The Beekeeper's Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America

by Hannah Nordhaus

  In 1950, a consortium of almond farmers formed the Almond Board of California to combine grower resources for marketing and research. At the time, U.S. growers produced 50 million pounds of almonds and claimed 17 percent of the world market; Spain commanded 75 percent of global almond sales. Today California boasts an 80 percent market share. Almond economics have defied the laws of gravity. Typically, a large supply of a product will mean a drop in prices for farmers who sell it—hence the regular price supports for staples like corn, cotton, and soybeans, of which we often produce too much. But not just anyone can grow an almond—you need a specific climate and soil, a large investment to get the trees growing, and five years of patience and funding before they begin to bear. Those who can do it are amply rewarded, because in the almond world these days, there is no such thing as too much. Thus far, more nuts has simply meant more money. Even at the trough of the global recession of 2008 and 2009, almond sales set a record. Growers shipped 10 percent more in 2009 than they had the previous year. The almond was one of the few products, agricultural or otherwise, that continued to boom as the rest of the economy went bust. It was, apparently, the bulletproof nut.

  The Almond Board has displayed remarkable marketing savvy in its campaign to increase demand. It has commissioned and advertised a number of studies touting the health benefits of almonds. Such campaigns have been credited for much of the increase in domestic demand, though the majority of Central Valley almonds today are still shipped overseas. The largest market is in Europe, but almond sales have also soared in India and China, where the Almond Board once deliberated over whether to rename the nut. The Chinese call it xingren—“apricot kernel”—and the board felt a less bitter-sounding moniker might boost sales. It toyed with names like “vitality nut,” “good fortune nut,” and “big California xingren” before deciding that continuing sales growth in China didn’t warrant a name change. Exports to China had more than doubled from 2008 to 2009. And “apricot kernel” is, after all, a discernible linguistic improvement over “tonsil plum.”

  The board has also plowed profits into agricultural research, developing state-of-the-art fertility management, irrigation practices, planting strategies, and optimal grid patterns to increase the chance of a successful crop set. In Spain, hilly terrain and antiquated planting and harvest practices keep farmers from retrieving more than about 100 pounds per acre. Growers in the Central Valley, by contrast, can expect up to 3,000 pounds an acre. But for all their sophisticated strategies to increase yield and profitability, almond growers still have one major problem—pollination. Unless a bird or insect brings the pollen from flower to flower, even the most state-of-the-art orchard won’t grow enough nuts. An almond grower who depends on the wind and a few volunteer pollinators in this desert of cultivated fields can expect only 40 pounds of almonds per acre. If he imports honey bees, the average yield is 2,400 pounds per acre, as much as 3,000 in more densely planted orchards. To build an almond, it takes a bee.

  NO ONE KNOWS EXACTLY WHEN THE HONEY BEE BEGAN DOING the reproductive work of the flowering plant. Paleobotanists place the development somewhere around 100 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period, when the number of plant species grew more than sevenfold and flowers learned that visiting bugs or birds could make their procreative task much easier. Some flowering plants pollinate themselves. But many make seeds and reproduce only when pollen—the sticky powder in the flowers—moves from one plant to the next. Although some types of pollen travel on the wind, many fruiting plants require outside help from insects and birds. Some pollinators are attracted by bright colors; others, like honey bees, by the fragrant nectar the blossoms emit. The nectar lies deep at the base of the petals, and when the insects retrieve it, they get covered in dusty pollen, the male product of the bloom. When they fly to the next flower, some of that pollen rubs off and—voilà—fertilizes the seeds in the stigma, the female part of the blossom. Thus flowers evolved to emit more nectar for the insects—and developed sweet smells and bright colors to attract them. Bees began bringing that nectar home to evaporate into honey, storing it in wax cells for feeding the young and surviving fallow periods. Honey supplies, in turn, allowed the bees to develop larger, better-organized communities, the better to collect nectar and pollen. Bees and flowers adapted to help each other.

