Bees and Food: Why hives hit the highway (to hell?!)
California almond growers depend on renting beehives. But the bees die in droves. A beekeeper explains the hidden cost of your macaron cravings.
Dear Climate Culinarians,
Every winter, there is an insect bonanza in California. People love it. They even depend on it.
Just when California’s almond trees are starting to blossom, billions of honeybees swarm into the orchards. Nature didn’t drive them there; beekeepers did. From all over the U.S., beekeepers truck their hives to California just in time. Why?
That’s my first question to beekeeper Derek Shenefield. I talked to him after he and his hives are back in Indiana, where his family runs Clover Blossom Honey. And I was in for a surprise. No, two. I’ll share them over this newsletter and the next one. This whole month, the newsletter will be about honeybees and food supply. This week, you’ll read about
how bees secure our food supply,
what’s behind the headlines of bee die-offs,
what a full-time beekeeper’s work life looks like and
why beekeepers take their hives on the road.
Why beekeepers truck their hives to California’s almond orchards
If you enjoy macarons or sprinkle almond slices onto your salad, there’s a good chance your key ingredient comes from California. California produces 80 percent of the world’s almonds supply - on 1.3 million acres of almond orchards. That’s four-and-a-half times larger than Los Angeles. On this amount of land, you could create 1500 parks the size of New York’s Central Park. So I’m not going to even try and compare almond orchards to football fields.
“It’s a manmade demand by planting so many almond trees that they just cannot be pollinated without bringing in additional honeybees.”
That’s how beekeeper Derek Shenefield answers the question why he drives truckloads of beehives to California. He says no kind of natural pollinators could manage this amount of blossoms. Not even with the help of California-based honeybees. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) backs up this claim.
USDA experts estimate that every acre of almond trees requires two beehives to make sure the flowers turn into almonds. That makes roughly 2.6 million honeybee colonies - not individual bees, mind you. And given this number, plus surveys among commercial beekeepers, the USDA claims that during almond blossom, 89 percent of all the commercially kept honeybees in the country are gathering on almond orchards in California.
Almond growers pay beekeepers to turn their hive-bound bees into nomads. And they are not the only food producers to do so.
What the heck is a pollination service?
Along with wild bees, flies, moths and others, honeybees help flowering plants to transform blossoms into fruit and seeds. That will only happen after pollen from a blossom’s antlers somehow got onto the blossom’s stigma. Conveniently, bees visit flowering plants to collect nectar and pollen. And while they carry their bounty from plant to plant, they drop a little pollen on the stigma. Ooopsie! That sets the transformation from blossom to fruit in motion.
Not all food plants rely on bees and other insects to pollinate their flowers. Corn just needs a breeze, most beans self-pollinate. But without bees, there would be no watermelon salad and no sunflower oil. Apples, cherries and many other fruit trees rely on pollinators, as do many berries. Squash, too. And so on.
We need pollinators to provide this service for two reasons:
We - and the animals some of us eat - eat those fruit, vegetables, grains and seeds.
Seeds are required for new (food) plants to grow.
Pollinators make sure we can put food on the table. And honeybees play a big part in that. Just not … the whole part.
While honeybees stash pollen away in baskets on their hind legs, many wild bees are messy. My grandmother wouldn’t approve, but Mother Nature does. Messy bees spread more pollen. Bumble bees can even buzz deliberately: They literally shake down blossoms for pollen. That’s the only way tomatoes, peppers and egg plant will develop fruit, by the way.
Honeybees cannot do that. Generally speaking, wild bees are more efficient pollinators. But honeybees offer an outstanding advantage to humans: People can control where honeybees live. Because these bees live in hives. That makes it convenient to harvest what they make: honey, wax, and propolis. It also makes it possible to offer pollination as a service, for a fee.
Working with worker bees
Just like cows, pigs and chicken, honeybees (Apis mellifera) are imported livestock. They are not native to the U.S. Although once upon a time, a different type of honeybee, Apis nearctica, lived on the continent - 14 million years ago. That’s when the first apes evolved elsewhere. Read more about the bee fossil discovered in Nevada here - and thanks to Debbie from the American Beekeeping Association to point this out!
European colonists brought beehives to America’s East Coast in the 1620s, because they wanted to produce honey and wax. And they took the useful insects wherever they went.
