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Comment by njarboe | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if enough bees to pollinate the trees could survive on just being left alone in a almond orchard year round? The almond farms could have hives they leave in their orchards and don't extract the honey so the bees have lots of stored energy. This is the reason the bees make honey in the wild, a stored energy source. Hire a few bee keepers to keep an eye on things and fix problems. No moving around of diseases, stable source of bees, low cost? I know it is all the trend to outsource everything but bees seems pretty core to a fruit/nut tree operation.

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Almond trees produce no (or very little) nector. Older bees need that to live. Brood will eat pollen though.

Googling images of almond orchards, they look like deserts. There is nothing else anywhere near so bees wouldn’t be able to forage anything else to sustain them. Given the look of the land, these orchards are watered, and that must be a massive problem also.

But do they have to be deserts? Couldn't some kind of cover crop be useful both in terms of bee-feeding and in terms of reducing leeching of soil nutrients?

I think that's a great idea, but seems conflicting to the mindset that the almond farmers have (and most conventional farmers). That is, that's a more whole system mindset (see also permaculture) where farmers growing acres upon acres of just one crop (almonds, corn, soy) see it as discrete and disconnected from other crops and resources.

In the EU farmers are paid to leave wildlife-strips and beetle-banks in their fields. The almond mono-culture I saw on the Netflix series mentioned was shocking to me. It looks like one big drought could turn it into a dust bowl! Land is almost never left as bare soil in Britain due to our wet climate.

However before the EU paid for it, and rules were put in to stop removal of hedgerows, the UK was being carved into larger and larger fields of mono-culture cereals.

Ah that's very interesting! You might find Bill Mollison's "Global Gardener" series interesting.

It's too short of a season - few weeks. For the rest of the year, the bees will literally have nothing to forage on and when there is lack of forage, the queen will stop laying eggs, which will eventually lead to colony's death.

Looks to me like the tradeoff is between hiring/paying local beekeepers to tend hives as needed year-round, or paying $200/hive to ship in hives from elsewhere during the flowering season. The latter probably ends up being less expensive, as long as there's enough supply.

In theory this sounds great. So I wonder why it's not implemented? Perhaps it results in lower profits for bee keepers since they have to bring up more hives to service the same number of customers?

No -- beehives rely on near-continuous nectar flow throughout spring and summer, and almonds don't produce enough for long enough to feed a hive.

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