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Holy Shit! Almonds Require a Ton of Bees

Mother Jones

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Growing 80 percent of the globe’s almonds in California doesn’t just require massive amounts of water. It also takes a whole bunch of honeybees for pollination—roughly two hives’ worth for every acre of almonds trees, around 1.7 million hives altogether. That’s at least 80 percent of all available commercial hives in the United States, Gene Brandi, a California beekeeper who serves as vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation, recently told NPR.

Now, that vast army of bees—made up, all told, of more than 80 billion flying, buzzing soldiers—doesn’t stay put in California’s almond-happy Central Valley all year. The almond bloom typically lasts for just a few weeks (or less) in February. The modern honeybee operation is an itinerant business—beekeepers move hives throughout the year, in pursuit of paid pollination gigs—from tangerines in Florida to cherries in Washington state—as well as good forage for honey.

But California’s almond bloom is the biggest gig of all—the “largest managed pollination event anywhere in the world,” Scientific American reports. And as US honeybee populations’ health has flagged in recent years—most famously epitomized by the mysterious winter die-offs that began around a decade ago, known as colony collapse disorder—the almond industry has been drawing in a larger and and larger portion of the nation’s available bee hives.

One question that arises is: Why do the nation’s beekeepers uproot themselves and their winged charges to travel to California each year? The state houses about 500,000 beehives, meaning that more then 1 million come in, from as far away as Maine. What’s the incentive?

These days, US beekeepers typically make more money from renting out their bees for pollination than they do from producing honey. “Without pollination income, we’d be out of business,” Brandi told me. Income from the two sources varies year to year, but pollination income has grown over the years even as honey revenues have fallen, depressed by competition from imported honey. In 2012, for example, US beekeepers brought in $283 million from honey, versus an estimated $656 million from pollination.

And California’s almond growers have to shell out big money to draw in their pollinators—between $165 and $200 per hive, vs $45 to $75 a hive a decade ago, according to the Fresno Bee. That’s around $309 million, if we assume as average price of $182 per hive, the midpoint of the Bee‘s range.

What’s the impact on overall honeybee health, which has been under heavy pressure over the past decade? There are two potential downsides.

The first is from pesticides—insect growth regulators and fungicides—bees encounter in their travels around almond groves. During the 2014 California almond bloom, between 15 percent and 25 percent of beehives suffered “severe” damage, ranging from complete hive collapse to dead and deformed brood (the next generation of bees incubating in the hive), the Pollinator Stewardship Council estimated. The die-off caused an uproar, and many beekeepers pointed a finger at pesticides—and they probably had a point, as I showed here.

This year, Brandi told me, some beekeepers reported losses, but they weren’t nearly as severe or widespread as the ones in 2014. In the wake of the 2014 troubles, the Almond Board of California released a set of “best management practices” for protecting honeybees during the bloom that, Brandi said, may have influenced growers to avoid particularly harmful pesticide applications. Given that almond growers utterly rely on—and indeed, pay heavily for—honeybees for pollinating their crop, it seems logical that they’ll avoid poisoning them when possible. There will also be tension, though, as long as almond trees are planted in geographically concentrated and vast groves. Large monocrops provide an ideal habitat for pests like fungi and insects, and thus a strong incentive to respond with chemicals. There’s also the possibility that concentrating such a huge portion of the nation’s bees in such a tight geographical area facilitates the spread of viruses and other pathogens.

The second threat to bee health from pollinating California’s massive almond bloom comes from long-distance travel. This one lies at the heart of the beekeeping industry’s itinerant business model. Does it compromise bee health to pack hundreds of hives onto a flatbed truck for cross-country trips? The stresses go well beyond the occasional truck wreck. Scientific American explains the rigors of apiary highway travel like this:

The migration…continually boomerangs honeybees between times of plenty and borderline starvation. Once a particular bloom is over, the bees have nothing to eat, because there is only that one pollen-depleted crop as far as the eye can see. When on the road, bees cannot forage or defecate. And the sugar syrup and pollen patties beekeepers offer as compensation are not nearly as nutritious as pollen and nectar from wild plants. Scientists have a good understanding of the macronutrients in pollen such as protein, fat and carbohydrate, but know very little about its many micronutrients such as vitamins, metals and minerals—so replicating pollen is difficult.

