Migrant Bees

Oakdale, California – It’s the largest migration of "workers" in the country, and it happens every February. About eight billion honeybees arrive in California’s Central Valley to do a job that’s critical to the state’s agriculture. They must pollinate the state’s 700,000 acres of almond orchards.

Each acre needs an average of two hives for pollination. That’s about 16,000 bees. That means more than a million hives are needed for the almond crop, and with only half that number of hives available year round in California, growers there must call on men like Brent Woodworth to bring in hundreds of thousands of hives to make up for the shortage.
  
On a chilly February morning, Woodworth and his crew have trucked in nearly four thousand hives from his bee business in North Dakota.
Most of the colonies survived the ride in good health.

"We lose about 25 to 30 percent of all colonies every year," says Woodworth, "just to die-off, not necessarily to any particular diseases. But queens go bad. It’s a naturally occurring bee loss."

Woodworth waits for the dimmer hours of twilight to deliver his hives to the orchards. Along with the ubiquitous "smokers" that beekeepers use to pacify their insects, darkness and cooler temperatures help keep them from becoming aggressive.

Crews use a special forklift to remove the pallets of hives from a flatbed truck. Once the hives are in place, the tough part of Woodworth’s job is done. The bees’ job is just beginning. While they roam and circle the almond blossoms, Woodworth reflects that in the honeybee, nature has created the almost-perfect pollinator. 

One busy bee will make more than a dozen trips from the hive during as many as eight hours a day. And then there’s the way nature designed them.

"If you look at their legs where they carry the pollen, there’s an awful lot of minute little hairs on them that grab and carry the pollen grains," he says.
                  
And if the pollen grains don’t hitch a ride on the bees from blossom to blossom, a fruit or nut tree simply won’t produce. Alan Toste, who puts Woodworth’s hives on his two hundred acres of almond trees in the San Joaquin Valley, says so far no one’s come up with a better way to pollinate.

"Because you have to have at least two varieties to get a cross pollination, then you don’t have any option but to have a bee visit one flower then fly to another with the pollen and deposit it on the parts of that flower. And then you get a nut."

Interstate travel and constant orchard pollination is hard work – even for bees. It may surprise some that they have to be fed.  Woodworth shows an orange-brown substance spread out as a meal for his "workers."

"It’s just a high protein content of soy flower. And we mix honey with it, and feed it right to the bees." In this part of the Central Valley, some 6,000 farmers are now in the almond business, thanks to growing demand and rising prices. Acreage is expanding. 

More trees equals more bees. While more than a million hives will into the orchards this season, growers expect they will need more than two million hives to pollinate trees that are expected to bear nuts by 2010. That means big business for Woodworth: for a month’s stay in the orchards this season, his bees will bring him about half a million dollars, a number that’s tripled over the past decade. Across the country, as the demand for bees has increased, the supply of them has come under pressure. Ills afflicting the Heartland’s honeybees have been well-publicized: first, scientists puzzle over something called "Colony Collapse Disorder," marked by the unpredictable wholesale disappearance of millions of bees from their hives.

Then there’s a parasite called the Varroa Mite. Eric Mussen, a bee specialist with the University of California in Davis, says, "The Varroa mite has really wrecked havoc with the bees, simply because they are a parasite that sucks the juices right out of the bee. And when that happens, they’re actually bringing in different viruses."
                        
Mussen adds that some of the materials used to control the exotic mites just don’t work anymore. "If things work the way we want, I think the solution we’re looking for is to breed selective stocks of honeybees that can tolerate having the mite around, or even resist the mite in such a manner it can’t reproduce as well." 
     
Until a solution is found, beekeepers like Woodworth are doing their best to keep their bee populations stable and growing. Meanwhile, his bees have three more weeks ahead of them in Alan Toster’s almond orchard. Then, these "migrant workers" will migrate yet again – to another state and new fields, to work their magic on another crop.