  There are other insects that are more efficient than honey bees. Blue orchard bees, for instance, can pollinate fifty times the flowers that honey bees can. But they are solitary insects, and their populations increase by a factor of only three to eight a year; honey bees can expand from a queen and a few dozen attendants to tens of thousands of bees in just a few weeks. And honey bees live in naturally portable communities that are easy to move from bloom to bloom. That appeals to the almond farmer, who has a lot of flowers to pollinate—twenty-five thousand blossoms per tree, 135 or so trees per acre—about three and a half million flowers per acre. That’s a lot—an inconceivably large number—of flowers, and for that, solitary bees won’t do; you need a mob. Unlike most fruit and nut crops, which must be thinned to reduce competition for resources among fruit, an almond tree can’t have too many flowers. (Those that don’t “set”—that aren’t successfully pollinated and fall off—have been given the apt nickname “old maids.”) The more almond blossoms that set, the more almonds, the more pounds, the more sales, the more dollars. Which means, for the almond farmer, the more bees the better. Most agricultural extension agents recommend that growers place two colonies for every acre of almond trees. Some growers, seeking to maximize their yield per tree, will use more than three colonies per acre.

  The quantity of bees can’t guarantee the quality of the crop, however. Bees won’t forage if it’s under 50 degrees, or if it rains (when it does, they hunker down: “You can see them fighting over the clicker,” Miller says). If it doesn’t rain and there’s not sufficient supplemental irrigation, the pollinated nuts won’t grow. If there’s a hard freeze at the wrong time, the blossoms won’t survive. (Growers have been known to hire helicopters to hover over their crops during a freeze so that the rotors move warmer air down from the valley’s inversion layer.) If it’s too warm in December and the tree doesn’t spend enough time in a dormant state, it will store fewer nutrients and produce fewer flowers and hence fewer nuts. These are matters that are beyond the ken of the honey bee. It just does its one job, and does it well. But without it, none of the rest matters: one thing every almond grower knows is that if there are no bees, there is no crop. And to get a bee these days, you need a traveling beekeeper.

  Pause to think about it: bee guys pull off a remarkable feat—one that, like pollination itself, is so invisible as to be almost mundane, and so complicated as to be almost inconceivable. Every January, 1.5 million hives—somewhere in the vicinity of two thirds of the nation’s bees—are imported to California to fulfill the almond farmers’ pollination demands. Miller takes his bees to California in late January, waking them prematurely from their winter’s rest in the cellars of Idaho. They arrive at his headquarters in large semi loads, around five hundred hives per truck, four double-deep hives per pallet. The pallets are unloaded and stacked in a holding yard down the hill from Miller’s house. A smaller truck delivers the hives to one of Miller’s many nearby bee yards. Miller is lucky. Because he has run this territory since 1976, he has access to fifty-five or sixty bee yards in the vicinity of Newcastle, an old Gold Rush community with a historical-society-precious main street lined with log-and-blond-brick buildings. He knows every back road, meadow, and field better even than the pot growers and the police, although he sometimes has to tie a T-shirt to a tree to remind himself where to turn off the road for a particularly well-concealed yard. He is always on the lookout for new apiaries—in this countryside where prospectors once panned the rivers and excavated the hills for veins of gold, he prowls for perfect meadows. He calls it “mining yards.” Like gold deposits, there are fewer and fewer.

  His apiaries are located mostly in the hil
ly country nearby, fields dotted with farms and ranches, and, increasingly, with the cedar-and-stone McMansion ranchettes of what Miller likes to call the “wine barrel literati.” Many of these property owners do not look kindly upon strange beekeepers visiting their upscale redoubts. When one of the properties on which he keeps his bees gets sold, Miller offers the axiom that the nicer the remodel, the sooner his bees will get kicked off the land. Miller had kept bees at his friend Eddie Ferrera’s place, for instance, for twenty-five years. Ferrera loved honey, and his sweet tooth didn’t appear to inconvenience him. He died at age ninety-two with a mouthful of perfect teeth. “He had the most amazing set of teeth I’ve ever seen in my life,” Miller says. His hilltop home was sold, and soon after, the new owner razed it, built a demi-castle, sued the long-established cattle ranch next door because of the noise and smell, and kicked Miller’s bees off the property.

