Another Animal Species Abused by Human Culture

"The bees in the almond groves are being exploited and disrespected."
"They are in severe decline because our human relationship to them has become so destructive."
Patrick Pynes, organic beekeeper, environmental studies, Northern Arizona University

"We have to think about how we grow monocultures. And that is much bigger than an individual issue."
"We have to look at regions, like the Central Valley of California where we take billions and billions of bees to pollinate the almonds and say, 'Okay, what could we plant here so that we could have bees here all the time'?"
"Because ultimately, bees are not supposed to move. They build a colony, they stay there, they map out where everything is ... they're like us, moving into a new city."
"The solution might be diverse enough agriculture in the region so that the pollinators don't have to move."
Lenore Newman, author of Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food

Over the past few decades Western society in its search for the perfect food, has invented substitutes for certain products that food 'experts' deem can be harmful to human health, or conversely reflecting a movement away from animal products to provide people with foods that are similar, considered more healthful, and aren't derived from an animal source. Almond milk falls into that category. Blended and strained in huge quantities to serve a specialized market, nut milk is seen as a nutritious and sustainable non-dairy beverage popular among today's consumers.

Food Navigator, U.S.A.

Almonds, originating and native to the Tian Shan Mountains of Central Asia, hosts a honeybee population that specializes (as in species-specific) in pollinating almond blossoms, as a byproduct of their honey-making process. Almond tree seedlings have long since been transplanted to California which now grows 82 percent of the world's almonds, in a hot, dry climate, requiring a huge amount of irrigation in what is also a water-deficient landscape. Above all, the vast mega-farms in the state require pollinators since almond production is reliant on honeybees for pollination of the millions upon millions of blush and white blossoms on millions of trees.

Slate Magazine

For over a full one-third of vegetation bearing food for our species, without pollination there would be no resulting fruit. The huge demand of the almond blossoms has created a situation of frenzied deliveries of bee pollinators. The bees packed in boxes are loaded onto trucks and vast numbers are transported to the huge California forests of almond trees. This is yet another industry linked to the growing of almond trees; bees for hire. And those hard-working bees are seen to be perishing at what beekeepers and scientists speak of as unprecedented rates.

For California, the almond industry represents a $14-billion crop. Which has resulted in fifty-billion bees dying, themselves representing 40 percent of the honeybee colonies in the United States, not surviving last year's winter, according to a national survey. Once considered an efficient and high-yielding process, mass pollination of monocultures appears to be failing. In view of almost universal record losses of bees, beekeepers were placing blame on pesticide exposure and parasites.

Organic beekeepers, on the other hand, along with environmentalists, beg to differ, placing their belief in a more fundamental causation. No other California crop uses bees in the numbers that almond orchards require. Pesticides like glyphosate (an active ingredient in the Monsanto product Roundup) is pointed out as the leading cause of colony collapse disorder, but bees also face other threats threatening their longevity.

The bees' winter dormancy is being disrupted by transporting them to California almond orchards. They are placed under huge stress by concentrating them in an area that facilitates the spread of disease. Lacking diversity in a monocrop places them under additional stress.

The full causes of colony collapse remain elusive. But it does seem clear to environmentalists that the very shipping of pollinators from crop to crop represents part of the problem. Bee die-off during the winter months is not unusual. It is the sheer scope and scale of the bee die-off that is so troubling and not reflective of nature's programming.

We ourselves discovered decades ago the presence of wild-bee hives in a forest near where we live. And winter after winter, we see hundreds of bee corpses flung out of the hive. Which each successive snowfall that occurs, new dead bees appear, in a presumed ritual of perpetual house-cleaning by the remaining hale and healthy bee population in that hive located thirty feet in height inside the trunk of a venerable, stout pine growing deep in a forested ravine.

In spring, when the forest recovers itself after a long cold, snowy winter, wildflowers begin to blossom, long after we see bees flying about the undergrowth on the forest floor when warm spring weather reactivates the bees, awakening them to activity, heralding the beginning of their busy season and nature-lovers' appreciation of the appearance of huge arrays of wildflowers.

In that forest there are wild apple trees and hawthorns, along with honeysuckle and grape vines as an understory. The forest is also rife with the growth of berries; tiny strawberries, stands of raspberries and blackberries and thimbleberries, none of which would bear their delicious fruit without the vital intervention of the wild honeybees.