Original subtitles

[ Reverse signal beeping ]

♪♪

[ Whirring ]

♪♪

-Remember how bad this road is?

I couldn't make the left. -Mm-hmm.

♪♪

I think there's 18,000 coming out.

It's about -- be about 40 tractor-trailer loads.

♪♪

Now we go out and straighten boxes,

straighten covers, make sure our count's right.

And, uh...

A little more than we did last year,

but two years ago,we did 64 trailer loads, though.

We're just a little bit of it.

It's the biggest...

annual move of bees

in the world.

We got them in on time...

[ Indistinct talking in distance ]

...this year.

[ Chuckles ]

Now we can get some sleep.

♪♪

-Bees are so fascinating.

When you first go into a beehive,

you are, like, worried about getting stung,

and then as soon as you start watching them

and seeing them on the combs, communicating with each other,

all of the chemical signals

that keep the worker bees doing the right thing,

it's just so fascinating, so complex,

and it mostly works

until we get in the way of it.

♪♪

-Well, most beekeepers, including ourselves --

now if you're a commercial beekeeper,

for the most part, your honey bees are mounted.

The hives are sitting on pallets --

They're either four hives on a pallet,

or there are six hives on a pallet.

And everybody's got forklifts.

You know, all-terrain forklifts,

Bobcats, swingers,

articulated loaders.

Most of all of our short-distance bee moving

for pollinating apples and vegetables and so on,

that's all done with straight trucks and so forth.

[ Indistinct conversations ]

Now we start crisscrossing the United States,

that's all done with semis.

Most of the public out here

has probably seen loads of bees going down a road

and didn't even know what they were looking at.

Just looks like something covered up with a big net.

Most of the bee moving all is done at nighttime.

The bees all come home in the evening,

you know, come in after dusk.

So, we wait till the bees are all home,

and then we go out there and load them

and send them on their merry way.

So, when a semi-truck gets to its destination,

there'll be a beekeeper there that's gonna unload that truck

and put them out in the almond orchard,

the apples, the blueberries, or what have you.

The farmer, basically, pays us for bringing the bees in --

depends what the crop is.

You know, almonds in California,

the going rate right now is anywhere

from $165 to $225 a hive.

And that's for a period of, you know, five to six weeks

while the almond bloom is.

♪♪

[ Whirring ]

♪♪

-Many crops require

pollination by insects,

and because the native pollinators

who used to be here are no longer

in large enough quantities to do that pollination,

the managed honey bees have stepped in

to take the role of pollinator.

-Pollination is a basic natural function.

A lot of plants in nature need insects to transfer pollen,

and one of the most efficient is the honey bee.

-So, basically, you know, of all the good stuff we eat,

you know, the vegetables and the fruits and so on,

most of that needs honey bee pollination

or pollination by native pollinators.

-The chemical companies -- they figure we should eat corn,

soybeans, and rice, and that don't need to be pollinated.

And that's what they think we ought to live on.

But if you like your fruits and vegetables and your nuts,

a lot of that stuff need pollinating.

A lot of wild insects can do the job,

but not as well as bringing in a commercial beekeeper

to put down a thousand colonies in one area

and give a good blast to the pollination.

-Our business has got two different ends to it.

One of them is producing honey, but, of course,

the reason them honey bees are here in the first place

is to pollinate our crops, you know,

'cause one out of every three bites of food

we put in our mouths comes

from honey bee pollination.

-I think the general public should know

that our food system is threatened

by the fact that the bees are in trouble.

And they should care about that because they eat food.

-So, the problem is that native pollinators have disappeared

and farming has become a lot bigger,

and so due to all this,

you know, now they need beekeepers

that can move bees from one place to the other.

And, of course, the only bees that are really movable,

that you could put on the back of a truck

and truck them all over the place

is honey bees.

The big pollination in this country is almonds,

which is in the dead of the winter.

The almond tree's not very smartin that way,

because blooming in the end of February, in through March.

So, in California,

now today, there's close to a million acres of almonds.

It takes two hives of bees to the acre

to pollinate them almonds.

So these bees got to crisscross

the United States to get there.

Our business, basically -- it's a timing situation,

that orchard or blueberry grower

or almond grower, or vegetable grower,

his livelihood is depending on him growing a crop.

And if that crop isn't pollinated

when the flowers are in bloom, we got a short window there.

When he picks up the phone and calls us --

"In two days, I need bees" --

it's not two weeks, or two months.

He needs bees in two days.

♪♪

-Beekeepers are kind of like the last of the cowboys

you've seen in the Westerns.

We migrate the bees from up in the northern prairies

all down here to the Bakersfield area,

and we keep 'em in the west side of the valley.

When the spring bloom comes, we'll take the bees,

and we'll spread 'em from the Turlock area

down to the southern Bakersfield area.

The almond pollination is

the biggest pollination event in the U.S. bee industry.

It takes almost the entire national bee supply.

♪♪

-And so a semi-truck will hold somewhere around

400 to 450 hives of bees.

And so you start thinking about this.

It takes somewhere in the neighborhood

of two million hives of bees in California.

Say, you know,

a couple hundred thousand of them are already there,

maybe 250,000 of them are already there,

so that means the rest of those beehives

have to come from someplace else.

So there's a lot of truckloads of bees

crisscrossing the United States.

-Our honey bees get picked up and moved

almost 22 times a year.

And a lot of people think that this is one of the reasons

why our bees are not surviving like they used to.

But we've been pollinating fruits and vegetables and nuts

since the '70s, '60s, '50s,

and we haven't had these kind of losses.

-You know, it depends on whose numbers you look at,

but the USDA numbers say

we have somewhere around 2.6 million hives.

And the Bee Informed Partnershipout of Maryland's

been showing -- been losing 30% to 40% of our hives.

So a 30% loss there puts us downto about 1.8 million hives,

and that's about what the almond industry takes,

so we're almost at 100% utilization

of the bee supply.

[ Bees buzzing ]

-We rely on the managed honey bee

for our relatively inexpensive fruits and vegetables

that we have in the grocery story,

and this means that they're in an area

that is treated with pesticides on a regular basis

and also densely packed

with agricultural crops,

leaving very few wildflowers.

Once the crop has bloomed,

there's nothing there for the bees to eat.

For example, the almond bloom in California --

very intense activity for the bees for about a month,

and then the beekeepers

can't leave their bees there afterwards

because there's nothing more for the bees to eat.

The managed honey bee

has the beekeeper helping them survive

because it's in everyone's interest

for the bees to survive,

and so they do move their bees

to places that have good forage,

away from threats,

although that's not always possible.

The native pollinators are in deep trouble.

They're in trouble because

they can't move away from agriculture.

We're not monitoring the populations

as well as the managed honey bees

but we are seeing in certain places

that their populations have plummeted.

One, the rusty patched bumble bee,

was just listed as an endangered species

and a lot has to do with agriculture

and pesticide use, in particular.

-It's so important what happens in California

'cause it sets up the table for the rest of the year,

because right after the almonds --

Almonds are the earliest crop in the spring,

and after this, most of the bees will go either

into a secondary pollination

or into a breeding program to replace the old queens

and to make up for the previous year's death losses.

It's really important on how bees come out here

and the Almond Board of California

has done some really good extension work,

trying to educateall the farmers across the state

on what the best management practices are

for bee conservation.

But it's kind of sad sometimes, you know.

A farmer or a rancher has so many obligations,

he doesn't have time to stay up with the latest technology

until there's a bad event.

♪♪

-Bees are important for all kinds of reasons.

They're important because we're not capable

of making all kinds of things grow by ourselves.

It's not some kind of magic,

it's a deep biological process,

of which, bees are a part.

But bees are also important to us

because they're a very good kind of sentinel signal

for the trouble that we're in.

There they are every day, out in the world,

foraging through every corner

of the rural landscape.

If suddenly, one year, 25% of them show up missing,

that means there is something wrong

with that landscape.