  Still, Miller counts himself luckier than many beekeepers who travel to California for the almonds. Many of them must keep their bees in massive holding yards without a flower in sight, feeding them syrup and waiting for the almonds to come into bloom. Miller’s still got plenty of good yards. In January, when the brown fields have turned unearthly green with the winter’s rain, some of Miller’s bee yards could be mistaken for paradise. There are fields the color of jade, bordered with live oaks, valley oaks, blackberry, and belly-high flowering yellow mustard, dotted with round granite “earth eggs” and quartz outcroppings, scattered with ponds and big red heifers and cawing geese. There are needle-strewn, bear-scratched clearings among the ponderosa and twisted digger pines of the Sierra foothills, manzanita and madrone and ceanothus and even poison oak thrusting into bloom. There are stark ravines with sunburnt grass and bleached clay buttes. Bees, of course, don’t care about the view; they will happily set up housekeeping near a quarry or a sawmill or a landfill, just so long as there is ample water, nectar, and pollen.

  At the end of January and early February, Miller and his crews work three straight weeks of ten-hour days, taking only Sunday off. They receive semis, place bees, feed them, examine the hives to see how they fared over the winter, and remove the “duds” that didn’t make it. Then they begin transferring the bees to orchards in the Central Valley, piling hives back onto semis for the trip to Modesto. The same precision that drives every step of growing an almond also applies to the placing of bees. Miller and his crews move the hives at night, when the bees are dormant. Whether the grower has forty acres or two thousand, the hives must be placed where they will best penetrate the canopy of the orchard. They always sit at the ends of rows where they are easy to move with a forklift and not likely to get in the way of mowers that shear vegetation on the orchard floors close to the ground. A beekeeper must be aware of the location of irrigation systems—if the hives are placed too close to a Rain Bird, the bees won’t fly. If the grower uses flood irrigation, the hives must be off the orchard floor, on an irrigation berm or row end. If there’s a school near the orchard, the hives should be placed far away. If the location is muddy and has heavy clay soil, the trucks will invariably get stuck; there’s not much Miller can do about that.

  With so many acres of almonds, the months preceding the almond bloom are, for Miller, a virtual bazaar, a flurry of phone calls, emails, inspections, haggling, wheeling and dealing, matching hives to acres, tinkering with contracts, signing them, and hoping really hard that the bees arrive healthy enough to keep his promises. The negotiations and logistics surrounding the renting of honey bees have become so complex that many beekeepers and growers rely on “bee brokers” to bring the two parties—pollinator and pollinatee—together, to inspect the hives and grade them according to their health, to oversee their placement, to see that beekeepers get paid, and generally to ensure that the almond farmers who pay their bills will not end up with what Miller calls a “superabundance of lumber”—a lot of wooden beekeeping equipment without healthy bees. Miller has longtime relationships with growers and works directly with them. He prefers not to use brokers, but “if I know the grower’s a sonuvabitch and doesn’t pay—or if he’s a cherry grower—I’ll use a broker.”

  Almonds didn’t always require this degree of intervention—nor did all the other insect-pollinated crops that farmers grow and we eat. When farms were smaller and crops were varied, growers could rely on native pollinators and local beehives to get the work done. But large farms have replaced small ones, and farmers now plant larger crops with less variety—rows and rows and rows of crops like corn and grain, which provide little to no nutrients for bees to survive on, or almonds, which bloom for twenty-two days a year and then, after the petals fall, leave behind a desert—not a hedgerow, not a weed. Furthermore, the land is plied with pesticides that kill insects and herbicides that kill the plants that insects rely on for year-round survival. Huge swaths of land are thus custom-designed to sustain no living thing except one designated crop.

