One day early last spring, Ed Olson’s life got much harder. A few weeks earlier, Olson, a commercial beekeeper, had delivered 200 of his 500 hives of honeybees to an almond orchard in Arbuckle, California. There, the honeybees would do their part buzzing up and down rows of fragrant, flowering trees, helping to make California’s Central Valley the almond capital of the universe. Like more than 100 of our food crops, almond trees will set fruit only if their flowers are cross-pollinated between two different varieties. Like tiny farmworkers, honeybees carry the pollen from one tree to another as they forage. Corn, wheat, rice and other grains rely on wind to spread their pollen. But honeybees pollinate much of the other stuff that adds color to our plate and vitamins and antioxidants to our diet. They give us blueberries, apples, berries, cherries, melons, grapefruit, avocados, squash, broccoli, carrots, onions, and more. If it lowers cholesterol, improves eyesight or turbocharges the immune system, it was probably fertilized by a bee. A surprising amount of our well-being rests on those tiny striped backs—and on the beekeepers who haul 2 million hives from crop to crop every year, renting them out for pollination.
