The Industrial Revolution of Bees

It’s Pollinator Week, and the bugs need us more than ever. Not just bees: butterflies, moths, wasps, flies, beetles, midges, hummingbirds … Around 90 percent of the world's flowering plants and 75 percent of our major food crops rely on pollinators, and they’re dying. Nowhere is insect decline more intimately entwined with our own than with honeybees, 2.7 million colonies of which are hauled around the country to pollinate American crops—most often, California almond trees. Since 2012, Jennie Durant has been studying the social and environmental drivers of bee decline, and her new book, Bitter Honey, combines her research with dozens of interviews with beekeepers, conservationists, scientists, and farmers.There’s no single answer to what’s killing the bees—pesticides, monoculture crops, overwork, parasites, viruses, competition for decreasing forage, the list goes on, and climate change exacerbates all of it—but that also means there are many ways we can still save them.Jennie Durant is a writer, researcher, and author whose work explores why bees and other pollinators are declining, and what it will take to build a more just and sustainable food system.Go beyond the episode:Jennie Durant’s Bitter Honey: Big Ag's Threat to Bees and the Fight to Save ThemIt’s not too late to celebrate Pollinator Week!Learn to identify some of the 4,000-odd bee species in North AmericaSave the Beltsville Bee Lab!Tune in every other week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • PandoraHave suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.