'Like sending bees to war': the deadly truth behind your almond-milk obsession
Like most commercial beekeepers in the US, at least half of Arp’s revenue now comes from pollinating almonds. Selling honey is far less lucrative than renting out his colonies to mega-farms in California’s fertile Central Valley, home to 80% of the world’s almond supply.
But as winter approached, with Arp just months away from taking his hives to California, his bees started getting sick. By October, 150 of Arp’s hives had been wiped out by mites, 12% of his inventory in just a few months. “My yard is currently filled with stacks of empty bee boxes that used to contain healthy hives,” he says.
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Beekeepers attributed the high mortality rate to pesticide exposure, diseases from parasites and habitat loss. However, environmentalists and organic beekeepers maintain that the real culprit is something more systemic: America’s reliance on industrial agriculture methods, especially those used by the almond industry, which demands a large-scale mechanization of one of nature’s most delicate natural processes.
Honeybees thrive in a biodiverse landscape. But California’s almond industry places them in a monoculture where growers expect the bees to be predictably productive year after year.
Commercial honeybees are considered livestock by the US Department of Agriculture because of the creature’s vital role in food production. But no other class of livestock comes close to the scorched-earth circumstances that commercial honeybees face. More bees die every year in the US than all other fish and animals raised for slaughter combined.
“The high mortality rate creates a sad business model for beekeepers,” says Nate Donley, a senior scientist for the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s like sending the bees to war. Many don’t come back.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/07/honeybees-deaths-almonds-hives-aoe
Now Arp finds himself in a vicious circle: he is constantly battling to keep enough bees alive to meet the requirements of his almond contract. But if he was not pollinating almonds, maybe his bees would be healthier.
This year Arp’s bees, like more than two-thirds of the United States’ commercial honeybee population, will spend February in the toxic chemical soup of California’s Central Valley, fertilizing almonds one blossom at a time.
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On top of the threat of pesticides, almond pollination is uniquely demanding for bees because colonies are aroused from winter dormancy about one to two months earlier than is natural. The sheer quantity of hives required far exceeds that of other crops – apples, America’s second-largest pollination crop, use only one-tenth the number of bees. And the bees are concentrated in one geographic region at the same time, exponentially increasing the risk of spreading sickness..
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/07/honeybees-deaths-almonds-hives-aoe
= new reply since forum marked as read
This article seems really sloppy to me. Agricultural pesticides are undoubtedly a huge problem especially those containing neonicotinoids which the Trump Administration just lifted the ban set by Obama. But why would they be dousing almond trees with Roundup?? Its a herbicide. They use it with row crops to keep down the weeds and the corn is genetically modified... but why would you ever spray it on an almond tree?
I live in Illinois not California where the fruit tree industry makes bees a much bigger business, but the two primary threats to bees here in my experience are the varroa mites which the article mentions as wiping out large amounts of this guys hives, but then somehow thats attributed to the almond industry or agricultural monocultures in general. The mites are everywhere. Every beekeeper in North America has to treat for them or they will wipe out your hives during different parts of the year.
The second primary killer of beehives here in the midwest is starvation in the mid and late winter brought on by so many warm days in January and February due to human induced climate change. For that reason nearly everyone feeds sugar in some form starting sometime in the winter because the bees instinctively mistake extended periods of warmth in midwinter for the onset of spring and begin laying eggs, multiplying exponentially to anticipate the coming bloom. But spring is still many weeks away and the much larger than it should be colony blows through all of its stores before it ever arrives. Again, I fail to see how that relates to the central thesis here that transporting hives to groves of blooming almond trees a month early somehow taxes them. Bees merely survive the winter, they don't "rest". They go down to a skeleton crew that feeds on stored honey and keeps the brood alive until spring. They are healthiest during the bloom, not stressed because it comes too early.
Well thats just what my experience has taught me. I mean humans are stressing the bee population in many ways and any longtime keeper will tell you its much MUCH more difficult to keep bees alive now than 25 years ago. But I don't see how its attributed to almond milk. 
