Every year, as almond trees bloom across California, the world’s largest managed bee migration event kicks off. Beekeepers from around the United States truck billions of bees onto vast orchards in the Central Valley to cross-pollinate the trees. This beekeeping practice sustains California’s almond industry — the state’s top valued agricultural export — but it comes at a deep cost to the insects. It’s also just one example of how our food systems have come to rely on honey bees.

In Bitter Honey: Big Ag’s Threat to Bees and the Fight to Save Them, Jennie Durant traces the relationship between industrial agriculture and honey bees across more than a century. The book offers a deeply-reported examination of the stressors faced by beekeepers, what they do to stay in business despite them and how those decisions impact wild bees, domesticated honey bees and the environment. Through conversations with beekeepers, scientists and policymakers, the book paints an incisive picture of beekeeping as a large-scale livestock operation that has prioritized “productivity and efficiency above all else,” to the detriment of native bees and crops. Still, despite its subject matter, it does all this with a good dose of humor and hope for these buzzy creatures’ future.

The title of the book on beekeeping, Durant explains, has a double meaning. “Literally, the title refers to the acrid honey that bees produce as they pollinate almonds, honey that beekeepers typically do not sell but let their bees consume instead,” Durant explains in the book. “Figuratively, however, it refers to the compromises beekeepers make to keep their operations afloat.”

Agriculture and Beekeeping: A Toxic Relationship

To understand the current state of beekeeping in the United States, Durant takes the reader to its very beginning. Western honey bees were brought to the Americas by European settlers for their honey and the pollination of non-native fruit trees and clover, which were used as food for livestock and their communities. As colonists traveled west, so did their bees and crops. Bees and beekeeping became symbols of colonization. “Like the settlers they traveled with, honey bees reshaped the land in Europe’s image, displacing native bees, changing plant communities, and mirroring the wider story of Indigenous loss.”

Read the full article about beekeeping and Big Ag by Sara Hashemi at Sentient.