JOSH DZIEZA - Save the Honeybee, Sterilize the Earth
Monoculture, agriculture and modernity. A fascinating account of the consequences of technical intervention in nature.
The dramatic transformation of our relationship with the
honeybee, however, began in the years following World War II, as the
mechanization of agriculture drastically increased the size of the nation’s
farms and the use of pesticides exploded. This marked the decline of many
remaining wild pollinators, and the beginning of the honeybee’s shift from a
semi-domesticated producer of honey to a living tool integral to industrial
agriculture. In the past several decades migratory pollination has only become
a bigger portion of the beekeeping industry, surpassing revenues from honey
sales sometime around 2007. The economic shift from honey to pollination was a
long time coming, but two things finally tipped the balance. First came the
almond boom in the Central Valley . Then the
bees began to die...
The old mutualism, where we make homes for bees so bees can
make us honey, is turning into fraught co-dependence. We need bees on an
industrial scale to fertilize our food, and the bees need us to keep them alive
in an increasingly hostile industrial landscape... This scenario takes place against a backdrop of ecological
disaster, as many species that don’t have an industry dedicated to their
survival face extinction. Monarch butterflies are already declining
drastically. Bumblebees have been disappearing since at least the 1990s. In
2009 and 2010, researchers visited locations near Carlinville , Illinois
A decade ago, people started panicking about the collapse of
the honeybee population and the crash of our food supply. But today there are
more honeybees than there were then. We have engineered our way to a frenzied
and precarious new normal.
To drive through California ’s
Central Valley is to witness farming on a
baffling scale. For hundreds of miles along either side of Highway 99—which
splits the valley from the college town of Chico in the north to the sprawling,
boxy city of Bakersfield in the south—are orderly corridors of grapevines and
cherry trees, followed by flat expanses of yams, followed by fields of carrots
and the gigantic harvesters that yank them from the ground by the thousands.
Dwarfing all these crops, however, are row after row of snaggly black-limbed
almond trees, punctuated occasionally by monolithic towers where the nuts are
shelled. In recent years, these almond groves have grown to cover almost a
million acres; they now produce four-fifths of all the almonds in the world.
The Central Valley is a
paradoxical place, both desolate and tremendously fertile. As Joan Didion, a
native of the region, wrote in 1965, the towns there “hint at evenings spent
hanging around gas stations, and suicide pacts sealed in drive-ins,” yet “U.S.
99 in fact passes through the richest and most intensely cultivated
agricultural region in the world, a giant outdoor hothouse with a
billion-dollar crop.” Generations of farmers have transformed this arid and
flat valley into a machine that produces more than a third of the vegetables in
the United States
and nearly two-thirds of the fruits and nuts. To keep running, it must be fed
with tremendous quantities of fertilizer, flooded with water pumped from deep
underground or diverted from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, doused with insecticides, herbicides,
and fungicides, and harvested by an arsenal of lumbering machinery. But for the
system to work, it also needs bees.
Today, to pollinate California ’s
almond crop alone requires the services of up to three-quarters of all the
managed honeybees in the United
States . And they don’t get to the valley on
their own; the bees are trucked in by the billion from as far away as Florida each January,
just before the trees begin to bloom.
When I step out of my car on a dusty Central
Valley bluff where the beekeeper Zac Browning is unloading his
hives, I’m surrounded by the sound of a strenuous C note. There are bees
crawling on metal drums of wax, bees roiling on the spigots of plastic syrup
vats, bees on the trucks and forklifts parked along the rim of the escarpment.
What look like yellow ice-cream sprinkles litter the ground and spatter the
cars. Bee feces, which few of us have cause to think about when we see a
solitary bee buzzing around a garden, take on more significance when the swarms
number half a billion, at which point you learn to wear a hat.
Managing a pollination operation the size of the Brownings’
requires a martial level of logistical coordination. Zac’s company, Browning’s Honey Co.,
which he runs with his two brothers, an array of cousins, nephews, and in-laws,
and about two dozen employees, is one of the larger beekeeping operations in
the country. They have two permanent bases, one in North
Dakota , where most of the colonies spend the summer making honey,
and one in Idaho , where the bees are stored
for the winter in temperature-controlled warehouses before being driven to California . Once they
arrive in the Golden
State Bakersfield
told me.) This year Zac has found such a place here in an almond orchard atop a
plateau 30 miles outside of Modesto ,
one of the largest cities in the region.
Getting the bees to California