-There's been a pretty dramatic change in agriculture

over the last 20 years or so

in the types of pesticides that are being used.

In 1996, Congress passed the Food Quality Protection Act

that required a reevaluation of all of the existing pesticides,

and the ones that were really a big target

because they were so problematicfor worker poisonings

were these nerve toxins called organophosphates

and carbamate pesticides.

Those have dropped dramatically in use.

Many of them have been pulled out of the system altogether.

And what came into replace them are a group of pesticides

called the neonicotinoids,

and starting in 1994,

the first one was registered in the U.S.,

and every year, more and more crops

and more and more acres

are treated with these types of pesticides.

These are very problematic for bees,

and while the organophosphates were highly toxic to bees,

they degraded relatively quickly.

The neonicotinoids take years

to degrade in the environment,

and what that means is,

you're going to continue to poison the bees

for many years after you apply these pesticides.

They're so widely marketed and so widely used

that they're, really, everywhere now.

-Neonicotinoids basically work by breaking down immune system,

cause the insects to lose their memory,

make them sick.

Whether it's the insect or it's a human, you know,

your immune system's broke down,you don't want to eat,

and that's exactly what we got going on

inside these honey bee hives, and, eventually, you know,

we're going to somebody's funeral.

-Bees, it turns out, are very good

at picking up pesticides in the environment.

It seems like even

the smallest amount of pesticide,

even if pesticides have been sprayed months

or even a year or two earlier,

there seems to be residues in the environment,

and the bees seem to pick these things up

and actually bring them back to the hive.

It was shocking how much pesticide

and the diversity of pesticides that we were finding --

herbicides, fungicides, growth regulators,

insecticides,

all of them showed up in samples that we collected

and looked at across the country.

It was -- It was disturbing.

Most pesticides are lipophilic,

meaning they want to dissolve in a fat,

and so pollen

and particularly wax are fats.

Wax, it turns out, is almost like a fossil record.

The wax combs that the bees live in,

that they put their food in, that the brood is produced in,

accumulates and holds onto these pesticide contaminants,

and so it's very hard for a beekeeper

who's doing crop pollination to protect their bees

from pesticides -- very hard.

-The effect of pesticides on bees of all sorts,

our native species, as well as honey bees,

has been documented in North America,

and now it's being documented worldwide.

And this is a real -- a real concern,

that pesticides seem to be playing a key role

in the downturn

of our bee populations.

-The fighting man came home.

Families that have been torn apart were reunited.

-Something changed after World War II

in America for agriculture.

The advent of synthetic chemicals

that could be used

to poison insects was a big one.

-Man fights back.

Modern insecticides have come into being

as a hoped for poison gas to stop the enemy.

The stakes are high --

millions of dollars of valuable foods

stand as the reward.

-And synthetic chemists,

taking chemicals from the paints

and pigments industry and other industrial uses,

and evaluating those

for their potential use in agriculture

really accelerated the development

of synthetic pesticide production.

Natural molecules

like nicotine and pyrethrum

that have an inherent property for killing insects,

could those be improved upon?

And the answer was yes, and without any other regard

about what placing that chemicalin the environment might mean,

short-term or long-term,

at first it seemed like this was the silver bullet.

There are major differences

between the United States and Europe and other places,

in a philosophical basis,

by which risks for pesticides are evaluated,

and in the European Union, the precautionary principle,

which states that, if we don't understand fully

the risk of using something, we should not use it

until we have that greater understanding.

Whereas in the United States,

without the precautionary principle,

we say, "Well, let's take the risk,

and we'll find out if it's not working and readjust."

And that's a matter of law that the EPA's bound by,

but I would really like to see us

reevaluate that situation from a policymaking standpoint.

-I mean, nobody's looking at what damage

we're doing here to our environment.

Some of the stuff we're using is a neurotoxin

that's gonna destroy our health and children

and everything else, but we're spraying it

'cause somebody has more say and more power than we do.

♪♪

♪♪

-Yesterday, I got a call

from one of the partners of this ranch,

said, you know,

"Adee, the bees are dying.

Come up here and figure out why."

And so I jumped in the pickup and came up here.

And it was very obvious it was an acute bee kill,

you know, some type of insecticide or fungicide

or some synergistic reaction with chemicals around the area

was killing the bees.

They were dying today as they were looking at them.

The first sets they were looking at,

we seen bees laying on the ground.

We found a queen staggering out in front of a hive.

Anyway, that's what we want to do,

is find out what's affecting it.

This family spent a lot of moneyfor these bees,

and they're counting on them for their pollination.

And it would be terrible to think that they were doing

something that was completely legal and by the book,

yet it was hurting the bees,

and if a neighbor was being sloppy and hurting the bees,

that would be really bad, too,

but something's definitely hurting the bees.

-How many are you here? -We just finished eight.

-Okay, that's fine. -Yeah, yeah.

That's fine, good. -And that'll give you --

That'll give you enough to compare.

-Yeah, well, when they do the chemical analysis, I know,

yeah, they'll have enough to tease out a difference.

Nobody's going to want to admit that this happened

because, you know, this man spent

hundreds of thousands of dollarsto rent these bees.

And he has, probably,

millions of dollars worth of nuts at risk.

And, you know, the guy down the road

is not going to come up and say,

"Hey, well I put a cocktail on my apricots

that happened to kill your bees."

Nobody's going to say anything like that

because they don't want the liability.

So, anyway, it's really hard to track these things down.

You know, this is why we have to have lab work done.

So, you know, it can be prevented.

You can't bring the dead back to life,

but, you know, you can keep more from getting killed.

It's really important to have good stewardship

while they're in the almonds

so they're available for everything else.

This is the crop100% of the bees are exposed to.

How bees leave this crop is how they start the next crop.

After this, it will be a real rush

to get the bees to the apples and the cherries

and after that, the seed crops across the nation.

You know, if we put the same economic value

on a honey bee as cattle, you know, we wouldn't have

a pesticide investigator out there for this kind of losses.

We'd have the FBI out there.

Honey bees are kind of thought of as, you know,

oh, well, they'll just make more.

People talk about the financial viability

of the bee industry,

but what I think I'm more concerned with

is the biological viability of the bee industry.

It's like, can we divide them fast enough

to make up for the losses?

♪♪

[ Engine idling ]

[ Hydraulics hiss ]

-Shut that thing off, make less noise.

Phone here before I lose that.

-How many you putting on? -46 pallets.

-What's that come out to? -That's three rows --

That's five rows on top.

Them things are jumpy.

Put three rows of two,and the rest of them will go up.

Warmer tonight than it was last night.

[ Bees buzzing ]

They're kind of pissy.

What did you do to get them all pissed off today?

-We took 300 hives out of here last night.

What do you expect?

[ Engine revs ]

-I'm a lot slower getting out of here

than I used to be. [ Chuckles ]

Just throw some straps on them, down the road.

-Hold on.

-Well, we just loaded 46 pallets of bees,

180-some hives.

We're going to two apple orchards

out around Martinsburg,

Roaring Spring, Pennsylvania.

Drop these bees off at the orchard

and come home -- come back home and go to bed

in the wee hours of the morning.

Spring came early this year.

Wasn't supposed to, but it did.

Apples are just roughly 10 days early.

-Neil, the guy we're going to tonight,

told me he had some early apples out.

He wasn't really much worried about them

because he's got quite a few native pollinators

around there.

[ Bees buzz, birds chirping ]

Farmers, apple growers, apple growers especially,

are seeing a need to promote,

you know, native pollinators and, you know,

preserve what they got in the woods around them.

♪♪

♪♪

-Peaches, cherries, apples --

they have to have so many degrees below 40.

Peaches have less requirement than apples.

Apples have the most.

Most of them at around 1,000, 1,200 hours

below 40 degrees to bloom.

Once you reach those degrees, they can come any time.

So, if it's a cold winter, they already have

the chilling requirement in by early March,

so as soon as it warms up,

they're ready to move,

and that's what happens.

