Mark XBT

Pollinating California's almonds takes almost every commercial honeybee in the United States, and in the winter of 2025 the beekeepers lost 62 per cent of them on the way. Step one. Clear the ground. California grows around 80 per cent of the world's almonds across 1.4 million acres, most of it planted within a generation over rangeland and mixed farmland. The orchard floor is sprayed to bare dirt. Nothing flowers there and nothing nests there, and for eleven months of the year it is one of the quietest places in American agriculture. Step two. Find the water. An almond takes roughly 1.1 gallons, and the tree drinks every year of its 25 year life whether there is a drought on or not. Almonds account for close to a tenth of all agricultural water use in the state. When the surface allocation is cut, growers drill, and the valley floor has been sinking for decades. Step three. Import pollinators, because you removed the ones that lived there. Almonds cannot pollinate themselves. An acre needs two colonies, so the bloom needs 2.8 million of them, which is virtually every managed hive in the country. There is no second option and no reserve. Step four. Load them onto lorries in Florida, Texas and the Dakotas and drive them across a continent. It is the largest movement of livestock on earth and it exists to fertilise a nut. Stack them at densities no bee evolved for, so that every mite, virus and spore in American beekeeping is introduced to every other one, annually, on schedule. Step five. Spray them while they work. Fungicides go on during bloom because the crop is worth too much to risk. The label says it is safe for bees. The beekeepers have been saying otherwise for twenty years. Step six. Feed them syrup. A monoculture flowers for three weeks and then offers a colony nothing at all, so the industry keeps its livestock alive on sugar and protein patties for the other forty-nine. Step seven. Count the dead. Beekeepers had come to accept losing 30 per cent a year. Then February 2025 arrived and commercial operators had lost an average of 62 per cent, some of them close to everything. 1.6 million colonies, $600 million, the worst losses ever recorded. Lorries pulled into Fresno with half the boxes already silent. Step eight. Shake the trees. Mechanical shakers drop the crop onto the dirt and the valley disappears into dust for weeks, in a basin that already has the worst air in the United States. Step nine. Feed the hulls to cattle. The waste goes into dairy rations, so the almond industry is quietly propped up by the animal almond milk was invented to replace. Step ten. Blend two per cent of it with water, add a gum from Rajasthan, chalk for the calcium and a synthetic B12, and print a leaf on the carton. The cow eats grass and pollinates nothing, because she does not need to. She is the ethical problem. The system that required every bee in America and killed two thirds of them getting there is the solution.