The Golden State’s annual almond harvest shows what happens when biodiversity collapses and bees become a commodity valuable enough to steal.
EPISODE 6 TRANSCRIPT
Teresa Cotsirilos: Hey, you’re listening to Buzzkill. I’m Teresa Cotsirilos.
God, that’s crazy. There are bees crawling on us right now. Uh, do you have any particular tips about being covered with bees, like …
Saar Safra: Yeah, I have one big tip. You want to be suited up.
Teresa: OK, yeah, that makes sense.
Saar Safra and I are standing next to his bee colonies in a remote corner of California’s Central Valley, about half an hour outside of Modesto.
Saar: If you’re sweating, you’re nervous, they’ll feel that.
Teresa: Right.
Rows of almond trees are in full bloom for as far as we can see, in all directions. Saar’s colonies are home to about half a million bees. And all of them seem to have mixed feelings about me being here.
There appear to be two — are they stuck in my microphone, or are they just lying in wait? Because if they’re stuck, I want to help them.
Saar: I don’t think they’re stuck.
Teresa: I’m here because for a few weeks every spring, this area is home to the largest managed pollination event on the planet. The Central Valley’s almond industry is a $4 billion industry. And when these trees bloom, it takes at least 54 billion honeybees to pollinate them.
So farmers pay commercial beekeepers to bring hives of honeybees to their fields. Beekeepers call it the Super Bowl of Beekeeping. And Saar Safra is one of its up-and-coming players. Saar isn’t a beekeeper. He’s a tech entrepreneur and the cofounder and CEO of Beewise, a startup that says it’s, quote, saving bees to feed the world.
And this isn’t an ordinary beehive.
So there’s a server and then there’s a robot arm on top of it?
Saar: So this is the robot. We’ll just move it a little bit so you can actually see what’s going on in there.
Teresa: Beewise keeps its colonies in a patented BeeHome device, a smart beehive that’s the size of a small car and kind of looks like a massive gray computer server. Inside the BeeHome, there’s a layer of cameras that’s watching the bees at all times.
Saar: There’s half a million bees in there, and cameras look at all of them throughout the day, throughout the week, the month …
Teresa: Data collected by these cameras is fed into an AI model, which crunches data from about a thousand different BeeHome devices around the world, and determines if any of the bees are sick or hungry.
Then it instructs the robot arm in the BeeHome smart hive to take corrective action, like giving the bees medicine or more food. The whole thing seems a little sci-fi. But Saar says his company’s selling a practical solution to a familiar problem. And that problem is the brutal combination of pesticides, pathogens, pests, and extreme weather that’s killing an average of 40 to 50 percent of U.S. honeybee colonies every year.
Saar: If we don’t save the pollinators, things will get ugly pretty quick.
Teresa: And as our food system kills off both the native pollinators and the honeybees that it relies on, some corners of the ag industry are concerned enough to be looking for a backup plan.
Marketing clip: This is Robie, our revolutionary biomimicking device.
Teresa: Welcome to the world of robotic pollination.
Marketing clip: We replace manual labor and bumblebees, improving yields and offsetting bees’ drawbacks.
Marketing clip: Using all natural pollen and changing the delivery vector from bees, insects, and wind to machines.
Teresa: And yes. In case you were wondering, that dystopian show Black Mirror did do an episode about this. You know, the one where swarms of robotic bees start going rogue.
Black Mirror clip: I didn’t expect to find myself living in the future, but here I fucking well am.
Teresa: I think that really captures how uneasy people feel about tech like this. Startups and academic research labs have already developed six-armed pollinating robots that lurch around greenhouses, and drones that shoot bubbles at flowers to pollinate them.
A lot of pollination experts are pretty skeptical about these robot pollination schemes. They argue they’re inefficient, and prohibitively expensive to produce at scale. Some scientists and agribusiness execs think that bioengineering crops to pollinate themselves, or breeding pesticide resistant honeybees are more promising solutions.
Others have taken a more lo-fi approach.
Marketing clip: It’s time for Wu Qingyu to start work on something that’s normally taken care of by nature.
Teresa: A few decades ago, farmers in Maoshan, China, ran out of pollinators. Now, they pollinate their fruit trees by hand.
Chinese farmer: Nowadays, it’s really hard work being a fruit grower.
Teresa: This kind of thing isn’t just happening in China, by the way. Farmers have also been forced to hand-pollinate crops in parts of India and Brazil. The truth is that if pollinator populations really collapse, it could be very difficult to replace them. Over the past five episodes of Buzzkill, we’ve broken down why pollinators are in crisis and what we can do to help.
Now we’re going to take a look at what happens if we fail. So in this, our final episode, we’re tailgating the Central Valley’s Pollination Super Bowl, and taking a hard look at whether we’re really on track to save these creatures. From the Food & Environment Reporting Network, this is Buzzkill, Episode 6, A Post-Pollinator World.
Will Nissen: There’s nothing better to open a beehive and take your hand and just put it over the top bars, and they don’t attack it or anything cause they know that you’ve introduced yourself right and said hello.
Teresa: Why don’t you, why don’t you introduce yourself? What’s your name, what’s your job? That kind of thing.
Will: I’m Will Nissen, beekeeper. What else you want, about it …
Teresa: And, and, uh, Peggy, you wanna introduce yourself, too, or …
Peggy Nissen: I’m Peggy Nissen. Will’s wife. Mm-hmm.
Will: And beekeeper.
Peggy: And beekeeper.
Teresa: Uh-huh, uh-huh.
Teresa: Will Nissen and his wife Peggy have been pollinating Central Valley almond trees for over 30 years. I caught up with them, and their bees, in an almond orchard a few hours south of Saar’s hives.
Oh, wow.
Peggy: Sometimes the queen is on top. We look for the queen. Sometimes she’s …
Teresa: Will and Peggy are a little more old-school than Saar is. No A.I. or robots, just common sense and a high pain tolerance.
Will: Well, they’re just a bunch of ladies in a box, you know.
Teresa: About 95 percent of honeybees in the hives are female.
Will: It’s probably a good thing, right, Peggy?
Peggy: Yeah.
Will: Get something done.
Teresa: It’s peaceful here. But that peace is kind of deceptive. Will’s planted Verizon GPS trackers in his hives. He’s hidden game cameras throughout the orchard, and for good reason. A certain kind of crime is on the rise here. And during 2023’s Pollination Super Bowl, Will says it landed on his and Peggy’s doorstep.
The way he tells it, one night around 8 o’clock, a game camera that he’d hidden in some tumbleweeds went off.
Will: Then I thought, ah, it’s probably that coyote. I look at it, here’s a headlight in the beeyard.
Teresa: Two men had just driven a forklift over the tumbleweed that Will had planted his camera in. Will says they were headed towards a row of his beehives. And Will knew exactly what that meant. He jumped in his pickup with two of his sons.
Will: My boy told me that he didn’t think all four wheels were on the ground at one time driving that eight miles cross country to get there. You want to protect what’s your own, and I guess weird things go on in your head, your adrenaline’s going.
Teresa: By the time Will pulled up on them, he says the two men were using the forklift to load 168 of his bee colonies into the trailer of a single-axle truck. Will says he recognized the truck immediately. It belonged to another beekeeping company. This was a bee theft. And the reason for it was simple supply and demand. Bees have become such a precious resource in the Central Valley that people are stealing them.
So how did we get to the point where people are stealing hives in the middle of the night? To understand that, you have to look at the Central Valley’s evolution over the years. Back in the mid-1800s, parts of this valley used to be a pollinator paradise.
The famous naturalist John Muir even gave them a nickname in his writing: the bee pastures.
John Muir, via voice actor: When California was wild, it was one sweet bee garden throughout its entire length.
Teresa: Rolling grasslands stretched across much of the valley, and in the spring, wildflowers, the Golden State’s famous superblooms, turned those grasslands gold and purple.
The valley was humming with wild bees, and teeming with monarch butterflies and large spotted moths. Native peoples like the Yokut sometimes ate these pollinators’ larvae and caterpillars, and they used cultural burning in parts of their territory to keep the environment healthy.
John Muir, via voice actor: North and south, and all the way across, from the snowy Sierra to the ocean.
Teresa: According to Muir, these superblooms used to stretch for over 400 glorious miles. That’s more than twice the length of the entire state of Massachusetts. But as American settlers pushed west into California, a lot of the Central Valley’s pollinator habitat was plowed under by wheat farmers, and trampled by sheep and cattle barons.
Today, it’s pretty much gone, and over time, the valley became home to something else.
Marketing clip: Nobody does fresh better than Fresh Del Monte.
Marketing clip: At Wonderful, we’re proud to grow and process healthy products for healthier lives.
Teresa: These are just a few of the major agribusinesses that operate here. There are multibillion-dollar corporations like Del Monte and the Wonderful Company. And smaller companies like Sun-Maid. Their annual revenue’s only in the hundreds of millions.
Marketing clip: The Sun-Maid, America’s favorite raisin.
Teresa: Today the valley is a patchwork of fruit trees, row crops, and industrial dairy farms. And it’s one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world. Forty percent of the nation’s fruits, nuts, and table foods are grown right here.
And over time, almonds have become one of the valley’s most lucrative crops, thanks in part to some savvy marketing.
Marketing clip: What? Not having your usual? Nope. But you always! Today I’m having something different. Hills Bros. new almond mocha. New mocha?
Teresa: But at a certain point, the almond industry didn’t have enough pollinators to sustain our penchant for almond drinks.
You see, as almond orchards expanded, The industry’s demand for pollination was too much for the valley’s native pollinators to handle. And as almond farmers and other Central Valley growers sprayed pesticides and destroyed hundreds of miles of habitat, they also killed off the very native pollinators their crops needed.
Which created a pollinator supply problem. Muir’s bee pastures were long gone. So, growers needed to import honeybees. Lots and lots of honeybees. And for beekeepers like the Nissens, The valley’s pollinator decline was a business opportunity.
Will: I said, geez, we should go to California, you know, kind of diversify a bit.
Teresa: Will and Peggy Nissen got in on the action in the 1990s. They live in North Dakota, but when they heard about California almond pollination, they packed up about a hundred million honeybees into a couple of trucks and drove west. Back then, almond pollination was more of a peewee game than a Super Bowl.
Will says there just weren’t that many almond orchards in the valley yet.
Will: When I first started, if I saw a bee truck, I knew who it was.
Teresa: Then, beginning in the 2000s, global demand for almonds boomed. Almond prices went up, farmers started planting more and more of them, and almond pollination exploded.
News clip: It’s almond pollination season in the Central Valley, folks …
News clip: In ag matters, the world’s biggest pollination event is taking place right now in our own backyard …
News clip: I mentioned earlier about this almond thing, they’re, uh, you know, they’re shipping that — they’re shipping those things in a, in an 18-wheeler …
News clip: It’s 2 a.m. in the morning, and I am unloading my bees on the almond orchards …
Teresa: These days, the Central Valley produces 80 percent of the world’s almonds. And honeybees are the migratory livestock that it relies on. Every year, beekeepers from across the country take an estimated 90 percent of the nation’s honeybees, load them onto trucks and haul them to the Central Valley. Think about that: 90 percent! I’ve talked to a couple other beekeepers about this.
Beekeeper: It’s like come to a four-way stop or something and, you know, I’ve seen like 12 semis loaded with bees working their way through that little four-way stop.
Teresa: And they say the Pollination Super Bowl can get as nutty as it sounds, pun very much intended.
Beekeeper: Almost 50 percent of the trucks you see will have bees on them.
Beekeeper: And then there’s like eight bee trucks and forklifts and you’re like, man, this is, it just turns into a rat race real quick.
Teresa: Almond trees have a narrow pollination window. So all this happens in a matter of weeks, thus the Super Bowl. And running bees to California has only gotten more lucrative.
These days, growers pay about $225 per hive. That rate’s about eight times higher than what Will says he got paid in the ’90s.
Now, there are two big reasons that pollination prices have kept going up. The first is demand. As the almond industry rapidly expanded, demand for honeybee pollination expanded, too. The second is supply. And Will says that has everything to do with what some people call colony collapse disorder.
Will: The loss of bees made pollination prices double, triple, almost quadruple. Isn’t that something?
Teresa: Beekeepers are charging growers more for their honeybees, because it’s harder to keep them alive.
The bee theft started a little over a decade ago. And these days, Will says he gets hit by bee rustlers about three to four times during every Pollination Super Bowl. And losing 200 hives or so, that costs him about $80,000.
Will: It’s just sickening how much we’ve lost. And you think about the dollar amount and the work you put in. You ain’t just stealing beehives, you’re stealing a part of me.
Teresa: The valley’s sprawling orchards are rarely fenced in or securely guarded. But it takes a lot of skill to steal millions of honeybees at once. And only a trained beekeeper would really know how to do that. The way Will sees it, these are guys who’ve struggled to raise honeybees themselves.
So they’re stealing other people’s to make up the shortfall.
Will: I’ve said it over once and I’ll say it again. These guys can’t keep bees alive.
Teresa: Beekeepers usually brand their hives. But it’s easy for thieves to grind those off and pass the hives off as their own. So easy that Will says law enforcement can have a very hard time catching them. So, if the cops couldn’t really help him, Will knew he had to get out there and protect his hives himself.
And when he caught those two rogue beekeepers loading his hives into their truck, he says he ran over to the truck and stole its keys.
Will: If anybody ever talked to me the way I talked to them, I would have not been able to hold my temper. And then after a lot of screaming and cussing at them, they said that, uh, well, this is our beeyard.
Teresa: Will says the men claimed this was just one big misunderstanding. They thought these were their beehives. Then Will called the cops, and the owner of the other beekeeping company the thieves clearly worked for. After those calls, Will says the thieves just sat down on the bed of their truck’s trailer, quietly waiting for the cops to arrive.
Will says it was almost as if they’d done all this before. The men were arrested, and their case is still working its way through the court system.
According to law enforcement, commercial beekeepers have seen an 86 percent increase in hive theft in the last decade. And a lot of it has been in the Central Valley. In 2023, one beekeeper in Fresno County lost an estimated 8 million bees in a single hive heist. Several years before that, local law enforcement busted what they described as a bee chop shop, a thieves’ collection of over 2,500 hives worth nearly a million dollars.
A task force that includes Central Valley law enforcement officers has been launched to crack down on these thefts. But no one really expects this to stop anytime soon. There’s too much money involved in the Pollination Superbowl. Almond prices have dropped recently, but this is still a thriving industry.
Which means demand for honeybees is high, too. And because beekeepers are losing so many colonies, supplying those bees can get tricky. Which can be all the more incentive to steal them.
Will: It’s definitely a problem. It’s not getting better. We lost 60 last year.
Teresa: You lost 60 percent last year?
Will: Yeah.
Teresa: On average, beekeepers in the U.S. are losing 40 to 50 percent of their honeybees a year. As bad as that sounds, it’s actually something that beekeepers can manage. Honeybees reproduce so quickly that even with a death rate that high, a skilled beekeeper can often replace them.
But replacing half your bees takes time, it isn’t a perfect process, and it doesn’t change the fact that this species is doing way worse than it was a few decades ago. Or that it’s harder to keep them alive.
Teresa: The causes of colony collapse disorder are complex, but most scientists agree that industrial agriculture is a significant part of the skyrocketing death rates for honeybees. The neonicotinoids you heard about in Episode 2? They damage honeybees’ brains and make them more susceptible to viruses and parasites, including the varroa mite, which has been plaguing honeybee hives for years.
And that’s on top of the pesticides and fungicides that poison honeybees larvae, and the insecticides that addle their memories and warp their ability to fly. Will says most of the farmers he works with coordinate really closely with him, spraying their fields at night when the bees are safe in their hives.
But some farmers are less conscientious.
At the end of the day, like, you know, like the people who are spraying some of this stuff, like, like they’re, they’re your neighbors or your clients.
Will: Yeah, you know …
Teresa: How do you deal with that?
Will: I put myself in the farmer’s shoes, you know, you got to protect your crops. And most of them have been very patient with us beekeepers …
Teresa: This all puts beekeepers like Will in a delicate position. They know they’re hauling some of their bees to the valley to die. That of course impacts the Pollination Super Bowl’s honeybee supply. And that probably means that bee thefts are going to keep happening.
According to some of my sources, beekeepers have started arming themselves to protect their hives. I caught up with Will on Zoom shortly after I visited him and asked if he knew anyone who’d done that.
Will: Um, I wouldn’t go to a gunfight with a knife, you know what I mean?
Teresa: That’s a damn good answer, Will!
Will: I didn’t say nothing, did I?
Teresa: No, you didn’t.
Will: Okay, that’s all.
Teresa: No, you didn’t.
Will: That’s all I’m going to say about that.
Teresa: As the pollinator crisis gets worse, there are a couple ways this could shake out. One of the most likely scenarios is what’s playing out right now in the Central Valley. Which is not great.
This is a place one pollinator expert described to me as a Blade Runner-style post-nature world. Beekeepers like Will may be fighting to protect their honeybees, but some of the valley’s native pollinators have all but disappeared. Populations of the native Crotch’s bumblebee have declined by 98 percent.
It’s not just bees either. In the past few decades, monarch butterfly populations have dropped by 99 percent in the valley, and throughout California. And it’s pretty obvious why. When scientists tested California milkweed, they found that 100 percent of the plants they sampled were contaminated with pesticides. And if creatures as resilient as pollinators are dying off, you know the rest of the valley’s ecosystem is suffering, too.
News clip: California’s Central Valley has some of the worst air quality in the nation.
News clip: The amount of smog produced by agriculture is at a much higher level than we previously thought.
News clip: People have become immune to, um, to the fact that our water quality is so poor that you can’t actually drink it.