  So just like that, something that used to happen freely now requires three layers of management—keeper, broker, and grower—to unite flower and bee. It is a very American story: creating a market where once there were just bugs and plants and unfettered visitation. But for what the bee-and-agriculture crowd has come to call the “largest managed pollination event in the world,” that degree of middlemannery is necessary. The almond now occupies vast stretches of land—the Central Valley floor—that were once covered in oaks, California poppies, and native grasses. Because there are so many almond trees planted so closely together, and because there are so few local bugs anymore, insects from, say, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Florida—in 2004, the USDA for the first time allowed almond ranchers to import hives from Australia as well—must now be trucked or flown to California to pollinate a tree that originally came from across the world. Such are the wages of modern agriculture. The first known bee rental for pollination was recorded in a New Jersey apple orchard in 1909, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that farmers began paying for pollination on a systematic basis, and it wasn’t until the late 1990s that beekeepers began making real money from pollination fees, rather than just supplementing their earnings from honey production. In the 1960s, hives rented for as low as $6; in the 1970s, a beekeeper could expect to earn $12 a hive from an almond grower; even as recently as 2004, hives were renting for only $48. In 2010, those willing to wait until the very brink of the bloom earned as much as $210 a hive. Miller, who says he is “not brave enough to play that game,” is happy to settle at a guaranteed $140 or $150 a hive earlier in the season.

  These almond-fueled superpaydays may be fleeting, however. Almond acreage continues to grow. So does demand—so far. “There probably is a saturation point there somewhere,” almond farmer John Thoming, whose father was the Millers’ first pollination client, told me. “We thought that when we got to a billion-pound harvest we’d have problems, but then we got to a billion, and now a billion and a half, and we haven’t reached that saturation point yet.”

  Someday, certainly, they will. Australia has beefed up its almond plantings. And in western China, the purported birthplace of the almond, authorities have embarked on a forced-labor campaign, enlisting ethnic Uighurs of the northwestern Xingiang region—one person and donkey cart per household, at risk of a hefty fine—to plant almond trees. Eventually China’s massive state expansion may put a dent in growers’ sky-high profits.

  The prospect of struggling almond growers is a troubling one for bee guys, because without the almonds, most commercial beekeepers would not be able to make a living. Like bees and blossoms, bee guys and almond guys are engaged in a symbiotic relationship: neither could survive, much less prosper, without the other. We know that what is bad for the bee guy is bad for the almond guy—without bees, there are no almonds. But the reverse is also true: starting in the mid-1990s, when the price for a pound of honey fell below what it cost to produce it—a victim, like many homegrown industries, of cheaper Chinese competitors with names like Wuhan Bee Healthy Co.—almond guys were th
e only thing keeping most bee guys afloat. Other crops, like cherries and apples and melons, provided a place to park bees with ample nectar and pollen between seasons, but those crops didn’t fetch enough on the commodities markets, and thus couldn’t pay enough, to net beekeepers much of a profit. So what’s good for the almond industry is, at least in the short term, good for the beekeeping industry. “Thank goodness for the almonds,” Miller says. “I want those guys all driving new Escalades.”

  Still, Miller and his bee guy friends also know that in the long term, the almond rush is not so good for the beekeeper. Indeed, the success of the almond and the survival of the honey bee appear to have an inverse relationship—the higher the price of almonds rises, the harder time beekeepers have keeping their charges alive. There are plenty of explanations for this sorry state of affairs. Bees didn’t evolve to work so hard in the dead of winter. Spring comes early in the almond orchards. It’s a chilly and rainy time of year, when any northern honey bee in her right mind should be huddled up with her companions in the bowels of the hive, keeping still and quiet. To build up summerlike numbers for large-scale pollination during winterlike conditions, beekeepers must convince their bees that spring has arrived. So they move them to warmer climes, then pour corn or beet or sugar syrup into plastic feeder troughs or drip bottles and place pollen patties—granular cakes of human-harvested pollen, brewer’s yeast, and sucrose—across the tops of the hive frames to provide a protein boost. That’s how commercial bees get pumped up for their orchard acrobatics. “It’s not a natural thing to have big booming hives in February,” Miller says. Bees are adapted to cold climates—“but we bring them down here to make money.”