Saturday, October 25, 2008




When it happened, Miller was in California's Central Valley, where each February, when the almond trees burst into extravagant pink-and-white bloom, hundreds of beekeepers descend with billions of bees. More than 580,000 acres of almonds flower simultaneously there, and wild pollinators such as bumblebees, beetles, bats and wasps simply cannot transport enough pollen from tree to tree. Instead, almond ranchers depend on traveling beekeepers who, like retirees in Winnebagos, winter in warm places such as California and Florida, and head north to the Dakotas in the summer, where fields of alfalfa and clover produce the most coveted honey.

This annual bee migration isn't just a curiosity; it's the glue that holds much of modern agriculture together. Without the bees' pollination services, California's almond trees — the state's top export crop — would produce 40 pounds of almonds per acre; with the bees, they can generate 2,400 pounds. Honeybees provide the same service for more than 100 other crops, from lettuce to cranberries to oranges to canola, up and down the West Coast.

...

Recently, however, even the simple task of understanding bees has become more difficult. Like much of modern agriculture, beekeeping has changed. Where Nephi used trains and telegraphs to conduct his business, John Miller's tools of the trade are semi-trucks and contracts and spreadsheets and amortization schedules. Where Nephi made his income from honey, most beekeepers now derive all of their profit from pollination fees. Nor could Nephi expect the kind of nationwide, devastating losses that John Miller and his colleagues experienced during the almond bloom of 2005. Thirty years ago, there were nearly 4 million bee colonies in the U.S. Today, fewer than 2.5 million remain, thanks to a reddish-brown parasite so tiny it could stand on the head of a pin, and to a malady so new no one is sure of its origin.







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