We're gonna go to another place,and then ten more off,

and that will be all for me.

♪♪

-If I had a dollar for every time

I went on and off that trailer...

I think I did have a dollar

for every time I went on and offthat trailer.

Him and I were just having

this discussion.-We were having that discussion.

-Having this discussion here the last five minutes.

How long is this thing going to last?

-Oh, I would say we'll have them till probably

the end of next week, at least.

-I think. -Those are Fuji right there,

and their flowers are barely open yet.

But I have Empires just down here,

and they're in full bloom.

Does anybody document where the wild bees are having trouble?

Or nobody says, there isn't any wild bees?

-Oh, yeah, there's a guy at Cornell University

that's done some work.

-I mean, we use as many -- probably more --

We use more chemicals than dairy.

We don't use as much herbicide as they do.

You know your salesman comes around,

and he expects you to buy something

every time he come around. -I know.

[ Engine revs in distance ]

♪♪

-Is it possible to grow fruit

without insecticides and fungicides?

Well, yeah, it is.

Probably not the fruits we have today

because, you know, obviously, my great-grandfather

and great-great-grandfather were growing fruit,

and they didn't have pesticides.

I don't know what the yields were,

and I'm sure there were some disasters.

But, you know, the consumer today

is so used to a perfect piece of fruit,

and they can get it year round.

I don't know that they'd want to go back to the varieties

that were growing,

that are resistant to insects and diseases.

You know, the consumers in those days before pesticides

would put up with, you know, a mark on an apple.

They would just be happy to have a piece of fruit.

-Fruit growing without chemicals --

I'd be happy because it's a major expense for me.

That and labor are my two biggest expenses.

And if I could cut way back on my use,

I would tomorrow.

And we don't use any more than we have to,

but we have to use it

to get the fruit that we want, that people want to buy.

Varieties that we grow are Ginger Gold, Gala,

Honeycrisp, Golden Delicious,

Red Delicious, McIntosh,

Fuji, Jonagolds, and Empire.

We start now, start in spring.

The trees will come out in the spring

when it warms up, comes into bloom.

When the blooms starts to open,

we want bees to come in to pollinate,

'cause if we have -- we need pollination.

We need to move the pollen to the ovary,

'cause then it grows down, and that's what forms an apple.

Well, the bees are one of the most efficient ways

to transfer the pollen from the flower to flower.

On a typical apple bud, when it comes open,

there's usually five to six blooms on that bud.

But there'll be one that will come out first.

It's called the king flower.

That's the flower that we would like to set,

'cause that gives the biggest apple.

If that sets like this one -- I'll just pull this off.

If they all set, there's five apples --

If they would all set, there's five apples on there.

And that's more than I want. I only want one.

So, I have to have some come off.

We do mostly chemical thinning,

and it'll cause the fruit to fall off.

We don't do any flower or blossom thinning,

as they called it.

This will be the --

This here will be the stem of the apple.

If this develops into an apple, this would be the stem,

where it's attached,

and this brown part at the bottom here is

actually the start of the form of the apple right here.

We have to put on a fungicide, which is for disease.

Apples get disease.

They get disease on the leaves

then that transfers onto the fruit.

I know there's some work being done

that some of the fungicides are not good for bees.

As far as I know, they're okay.

And then we have insects.

There's a whole list of insects

that attack the trees and the fruit.

And if we don't control them, then we have problems.

And there's some insecticides that you can use

that are safe on bees.

My policy is, when the bees come,

we don't put any insecticide on.

-I know when I grew up,

the fruit business was very seasonal.

Strawberries were in strawberry season,

blueberries were in blueberry season,

raspberries were in raspberry season.

You didn't see them till the next year.

With the worldwide production and transportation,

you have strawberries, blueberries,

raspberries, year-round.

You know, you can go in the chain store

and find these things

and you have such a plethora

of fruits that we never saw before.

Fruit is much more available than it was in the past.

So, I think, for that reason, people don't understand

the seasonality of local produce.

♪♪

-Alright. Sounds good.

Thanks, Kevin. Talk to you later.

♪♪

I've been doing this, you know,

consistently for 16 plus years,

and, you know, you jump out of the truck,

and these bees have been here

less than 24 hours, sitting here.

And there's quite a few beeson the ground outside the hives,

and it's only 50 degrees or so.

So, it's definitely an alarming situation

where you see this many, you know, bees dead

on the ground outside the hives when it's only 50 degrees.

Bees haven't been flying much today.

They are flying a little bit, but this is nothing

compared to what it would be if it was 70 degrees out.

We probably wouldn't be able to stand here

without any equipment on.

Sometimes I feel as though I get numb to it,

and I just -- I'm used to it 'cause it's the way it is now.

But, you know, other times,

I want to sit here and scoop all these bees up

and send them off to a lab to get analyzed

and, you know,

find out what's wrong, what's going on here.

But, you know, in many cases, like right now, I don't.

Beekeepers are hustling around.

I'm moving this load out tonight,

and I got to move another load in tomorrow

to do the same thing again.

Consistent pollination race, so to speak.

If you look up close there, you can see the bees

are pulling out the dead from inside the hive.

They'll just drop them off the front of the hive

and leave them out in front.

I just recently found out, basically,

that they're using Sevin to thin the apples,

which is a highly toxic pesticide

for bees and all insects.

You know, everybody's wanting to thin right now,

so as soon as the bees get out,

they start up the sprayers and and try to thin.

-Things like apples, where they purposely

only want to set the king bloom,

because they want to get larger fruit size,

what they've found isthat if they set too much bloom,

they actually have to send people out to thin them.

And they found that some of the insecticides,

particularly Sevin or Carbaryl,

can be used -- sprayed on the blossom

to actually cause it to abort bloom.

And so one of the issues we havearound those types of crops

is actually removing the bees quick enough

that we don't come in contact

with the thin sprays

later in the bloom.

-Even though this is a really big orchard,

just the other side of that hillright there is somebody else,

and it looks like, judging by the tire tracks,

someone was in there spraying last night.

Every single row had been gone up and down

in the last 24 hours.

You can see it in the grass.

I'm sure there's a good reason for it.

It's an effective thinner. It's what they're using.

But is everybody communicating enough

with their neighbors about the bees?

Or is it just, "Well, my bees are out,

so I'm going to thin"?

You know there's still partial bloom on some of his trees,

and my bees work those trees.

So, you know, it's something that --

It's definitely a danger in pollination,

and we don't quite have answers

as to what to do about it.

One guy doesn't know the other guy's bees are there,

and next thing you know, they get dead bees

and an upset beekeeper.

So... [ Sighs ]

[ Chuckles ]

Never ends.

♪♪

-Populations of honey bees are dying at levels

that are unprecedented and very concerning.

So, we have been seeing between 33% and close to half

of the colonies in the U.S. dying every single year,

which is disturbing.

But the numbers of colonies in the U.S.

have been able to hold steady,

because we then split the colonies that survive,

and we recoup those losses.

We're doing it because we have to,

but our hope is that, eventually,

we can stop splitting colonies,

which is not a sustainable way of keeping them,

and get back to a time

where we had acceptable levels of loss, at 10% or lower.

-One of the things that they're not really looking at

and not telling you is that beekeepers have changed

a lot of their management.

Everybody is replacing queens, you know,

at an unheard of rate.

-So, we're up at the bee yard here.

We're going to put in some queen cells

to hives that we split earlier.

And that's what is in this box here,

it's some attendant worker bees and a frame --

a couple frames of honey for feed,

and then we purchase queen cells

from a beekeeping operation that raises those.

So, what I'll be doing is, I'll be taking these,

and I'll be installing one queen cell

per hive that we've split,

and you can see the queen cell.

You can see the bees working on it.

We'll put the queen cell in each of the hives.

♪♪

-I go back to the dayswhen you put a queen in the box,

and she was there for years.

