- [Narrator] Production funding for "American Grown" provided by James G Parker Insurance, protecting agribusiness in the valley for over 40 years.

Brandt, professional agriculture.

Discovering, manufacturing, and supplying the ag inputs that support the heroes that work hard to feed a hungry world every day.

By unWired Broadband, today's internet for rural central California.

Keeping valley ag connected since 2003.

By Hodges Electric, trusted by builders to wire thousands of valley homes.

Now bringing that trust direct to you.

By Wawona Frozen foods, fruit as it should be.

Family-owned since 1963.

By Harris Farms, a legacy of growing.

And by Valley Air Conditioning & Repair, family-owned for over 50 years dedicated to supporting valley agriculture and families that grow food for the nation.

(logo bangs) (gentle music) - Right now I'm looking to see, I requeened these hives on the 11th of this month, so I'm looking to see if they took the queen that I put in here and released her.

And then seeing if there's any eggs in the brood and see if they accepted the queen after they released her, if they killed her off.

And I gotta put another one in, so.

Big part of springtime operations of beekeeping, a lot of guys will let their queens go a couple years.

I personally like the one year approach, because after year one, once they start getting into year two, their fertility kind of starts to go down and they don't produce as much brood, which means they don't produce as many bees.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Every day, most of us sit down to a meal without giving it much thought to how it arrived on our plate.

We expect grocery store shelves to be full.

We expect orchards to bloom.

We expect another harvest to come next year.

But hidden inside that expectation is one of the hardest working creatures on earth, the honeybee.

- I'm Brian Johnston from Chowchilla, California.

I've been a beekeeper.

My family's been running bees since 1908, fourth generation.

Started in Colorado, north of Denver, about 25 miles where my youngest uncle still works, runs bees out of where my great-grandfather was.

And then we moved out to Chowchilla in 2008 and bringing bees out here since 1988 for the almond pollination.

As the development of all the almonds kept growing, our business kept growing with it.

So it was time to make the move to leave Colorado.

And we moved out here, like I said, in 2008 and haven't looked back since.

- [Narrator] It's easy to think of bees as little more than backyard nuisances, something to avoid at a picnic or squat away on a summer afternoon.

But for farmers, beekeepers, and really all of us, they are something entirely different.

They're essential.

From almonds and cherries to melons, berries, squash, and dozens of other crops, millions of bees go to work every single day performing a job no machine has ever been able to replace.

In fact, about one out of every three bites of food we eat depends in some way on pollinators like honeybees.

Their work contributes billions of dollars to American agriculture every year.

But lately something isn't right.

Across the country, beekeepers are fighting battles the rest of us rarely see: tiny parasitic varroa mites that spread deadly viruses, changing weather patterns, shrinking forage, the stress of moving millions of hives from crop to crop, and yes, sometimes even pesticide exposure.

None of these changes exist in isolation.

Together, they place incredible pressure on the colonies that agriculture depends on.

- And the restrictions here, it says this product can be toxic to bees.

So what do I do?

Well, the regulations require me to check what we call the bee maps, BeeWhere California.

And the way this works in California, we have to have a working relationship with the bee guys and applicators like myself.

The bee guys need to correctly place on the map where they really are, so I know as an applicator where they really are.

Sometimes they may be a quarter mile away actually, or half a mile away when I show up I'm like, "Oh, this is not exactly where they are."

- [Narrator] So what does it take to keep America's pollinators alive?

What does modern beekeeping really look like today?

And if we fail to protect one of nature's most important workers, what does that mean for the future of our food?

Sometimes the biggest stories aren't the loudest.

Sometimes they're measured in the beating of tiny wings in orchards filled with blossoms.

And in the quiet dedication of people whose work most of us never see.

Now, we're following them to discover why protecting the smallest workers in agriculture may be one of the biggest jobs on the farm.

(guitar strums) (light country music) - Now the reason bees are so important for agriculture is they pollinate one-third of all the food we eat and consume on a daily basis.

You know, from your cantaloupes, to your watermelons, to the almonds, obviously, you know, your pickles, strawberries, kiwi, you name it, it all comes down to, you know, the bees doing the pollination and going to all the plants to pollinate them so we put food on the table for everyone.

