< Why California Almonds Need North Dakota Flowers (And A Few Billion Bees)

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

And I'm Melissa Block.

Every once in a while we hear a story that reminds us that everything really is connected to everything else. This is one of those stories.

NPR's Dan Charles reports that high corn prices are making life difficult for honeybees in North Dakota, and that could undermine a booming almond business a thousand miles away in California.

DAN CHARLES, BYLINE: Let's start with the almonds. They're from an old-world tree that migrated to California and prospered in the hands of farmers like James McFarlane of Clovis.

JAMES MCFARLANE: When I was a boy - I'm still a boy - they used to talk about how California's crop rivaled Spain's. Well, California left Spain in the dust and didn't even look back.

CHARLES: It's one of the great success stories of California agriculture. Twenty years ago, the state produced a modest half-billion pounds of almonds each year.

MCFARLANE: We hit a billion pounds and it just never stopped. And this last year, it's the better part of two billion pounds.

CHARLES: The Central Valley of California actually grows two-thirds of all the almonds in the entire world. Now, these super-productive almond trees are needy creatures. They need lots of water and fertilizer. Also, they need big, vigorous insects to carry pollen from one blossom to another. They need honeybees. Billions of honeybees that have to come from somewhere else.

ZAC BROWNING: This has really become ground zero in commercial beekeeping.

CHARLES: Beekeeper Zac Browning just brought his hives here from a storage building in Idaho where they spent the winter. They came in on a caravan of tractor trailers, 480 white wooden boxes per trailer.

BROWNING: We can see, right now, if we extend our vision down this road, about 5,000 hives of bees.

CHARLES: It's just one part of a great national bee migration that connects California to the Northern Plains.

Right now, 1.6 million bee hives are in California's almond orchards.

BROWNING: The almond bloom is one of those events that's big enough that all the bees - in fact, the majority of the bees in the country can all be engaged and prospering.

CHARLES: America's beekeepers now earn as much money renting their bees to pollinate almonds as they do selling honey. But the bees can't stay in the almond orchards. In few weeks, they'll have to move on.

BROWNING: Because just as quickly as it arrived, the bloom is over with and we're back to a desert scenario here. And the bees have nothing to do other than to pick and fight among themselves. And we have to find our sanctuaries for these bees.

CHARLES: To survive, certainly to produce honey, bees need food. They need landscapes with plenty of flowers and nectar. But those simple things are surprisingly hard to find in modern America.

BROWNING: We're limited to the fringes of rural America, where we can stay away from pesticides, where we can find wildflowers.

CHARLES: Browning and lots of other beekeepers pack up the bees and drive back to the Northern Plains, especially to North Dakota. It's one of the few places where thousands of colonies of bees have been able to graze happily. And a big reason is a government program, the Conservation Reserve Program, which has been especially popular in North Dakota.

The government rents land from farmers and sets it aside, takes it out of crops to conserve the soil, save water and support wildlife. Flowers bloom on that land, sometimes alfalfa, clover, wildflowers all summer long. Just what bees need. But that floral feast is shrinking.

This is where those high corn prices come in. Farmers who used to put their land into the conservation reserve are having second thoughts. Corn is more profitable.

DR. CHIP EULISS: So the landscape is changing.

CHARLES: Chip Euliss lives in Jamestown, North Dakota and works for the U.S. Geological Survey.

EULISS: When I first came 20 years ago, it was rare to see a cornfield in North Dakota. And now they're very, very common.

CHARLES: The amount of land in the Conservation Reserve in North Dakota has declined by about a third over the past five years. This year, it's expected to take another plunge, maybe down to half of what it used to be.

Euliss is now part of a group of scientists that's trying to measure the impact of those changes. They're monitoring dozens of different hives to see whether bees that now spend their summers near cornfields stay as healthy as bees that get to graze on conservation reserve land.

Bees, of course, have been having lots of disease problems in recent years. For Zac Browning, the fourth generation of Browning beekeepers, the shrinking sanctuaries in the Dakotas, on top of all that, feels like a kind of personal crisis.

BROWNING: This is my livelihood, it's also kind of my birthright. And I really, really believe that we need to be able to pass this business, this passion onto the next generations. And if we don't stand up now, I don't think we're going to be able to pass anything on.

CHARLES: If there's one small bit of hope, it's the fact that it's not just a beekeeper's problem anymore. He's getting a lot more attention because the prosperity of almond growers, way out on the West Coast, also depends on what happens to bees on the lonely Northern Plains.

Dan Charles, NPR News.

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