A 2012 paper, coauthored by USDA bee researcher Jeff Pettis, found that long-distance travel may indeed have ill health effects—the researchers found that “bees experiencing transportation have trouble fully developing their food glands and this might affect their ability to nurse the next generation of workers.”

Brandi, for his part, dismisses travel as a factor in the overall decline in bee health. “Bees have been traveling back and forth across he country for years,” he said—since long before the colony collapse disorder and other health troubles began to emerge a decade ago, he said. He said bee travel has actually gotten less stressful over the years as beekeepers have upgraded to smoother-riding flatbed trucks. He said other factors, including pesticides, declining biodiversity, and mites (a bee pest) are likely more important drivers of declining bee health.

Meanwhile, California almond country’s massive appetite for pollination isn’t likely to dissipate anytime soon. According to the latest USDA numbers, acreage devoted to almonds expanded by 5 percent in 2014, and growers continue laying in yet more groves this year, Western Farm Press reports. Land devoted to almonds has grown 50 percent since 2005—and every time farmers add another acre of trees, they need access to two additional bee hives for pollination.

So why don’t more beekeepers simply move to California and stay put, to take advantage of the world’s biggest—and growing—pollination gig? I put that question to longtime bee expert Eric Mussen of the University of California-Davis. He said the state is already home to 500,000 of the nation’s 2.7 million hives. The almond bloom is great for a few weeks, but in terms of year-round foraging, “California is already at or near its carrying capacity for honeybees,” he said—the areas with the best-quality forage are already well stocked with bees.So satisfying the world’s ever-growing appetite for almonds will continue to require an annual armada of beehive-laden trucks.

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Holy Shit! Almonds Require a Ton of Bees

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The Fault in Our Stars (Unabridged) – John Green

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The Fault in Our Stars (Unabridged) – John Green

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Your Brussels Sprouts Could Power a Holiday Tree

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Your Brussels Sprouts Could Power a Holiday Tree

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Election Over, the Mormon Church Quietly Re-enters the Gay Marriage Fight

Mother Jones

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Reports that the Mormon Church had given up the fight over gay marriage were premature. Earlier this year, Mother Jones and other news outlets noted the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was making a concerted effort to mend its tortured relationship with gay members and their families and to stay out of divisive political fights over gay marriage. The church sat out virtually every state ballot measure on the issue in 2012, helping assure that marriage equality bills passed in Maryland, Maine, Minnesota and elsewhere. It launched a website, mormonsandgays.org, to urge better treatment of LGBT members. Mormons even marched in pride parades in Salt Lake City.

Now that the 2012 election is over, and Mitt Romney, the nation’s most famous Mormon, is no longer running for president, it seems the church is back in the ring. This week, the Hawaii state legislature began a special session to consider a bill that would legalize gay marriage in the state. The church is actively working to kill that measure.

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Election Over, the Mormon Church Quietly Re-enters the Gay Marriage Fight

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The Obamacare Website Might Finally Be Getting Better

Mother Jones

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My timing, as always, is perfect. Last night I wrote a post wondering just how bad the problems with the Obamacare website really are. Today, Sarah Kliff reports that things are finally getting better. The site remains slow, but she was able to complete an application that included financial assistance in about 30 minutes. Her application is now “in progress,” so she hasn’t begun the actual process of choosing a plan, but this is still better than it was before. Kliff also reports that shopping for plans is fairly smooth and easy.

So….maybe the problems are more resolvable than we thought, and are in fact finally getting resolved. Stay tuned.

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The Obamacare Website Might Finally Be Getting Better

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Portrait of an Afghan Assassin

Mother Jones

August 10, 2012, was the 22nd day of Ramadan, the holy month when devout Muslims fast from dawn until dusk. Summer days in southern Afghanistan are long and brutally hot, and the few dozen officers at the Garmsir headquarters of the Afghan National Police were relieved when, as the light slanted low over the Helmand River, the sunset call to prayer finally sounded. After the evening meal, no one paid much attention as Aynuddin, the 17-year-old assistant to the police chief, walked into the station, picked up an AK-47, and headed toward the open-air gym out back.

There were seven Marines in the gym that night, part of a police-training team that lived on the second floor of the dun-colored police station. They liked to use the gym—a makeshift cluster of weights and equipment under camouflage netting in a corner of the yard—after dusk, when the heat had begun to dissipate. Hospital corpsman David Oliver, a buff, blond, 24-year-old medic, was skipping rope in the corner. Two younger Marines, Greg “Buck” Buckley Jr. and Richard “Richie” Rivera, were doing dumbbell curls, yelling “Beach Day!” each time they brought the weights to their shoulders.

