Debunked - Debuzzed

Many People don’t think of Bees as being “Essential”, However Much (About 1/3) of the Food we Eat Requires Bees.

Another issue is that Bees are Not Considered to be “Exploited”, Far from True.

Bees are essential to the functioning of America’s titanic almond industry – and billions are dying in the process.

Like most commercial beekeepers in the US, at least half of Arp’s revenue now comes from pollinating almonds.

Commercial beekeepers who send their hives to the almond farms are seeing their bees die in record numbers, and nothing they do seems to stop the decline.

A recent survey of commercial beekeepers showed that 50 billion bees were wiped out in a few months during winter 2018-19.

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…

Like all bees, honeybees thrive in a biodiverse landscape.

Commercial honeybees are considered livestock by the US Department of Agriculture because of the creature’s vital role in food production.

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.”

Nuts for almonds

California’s $11bn (£8.4bn) almond industry has grown at an extraordinary rate. In 2000, almond orchards occupied 500,000 acres. By 2018 that had more than doubled – almond groves in the Central Valley now blanket an area the size of Delaware, producing 2.3bn lb (1m tonnes) of almonds annually sold around the world.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, beekeepers earned a modest living selling beeswax and honey.

When cheap imported honey began cutting into Arp’s profits in the 1980s, he decided to send some of his hives with a beekeeper friend to pollinate almonds in California. A decade later he struck up a deal of his own with an almond grower in California’s Kern county. With that strategic move, Arp joined the growing ranks of migratory beekeepers in the US who still sell honey but mostly travel the country from one pollination site to the next with stacks of bee boxes in tow.