'It's only important if you eat food': inside a film on the honeybee crisis
Written by Adrian Horton
The Pollinators investigates the honeybee, which is essential to America’s agriculture and food supply, and dying by the billions in the process
Every February, Brett Adee joins a caravan of semi-trucks, bound for California’s Central Valley, loaded with millions upon millions of fragile, precious cargo: honeybees. In order for the state’s almond trees to bear fruit – and thus generate an $11bn industry supplying 80% of the world’s almonds – they must be pollinated during the brief window in which the trees flower, from late February through March. And that requires an army of pollinators: some 1.8m hives of honeybees, almost the entire commercial supply in the US, drafted into big agriculture and trucked into central California from as far as the Great Plains and the east coast.
Related: Alarm over deaths of bees from rapidly spreading viral disease
Related: 'Like sending bees to war': the deadly truth behind your almond milk obsession
The Pollinators is out in the US digitally with a UK date yet to be announced
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