Members of the close-knit group had fantasized about Beach Day since the unit landed in Garmsir four months earlier. Once they arrived back at their base in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, this long-awaited day would be dedicated to women, waves, and booze, the things they missed most in dusty Afghanistan. They had planned every moment—where they’d stay, who’d carry the cooler and who the boom box. In just 40 hours they would begin the journey home. That’s why 29-year-old Staff Sgt. Scott Dickinson had joined them. He was trying to get in better shape for his wife.

The end of the deployment couldn’t come soon enough. Garmsir wasn’t exactly the action-packed war zone that they had been hoping for. Southern Helmand was largely peaceful now, three years after the 30,000-troop surge ordered by President Obama began in earnest, and none of them had fired a single shot in battle. Mentoring the Garmsir police force was a thankless task that they had come to loathe. It wasn’t just that the Afghan police were shockingly ill-trained and corrupt, or that the Marines spent their days teaching them the most rudimentary of tasks, such as using handcuffs or tourniquets. What was really galling was that the police clearly didn’t want them there. “The Afghans didn’t really give a shit,” Oliver recalled. “We’re supposed to be helping them, and it’s hard for us to understand that these guys really do not want our help.”

Lurking behind the resentment was a gnawing concern: that one of the cops might turn on the Marines without warning. So-called green-on-blue (or insider) attacks had been sweeping Afghanistan, leaving dozens of Americans dead. Innocent frictions between the two sides in Garmsir—such as arguments over living space—now took on a more menacing tone. The Marines felt like they were walking on eggshells. “I didn’t ever feel safe,” Oliver said. “It was, ‘Be aware, never trust them, always have your weapon on you.'” But that evening he and some of the other Marines had left their pistols on the weight rack. They were almost home free.

Aynuddin stepped into the gym and leveled his rifle.

The surge of insider attacks came out of nowhere. In 2007 and 2008, there were just six such attacks combined against members of the US-led International Security Assistance Force. The following year there were 8, the next, 15. In 2011, there were 22 attacks that killed 33 ISAF soldiers and wounded 50. In 2012, the number of attacks more than doubled, with 48 incidents that killed 64 soldiers, accounting for 16 percent of all coalition combat deaths that year. “The sudden wave of insider attacks caught nato and the Obama administration completely by surprise,” says Graeme Smith, a Kabul-based analyst at the International Crisis Group. “It cut against the grain of counterinsurgency theory, because these betrayals happened right at the moment when the internationals were lavishing money and attention on the Afghan forces.”

Coalition deaths spiked as partnering with Afghan units increased.

The attacks have had a dramatic psychological and political impact on the international mission in Afghanistan. An attack that killed four soldiers in January 2012 convinced French forces to pull out of Afghanistan by the end of the year. “The French army is not in Afghanistan so that Afghan soldiers can shoot at them,” then-President Nicolas Sarkozy said.

The perpetrators have come from each of Afghanistan’s regions and major ethnic groups, and from every branch of service. They range from lowly recruits to colonels, from teenagers to men in their 60s. Some have been identified as Taliban infiltrators, and many of the surviving attackers have cited their anger at the occupation of their country. But the US military maintains that the majority of attacks have no relationship with the insurgency, and are the result of what it calls cultural conflicts—like the February 2012 case of an Afghan soldier who shot two US troops at Bagram Airfield over the accidental burning of Korans by NATO soldiers.

The attacks have confounded military leaders. There was no parallel experience in Iraq or Vietnam, where the United States also battled powerful insurgencies while simultaneously training local forces. Nor does the cultural hypothesis fully explain why insider attacks exploded in the last two years, after thousands of coalition soldiers have been in Afghanistan for nearly a decade and the bulk of the surge troops were in place by the summer of 2010.

By 2012, the attacks had precipitated a crisis in ISAF’s training and transition plan. The Obama administration’s withdrawal strategy hinges on training a functioning Afghan army and police force that will fill the void once all US combat troops exit Afghanistan in a little more than a year. The training mission had to go forward for the strategy to have a glimmer of success. But soldiers were dying in alarming numbers at the hands of their Afghan allies. This is what the ISAF command was grappling with in the spring of 2012, when the helicopters carrying Buck and his unit touched down in Garmsir.

