This year of 2020, National Apple Day is on Wednesday, October 21st, in the U.S. If you love this all-American fruit, then you love bees! 

Thanks to all that pollinating work in the spring, we get to enjoy the crisp, juicy goodness of apples in the fall. 

FUN FACT: There are over 2,500 different varieties of apples grown in the U.S. If you ate an apple each day, it would take you about 7 years to taste test each one!

Also an interesting tidbit on apples: two-thirds of the U.S. crop is eaten fresh and one-third goes to processed uses like apple juice, applesauce, apple butter, packaged apple slices, etc. 

Apple varieties change over time. Red Delicious apples are still the most grown apple, making up most of the U.S. apple crop, but as consumer tastes shift, apple growers are adapting their orchards. One of the most efficient ways to do that is by trimming the trees down to a main trunk and several large branches, and then grafting growing tips of the new variety into those remaining branches. This allows growers to quickly (within 2 years) produce the new variety to meet consumer demand.

Honeycrisp is growing in popularity across the U.S. according to the USDA, rivaling the Red Delicious. The top ten apple varieties in terms of demand currently grown in the United States are:

• Red Delicious

• Gala

• Golden Delicious

• Fuji

• Granny Smith

• McIntosh

• Honeycrisp

• Rome

• Empire

• Cripps Pink

Is there a favorite apple missing from this list! Let us know! Meanwhile, support local and organic apple growers...they not only provide an American fruit staple, but they provide acres and acres of apple blossoms that feed honeybees working hard to create the honey we all love so much.