I keep bees and own a honey company and have to say it has been very rough the last few years her in Texas. We have been over run with small hive beetles and varroa mites. These will literally suck the life out of your hives. The medications they produce are abused by those in the industry, and the "plague wagons" I call the pollination services are just making it worse for the small scale producers. There is no real regulation for these yahoos and these keeping 480 hives per truck in very close proximity bring disease across state lines to local areas decimating the wild bee populations and of course the local bee keepers. State officials are more concerned with the "$10" fee than what the hell is going on. They have also manipulated the laws here in Texas making it very difficult for the small timer to even produce honey for sale. It is a very sad situation. Myself, I have a steady client list that demands high quality honey not the corn syrup fed garbage most of the industry pumps out.
Did you know that many of the bee industry feeds their bees corn syrup in vats right in front of the hives or park their hives on cornfields. They then sell this as natural honey lol. There is nothing natural or local about it as doing so eliminates most the benefits of the honey making it basically corn syrup with very little pollen diversity in the hive.
The import industry is even worse China dumps honey on the US for less than it cost them to produce it to destroy the market here. Or they send it to South America ultra filter it so we can't determine the country of origin from the pollen and sell it as originating from that country. Again it's a sad state of affairs and this isn't even accounting for all the gmo lab grown roundup insecticide ridden honey sources. It's pretty sad.
Fortunately i have 900 acres of pasture and 5000 public land acres around me my bees can feed off. No one grows much around us except cows.