The buzz about the almond industry's worker bees

The buzz about the almond industry's worker bees
As bees die in droves with no known cause, California farmers worry about their bee-dependent crops

The story is about one of the beautiful rituals of spring the pollination of acres of blossoming almond trees by thousands of honeybees. Recent honeybee die-offs jeopardize this delicate ballet of nature. Matt Billings is an almond grower in Delano who figures in the story. Billings has had no problem with his bees which finished pollinating the trees a couple of weeks prior. A tractor pulls a fertilizing tank down one of the rows of trees. Los Angeles Times

By Russ Parsons
Los Angeles Times
April 01, 2008

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — Every spring, just as the swallows return to Capistrano, so do the bees buzz back to Bakersfield. But don't expect to look up in the sky and see a swarm of them making their way west. These bees travel by truck.

Although the place they're visiting is certainly beautiful, trees arranged in graceful "allees" and topped with billowing white and pale pink clouds of blossoms, this trip is all business.

The almond industry, which has emerged over the last decade as one of the biggest and most profitable in California agriculture, depends on bees for pollination. And so every spring, fully 60 percent of the commercially kept honeybees in the United States — more than 1 million hives ­— are trucked to California's Central Valley to do their thing.

But what happens when one of the state's fastest-growing businesses depends on workers who are disappearing almost as quickly? That's what California's almond farmers are waiting to find out.

California produces almost 80 percent of the world's almonds, grossing more than $2 billion in 2007. The state's almond exports are more than twice the value of its wine exports.

While almonds have been growing into an agricultural powerhouse, bee populations have been dwindling. Most recently, plagued by a mysterious condition called Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, honeybee colonies across the country have been vanishing, abandoning perfectly good hives. Even after two years, no one knows why. Theories are many, but definite answers are few.

And although the source of the disease is a mystery, its potential effects are not — at least when it comes to almonds. Because it's this simple: Without bees, there are no nuts.

Pretty as they are, if ever there was a plant that seemed designed to resist all efforts at domestication, it is the almond tree. Not only must the flowers be cross-pollinated with another almond variety, but because of the way the flowers are constructed, they rely on bees to do the pollinating. Other crops can be fertilized by birds, other bugs or even wind, but almonds need bees.

Plus, almonds flower for only about three weeks and always early in the spring, when the bees are at their lowest energy, just emerging from their winter rest.

So although most attention is focused on the fall harvest, almond farmer Matt Billings, 36, says it's this short period of time in the spring that makes or breaks his year.

"If we don't have bees or if it rains or blows or anything else, we've got nothing else to do for the rest of the summer," he says. "The whole crop is determined in this three-week window."

Early one mid-February morning in Billings' orchards, with the valley fog still cool and clinging, the beehives look like board boxes that have been discarded on the dirt shoulders between the road and the trees. A second-generation almond farmer from Bakersfield, Billings and his father D ("no period, just D") farm about 1,000 acres of almond trees scattered along 30 miles of Highway 99 between Bakersfield and Earlimart.

There are few sights in farming more beautiful than an orchard in spring, and that's especially true for almonds. "It kind of looks like a street in Paris, doesn't it?" asks Billings, and it kind of does.

Up and down the valley, from south of Bakersfield to north of Modesto, there are similar orchards, covering more than half a million acres.

Because almonds have been almost uniformly profitable for more than a decade, the acreage devoted to the crop has increased by almost one-third since 1997 and is projected to increase by more than 20 percent over the next five years.

If that happens, it's estimated that pollination will require the services of a whopping 70 percent of all the commercially kept bees in the U.S.And that's when what has been mainly an expensive inconvenience could turn into something more. Because as almond trees are being planted, honeybees are vanishing.

The cause of CCD determinedly resists solution. The condition is as fickle as fate. One beekeeper might lose almost all of his hives while his neighbor, who follows exactly the same practices, escapes unscathed.

"Whatever this is, it's not playing any favorites," says Eric Mussen of the University of California, Davis, one of the leading apiculture experts in the United States. "Pretty much everywhere it's been, it's clobbered some people and not affected quite a few others."

Various culprits have been suggested: mites, viruses, poor nutrition, genetically modified plants, travel stress, pesticides, drought, and, of course, global warming.Mussen says it's probably some combination of several of those factors rather than any one single cause.

So far, the main effect of the shortage of bees has been skyrocketing prices for their services. The price has gotten so high that a flurry of honeybee rustling has occurred in the valley. Only five or six years ago, farmers could rent hives for $30 or $40 each. That's still the price for most crops, but today for almonds, the increased competition means pollination costs $140 to $150 per hive and sometimes more.

Because it takes an average of two hives to pollinate an acre of trees, that can add up pretty quickly. Renting bees for 1,000 acres of almonds could run $300,000 or more.

Billings says when he started farming almonds in the early 1970s, beekeepers would volunteer to park their hives in the orchards during bloom. Now, he says, he spends as much on pollination as he does on water — astonishing in the parched southern end of the San Joaquin Valley.

In Billings' orchard, at first the hives look deserted. But as the air warms, the bees become more active. By the time the sun is high, the buzzing from their hives is audible a dozen yards away and you can see them boiling out of the gaps in the top ­— off to work.

It's this very industriousness that makes honeybees so valuable as pollinators. Turn a hive of bumblebees — honeybees' big, black-faced cousins — loose in an orchard and they'll amble one by one among the trees, pollinating with a lazy nonchalance. A hive of honeybees, though, will cover the trees in a swarm.

Farmers find their bees in a variety of ways. Dig around on the Web site of the California Almond Board and you'll find a Craigslist-like directory of hundreds of beekeepers advertising their services. Other farmers use brokers, who coordinate the hives of smaller beekeepers.

