Stung By Bees

Paying for those bees has sapped almond growers' profits. Joe Traynor, a "pollination broker" who matches almond growers who need bees with beekeepers looking to rent out their hives in the Central Valley, has watched the cost of pollination soar in recent years. "When I started in 1960, the price for honeybee rentals was $3 per hive. In 2004 it was $60 per hive. This year it was $160 to $180 per hive." Those runaway prices have made pollination expenses spiral to 20 percent of a California almond farmer's annual budget—more than fertilizer, water or even labor. In 2008, for the first time, the price for almonds fell below growers' cost of production. "They're really caught in the middle," says Traynor. "It's getting to be more and more of a hardship."

Because crops are now global commodities, their prices are set by the world market; farmers can't easily pass on cost increases to consumers. Instead, as their profits disappear, they go out of business or switch to more profitable crops. That reckoning day may soon come for almonds and many other bee-dependent crops. According to Bernard Vaissière, a pollination specialist with the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, we wouldn't even know if we were currently experiencing reduced yields due to suboptimal pollination, because there is no previous baseline to measure against. "Insect pollination has been totally overlooked as a production factor in Europe until very recently," he says. "Pollinators were taken for granted, just like the air and the light. So if there is a yield loss, it will be attributed to anything but pollination deficit. But there has been a definite increase in pollination-rental fees in many parts of France." Prices of many of the major insect-pollinated crops have soared in recent years. Farmers manage to get their crops pollinated, but at greater expense.

Governments have done little to solve the problem. In June 2007 the U.S. House of Representatives held an emergency hearing on the status of pollinators in North America and allotted $5 million to honeybee research in the ensuing farm bill, but the funding was cut a year later. Earlier this month the U.S. Department of Agriculture made $4 million available to a consortium of universities for research. On April 22, calling on the British government to provide £8 million in emergency funding, British Beekeepers Association president Tim Lovett said, "CCD has not yet crossed the channel from Europe, but we are urging the government that it needs to be prepared should this happen. Does the government want the nation to go without honey on their toast, not have homegrown strawberries to go with cream, and even put their own crusade for the public to eat five portions of fresh fruit and vegetables at risk?" Jeff Rooker, Britain's Food and Farming minister, responded that the government didn't have the funds to help.

That leaves beekeepers scrambling to keep the world in fruits and vegetables. "We can't stand another bug or virus or pest," says Mark Brady, president of the American Honey Producers Association. "Right now the industry is like crystal. It's that fragile. One slip and it will shatter."

Jacobsen’s book “Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honeybee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis” (Bloomsbury) will be published in the fall.

© 2008