I mean, literally, three, four years,

and you didn't re-queen a lot of beehives

because they normally re-queened themselves.

Now it's a different story.

You re-queen them, or you got a dead beehive.

A lot of guys are out there,

carrying a hundred queens with them every day.

You know, maybe they don't use a hundred a day,

but the next two days, they're gonna use that hundred up,

and they got another hundred coming,

you know, sizeable outfits.

-There are about 320 hives that we're going to assess

which half the queen is in and confine her

so we know where she is, and then this evening,

we'll move off those queen-less halves

so that we can establish new hives,

put queen cells in them in the next few days.

[ Bees buzzing ]

-They're keeping the losses at bay,

but I can remember the days

when I ran 1,500 hives of bees by myself.

But them days are over.

I mean, there's just so much management.

We ran bees on a let-alone system.

I mean the more you left them alone,

the more honey they made.

Now if you leave them alone, they're dead.

I mean, you got to -- You just basically got to be

in them things about every two weeks.

You know, if queens are starting to fail,

then we pop a new queen in there,

or you got an empty box.

[ Bees buzzing ]

-We start a new hive

by combining the frames of brood

from several different colonies.

Bring your camera in quick here.

There's a Varroa mite on that drone larva.

Red, orange fleck there on the larva here is

a Varroa mite.

They were accidentally imported.

-Varroa destructor is public enemy number one, by far.

It was a parasite in Southeast Asia,

and around the 1960s,

it started making the spread around the world.

Now it's present pretty much everywhere honey bees are kept.

-It's a small, little mite

that if you compared it to the size of a human being,

a 150-pound human being,

it would be like having a tick the size of your fist.

So, it's a huge parasite relative to the bee's body.

And it, literally, just pokes

right through the body wall of the bee

and feeds on it, both the adult bee

and the developing bee, in the larval and pupal stage.

-Mites carry viruses.

They transmit viruses,

and they also, we know, suppress the immune system.

So, it's like a double whammy for the bees.

-You can kind of imagine it as a triangle.

There are parasites at the top of this triangle,

pesticides, and poor nutrition.

There's a lot going on.

But it seems like they're all related to each other.

-Most bee populations can deal with one of these issues,

but they can't deal with multiple ones at the same time.

Example of this is the interaction of Varroa mites

and pesticides and viruses.

-The mites are parasites that weaken the bees.

They weaken the bees

and make them more susceptible to pesticides.

The pesticides further weaken the bees.

They reduce the population,

the number of bees that are in the colony,

and that gives you a lower force of bees

to actually go out and retrieve food.

-So, you have this sort of feedback loop where, you know,

if you have high pesticides, virus titers can go higher,

Varroa populations can go higher,

which can transmit more virus,

and then you can get into the cycle

that your bees are unable to cope with.

-The big problem with the mite is...

how do you get rid of a bug on a bug?

We think we've put a chemical in there to treat the mite,

and we're going to kill the mites.

Well, a lot of times -- sometimes, it works,

and sometimes it don't, and that's where

you get yourself into deep trouble,

because you either treat for the mites,

or the mites put you out of business.

It's just as simple as that.

-You know, it's one straw too many.

You got mites. You got virus.

You got, you know, poor nutrition,

and then you have

pesticide exposure on top of that.

It's more than we should expect of any organism to survive.

-What is happening with bees right now

is not colony collapse disorder

that we saw over a three to five year period.

Rapid loss of bees from a colony,

and the brood's left behind

and usually the queen is left behind.

That's CCD.

-You know so many people are so focused on CCD, CCD, CCD.

CCD is a small, little manifestation

of this whole pollinator decline.

It much more rare

than it was during those initial few years --

2005, 2006, 2007, 2008.

It's really not what's important.

-Everyone uses this CCD to mean whenever a colony dies.

We're seeing colonies die for a lot of reasons now.

♪♪

-Wild blueberries are growin'.

Only grow here in Maine and Nova Scotia

Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Quebec.

Annual event.

Been doing this for 30-something years

for this company.

So the bees are being brought inin the middle of May.

They'll be here until early, mid-June --

somewhere around the 10th, 12th, 14th of June.

The blueberries will be done blooming,

and they'll get them out of here

and take them on over to New York

or wherever they've got to go to produce honey

for the rest of the summer.

This load came out of Florida. There's 396 hives on here.

We're gonna put these out in three or four yards

this morning.

The black flies are bad.

We're effected by commodity pricing everywhere --

almonds, apples, you know, blueberries, everything.

You know, if they ain't making any money,

they can't afford to pay us or don't want to.

It's just the way life is.

You got a wrecking bar?

-It's on the nose of the trailer.

-Oh, okay. I'm trying to find --

Somebody must of took one out of this truck.

-But blueberries prices are down,

and it's costing more to producethe blueberries

than they're worth.

So, you know...

it's economics.

Well, I guess we won't get it off quick.

-Yeah, last night, two tractor trailers came in,

both of them were Dave Hackenberg's bees.

We put about a third of them out.

This morning, we put another third out.

Tonight we'll finish that load --

those two loads up.

This road didn't get any better since last year, either.

[ Engine revs ]

I'll let you put the other one here.

[ Chuckles ]

-[ Indistinct talking]

-Yeah, the other one will go in a big hole.

Okay.

-There's no place to turn around.

It's nothing but a rock pile.

You got to fix the fence -- His fence is there.

I got to put his fence up.

I got put the bees in the fence,

and I've got to get the fence closed up.

[ Cellphone rings ]

Ah, I don't want to talk to you.

-He sits by the windows,

'cause it's the only place in here he gets cell service.

-I start out to put bees in the first yard,

and there's spraying rigs in the first yard.

And where I wanted to unload the truck,

there was a hole.

They were filling spray tanks

and had their tractor trailer

and all their spray rigs sitting in there.

Them pancakes sure ain't mine,

'cause I know better than to eat pancakes here.

-[ Laughs ] You'll be full for the rest of the day.

-I can't handle that much pancake.

-Did you have guys have less bees this year brought up?

That's, like, the rumor that's been going on,

so I was wondering. -Yeah, it's not a rumor.

-So, cause I know -- -They cleared way back.

-So, how much did they cut you guys for?

-They didn't cut us, but, I mean, they cut --

They got rid of just --

Let a bunch of people go. -'Cause I know a lot of people

have been worried about, like,blueberry prices and everything.

-Oh, yes. -So...

♪♪

♪♪

-OSHA don't want to see that!

Go right out the road here,

until you turn left, and then make that first right.

♪♪

[ Rooster crows ]

-We can learn a good deal from bees

about the health of the landscapes that we inhabit.

And sort of secondarily, we can learn a good deal

about the folly of setting up our agriculture

in quite the way that we have.

It looked so efficient

and concentrate everything in the ways that we've done it,

but that turns out to be a false efficiency.

It is the cheapest way

to produce pork or corn or whatever else,

but that cheapness comes at a high price,

and that price is the loss of the agricultural diversity,

redundancy, resiliency,

that is really beyond price.

You know it's the thing that we've built up

over 10,000 years of agriculture,

and now in a kind of hundred years

of industrialization,

we've managed to get rid of most of it.

-The Industrial Revolution in the early 1900s was founded

to take people off the land,

bring them into cities and into places

where there were other kinds of jobs

that could be more profitable for them.

We had more than enough people

to grow the food that was necessary.

And so the emphasis in agriculture

was totally focused on increasing

the productivity of crop production

and animal production of the individual farm level.

And we've made great strides in doing that.

And as a consequence, fewer and fewer individuals

are engaged in farming because fewer individuals

can farm larger and larger operations,

whether that's a milking herd of a 100 cows,

or farming 300 or 400 acres of crops.

We've evolved a system

that's efficient from use of land

in terms of amount of food that can be produced on it,

but it's not a sustainable system.

It's not healthy for the soil.

It's not healthy for the productthat's produced

in terms of its nutrition or other properties,

and it's not healthy for the environment as a whole.