Beekeeper Derek Shenefield’s home is in the Midwest: in LaFontaine, Indiana. 798 people live there. Plus between 15 million and 150 million honeybees, depending on the time of year. Between June and August, his bees visit blossoms of honeysuckle bushes, black locust, basswood or linden trees - and make honey that Shenefield can harvest.
The apiary – that’s what a beekeeping business is called - grew out of Shenefield’s grandfather’s passion. Clover Blossom Honey is still a family business today: Derek’s aunt is in charge of sales, while he takes care of the bees with the help of his 70-year-old father Dave. To help ease him into retirement, the younger Shenefield hired a worker. And he considers himself lucky.
“Finding laborers for this type of work is pretty tough”, says Shenefield. One reason: People don’t like getting stung by bees. And beekeeping is a pretty labor intensive, sweaty job, says Shenefield.
We talk on the phone while a heat dome hovers all the way from his place to mine on the East Coast. I can’t bring myself to imagine what it must be like to don a bee suit at 95°F. And then work with heavy boxes. And the typical pay … let’s just say it would sting not make me forget about the hardships.
Rent a million bees: Why beekeepers offer pollination services
As an apiary owner, Shenefield has to look for extra income sources himself. So once the weather cools down in October or November, he brings his beehives into holding yards and checks on them. Soon enough, he starts loading the wooden boxes onto a truck. Off to California they go.
“It’s basically a rental”, Shenefield says. Mostly through middlemen, farmers rent beekeepers’ hives for a set amount of time, so the bees pollinate their crops. Once that time is up, beekeepers come back, pick up their hives, and take them elsewhere.
For many apiaries, that means criscrossing the country, following nature’s rhythm of blooms. From an almond orchard to a blueberry field to an apple plantation, doing migratory beekeeping year-round. Shenefield only trucks his bees from Indiana to California and back, and he describes his schedule as “pretty basic”. I sense relief when he says that.
Moving around is tough on bee colonies. Shenefield says that 30 percent of his bees dying off has become a common loss. And it can get much worse.
A record-breaking bee die-off
Bees in the U.S. suffer. Most of the buzz belongs to one of more than 3,600 native, wild species. They struggle due to a lack of space where they can live and find food. People poison them with pesticides. Climate change can lead to untenable conditions.
Honeybees feel all this pressure, too. But they deal with an extra double-whammy of problems:
Since honeybees depend on what the beekeepers do with their hive, they may lack the diverse nutrition they need, or suffer from poor beekeeping practices.
Honeybees are attacked by diseases and parasites, most prominently through rampant colony infestations by varroa mites.
This year reached a new record of honeybee die-offs.
According to the extensive Project Apis m. survey, 62 percent of commercial honeybee colonies in the United States died between June 2024 and January 2025.
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) are scrambling to understand the cause, their work impeded by a series of federal funding cuts and layoffs.
Preliminary findings indicate that in this year’s mass bee death, disease might be the main factor. Viruses spread by parasitic mites were found in nearly all dead bee colonies. And when the scientists examined those mites, most turned out to be resistant to miticide, a treatment for beehives meant to kill these mites (read the details in this Science article).
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Dangerous diseases among livestock usually call for quarantine, or culling. Think of bird flu. Or foot-and-mouth disease. Instead, beekeepers send their bees to California almond orchards, where they might mingle with other bees.
When I ask Shenefield if the industry is discussing alternatives, he points to a tough choice: “We are trying to have healthy bees, but still make a living at the same time.”
Apart from honey sales and pollination services, Shenefield found another source of income. It even involves his favorite part of beekeeping. But turning your passion into a business comes with a price, too. Though this price is kind of adorable, because … nope, you gotta wait until next week’s newsletter to find out. The next issue will also reveal what can be done to save bees (which may not be what you think!), and how everyone can take action. No hive required.
Read, eat, repeat!
Petrina
Climate Culinarians is a project by me, Petrina Engelke. I write about climate and food, and I help other writers turn their ideas into a book people want to read. In other words: I’m a journalist and a book coach. Read more about this newsletter & me here.
A fascinating read--as always, I learned a lot! We have hundreds of bees in our yard, so many that the shrubs and flowers seem to be buzzing continually (not only honey bees, but mason bees, mud bees, regular bees, sweat bees, wasps, etc). We "co-exist" in part because I know that bees, especially honey bees, are at risk. Quite interesting to read about the traveling hives in the almond groves.