The Pollinators (FULL MOVIE) Bees, Food Supply, Environment | Award-Winning Documentary

[ 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, includin

g 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 sta

rt 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 b

y 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 end

s 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 bec

ome 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 smart in that way, because blooming in the end of February, in through March. So, in California, now today, there's cl

ose 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 be

es" -- 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 in

dustry. 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 Unite

d 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 Partnership out of Maryland's been showing -- bee

n losing 30% to 40% of our hives. So a 30% loss there puts us down to 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 wildfl

owers. 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, alt

hough 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 educate all the farmers across the state on what the best managem

ent 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 ver

y 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 problematic for 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 acre

s 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 earlie

r, 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 w

ax 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 worl

dwide. 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 chemical i

n 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 p

recautionary 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 a

nd 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 b

ees 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 money for 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 h

urting 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 dollars to 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 stewards

hip while they're in the almonds so they're available for everything else. This is the crop 100% 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 th

e 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 off that 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 bigg

est 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, 'ca

use 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 bro

wn 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 the

re'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 a

nd 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 bees on the gro

und 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 th

e 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 de

ad 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 t

hey've found is that 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 have around 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

hill right 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 tr

ees, 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 telli

ng 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 ins

talling 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 days when 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 t

he 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 ca

n 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 r

id 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, 20

08. 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 in in the middle of May. They'll be here until early, mid-June -- somewhere around the 10th, 12th, 14th of June. The blueberries w

ill 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 produce the 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 o

ut. 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 r

ight 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 e

lse, 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 3

00 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 product that'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 th

at 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 replaced with acres of corn and soybeans. -When we were looking at mapping around 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 a

reas 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 vis

its 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 d

iversity 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 animals moving 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 added with 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 depleted on the East Coast, we plowed up the Midwes

t 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 cultur

e. 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 r

emarkable 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 r

ight 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 al

so 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 recogniz

e 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 peop

le don't think about how pollination is important but it's -- Without pollination, we wouldn't have 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 wan

t 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 of a juxtaposition of contrast. We've got what ag

riculture 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 th

e 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 terrestri

al 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 with neonicotinoid 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 of how we're producing ou

r 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 do

esn'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 attract the 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, th

e 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 o

f 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 the

y 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, m

ore 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 Protect

ion 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 Programs has people wh

o 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 t

he 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 thing called conditi

onal 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 long with 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 pol

itical 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 contributio

ns, 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 would be 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 project of 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 a

nd 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 themselves with 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 acr

oss 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 them to 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 f

irst 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 a

ny 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 a

re 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 line

d 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 deser

t 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 a

lso 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 agriculture without 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, keepi

ng 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 Intern

et 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 t

he 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 a

verage 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 fami

ly 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. hon

ey. If you know the beekeeper, go directly to him. If you're in a larger urban area and 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 deman

ding 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, throug

h 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 th

e 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 wa

tch 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 t

he glyphosate anymore. And... yeah. And we have healthy kids again. We have healthy bees. ♪♪ ♪♪