-Well, we went down a road with agriculture, didn't we?

And that road said

that the only way to be a successful farmer

was to have clean fields

and control --

in control of your land, right?

If you had weeds

or if you had something out of place,

you were a bad farmer,

and the easiest way to maintain that --

As that perception started to increase,

the food production system became simpler

and simpler and simpler.

And the only way to maintain a simplified system

is with more and more jugs, you know?

Maybe it's fertilizers, maybe it's GM plants,

maybe it's herbicides,

maybe it's insecticides, fungicides.

Simplify it. Control it, right?

And that seems to have worked for a long time,

but the cracks are really showing through

in the ice right now.

Everything within the current infrastructure

is hell-bent on making the system work,

rather than questioning,

should we have ever gone down this road to begin with?

-In the year 2000,

the only corn you saw in eastern North Dakota

was silage corn,

and there were a few soybean fields,

but not very many.

And in 2006, George Bush gave a talk,

and he mentioned something called biofuels. [ Chuckles ]

And as soon as that happened,

the renewable fuel standard was created.

We saw massive changes here in North Dakota.

Now the two predominant crops are corn and soybeans

and we have lost many, many opportunities

for producing honey due to those changes.

A lot of the grassland,a lot of the conservation acres,

a lot of the more traditional crops

have all been replacedwith acres of corn and soybeans.

-When we were looking at mappingaround apiaries in North Dakota,

we were looking at the amount of grasslands

and natural areas and stuff.

And as those grasslands and all disappeared

and turned into crops, like corn and soybeans,

there's very little fencerows or hedgerows at all.

So you've got corn and soybeans that bloom, you know,

one time during the year.

Very little other forage out there.

And plus, you've got the pesticide exposure

that comes with agriculture.

♪♪

-A lot of them grasslands have not had anything

planted on it for hundreds of years

and, all of a sudden, we have corn in areas

that shouldn't have corn because of ethanol.

And if they stop planting corn today,

it's going to take 20 to 30 years for that ground

to get back in the shape it was

to sustain life for all these wild insects,

birds, and fowl, and everything else.

So we're not doing ourselves any good.

-Agriculture, you know,

is an interruption of a natural system.

But it can be done thoughtfully as an interruption

of a natural system with great benefits.

From what I've studied and what I've learned

from visits to these farms

that are forced into monoculture --

I just want to be careful that we talk about farmers

that are driven to want to farm in monocultures.

There aren't a lot that I've met.

We have a system that's teetering.

It's hard to recognize that

because the supermarket shelves are filled.

The instability is there because of our food choices.

Not because of some evil empire

trying to destabilize our breadbasket to the world.

If anything, it's because we have demanded

an alarmingly small diversity of grains mostly that feed us,

and that's pushed the food system that we have

into the place it's in.

So, it's a reflection of us.

-Crop rotation is just really moving plants around

to different areas.

Rotation in general

is a really important concept in nature.

It reduces the potential of accumulated pathogens.

It exercises the soil

to really draw different things out of it,

because every plant species has a different need

that it's taking from the soil.

Kind of moving through sort of a procession of plants.

You're balancing the soil and working with that system.

That's not the case with corn and soy.

It's our choice

to have transposed this grass crop,

as corn or soybean crop,

on top of what really wants

to be a perennial grassland.

If we could really look close at the Plains,

we would see huge shifts in species.

And not just the animalsmoving across in the way they do

but the grasses changing, one species to another,

over long periods of time.

What made the Great Plains is that movement and change.

We have some of the most beautiful soil on this planet

in the Midwest of our country

and we're just chipping it away with corn and soy.

We're not generating something new.

There's more that could be addedwith the corn and soy.

-We've lived in the Garden of Eden.

We came to a place that had virgin soils

and has temperate climate that have resulted

in an over-abundance of food from the beginning.

And when the soils were depletedon the East Coast,

we plowed up the Midwest

and became very rich off of that.

And when those soils were depleted and distraught,

we moved west.

Manifest Destiny is about chasing

virgin soil and yields,

and we have come to the end of the line, of course,

only just recently.

And so the question now is a real inflection point

of a fork in the road --

Do you put the pedal to the metal

and try and increase the yields?

You think about how we produce food

in a completely different way, and if we do,

then we have to change the whole food culture.

We really have to create a system,

a pattern of eating that supports

the kind of diversity that the landscape

needs to be healthy.

We don't have that.

-Think about a place like the Dakotas,

which used to be a diverse agricultural landscape

and actually perfect for bees, in that part of their cycle,

you know, far north.

We've turned it into a agricultural monoculture.

And we've interspersed that monoculture

with thousands of oil wells,

as we have fracked apart the Bakken shale.

It's a pretty remarkable

industrial landscape now.

And it's not very friendly to people,

at least the people who'd been there

for many thousands of years,

who have tried their best to stand up against things

like the Dakota Access Pipeline.

And it's not very friendly to wild nature,

including the pollinators.

We have this idea of the American west

as this great untamed natural place,

but, in fact, outside of the national parks,

it's been about as industrialized

as it's possible to get.

♪♪

-The bees are dying right now.

They're not the only things that are dying.

I mean, we're also losing birds,bats, butterflies.

Entire habitats we're losing.

This is one of the worst mass extinction events

the planet Earth has ever seen.

So, what are they facing right now?

It's the same thing that we're all facing.

Pollution in the environment,

a simplified agricultural system,

a simplified landscape where they can't find food.

Suddenly, you've got starving,poisoned bees, and guess what --

They get sick.

So, what do I see when I see this simplified system?

I see farmers that are ready to make a change,

but don't have --

They're not hearing any voices telling them

what this is supposed to look like

or how to get it done.

And we can start that.

It's already started.

It's already started.

We know what we have to do.

It's just a matter of getting it done.

♪♪

-We got corn, soybeans, and small grains.

We got some rye. We're growing some canola.

That's up along the hill up here.

It's about two years old.

We're also growing some yellow field peas.

So, we got a diverse mix of some things,

but we're just not your standard farmers.

Last probably six, seven years, we've been farming

a little bit different than mainstream agriculture.

We've been trying to solve some problems

we're seeing on some of our farms

and bring it full circle

and bring it into modern agriculture

and not just be satisfied

with status quo, I guess.

A lot of things are self-pollinating.

That's why, I think, a lot of farmers

don't recognize bees as an important issue.

Because, well, what do I need to worry about bees for?

The rye pollinates itself.

The corn pollinates itself.

Farmers need to realize, is that the bees are,

like, one of the first line of defense

of why they're disappearing.

If the bees are disappearing,

what else has disappeared already,

because we don't count anything else.

And I think that's -- that's kind of the canary

in the mine shaft.

Opened our eyes up to pay attention

to what's going on the fields.

And people don't think

about how pollination is important but it's --

Without pollination, we wouldn'thave nothing but a stalk here.

So...

Traditional farming guys have a breakeven on --

They need the yields so much,

because I need to get a hundred bushel of corn

to sell for "X" amount of dollars

to pay for my input costs, to breakeven.

Anything above that's good -- that's the money you make.

But everybody gets focused on the yield, yield, yield.

We need more yield to make money.

And it's -- In my book, it's not all about yield.

It's about being profitable on the front side

with keeping your costs at bay.

Most farmers would be freaking out

by this crop that's standing here,

and I'm just tickled to death that it's still here yet.

This rye is going to lay down

and create a mat on top of the surface.

It's going to create a habitat for insects.

But it takes some management.

And the problem is, is this isn't simple.

This isn't -- This is outside the box,

and farmers want to be in the box.

They want to buy it in the jug.

They want to buy it in the bag.

I don't want to buy it in the bag or a jug

because that all costs me money.

Yes, cover crop seed costs me money,

but it's about learning how to work with nature

and allowing our plants to work for us.

-This was a soybean field last year.

And soon as the soybeans come off,

we get right on it with a drill

and plant the cover crop.

And it's the multispecies,

They call it multispecies.

It's crimson clover, the vetch,

the sweet peas, the rye.

He's got as much as seven and eight different varieties.

He's just he's always trying something.

Here we got vetch,

the purple flowers

and then crimson clover.

Right here is the vetch, lays down.

They're all the natural fertilizers.

This is before...

with everything up there, and this is the after.

And, the only thing

that disturbs this soil is the planter disk.

And this is the only place where it's worked up.

And that's just perfect.

♪♪

-Come to the realization that soil isn't dirt,

and that soil is a living, growing, thriving thing.

And just as you commented on why soil is so important

to the bee population and bee health,

it's also important to human health, also,

and that is something I think is hugely overlooked.

-We're trying.

You know, we're trying to help the environment.

I mean, we're doing all we can do

to do our share to save soils,

cut down on sprays,

just trying to help the environment, you know.

-So what we have here is kind ofa juxtaposition of contrast.

We've got what agriculture says,you know,

is a well-managed farm over here

and what I say is well managed farm over here,

as far as the diversity and stuff like that.

But this is soil from a heavily tilled field, right?

[ Thudding ] That's hard.

Imagine if you were a raindrop, and you were falling,

none of that water gets into the soil.

All of it just bounces off and then runs away, right?

Carrying, often times, a lot of your top soil with it.

I mean, when you -- [ Sniffs ]

When you smell it, there's not a lot there, right?

You break it up and what happens?

It plates off.

It plates. Look at that.

because there's nothing growing in there.

There's very little organic matter, okay.

Breaking it up -- I don't see any worms.

I don't see any ants, nothing.

So, now let's take a look at what we've got over here

in our regenerative soil.

Now look at this. Look at this.

That...

That is a healthy soil.

It crumbles.

That is a healthy soil.

You want to know the answer to your bee problem is?

Right there.

This is the answer to the bee problem.

If we got this on most of America's soils again,

your bees would stop dying.

♪♪

-Well, we're sitting 25 miles from New York City

in the middle of a working farm and education center

that explores the intersection between animal, vegetable,

and grain agriculture and the dining table,

the community around food,

and how do we promote good agriculture

and how do we talk about it

and inspire others to do this kind of system

in other regions of the country and the world?

-We want to generate health in this space,

first with the soil and the environment around it,

and that all areas, not just the production,

are really our focus.

We recognize the value of habitat

and the value of buffer and diversity and rotation

and soil health

as sort of components to long-term sustainability.

In the face of climate change,

these systems are much more resilient.

Protecting the land around us,

protecting the soil under us is really our obligation,

and from that, we get delicious,

nourishing products.

-Diversity is useful

because nature

is complicated.

Evolution has produced

an enormously intricate

and interesting world around us

with billions of niches

filled by different creatures doing different things.

And the human effort to simplify, basically,

is an effort of pulling out

as many of those pieces as you can

and seeing what you can get away with.

-When I look out and I see,

you know, simplified agriculture,

I see an opportunity, I guess.

You know, 5% of the terrestrial land surface of the country

right now is corn.

It's not 5% of the crop land. 5% of the land.

One plant species.

It's all maintained with chemical fertilizers,

most of it's genetically modified,

almost all of it is treated with glyphosate,

almost all of it is treated withneonicotinoid seed treatments.

One corn seed has enough neonicotinoid seed treatment

on it to kill tens of thousands of bees.

There is a real sense of urgency right now.

Climates are shifting because ofhow we're producing our foods.

Pollution is rampant right now

because of how we're producing our food.

That also gives us an opportunity,

a large scale opportunity,

because our food production system is so extensive,

to solve these planetary scale problems.

♪♪

-The strip we're standing on is actually a pollinator strip.

The farmer that I rent this from,

he grows pumpkins and sweet corn,

and the last three, four years,

his goal and my goal is create habitat

for beneficial insects and the bees.

Part of the field, it doesn't get sprayed,

just to start working with nature a little bit

and help them out a little bit.

He takes pumpkins to local produce over here,

and they want to know how much time he spends

washing his pumpkins, and he said,

"I don't wash my pumpkins hardly anymore

because they're all clean.

They lay on top of this rye."

And they said, "Well, you're full of mud.

You can't no-till pumpkins,"

and he's like, "Well, come to my farm."

-What we've got here is --

this is going to be a pumpkin field.

So, about a month ago, we came in,

and we planted an early pollinator strip,

which was buckwheat and mustard,

and the idea is to try to get that established quickly

so that when you know,

we do start to plant pumpkins in here,

that there already will be something existing

to attract our beneficial insects.

The idea to that is then that we will have something

blooming the entire time that the pumpkins are growing.

So, another tactic, if you want to put it that way,

we tried this year was...

Now, we did this about 10 days ago,

where we came in, and we planted a row

of Blue Hubbard squash.

I've been told by numerous seed companies

and also other producers

that Blue Hubbard squash attractthe cucumber beetles

particularly more than they will attract

to regular pumpkin plants.

The idea is, it creates a trap for these bugs to come to.

So, I pulled back the rye here

that was the cover crop in this field,

and this is one of the Blue Hubbard plants right here.

You can see how it's chewed.

Now, the cucumber beetles you're not seeing right now

because they're very shy.

As soon as they hear or see something,

they take off and hide in the residue,

which you can see here, as well,which feeds our biologics

and our critters that live in our soils here.

But there you can see what we got,

and they're just chewing the bejeepers out of this row,

and if we go over here...

...here's a row that's 6 feet away from it,

and this isn't just one that I picked out.

They're in a row here, every 4 feet.

You can see that this plant is green and lush

and no insect damage on it, whatsoever.

There's another one and right on down the row.

This is not the results I expected to see this early.

I really didn't expect to see this till later

when there was actual flowers on them

and there'd be more pollen there

and that pollen I believe is more attracted --

the cucumber beetles are more attracted to that type pollen.

So, it has just really been amazing,

and, like I said, we're in the very beginning stages of this,

but man, it's got me fired up right now.

So, we're excited.

What we're going to do is,

we're going to use our little hand sprayer

and we're only going to spray this row.

If we can keep them contained to one area

and not have to spray insecticide

over the entire field,

which, you know, most of the insecticides,

when you spray it, you kill everything,

and we don't want to do that.

[ Sheep bleat ]

-Regenerative farming, number one,

it's the future of our food production system.

I don't see any other way around it.

The principles seem to be consistent.

Do not disturb the soil.

Tillage was one of our biggest follies.

Number two, there should always be a living root in that soil.

Number three is, some diversity of plants

is better than none,

and more is better than less.

And then the final principle that seems to be unifying

in all of these different regenerative farms

is integrating crops and livestock production.

We separated them, didn't we?

We partitioned those things,

so now we ship our grain from our cornfield

over to a feed lot

and shove it down a cow's throat,

and then we have to pump the manure

back over onto the crop ground,

and that's like, what on Earth happened here?

When, really, all the cows want to do

is just eat grass to begin with.

-It's also an opportunity where everybody wins.

The farmers win. The beekeepers win.

Rural communities are regenerated.

Natural resources are rebuilt.

When these farmers start to adopt

these really innovative practices,

then they become the mouthpieces.

They have so much more credibility

than a scientist does with their neighbors.

You know, there's a relationship there,

and there's a trust there

and seeing is believing.

-20 years from now, cover crops

and that regenerative farming will be the norm.

I think we've probably hit the worst spot for bees,

and we're on the mend now.

It hasn't had a lot of acceptance,

but there's cutting edge guys in every community

that are starting to do this and experiment.

And, you know, more than policy,

what gets buy-in is new pickups.

So, when they're successful,

their neighbors will notice it, and anyway,

then that word will spread like wildflower,

'cause even faster than policy, new pickups. [ Chuckles ]

That's what spreads techniques.

♪♪

-We probably ought to talk a little bit about EPA,

'cause, you know, EPA, in my opinion,

has been co-opted by the people

they're supposed to regulate.

-[ Sighs ]

EPA should be taking care of, protecting our environment.

I call them the CPA.

They're chemical protection agency.

I've talked to people from EPA in bee meetings already

about just, like, this corn deal.

They know planting this corn. They've tested the dust.

They know how bad this chemical issue is

coming off the corn, but when you talk to them,

the first thing out of the guy's mouth is,

"What do you want me to do, tell the farmer he can't use

his new $150,000 piece of equipment?"

And that my thing was, what does it matter to you?

You're the EPA,

the Environmental Protection Agency.

Your job is protecting the environment at all cost.

It doesn't matter what that farmer paid

for that piece of machinery.

It doesn't matter what the chemical company paid

to put that chemical on the market.

Your job is protecting the environment.

-EPA doesn't do much original science,

certainly not the regulatory branches,

like the Office of Pesticide Programs.

The Office of Research and Development does,

but they don't regulate anything.

The Office of Pesticide Programshas people who review studies

that are done by, typically,

chemical manufacturers, themselves,

or consulting companies that they hire to do these studies.

Guidelines for studies on honey bees

are not very well developed yet,

and just in the last few years

do they even have some guidelines.

And I would say there's only been probably

three or four real studies done

that look at the bees in their environment,

instead of in the lab.

-I think there's infighting sometimes in the EPA.

And some are looking out for the money stream

to the political appointees who, you know,

answer to different politicians that want donations,

and then others are very concerned

with science and policy

and making sure we get good science,

and I think there's sometimes an internal fight,

and we, as citizens and taxpayers,

don't get the best results when those internal fights

are happening.

-Rules got changed at EPA.

Instead of registering a product

and making sure this product's okay,

we come up with a new thingcalled conditional registration.

Here's the packet.

We did the research.

We want a conditional registration.

The rules read that,

after this product's out there,

EPA has to review it,

and it can only be there so longwith conditional registration.

And it just go on like that for years.

Nobody ever does any more about it.

-Sometimes, you look and think,

"Well, is there a great cabal?"

[ Chuckling ] And I don't know if there is or not,

but it does look like a lot of times,

you have what's called, I guess in political science,

"the captured client,"

where the regulated ends up

controlling the regulator.

And it's the idea that a registrant that wants --

or a manufacturer,

that's a nice name for a manufacturer of a product --

wants to bring a product to the market,

so he'll write up the test

and show the EPA the test he wants to do

to test the product for its environmental impact.

Then they'll give him the nod, "Yeah, this is a good test."

Then he'll go test it,

and he'll generate all the results himself,

and then he'll give the results

back to the EPA for evaluation.

So, you know, given that model,

I think there's not a single person

that couldn't be a Harvard scholar.

It's like, I get to write my own test,

I get to take my own test,

and I get to turn the results in.

I know it came about on Libertarian ideas --

the person that benefits from the product

should pay for the process,

but it's like giving yourself a speeding ticket.

It's just not gonna happen. [ Chuckles ]

-You know, over the years, I've been to the EPA

on many, many occasions, and, of course,

gentleman that's the chief toxicologist

for Bayer Crop Science,

I meet him walking down the street.

We're a block from the EPA.

We walk in the door,

walk through security,

send our stuff through security,stand there in the lobby,

having to still finishing our conversation.

The gentleman coming to get me, because somebody

has to come down from upstairs to get me, gets me.

But while we're standing there having a conversation

with the EPA fellow, the Bayer Crop Science guy

gets on the elevator by himself and disappears.

I said to my friend from the EPA,

I said, "Oh, how does that work?"

His answer was, "Well, they're like the angels,

They come through the third story window."

So one of the problems we got here is,

we got too many people who know too many people,

And if you go to EPA,

it don't take you long to figure it out,

who worked for who,

or they leave EPA

and go get a very good job

or position at one of these companies.

As a taxpayer,

do I feel confident that they're protecting me?

No, they're not protecting me because they're basically

taking money from the chemical company

for registration to do the paperwork.

And that's how it all works.

You know, they're paying EPA.

-There's tremendous money invested in the current system,

and that money funds campaign contributions.

Those campaign contributions then influence

what senators and congressmen ultimately vote for,

and if you are jeopardizing those contributions,

then, suddenly, your federal agency's budget gets cut.

-Good friend of mine at EPA says,

"Every time I go into a meeting and start raising Cain

about something, I'm told to shut up.

Just remember, if they're not around,

you ain't going to have a job."

You know, it's just that simple.

-The USDA, the FDA, the EPA --

I mean, they're all government employees,

and I think there's a solidarity in that,

but the reality is that, no, they don't really --

In my experience, I didn't feel like they were --

they were working together for a common goal.

And especially the EPA and the USDA.

I mean, the USDA's job is to support agriculture.

The EPA's job is to protect the environment, right?

And so when agriculture destroys the environment,

then what happens, you know?

You would think that there wouldbe a common mind on this,

but the reality is, no, at least not in my experience.

-My naiveness that this thing was going to be fixed in,

you know a matter of time,

that's, you know...

It'll probably never happen in my lifetime.

I think the only way it ever gets fixed

is if the farmers themselves fix it.

♪♪

[ Bees buzzing ]

♪♪

-After the almond pollination,

we took a projectof re-queening all of our hives.

So, just because

of the environmental stresses on bees nowadays,

we re-queen every hive every year.

Concurrent to that, I had a part of my men take bees up

and pollinate apples and cherries in Washington,

and then we brought those bees back down.

And then after that, we began

the spring and summer honey season.

-Out here with the bees.

Sweet honey, and we are treating them,

putting some powder patties on them.

Keep them healthy.

-Smoke makes the bees very mellow.

The bees think that there's a forest fire coming,

so they start gorging themselveswith honey,

and it makes them really docile.

We put bees on the citrus to make citrus honey.

Then we started bringing bees back here

to make our wildflower, our clover, and alfalfa honey.

And in June, we're finished spreading them out

across the prairie here

and putting on extra boxes for honey.

And in July, we let the bees do their work

and try and fill up those boxes.

-Well, we've been everywhere.

Bees were in California,

and then they came back to Georgia and South Carolina,

and then they came back up to Pennsylvania --

pollinated apples

in Pennsylvania, here in southern PA,

and now the western part of the state.

And from there, a large portion of them

went to Maine to pollinate blueberries.

I'm leaving a day and a half here,

give or take, to go back up there

and spend the next week rounding them up

and sending them to Davey in New York

to use them to make honey and make more bees.

-This time a year,

we're beginning harvest full throttle,

because we want to have everything harvested

by the middle of September

and we'll ship themto the West Coast for the winter

before the prairies become really cold and unbearable.

First step in the harvest

is taking the honey away from the bees.

And then we'll heat it up,

and our first machine will take these little wax caps off.

Just a very thin layer of wax.

The bees put this cap on when they get it dry enough

so it won't spoil.

When it gets down below 18.5% moisture,

it becomes so dry that it can't ferment.

And so they put the cap on to keep it

from re-absorbing moisture.

And then we'll put it in a centrifuge.

It will spin the frame, and that will throw it out,

and we'll sell that honey to a packing house.

And then you can enjoy the same thing I'm enjoying.

If it was any fresher, you'd have to be a bee.

[ Whirring ]

-Well, we're getting ready to move south for the winter.

It's time. The cold weather is coming.

It's just that time of the season,

it's a vicious cycle, as I call it.

When the seasons change,

the bees need to go with the seasons.

[ Engines idling ] [ Indistinct conversation ]

♪♪

♪♪

-When I sit next to someone in a plane

and they hear that I'm involved with bees,

almost invariably they know there are problems with bees,

and they want to know what are the problems

and why is that important.

And, you know, the problems are many.

We're working hard to understand them.

And the importance is that our food system

is dependent upon their role as pollinators.

One of every three bites of food

is a result of insect pollination,

and that's something we don't want to give up.

-We ourselves have become users,consumers of pesticide.

You can see that very easily when you go to Walmart,

or you go to Lowe's, you go to Home Depot,

and the shelves are lined with pesticides,

and particularly herbicides.

You know, you think, well, herbicides aren't toxic,

but herbicides are completely, in many places,

eliminating the forage that bees require.

Bees require flowers.

They require nectar and pollen-producing flowers.

And this widespread use of herbicide,

not only in agriculture but also by homeowners...

Everybody wants a magnificent green lawn

without a single dandelion or clover plant in that lawn

or a blooming flower in that lawn.

That's a food desert for bees.

If you want a green lawn, great.

You know, let your front yard be green

and allow the backyard to have some dandelions and clover

and grow a pollinator garden.

Herbicides, fungicides and insecticides --

all three of those categories

are problematic for our bees.

And, again, it's not just honey bees.

It's all of our bee species.

-So, consumers may be curious as to how they can figure out

whether a pesticide product may hurt bees or not,

and I would avoid anything systemic.

You could also avoid pesticides altogether. [ Laughs ]

That's probably the best way.

There may be situations where you find it really important,

that you have a particular tree that you want to save,

in which case, using pesticides

that are approved for use in organic systems

are generally much less toxic,

and they won't be as persistent,for sure,

as the conventional pesticides.

-The dream of having agriculturewithout pesticides

is not a completely unrealistic dream.

But it means that science

would have to understand the complexity of biology

far more than we do now.

What the field of chemical ecology

tells us or gives us hope is that if we understand

the true complexities of the system,

we may be able to use those complexities

in a way that benefits us and is more sustainable

than if we try to come in

and overpower the system

with an external chemical that doesn't belong there.

-Beekeeping has changed a lot in the last 10 years.

In urban areas, in cities,

people keeping bees on rooftops,

keeping them on their balconies.

-It seems backwards to say

honey bees do well in urban areas,

but there's not as much natural forage

as there used to be, so in cities,

there's all these buffer zones,

and people like to plant colorful gardens,

so there is more natural forage.

-Research is helping us to better understand

what habitat we need to create,

and we're working right here with the USGS

in order to better understand

which of these flowers the bees are using,

when they're using them

and what it's going to do for the hives,

and that is going to be used to generate better recipes

for pollinator habitat

and conservation initiatives and policy.

-I think the bees provide, you know, sort of this window

into the natural world that people are very excited about,

and they want to support this as best as they can.

And then that trickles down into, you know,

this renewed interest and understanding

where our food comes from.

-When I started this job, you know,

it was basically older men who were keeping bees,

even at the, you know, backyard level.

And they were desperate for more young people

to get into beekeeping.

They weren't so vocal about women,

about wanting to have women [chuckling] come in

to the beekeeping arena, but there are now.

And there are a lot of young people,

a lot of new people, and it's very interesting.

The older beekeepers are a bit flummoxed,

because they don't know how to deal

with all these young people with new ideas

and, you know, new approaches and the Internet

and where they're getting their information.

So it's been a very interesting

to see how things have changed.

-The success of what's happening with honey bees is education.

It's going out in your community

and talking to people about bees, about farming,

bringing a beehive to your child's school.

You're seeing more female beekeepers.

You're seeing younger beekeepers.

You're seeing kids taking the beekeeping course

'cause they read about the bees or they're learned,

and they want to help.

They want to be a beekeeper.

-The U.S. beekeeping industry

and the U.S. production agriculture, I think,

would not have survived the last 10 years

if it hadn't been for the hard work of beekeepers.

Just dedicated to beekeeping

and replacing dead colonies and stuff.

And so that's all come at a cost to them,

usually personally, you know, in lost time

and money and things like that,

And a lot of people don't recognize that.

So, I think the U.S. beekeepers have to be applauded

for staying in there when the losses were so high,

otherwise they could have cut and run

and just gotten out of the business,

but they didn't.

They stayed in there, and most of them

have found ways to be a bit more productive.

Not as productive as they were in the past.

But we're still facing some uphill battles

in just trying to manage good bees

and keep them healthy.

-European Union-wide, there is a moratorium on use

of neonicotinoid insecticides on bee-attractive crops.

So any legislation like that that comes up,

the average person can make a difference

by letting their legislator know

that they want them to help protect bees,

and that that is a really important concept

and is going to help them get reelected, perhaps,

if they do support bees.

-So, what can consumers do?

Consumers can be aware of where their food comes from.

Food is so available in this country and so cheap.

We really have very little appreciation

for what it takes to produce food.

-Our foundation, our history is built on agriculture

and family farms.

It's getting wiped out through big agriculture

and, you know, big chemical companies.

How do we bring a respect and a reverence back

for the foundation of what the country was built on

and how do we do that in a way that's sustainable,

that looks towards the future and future generations.

Putting beehives in cities where people can go up

and see agriculture for the first time --

you know, a lot of them for the first time in their lives.

And to learn so much so quickly,it's the root

of what Bee Downtown is doing in cities,

is trying to just share education about it.

There are so many fantastic beekeepers across the country,

and if we can help tell their stories in cities,

then it helps to bring back

a respect and an understanding

for how much work goes into agriculture.

-A really simple thing people can do is just

buy U.S. honey.

It's cheaper to buy some of the foreign honeys,

but to keep the bee industry alive and healthy,

one of the things we need to do is just buy U.S. honey.

If you know the beekeeper, go directly to him.

If you're in a larger urban areaand you don't have that luxury,

you know, source it and check the jar

to make sure it says it's a product of USA.

If honey is a viable alternative,

we can keep the bees on flowers more.

-You know, supporting local foods and local farmers

is, again, a great way

to better connect with your community,

better sort of see what's going on,

you know, in your backyard, as it were,

and understand where your food is coming from.

-Also, as consumers,

accept more blemishes

on our apples.

We can say it's okay.

Right now, we want the perfect apple.

We want the perfect piece of fruit.

And what it takes to produce that perfect piece of fruit is

a lot of pesticide,

a lot of chemical pesticide.

The perfect apple is not the perfect apple.

-A better way for creating a sustainable agricultural system

is starting to come not from the regulatory agencies,

not from the top down,

but from the bottom up.

From the consumers demanding organic food,

from places like Costco

and Walmart providing organic food

because they're big enough

that they need contracts with growers.

They say "We need 500 acres of organic tomato sauce.

Can you do it?"

And then it's like

you're not swimming upstream anymore.

It's capitalism,

and you're using that economic driver

to change the farming system.

That's where the future is, in my opinion.

-We're seeing more people buying directly from farmers

in different ways,

through farm markets, through CSAs.

There's a whole food movement that is very exciting,

and a lot of young people

actually are very aware that there is a problem,

and they want to know where their food comes from.

They want to eat good, healthy food.

So, I am hopeful.

I am hopeful.

You know, it's like so many things --

Things have to get really low.

Things have to get really bad before they get better,

and I hope we're as low as we're going to go.

-I mean, I see the future,

and it gets me so excited, you know?

Not just the future in terms of bees,

but also it's so exciting to see these farmers

totally change what we think we know.

Challenge the system, you know.

-Paying attention to the natural world around us

and how it operates can be a lesson for us

in how to not only survive among fellow human beings,

but survive in synchrony with our environment.

-Bees are just one of those things

that benefit all the way around.

You know, you can see it if you watch it.

And then you can see it quantified

when scientists watch it.

I mean, we know bees are the right thing

to have on the landscape.

We know it's a win-win-win,

and we really get a nice pleasure out of it

when other people realize it, too.

-I don't care how many of these little,

you know, whack-a-moles that you knock down.

Your arm is going to get tired

before you solve the bee problem.

You need to focus back on reinventing

how we produce our food to begin with.

Then suddenly neonics aren't an issue anymore.

You just don't need it.

You don't need all the glyphosate anymore.

And...

yeah.

And we have healthy kids again.

We have healthy bees.

♪♪

♪♪