Now we have the best data on honeybees,
so I'll use them as an example.
In the United States, bees in fact have been
in decline since World War II.
We have half the number of managed hives
in the United States now compared to 1945.
We're down to about two million hives of bees, we think.
And the reason is, after World War II,
we changed our farming practices.
We stopped planting cover crops.
We stopped planting clover and alfalfa,
which are natural fertilizers that fix nitrogen in the soil,
and instead we started using synthetic fertilizers.
Clover and alfalfa are highly nutritious food plants for bees.
And after World War II, we started using herbicides
to kill off the weeds in our farms.
Many of these weeds are flowering plants
that bees require for their survival.
And we started growing larger and larger crop monocultures.
Now we talk about food deserts,
places in our cities, neighborhoods that have no grocery stores.
The very farms that used to sustain bees
are now agricultural food deserts,
dominated by one or two plant species
like corn and soybeans.
Since World War II, we have been systematically
eliminating many of the flowering plants
that bees need for their survival.
And these monocultures extend even to crops
that are good for bees, like almonds.
Fifty years ago, beekeepers would take a few colonies,
hives of bees into the almond orchards, for pollination,
and also because the pollen in an almond blossom
is really high in protein. It's really good for bees.
Now, the scale of almond monoculture
demands that most of our nation's bees,
over 1.5 million hives of bees,
be transported across the nation
to pollinate this one crop.
And they're trucked in in semi-loads,
and they must be trucked out,
because after bloom, the almond orchards
are a vast and flowerless landscape.
