Theres money in them there bees.

[Greengage]

Sometimes I think I lead a sad life reading about bees, but in America beekeeping is a serious business, I came across this article when looking up how much you can get for supplying bees for pollination in America.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/17/sticky-fingers-rise-of-the-bee-thieves

[fatshark]

800,000 acres of California under almonds, two hives per acre, $165-200/hive for pollination contracts (2015 prices) ... so perhaps $300M in rental fees. The almond crop is worth about $6.5bn annually. That area of land, up perhaps 50% in the last decade or so, is about 5% of the area of Scotland ... what Scotland, or Ireland for that matter, has which California is short of is water.

It's also worth remembering that the bees will go from the almonds in February (California) to citrus in March (Florida), apples in April/May (New York), perhaps on to blueberries in June (Maine), pumpkins in August (Pennsylvania) and then back to Florida for honey production ... 11,000 miles.

[The Drone Ranger]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pcxMKrhaLNE

Splat bloom good for almonds bad for bees ?
The presenter even talks like the bees are the enemy

Of course they could just underplant the trees with non competing flower species so that the natural pollinators could survive from one season to the next but it would interfere with spraying insecticides by aircraft

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