California’s almond orchards are the most important stop on a massive annual migration of around 1,600 of the nation’s beekeepers and their colonies. Today, many beekeepers make at least half of their annual income not from selling honey, but rather from renting their hives to farmers to pollinate crops nationwide.

After the almond bloom some beekeepers take their honeybees to cherry, plum and avocado orchards in California and apple and cherry orchards in Washington State.

Come summer time, many beekeepers head east to fields of alfalfa, sunflowers and clover in North and South Dakota, where the bees produce the bulk of their honey for the year. Other beekeepers visit squashes in Texas, clementines and tangerines in Florida, cranberries in Wisconsin and blueberries in Michigan and Maine. All along the east coast migratory beekeepers pollinate apples, cherries, pumpkins, cranberries and various vegetables.

By November, beekeepers begin moving their colonies to warm locales to wait out the winter: California, Texas, Florida and even temperature-controlled potato cellars in Idaho. The bees stay inside their hives, eating the honey they made in the summer and fall. Several decades ago beekeepers could let their colonies overwinter in a place as cold as Minnesota without worrying about too many bees dying. That’s no longer true; in the past 10 years, many American beekeepers have lost between 30 and 60 percent or more of their hives each winter.

Now I know very little more about bees than what is common knowledge: their legendary prowess at navigating and mapping in fine detail the area around their home hive. So even supposing being jiggled around in the back of a truck for thousands of miles and hours on end is not a big stress factor, what is surely going to be, is having their hive deposited in a strange spot in a bafflingly unfamiliar setting. And another thing we all know is that stress (whether for bee, human or any animal else) makes a creature much more vulnerable to parasites and disease. We hardly need scientists to tell us that, though their research is proving this is indeed the case.

Monoculture

I barely need to mention what is pretty obvious from Scientific American’s account of bee-trucking, that at each stop, the bees are feeding on a single crop at any one time. Take the Californian almonds. There are 810,000 acres of almond trees,  and 700 billion almond flowers waiting for the bees in spring, almond flowers as far as the bee’s eye can see, and further. And nothing but almond flowers.

This is monoculture – only one crop grown intensively in the same place year after year. Monoculture brings so many negatives – soil depletion, increasingly heavy use of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, to name a few. But focusing on what it means for the bees, it would be like you and me existing on nothing but bananas for two weeks, then moving on to a week of broccoli, morning, noon and night, followed by three weeks of peas, peas and more peas. Apart from being exceptionally tedious, a mono-diet would not be good for us, and it isn’t good for the bees.

So what needs to be done to restore bee health and numbers?

Good old Scientific American frames its solution in terms of dollars, a language farmers understand: a cost-effective process of encouraging more native bee species (the honeybee is a European import into the US). Report writer Ferris Jabr explains:

The more native bee species pollinate our crops, the less we depend on honeybees, which means less migration [trucking] and less disease spreading; the more wildflowers we sow, the more both native bees and honeybees have to eat. It all adds up to healthier bees. Farmers can restore wild habitat by planting a mix of native flowering shrubs on fallow fields near croplands for around $600 per acre. Scientists have shown that such newly planted wild habitat attracts native bees, which increases crop yield by 10 to 15 percent and makes honeybees themselves more efficient pollinators. And the increased yield is high enough for farmers to recoup the cost of setting up new habitat in a few years’ time. Now that’s the kind of math that could save the bees—and our food.

Bee-truckers may not be so keen on the plan!