, stdev 0.098) across all 785 SOC codes studied — banded here as Medium real-world AI usage relative to other occupations.
What a beekeeper actually does
Commercial beekeepers manage colonies of honeybees for honey production, queen and package-bee sales, and — for many operations — paid pollination contracts, trucking hives to farms that need bees to pollinate a crop during its short bloom window.
Day-to-day work means opening hives to check brood patterns, queen health, and mite loads, treating for varroa mites and disease before an infestation collapses a colony, feeding colonies through nectar dearths, and managing swarming so a hive doesn't lose half its bees mid-season. Commercial operations that run pollination routes load hundreds of hives onto flatbed trucks and move them, often overnight, to hit a crop's bloom window exactly — California's almond bloom alone requires roughly 2.
7 million colonies each February, more than any other single pollination event in the world. Beyond the hive work itself, commercial beekeepers negotiate pollination contracts with growers, inspect and grade colony strength for payment, and manage the logistics of a business built around a live, biologically unpredictable workforce.
O*NET has no dedicated beekeeper occupation code; the closest match is the broader "farmworkers" category covering all forms of livestock and animal-product work, which this description covers as it specifically applies to bees and honey.
Why it reads this way
Robotic hive technology is real and commercially deployed, but nowhere near the scale needed to threaten this occupation broadly. Beewise's AI-monitored "BeeHome" units — which detect mite infestation and hunger and can auto-treat varroa mites by thermally warming affected frames — have grown to roughly 1,240 units pollinating over 300,000 acres a year, with named commercial customers including Nuveen Natural Capital and Olam Food Ingredients and a $50 million funding round closed in 2025. Put against the roughly 2. 7-2.
8 million colonies needed for California almond pollination alone, that's on the order of 1-2% of just one crop's pollination demand — real, paying deployment, but early-stage relative to the market it would need to displace. None of it touches queen rearing, honey extraction, or the pollination-contract negotiation and colony-strength inspection that make up a large share of a commercial beekeeper's actual income.
State-level requirements (Florida, Montana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania all mandate hive registration and inspection) don't function as a practice-restricting license the way a fishing quota or forestry license does, so this occupation's safety rests more on the live-colony judgment calls automation hasn't reached yet than on any legal barrier. This shares its O*NET occupational code with Livestock Handler on this site — see that page for the shared BLS wage and outlook data underlying both.
Skills this role draws on
We don't yet have task-by-task time-share data for this occupation, so we can't show which specific tasks carry the exposure score above. This is the real skill set instead.
Typical salary range (USD)
$27,360–$54,080
Average: $36,670/yr
Range source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025
Average source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, Farmworkers, Farm, Ranch, and Aquacultural Animals (45-2093), May 2025 (Median Annual Wage) — a shared code covering all forms of farm-animal work, not beekeeping-specific
Related careers
Head-to-head comparisons
Beekeeper scores 86/100 (Safe band), sharing its O*NET code (45-2093.00, 'Farmworkers, Farm, Ranch, and Aquacultural Animals') and identical BLS wage/structural data with Livestock Handler on this site — disclosed explicitly rather than presented as an independently sourced number. Robotic hive technology is real and commercially deployed: Beewise's AI-monitored 'BeeHome' units detect mite infestation and hunger and can auto-treat varroa mites, with roughly 1,240 units pollinating over 300,000 acres a year and named commercial customers including Nuveen Natural Capital and Olam Food Ingredients. But California almond pollination alone requires roughly 2.7-2.8 million colonies each February — Beewise's footprint is on the order of 1-2% of just that one crop's demand, real paying deployment but far short of occupation-wide materiality. None of it touches queen rearing, honey extraction, or the pollination-contract negotiation and colony-strength inspection that make up a large share of commercial beekeeping income. State registration requirements (Florida, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania) don't function as a practice-restricting license, so this verdict rests on task difficulty and the low materiality of current automation rather than a legal wall — a genuinely thinner protection than most 'Safe' verdicts on this site, reflected in the Medium rather than High confidence rating.
This is a researched judgment (checklist v1.2), not a statistical measurement — it sits alongside, not instead of, the structural exposure signal above. Next scheduled review: 2027-02-10.
Sources (6)
- https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/beewise-inc-raises-50-million-in-series-d-financing-to-accelerate-innovation-and-expansion-302476268.html
- https://www.farmprogress.com/farm-business/how-robotic-hives-and-ai-are-lowering-the-risk-of-bee-colony-collapse
- https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-detail?chartId=107088
- https://wcngg.com/2025/02/02/economic-outlook-and-other-considerations-for-the-2025-almond-pollination-season/
- https://www.fdacs.gov/Agriculture-Industry/Bees-Apiary/Beekeeper-Registration
- https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/45-2093.00
Data sources & methodology
Salary data: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025. Min/max figures represent the 10th–90th percentile annual wage range across the United States. Average figure sourced separately: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, Farmworkers, Farm, Ranch, and Aquacultural Animals (45-2093), May 2025 (Median Annual Wage) — a shared code covering all forms of farm-animal work, not beekeeping-specific.
Automation Risk Score: Based on O*NET occupational analysis (45-2093.00) evaluating task complexity, physical requirements, social intelligence, and environmental variability. Methodology based on research from Frey & Osborne (Oxford, 2017).
Growth projections: -1% (2024-2034), based on BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook.