![]() But in the late 20th century there was a titanic shift, exemplified by the career of Dennis Arp.Īrp, 67, got into beekeeping nearly four decades ago when he established his Mountain Top Honey company in Flagstaff, Arizona. When European immigrants introduced their own version of agriculture to North America, they also imported the art of beekeeping, along with boxes of Apis mellifera, the domesticated European honeybee.ĭuring the 19th and early 20th centuries, beekeepers earned a modest living selling beeswax and honey. It wasn’t that long ago that beekeeping was mostly a boutique pursuit of the gentleman apiarist. “We don’t see a cap on growth at this point, especially with the incredible versatility of almonds in foods,” says Richard Waycott, president and CEO of the Almond Board of California, a not-for-profit advocacy organization representing the majority of farmers.īut these enormous orchards can’t function without bees. US almond milk sales have grown 250% over the past five years to reach $1.2bn, over four times that of any other plant-based milk, according to a 2018 Nielsen report. The average American eats 2lb (900g) of almonds every year, more than in any other country. By 2018 that had more than doubled – almond groves in the Central Valley now blanket an area the size of Delaware, producing 2.3bn lb (1m tonnes) of almonds annually sold around the world. In 2000, almond orchards occupied 500,000 acres. Photograph: Ann Johansson/Corbis via Getty Images Nuts for almondsĬalifornia’s $11bn (£8.4bn) almond industry has grown at an extraordinary rate. The bees pollinate many crops, including almond trees in February, and are essential to the food chain. Many don’t come back.”īeehives stand stacked along a blooming almond orchard near Shafter, California. “The high mortality rate creates a sad business model for beekeepers,” says Nate Donley, a senior scientist for the Center for Biological Diversity. More bees die every year in the US than all other fish and animals raised for slaughter combined. But no other class of livestock comes close to the scorched-earth circumstances that commercial honeybees face. But California’s almond industry places them in a monoculture where growers expect the bees to be predictably productive year after year.Ĭommercial honeybees are considered livestock by the US Department of Agriculture because of the creature’s vital role in food production. Like all bees, honeybees thrive in a biodiverse landscape. Environmentalists argue a better solution is to transform the way large-scale agriculture is carried out in the US. Honeybees out-compete diverse native bee species for forage, and threaten the endangered species that are already struggling to survive climate change. However, environmentalists and organic beekeepers maintain that the real culprit is something more systemic: America’s reliance on industrial agriculture methods, especially those used by the almond industry, which demands a large-scale mechanization of one of nature’s most delicate natural processes.Įnvironmental advocates argue that the huge, commercially driven proliferation of the European honeybees used on almond farms is itself undermining the ecosystem for all bees. This is more than one-third of commercial US bee colonies, the highest number since the annual survey started in the mid-2000s.īeekeepers attributed the high mortality rate to pesticide exposure, diseases from parasites and habitat loss. Photograph: Caitlin O’Hara/The GuardianĪ recent survey of commercial beekeepers showed that 50 billion bees – more than seven times the world’s human population – were wiped out in a few months during winter 2018-19. Adam Arp, Dennis’s son, works outside Rye on.
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