Can you read us a couple paragraphs?

Yeah.

Yeah.

so this is from the introduction it's easy to overlook the insect pollinators that surround us during the day bees and butterflies visit thousands of flowers beetles chew through leaves and petals to feed passing pollen from one bloom to the next bumble bees perform buzz pollination by gripping onto flowers and vibrating their flight muscles to release pollen Tiny midges no larger than a pinhead pollinate cacao, giving us chocolate, while a variety of bees, wasps, flies, and other insects pollinate coffee plants.

Even mosquitoes play a role.

Some species pollinate orchids, and all mosquitoes drink floral nectar and may transfer pollen as well.

As the sun sets, nocturnal pollinators emerge, drawn to pale, fragrant flowers that only bloom at night.

What are some farmers doing differently or right to make the system work?

So what's making beekeeping so expensive for commercial beekeepers?

Yeah, so a number of things.

One of the biggest is, as I mentioned earlier, one of the big issues beekeepers face is this loss of what they call pasture, which again is just bee friendly forage, but like large landscapes full of it.

And so as they lose that, they have to supplement their bees more.

And some of that loss is coming from urbanization.

Some of it's coming, a lot of it is coming from the expansion of monoculture crops like corn and soy.

But some of it is also coming from weather extremes.

What are the commercial beekeepers telling you that we need to know?

That sounds really exciting.

Yeah.

Thank you.

The book is about, well, kind of what the title says, right? It looks at how our large scale industrial ag- agricultural system, you know, the threats that it poses to bees.

It's the same system that our beekeepers are supporting is also a threat, you know, to, to them as well.

And so I- I started off, as I mentioned, with this interest in the almond industry and how beekeepers were transforming their, their management practices to pollinate for almonds and how that requires an intensification of their, of their management practices.

So like, you know, adding, feeding them more supplements, pushing their bees, you know, harder, trucking them cross-country, having to really manage for mites intensively, um, because, you know, when, when your bees are so valuable and you need a lot of bees to pollinate almonds in February, which requires o- over ninety percent of all commercial bee colonies, you know, in California.

I'll just let you give some thoughts.

Mm-hmm

... and they're becoming resistant to those over time.

And beekeepers are so intensely managing their bees because they need to have as many colonies as possible for mostly the almond industry, um, each February.

And so w- as I sort of was talking to beekeepers, my, my initial research question was, how have beekeepers changed their management practices over the last 20 years to pollinate for the almond industry, and how maybe is that contributing to honey bee vulnerability? And, and beekeepers, you know, would be the first to tell me that they know that their management practices for almonds are c- making their bees more vulnerable, but they're, uh, in this really tough bind because they're having such a hard time getting by as an industry because of cheap honey prices and because forage is disappearing.

And so the more I just dove into these questions, I started seeing how interlinked the problems were, you know? That, um, that, uh, you know, pesticides being applied, this is part of industrial agriculture.

Beekeepers intensively managing their bees, this is to help pollinate for industrial agriculture.

Forage being lost, and so bees aren't able to feed on, you know, natural nectar and pollen in the ways that they have in the past, and a lot of this is because of, um, agricultural, monoculture agriculture, and because of the use of herbicides, you know, to help promote monoculture agriculture.

Right

And can you walk us through the story of how bees were domesticated in the United States?

Yeah.

It's kinda cool.

You know, I think a lot of people might think that honeybees are from the US, but actually they were brought here by, um, our, you know, the European colonists.

The first recorded shipment was in 1622, uh, which from Europe, uh, to Virginia.

And, um, and colonists were, you know, really reliant on bees back then.

I, I think it's hard for us in this world of like sugar being available, uh, to imagine what it was like to like have very few sources of sweeteners, you know, back then.

[laughs]