Question

Please explain the two reasons why even though 1/3 of the honeybees have been wiped out, the almond population has yet to suffer?
Need help ASAP!!

Answer 1

California’s $11bn (£8.4bn) almond industry has grown at an extraordinary rate. In 2000, almond orchards occupied 500,000 acres. 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.

The average American eats 2lb (900g) of almonds every year, more than in any other country. 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.

“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.

But these enormous orchards can’t function without bees.

It wasn’t that long ago that beekeeping was mostly a boutique pursuit of the gentleman apiarist. 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.

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During the 19th and early 20th centuries, beekeepers earned a modest living selling beeswax and honey. But in the late 20th century there was a titanic shift, exemplified by the career of Dennis Arp.

Arp, 67, got into beekeeping nearly four decades ago when he established his Mountain Top Honey company in Flagstaff, Arizona. A commanding presence with biceps toned from hoisting heavy bee boxes, Arp is the sort of diligent beekeeper who spends his days driving between apiary sites, and his nights studying online forums, reading articles on the latest mite treatment.

When cheap imported honey began cutting into Arp’s profits in the 1980s, he decided to send some of his hives with a beekeeper friend to pollinate almonds in California. A decade later he struck up a deal of his own with an almond grower in California’s Kern county. With that strategic move, Arp joined the growing ranks of migratory beekeepers in the US who still sell honey but mostly travel the country from one pollination site to the next with stacks of bee boxes in tow.


Left: Dennis Arp works his hives outside Rye. Right: A colony of honeybees hard at work for Mountain Top Honey Company outside Rye.
In the early 1980s, when Arp was just selling honey, he would lose about 5% of his hives per year to disease or weather conditions. Around 2000, Arp’s bees started dying in greater numbers.

First, he experienced a nearly 100% loss of his hives from an infestation of tracheal mites. Then he had to cope with the intrusion of Africanized “killer” bees. And finally, what he still considers the bane of his business, a parasitic mite called Varroa destructor literally sucked the life out of his bees. The mite feeds on the bee’s plump body, destroying the insect’s immune system and other vital functions. If Arp doesn’t apply regular chemical treatments for the mites, his colonies will die.

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Now Arp finds himself in a vicious circle: he is constantly battling to keep enough bees alive to meet the requirements of his almond contract. But if he was not pollinating almonds, maybe his bees would be healthier.

This year Arp’s bees, like more than two-thirds of the United States’ commercial honeybee population, will spend February in the toxic chemical soup of California’s Central Valley, fertilizing almonds one blossom at a time.

Pesticides are used for all kinds of crops across the state, but the almond, at 35m lb a year, is doused with greater absolute quantities than any other. One of the most widely applied pesticides is the herbicide glyphosate (AKA Roundup), which is a staple of large-scale almond growers and has been shown to be lethal to bees as well as cause cancer in humans. (The maker, Bayer-owned Monsanto, denies the cancer link when people use Roundup at the prescribed dosage. So far this year three US courts have found in favour of glyphosate users who developed forms of lymphoma; thousands more cases are pending.)

On top of the threat of pesticides, almond pollination is uniquely demanding for bees because colonies are aroused from winter dormancy about one to two months earlier than is natural. The sheer quantity of hives required far exceeds that of other crops – apples, America’s second-largest pollination crop, use only one-tenth the number of bees. And the bees are concentrated in one geographic region at the same time, exponentially increasing the risk of spreading sickness.

An almond tree blooms, near Visalia, in California. Honeybees pollinate many crops, including almond trees in February, and are essential to the food chain. Bees are mysteriously disappearing at an alarming rate in 24 states throughout the United States.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest An almond tree blooms near Visalia, in California. Photograph: Ann Johansson/Corbis via Getty Images
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“Bees are exposed to all kinds of diseases in California,” says Arp. “There can be hundreds of thousands of hives from multiple beekeepers in one staging area. It is like letting your bees go into a singles bar and then they have unprotected sex.”

The almond business has been good to Arp – last February, for instance, he installed 1,500 of his hives in one grower’s orchard at $200 per hive – so he is reluctant to make a direct connection between the constant health challenges with his bees and the time spent every spring in the almond groves. “The bees like working on the almonds,” says Arp. “But it obviously exposes them to risks.”

Now he routinely loses 30% or more of his bees a year, mirroring national statistics. In any other industry, the death of a third of your workforce would cause an international outcry – but this staggering loss is now considered the normal cost of doing business.

“The bees in the almond groves are being exploited and disrespected,” says Patrick Pynes, an organic beekeeper who teaches environmental studies at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. “They are in severe decline because our human relationship to them has become so destructive.”

Answer 2

Uhhhh thanks Ig...

Answer 3

so like kinda use that to write a paragraph for how 1/3 of the honeybees have been wiped out, the almond population

Answer 4

Ohh okay, I already found the answer by time u responded tho lol.

Answer 5

ahhh my bad its fine at least I learned something too

Answer 6

then close this question plz

Answer 7

Lmao thats good ig lmao

Answer 8

idek why I typed lmao twice

Answer 9

thx so people wouldn't be trying to help when you already have it
u the best

Answer 10

\(\color{#0cbb34}{\text{Originally Posted by}}\) @destineebaker2005
idek why I typed lmao twice
\(\color{#0cbb34}{\text{End of Quote}}\)
idk either lol

Answer 11

Lmao thxs tho bro

Answer 12

no prob