Bees are dying in droves. Here’s why that’s important to you and the food you eat

My 12-year-old son’s a beekeeper, so we often get calls to go “catch a swarm.” People find a big, buzzing ball of bees in a tree or on their house, freak out, and wait for the experts to arrive.

Imagine their surprise when a little boy comes walking up. He started when he was 10, so when he put on his suit, they’d say, “Oh, how cute he looks in his costume” and pull out their phones. He’d then tell them all about bees and specifically the queen.

How the bees aren’t aggressive when they don’t have a home to defend, so don’t worry. How they have to starve the new queen for her to be light enough to fly and split from the old hive. How queens go on one mating flight, mate with 30 drones mid-air, and return to have their every need met, so they can lay eggs 24/7.

His suit is no costume, though, and he takes saving the bees seriously. We live in the almonds where every spring the orchards fill with hives. There aren’t enough bees in California to pollinate all the almonds, so they’re trucked in from all over the country.

Without bees, there wouldn’t be almonds. The pollen from one tree has to be transferred to another tree to produce every single nut. The hairs on a bee collect those particles and spread them to the next blossom as the bee gathers food.

While growers continue to plant an average of six to eight percent more acres each year, the bees aren’t so lucky. Instead, nearly a third of all hives in the U.S. die each winter. It could be anything from diseases to mites to the mysterious “Colony Collapse Disorder” — a fancy way of saying the bees just disappeared.

If all of the bees disappeared, we’d be in real trouble. The USDA says more than 100 crops, including many flowering fruits and vegetables, depend on pollinators. It’s hard to imagine life without melons, berries, citrus, pumpkins, peaches, and avocados.

The impact for the Valley, though, goes far beyond losing your favorite foods. Crops pollinated by bees are valued at over $7 billion in the San Joaquin Valley. Add in all the jobs and ag-related businesses connected to those crops, and that’s a $25 billion economic impact that would affect every one of us.

While scientists try to figure out how to save the bees, there are many theories about what’s killing them, from pesticides to 5G signals. Brian Cook is an almond grower and beekeeper in Chowchilla who’s found a way to coexist.

“You have to be willing to make that little bit of change, but if you plant trees, you know you need bees, so do the right thing,” Cook says. “Spray in the evening or early morning when the bees aren’t active.”

Joe Del Bosque is the largest grower of organic melons in the country. His west side farm produces 70% of the nation’s melons, all dependent upon bees. He uses a pest control advisor who doesn’t work for a chemical company, and there’s a group text with the beekeeper whenever anything will be sprayed.

“The whole country depends on California because we grow crops you can’t grow anywhere else,” Del Bosque says. “We have to have agriculture to continue to produce for the sake of our food supply, our jobs, and a healthy economy.”

Del Bosque plants habitat for insects between his fields, including sunflowers, buckwheat, and corn, which provide pollen and nectar. With so many farmers spraying weeds, bees have no natural food source for five months in the summer. Beekeepers have to feed substitutes to keep them alive.

Both of these men have found common ground in organic and conventional farming to protect the bees. I highlight their stories in BEEware, a documentary airing 7:30 p.m. Friday on ValleyPBS as part of the Central Valley Community Foundation’s “Big Tell” Film Festival.

Kudos to the CVCF and the James B. McClatchy Foundation for supporting local storytellers. We have to tell the Valley’s stories, so that a New Yorker eating a Del Bosque cantaloupe from Whole Foods understands why he should care about bees on the other side of the country.

This story was originally published October 16, 2020 at 11:22 AM.