Most of these beekeepers are mom-and-pop operations. Mussen says a typical beekeeper needs to run about 1,000 hives to be profitable. A few bigger outfits manage 12,000 to 15,000 hives.

For almost 25 years, the Billingses have rented their bees from Dennis Arp, a beekeeper in Flagstaff, Ariz.

"Every February they give us a couple of cases of honey and we give them a couple of boxes of almonds, that's how we start every year," Matt Billings says.

Arp keeps approximately 1,000 colonies himself and uses his connections with other keepers to fill the Billings' demand. Some beekeepers have started flying hives in from Australia to meet their commitments.

"The price just keeps creeping up," Arp says. "Sometimes I feel kind of sorry for the Billingses. I think what's happened is the numbers of acres of almonds kept increasing, but everyone still kept adding more almonds. The acreage kept increasing, but the population of bees didn't."

Every spring, about a week before the almond trees start to flower, Arp loads a bunch of his hives on the backs of a couple of semis and drives them to Delano. He unloads them in the cool evening, catches a few hours sleep, then drives back to repeat the trip with the remaining bees.

When the bees are done working the almond trees, they'll be trucked to the Phoenix area, where Arp will put them in citrus groves to make orange blossom honey (honey from the nectar of almond flowers is too thin and bitter to be useful). From there they'll move on to high desert orange groves and finally wind up on desert wildflowers.

Other beekeepers prefer to keep their charges pollinating. Some will stay in the Central Valley, working the peach, nectarine and plum orchards and then moving on to squash and melons. Others will travel as far north as Washington state to pollinate apples, cherries and pears. Or they'll go back east to work orchards and cranberry bogs there.

Arp has been affected by CCD. He says he lost 500 colonies last year and an additional 250 to 300 this year. He says he has spent $40,000 buying new colonies to replace those he lost — a major expenditure for a small operation.

"From a beekeeper's point of view, everything looks real good, there's a good laying queen and lots of honey stored. And then two or three weeks later you go back and something has happened. Instead of the colony expanding and moving forward, it's going backward, and really fast.

"I'm not really sure what's going on with it," he says. "I don't think (Colony Collapse Disorder) will be the end of beekeeping, but it's having an impact. I'm trying not to hit the panic button."

That's about the same attitude the Billingses have, running a million-dollar business that depends on the whims of a six-legged insect. "What will we do (if Colony Collapse Disorder problems continue)?" asks Matt. "Mostly worry. We've pretty much perfected that."

For the immediate future, anyway, it's just another in a long list of inconveniences. Once again this spring it looks like the honeybees have done their job.

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GM seeds can 'last for 10 years'
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website

Protest. Image: AP

Seeds of some genetically modified crops can endure in soil for at least 10 years, scientists have discovered.

Researchers in Sweden examined a field planted with experimental oilseed rape a decade ago, and found transgenic specimens were still growing there.

This was despite intensive efforts in the intervening years to remove seeds.

No GM crop has been found to endure so long; and critics say it shows that genetically modified organisms cannot be contained once released.

Tina D'Hertefeldt from Lund University led the team of scientists that scoured the small field which had hosted the GM trial 10 years ago looking for "volunteers" - plants that have sprung up spontaneously from seed in the soil.

"We were surprised, very surprised," she told BBC News. "We knew that volunteers had been detected earlier, but we thought they'd all have gone by now."

Eradication effort

Presenting their findings in the journal Biology Letters, the researchers note that after the trial of herbicide-resistant GM rape, the Swedish Board of Agriculture sprayed the field intensively with chemicals that should have killed all the remaining plants.

And for two years, inspectors looked specifically for volunteer plants and killed them.

"We should assume that GM organisms cannot be confined, and ask instead what will become of them when they escape"
Professor Mark Westoby

This is much more effort than would usually be deployed on a normal farmer's field.

But even so, 15 plants had sprung up 10 years later carrying the genes that scientists had originally inserted into their experimental rape variety to make them resistant to the herbicide glufosinate.

Non-GM varieties were used in the 10-year-old study as well, and some of these had also survived.

"I wouldn't say that the transgenic varieties are able to survive better," said Dr D'Hertefeldt. "It's just that oilseed rape is a tough plant."

Jeremy Sweet, a former head of the UK's National Institute of Agricultural Botany and now an independent consultant on biotech crops, agreed.

"It's been known for some time that oilseed rape is a bit of a problem because of the survival of its seed," he told BBC News.

"It means that if farmers want to swap [from growing GM rape] to conventional varieties, they will have to wait for a number of years."

Growth industry

Rapeseed - often known by its Canadian name canola - is the fourth most commonly grown GM crop in the world, after soya beans, maize and cotton.

An industry organisation, the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), calculated recently that more than one million square kilometres of land across the world are now dedicated to growing GM plants.

Europe accounts for only about 0.1% of that total, with a single maize variety the single transgenic food plant being grown.

Many European countries, including the UK, have yet to implement legislation on the thorny issue of how fields of genetically modified crops could co-exist with others that farmers are keen to keep free of transgenic material.

The Lund research does not deal with the flow of genes into neighbouring fields, or whether transgenes can transfer into wild plants growing nearby.

But Tina D'Hertefeldt believes legislators do need to take note of her findings.

"What we are saying is they also need to take into account the temporal aspect," she said.

Professor Mark Westoby, a plant ecologist from Macquarie University in Australia, had a more blunt assessment.

"This study confirms that GM crops are difficult to confine," he said.

"We should assume that GM organisms cannot be confined, and ask instead what will become of them when they escape."