by Sarah HashemiSensitive media
Every year, almond trees bloom across California, kicking off the world’s largest managed bee migration event. Beekeepers from around the US truck in Billions of bees in a vast garden To pollinate trees in the Central Valley. This practice sustains California’s nut industry — the state’s top valuable agricultural export — but it comes at a deep cost to insects. This is an example of how our food system has come to depend on honey bees.
In Bitter Honey: The Big Egg’s Threat to Bees and the Fight to Save Them, Jenny Durant has been tracing the relationship between industrial agriculture and honey bees for more than a century. The book provides an in-depth, reported examination of what beekeepers do to stay in business despite the pressures they face, and how these decisions affect wild bees, domesticated honey bees and the environment. Through conversations with beekeepers, scientists, and policymakers, the book paints a nuanced picture of beekeeping as a large-scale livestock operation that prioritizes “productivity and efficiency above all else” to the detriment of native bees and crops. Still, despite the content, it does all this with a good dose of humor and hopes for these The future of hummingbirds.
Durant explained the title has a double meaning. “Literally, the title refers to the pungent honey that bees produce when they pollinate nuts, honey that beekeepers don’t usually sell but instead let their bees eat,” Durant explains in the book. “Figuratively, however, it refers to the compromises beekeepers make to keep their operations going.”
Agriculture and bees: a toxic relationship
To understand the current state of beekeeping in the United States, Durant takes the reader to its beginnings. Western honey bees were brought to the Americas by European settlers for their honey and for pollination of non-native fruit trees and clovers, which were used as food for livestock and their communities. As the colonists traveled west, so did their bees and crops. The bee became a symbol of the colony. “With the settlers they traveled with, honey bees reshaped the land in European imagery, displacing native bees, altering plant communities and reflecting a wider story of indigenous loss.”
Finally, Durant landed in the post-war era. At this point he marks a major change in using bees. Farmers have increased their activities, Shifting to monocultures and commodities Crops like corn, wheat and soy and honey bees have taken on a new role as agricultural pollinators. Beekeepers began moving their colonies to produce crops, especially alfalfa and clover seeds, which were used to feed livestock. Durant aptly puts it: “Bees moved from wild forage to workers, clocking in for the blooming season while beekeepers chased them from farm to farm.” With each migration, they reshaped the American landscape, driving out native pollinators and sustaining crops that otherwise would not have survived.
Durant spends most of the book on California nuts. As he explains how beekeepers maintain their colonies in the face of parasites, climate change and the growing demands of the agricultural industry, it’s hard not to draw parallels with modern factory farming. We learn how beekeepers began supplementing their bees with “pollen substitute patties” to ensure their colonies could meet the demands of nut growers even though it might lead to overcrowding, and how they developed insecticides to combat deadly mites. When Durant asks a beekeeper why he shouldn’t downsize his operation, he simply replies that a good operation must grow.
A way forward
The book is not only about the challenges bees face; It’s also about potential. In the second half, Durant describes practices that can help both managed and wild bees. We meet Pete Barthelsen as he conducts a prescribed burn on his Nebraska farm, one of several ways he’s restoring pollinator habitat to the Midwest. Prescribed burning can help native grasses and wildflowers grow, while eliminating invasive plants that inhibit flowering plants that attract pollinators.
We also meet an almond farmer who grows cover crops among his trees, a native plant and pollinator farmer from Oklahoma, and a regenerative farmer from South Dakota who keeps bees on his land. Here, the book doesn’t do enough to describe Limitations of Regenerative Agriculture. Studies have shown that this is not necessarily an effective climate solution, but Durant only offers positive aspects such as biodiversity and soil health.
“To help pollinators thrive — and maintain access to the nutritious, diverse food crops we depend on — we’ll need more than stopgaps and emergency measures,” Durant wrote. “We need a food system that works with nature, not against it; one that puts the well-being of pollinators, wildlife, farmers and the rest of us at the center.”
Here, Durant is touched on a lasting Debates on how to protect nature — farms that aim to integrate with nature or prioritize efficient industrial operations while limiting their encroachment — without debating both sides.
Durant ends the book with a short mantra on how to help bees: “Plant flowers. Limit pesticides. Share the land.” After looking in such detail at how our food system and bees intertwine, one hopes he will suggest more transformative changes to the way we eat. Because, as he says, solutions must also come from the industries and organizations that support and depend on pollinators.
Clarification: This sentence has been edited for clarity: The book provides an in-depth, reported examination of the stress beekeepers face, what they do to survive in business, and how these decisions affect wild bees, domesticated honey bees, and the environment.
This article originally appeared on Sentient https://sentientmedia.org/california-almonds-depend-on-billions-of-bees/.
–
This story was originally published by sensitive
***
If you believe in the work we’re doing at The Good Men Project, please join us as a Premium Member today.
All premium members can watch The Good Men Project without any ads.
Need more information? A full list of benefits is here.
–
Photo credit: splash