Oh, it's really took a hit this year on the bee losses.

As a nation, you know, we lost a little over 1.2 million hives as an industry this through this fall and spring here, compared to what we normally do on a year, which I'd say is probably about, you know, half a million hives on a normal basis.

But it was very drastic this year, which took a hit on the almonds.

I know several guys who, you know, didn't have enough bees for their contracts for almond pollination and several growers that were scrambling at, you know, the tail end.

And some of them did not find enough bees to cover what they needed for the pollination on the almonds, you know, due to the lack of bees on the losses this year.

- So right here you can see the candies all been eaten out.

They released the queen that was in the cage.

So now we can try and find an open frame of open cells full of eggs.

So this is a good frame of brood.

You can see they're starting to build some queen cells right here.

We don't want those, so we'll take them out.

We want to see them accept that queen that we put in versus raise their own.

So this one, they got a whole bunch of orange honey stored away, and then another decent pattern of brood.

So population-wise, this one's pretty strong.

Starting to draw a lot of the foundation and putting some orange honey away.

That's the good stuff.

For oranges, it's usually right after the almonds.

Almonds are the second, if not the biggest source of income for beekeepers year round.

Just for, it's guaranteed money.

You're not dealing with the what ifs of selling, selling your honey for certain prices.

And I think without that, the industry would be in a lot of trouble.

So it's usually the beginning of April, you want to get into your orange locations, and they start blooming that first week.

The bloom will last up until the second to last week of April, the last week of April, depending on the county.

Fresno County, they actually do a really good job with pollinator protection when it comes to citrus.

They have a time period where they'll announce that the citrus is in bloom.

So you're not allowed to spray within a mile of a citrus field any pesticides.

And that goes on until they call petal fall, which is 75% of the petals on the north side of the tree have fallen off.

And they have county guys that drive around the county looking at different orchards to determine that.

Like I said, it's usually the last week or the second to last week of April.

But as soon as they call petal fall, all the growers are no longer obligated not to spray pesticides, and they usually want to get on it right away because there's a pest in the oranges called thrip worm, and it's usually prevalent right around the blossom period.

So they want to get ahead of the thrip worm right away so it doesn't ruin their crops.

But as soon as they call petal fall, you want to be pretty far away from an orange grove if you could.

(slow country music) - [Narrator] For most of us, bees are simply part of the landscape, a familiar buzz in the spring that we rarely stop to think about.

But for the people whose livelihoods depend on them, every season brings a new set of challenges.

Honeybees today face pressure from almost every direction.

Tiny parasitic mites weaken entire colonies.

Diseases spread quickly through the hives.

Nutrition can become scarce as habitat disappears and flowering plants become less diverse.

Long distance transportation places stress on colonies that may travel thousands of miles each year following bloom after bloom across the country.

And then there are pesticides.

It's a topic that often sparks strong opinions.

But the reality, at least here in California agriculture, is far more complex than many people realize.

Modern farming depends on healthy pollinators just as much as beekeepers do.

Almonds, melons, citrus, dozens of California crops rely on bees to produce the food that ends up on our tables.

Protecting pollinators isn't simply good stewardship, it's good farming.

That's why California has built one of the nation's most comprehensive systems for coordinating pesticide applications around managed bee colonies.

Farmers, licensed applicators, county agricultural commissioners and beekeepers all work together through mapping systems, notification requirements, and carefully timed applications designed to reduce risk before sprayers ever enter the field.

It's a level of planning that most consumers never see.

To understand how that system works in the real world, we meet Erik Wilson.

He's both a farmer and a licensed pesticide applicator.

He depends on bees to pollinate his own crops while also carrying the responsibility of applying crop protection products safely around the very pollinators agriculture depends on.

- What I like to try to do is try to do my mixing is not to have to measure, just throw a box in.

You know what I mean?

- [Producer] Yeah.

- And I can do that by adjusting my rate on my sprayer to use a little bit more water or a little bit less, and then I can get a easier mixing and loading.

So let's do it at 15 gallons.

How it works and for a lot of people who don't understand how a spraying application starts with, we have what we call pest control advisors that check the fields on a weekly or biweekly basis.

And they walk through and they give us a report of what they're finding.