News clip: Agriculture’s demand for water here has sent pumps ever deeper into the ground, causing the valley floor to sink.
Teresa: Scientists have a term for what’s happening here: ecosystem collapse.
Eric Lee Mäder: In the case of the Central Valley, it is the collapsed ecosystem. So that’s happened.
Teresa: Eric Lee-Mäder was formerly part of the conservationist group the Xerces Society. You might remember him talking about the bee poisoning at Target in Episode1.
An ecosystem is considered collapsed when it can no longer sustain the plants, animals, and pollinators that once thrived there. And parts of the valley have been in a state of collapse for years.
Eric: It is a difficult place, and in many ways, I think all of us are responsible for it. You know, whether you’re in New York City or Chicago or Minneapolis or whatever, you bear some responsibility for what’s happened in the Central Valley.
Teresa: This is the industrial food system that feeds us. So, the question is, can that system survive the pollinator crisis that it’s creating? Honeybees are so resilient that few scientists expect them to completely collapse, even as their death rates keep going up, and they’re going to have to fill in a lot of gaps as native pollinators die off.
But some experts say it’s risky for our food system to rely so heavily on a single species. Biodiverse environments are resilient because they’re diverse. If one pollinator species has a bad year, for instance, a dozen others can pick up the slack. In Episode 5, we witnessed how agricultural industries that eliminate biodiversity are asking for trouble.
Tipping points do exist, and we’re playing with fire. But as we’ve learned throughout this series, we also have the tools we need to fix this. The pollinator crisis could be significantly reversed with just a little bit of tinkering. And we know what we need to do to make that happen. The problem is actually doing it.
Over the last six episodes, we’ve given you a crash course in how the way we produce our food is destroying the creatures we need to produce it. From the billions of pounds of pesticides we drop on this planet every year, to the loss of habitat surrounding our crop fields, to our overreliance on a single bee.
This system is unsustainable. It’s already breaking down, and there are a lot of people trying to fix it. We’ve introduced you to some of them. Farmers, scientists, and activists shutting down polluting ethanol factories in Nebraska and fighting homeowners associations in Maryland. They’re quietly challenging an industrial food system that is rich and powerful.
At least 18 states have passed pollinator-friendly legislation.
News clip: Well, Colorado is limiting the sales of a pesticide after a new law went into effect this week.
News clip: This week, some New York State lawmakers are pushing for legislation intending to protect pollinators like honeybees.
If you zoom out a bit, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has helped bankroll farmers who’ve turned some of their land into pollinator-friendly habitat. The Environmental Protection Agency is working with state and tribal officials to develop plans to protect local butterflies and bees. And the White House launched a pollinator health task force under the Obama administration about a decade ago.
And, while industrial ag is fueling this problem, even some large food corporations are starting to think more sustainably about these issues. But to be honest, this is all kind of piecemeal. A large-scale crisis needs large-scale solutions. One solution might be a national plan to restrict or ban pesticides that are toxic to pollinators.
Or policies that incentivize farmers to embrace sustainable strategies, so that it’s not as financially risky for them to, say, go organic, or ditch monoculture. And preserving habitat, both on our farms and in our backyards? That kind of reform seems pretty obvious. What we’re talking about here is fundamentally transforming our food system.
The problems are that big. Tackling them means changing how we think about the land and how we use it.
Teresa’s wife: Let’s pick up a few things for dinner. We’ll hit the produce first.
Teresa: And that means changing how we grow our most nutritious foods. A food system that’s better for pollinators would also be better for us.
Creating that better food system might feel impossible in the current political climate. But that doesn’t mean we can just give up. We basically owe our lives to the trillions of bees, butterflies, and bats that pollinate the food we eat. They’ve done plenty for us. Why is it so hard for us to protect them?
This episode was reported by me, Teresa Cotsirilos, and produced by Buzzkill’s senior producer, Alyssa Jeong Perry. Special thanks to Don Cameron, Eric Lee-Mäder, Alina Nino, Phil Garone, and Angel Santiago Fernandez Bell. Buzzkill is a production of the Food & Environment Reporting Network, and is distributed by PRX.
Adizah Eghan, Theodore Ross, Brent Cunningham, and Tom Laskawy are Buzzkill’s executive producers. The music arrangement and audio engineering were done by Sound Sanctuary. Our theme song is by Sarah Lawson Ndu. Naomi Barr is our fact checker. Funding for this podcast is provided in part by the BAND Foundation.
And I’m your host, Teresa Cotsirilos. Thanks for listening.