And then we discuss what materials might be most advantageous if we need to spray.

And we consider a lot of things.

We consider when the crop might be harvested because there's limitations on products you can use when we're spraying, like for cantaloupe or honeydews, for fresh produce, you know, there's time restraints on when you can use a product.

And so we go through a list of ideas of what would be the best if we have a situation.

Most if not all growers don't like to see this machine in their field because it's costing them lots of money.

And so we do everything we possibly can, including myself because I farm too, to not have to spray.

And so yesterday I had to do a bee check, and there was one bee guy on the map that was within about 4,000 feet of the application site that I had to do.

And anything within a mile radius of bees, every grower that's doing an application has to tell this bee guy or give him 48 hours basically.

- [Producer] To move the bee.

- If he decides to.

Most bee guys out here in this time of year are not being hired to pollinate cotton.

Cotton doesn't need pollination.

Corn doesn't need pollination.

Alfalfa doesn't need bee pollination.

We do pay, like we have cantaloupes over here and honeydews for pollination for those crops.

And a lot of times there's a lot of bees because of the almond industry, just an enormous amount of bees in the spring.

A lot of guys from out of state will find open areas wherever they can to put bees, and they do it specifically so they can go into our cotton fields to keep them going through the summer.

- It happens every few years on losses like this.

You know, 2005 was one of our most devastating years, you know, years past until now.

And I think a lot of it is, you know, pesticide-related neonicotinoid seeding that goes on in the Midwest on the corn crops and soybean crops where the bees start working that into the corn and when the corn starts tasseling, the bees will go in there in the fall and, you know, think getting the pollen out of it and storing it in the comb.

Well, a lot of that stuff I think, you know, with the neonicotinoid, it has the poison in there, and it really doesn't show the effect on the bees until later in the fall when in the dearth times of the years when there's no nectar, no pollen.

They'll start eating what they stored, and that's when you start seeing a lot of the losses coming out of the bees is during that time.

Mites definitely have a huge impact on it too.

There's no ifs, ands, or buts, we've been fighting mites since 1980, ever since I was 13 years old wanting to get into bee business.

And my dad's like, "You're nuts.

Maybe you ought to start looking at something different.

I don't know how these mites are going."

But, you know, we've been fighting it for 45 years as an industry still with the mites.

And you just get a lot of more mite resistance year in year out on them.

You know, the mite treatments that we have, we just haven't had anything new coming out on the market, you know, that's USDA approved while you're trying to produce honey that's really having an effect on the mites.

So, you know, we're down to just a few products that are working, but, you know, the bees are just getting so immune to it.

It's like putting water on them a lot of times.

I mean, you keep treating them, you keep treating them, and then you're just not getting the effect that they used to have on it.

So that has a lot to do with it also.

I think it's still gonna keep going.

The industry as it is, is there gonna be changes?

Sure there's gonna be some changes, but, you know, we have to keep the bees going, otherwise we're not gonna be eating near as good as what we are right now.

So there's gonna be ways.

I'm not exactly sure what it's gonna be just yet, but it's gonna be out there.

We'll find a way through it one way or the other.

- Yeah, and these bees, they're on a honey flow right now, so they really are at the calmest point they'll ever be because right now they smell all the nectar in the air, and they want to really chase that and get as much into the hive as they can before winter.

So, when they're on a flow like this, you're pretty much ignored for the most part.

Anymore with honey prices the way they are, if you could do it and afford the labor and everything else, it's a lot easier.

The margins are better to pack your own honey versus selling it to big honey packers.

(producer speaks indistinctly) - Yeah, and just the honesty and transparency of it.

I mean, if you're selling a bottle of Argentinian honey, say it's Argentinian honey.

And if people want exotic honey, I'm sure they'd buy it, you know?

But, it's always hidden in small print on the back of the label where consumers don't see it up front.

(contemplative music) - Yeah, I've got my temperature and wind speed going on right now.

And so now I got the field and these are my lines.

You can kind of see the field.

- [Producer] Oh yeah.

- So I do that way.

The rate of what I'm supposed to do on one product is 9.078 ounces per acre.

And the reason why they did that is so the pest control advisor did the grower a favor.

Because when he did that, he needs only exactly 10 gallons of the product.

So see if he wrote it for 9 or for 10 ounces, then he would've had to bought another whole jug and only use a little bit out of it, right?

And they're not gonna, you don't get to return it.

So he's being conscientious about the grower's expenses.

When I'm alone and I'm doing a job, I really enjoy it.

I have a good time.

Stuff needs to be done.

And I just like being outside and working out on a farm for this.

I gotta pinch myself because I wasn't born into this.

I found my way through this hard work, I guess, and it's worked out pretty cool.

Okay, so what we're doing today here, we're spraying to control some weeds.

I was spraying a plant growth regulator, okay?

In California, a lot of cotton growers use plant growth regulators to slow the growth of cotton plants now because a vegetative growth takes away from fruit production.

You want to try to steer your plant in not growing vegetatively, stretching out.

And it's putting its energy and water into non-productive forms of growing.

So you try to keep it tight and compact and that also saves you on water.

It's putting the expensive resources like fertilizer into the plant for productive purposes.

So we put that on there.

Cotton is one that needs a plant growth regulator.

It's really, really soft on bees.

It's actually listed as non-toxic to bees.

And the only issue with this stuff is there's limitations even how many times you can use a product.

Because we don't wanna, I think it's twice and then you're done.

That's all you can use it.

So you really want to make sure when you do use it, you've got a problem built up enough.

And what that does too is, it doesn't hurt your beneficials.

And so throughout the season, later in the season, we usually have aphid and whitefly that can show up.

And and if you manage your cotton crop in such a way, you will have beneficials.

Sometimes they do like ladybug larvas, man, they can just mow down aphids.

I mean, it's amazing when you get them going.

If you haven't disturbed that in your field, they can save you thousands and thousands of dollars, man.

- [Producer] No kidding?

- Yeah, oh my gosh.

It's amazing how they can clean up a field.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] If there's one thing we take away from this story, it's that bees aren't just another insect.

They're part of the foundation that keeps food on our tables.

Every spring, millions of honeybees are moved across the country to pollinate crops that feed families here in California and the world.

It's a remarkable system built on timing, trust, and an enormous amount of work that most of us never see.

But it's also a system under pressure: disease, parasites, changing weather, habitat loss, pesticides, transportation stress, and the economics of modern agriculture all play a role.

As demand for pollination grows so does the pressure on beekeepers to keep healthy colonies alive and productive.

In years when hive numbers fall, competition for those colonies become even more intense.

It's a reminder that this isn't just about bees, it's about an entire food system that depends on them.

One thing became clear to us while making this episode, farmers and beekeepers aren't on opposite sides of this conversation.

Their futures are tied together.

A grower can't produce many of the crops we depend on without healthy pollinators.

And a beekeeper can't succeed without growers who understand the value of protecting those bees.

That's why programs like BeeWhere, careful communication between growers and applicators, and a growing awareness of pollinator health matters so much.

They represent people working together, not because they're told to, but because their livelihoods, their families, and in many cases, generations of tradition depend on getting it right.

Maybe that's the biggest lesson here.

Protecting our food supply doesn't begin at the grocery store.

It begins in orchards and fields with people whose names most of us will never know, but whose work touches every meal we eat.

So the next time you see a bee drifting from flour to flour, remember you're watching something far bigger than a single insect at work.

You're watching one of nature's most important partnerships and one that deserves our attention, our respect, and our commitment to protect it.

Because when we take care of bees, we're also taking care of ourselves.

(serene music) Production funding for "American Grown" provided by James G Parker Insurance, protecting agribusiness in the valley for over 40 years.

Brandt, professional agriculture.

Discovering, manufacturing, and supplying the ag inputs that support the heroes that work hard to feed a hungry world every day.

By unWired Broadband, today's internet for rural central California.

Keeping valley ag connected since 2003.

By Hodges Electric, trusted by builders to wire thousands of valley homes.

Now bringing that trust direct to you.

By Wawona Frozen Foods, fruit as it should be.

Family-owned since 1963.

By Harris Farms, a legacy of growing.

And by Valley Air Conditioning & Repair, family-owned for over 50 years dedicated to supporting valley agriculture and families that grow food for the nation.

(logo bangs)