Once upon a time there was a boy who was seventeen. He would always go to school and attend his classes, but at home he would constantly get into fights, and his brothers and his family were very unhappy with him.

One day, he got into an argument with his mother. She would normally curse him, but this time she even said, “I hope you are hit by a cold bullet.”

So she wished even death for her own son. This sentence made him very sad. By now it was sunset, and the boy took some money that he had and left the house.

“The big fight is over, but we are still on high alert. This is their backyard; we have learned to watch our backs. No one can be trusted.” Lance Cpl. Brandon D. Seebeck, 23.

“It all started over an argument. I don’t know if the Taliban had any influence.” ANP Jahanzeb Baloch, 22.

Lashkar Gah, about an hour and a half drive north along the river from Garmsir, is the quiet provincial capital of Helmand, where bazaars selling pomegranates and freshly slaughtered chickens bustle for an hour at sunset before plunging into a deep nocturnal calm. I had come here with a question whose answer had eluded both the Marines and the Afghan government after the Garmsir attack that had killed three Marines: Why had Aynuddin committed such a brutal act?

His family wasn’t hard to find. They lived down a side street and invited me into their modest, concrete-walled guest room, a common feature of many Afghan homes. I sat down cross-legged with the men of Aynuddin’s family, glasses of green tea steaming before us in the brisk winter air. His 27-year-old half brother, Isamuddin, sat across from me and did most of the talking. He was a truck driver, and he had a round face with black eyebrows that pointed upward in the middle like chevrons, giving him an air of constant concern. Beside him was Shamshad, Aynuddin’s full brother, 16 years old with pale freckles, clear green eyes, and roughly chapped hands. “He looks exactly like his brother,” Isamuddin said, patting him on the shoulder.

The brothers had grown up during the civil war, a brutal conflict during which many Afghans perished from hunger and lack of medical care. Life was better now, though. Isamuddin and relatives had a decent business hauling containers to the military bases, and so the younger boys like Aynuddin and Shamshad had a chance to go to school. “We grew up illiterate and uneducated,” Isamuddin said, tapping his head, “and it’s only today that we know about education.”

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Portrait of an Afghan Assassin

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How the Failure of Immigration Reform Might Pave the Way for Filibuster Reform

Mother Jones

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Ed Kilgore makes a point today about immigration reform and “enforcement first” that deserves more attention:

What hasn’t much been discussed is the fact that when it comes to border enforcement, the Obama administration has actually been very, very hawkish, precisely because it was considered necessary to make it possible for Republicans to support comprehensive reform.

….This deportation record has gotten extensive coverage in Spanish-language media, and was hardly a secret to anyone….There’s a [] lesson for the White House in this story: taking actions thought to be popular with conservatives in order to create good will among congressional Republicans is rarely a good idea. They’ll either ignore the evidence or come up with some other reason to oppose the hated Obama.

Yep. Immigration from Mexico is way down from its peak, and that’s partly due to the lousy economy. But it’s also due to Obama’s dedication to continuing—and even beefing up—the tougher immigration enforcement started under President Bush: more border patrol officers, continued building of the fence, harsh deportation policies, and continued improvement of the E-Verify program that employers use to check the legal status of new hires. All of these things have annoyed liberals (or worse) and, as Ed says, were done primarily to set up conditions that would allow Republicans to support immigration reform. But it sure looks as if it didn’t do any good.

This is just another example of why Harry Reid might actually go through with filibuster reform this year: there’s simply nothing that Democrats can do anymore to get even the most modest cooperation from Republicans. The GOP is now so uniformly obstructionist that, paradoxically, they have no political leverage left. Ezra Klein provides the play-by-play:

Consider the record. Republicans abandoned a budget deal in favor of the mess that is sequestration. Gun control failed. Student loan rates doubled. Republicans are promising another debt-ceiling showdown. And now immigration looks unlikely to make it through the House. What exactly is left that Democrats want to get done and Republicans are likely to work with them to finish?

Good question. Earlier this year there was lots of talk about Obama’s need to reach out and do more schmoozing, or perhaps his need to make sure that Republicans actually knew what he was offering. That stuff can’t hurt, but it sure doesn’t look like it did any good, either. The modern Republican Party just doesn’t care. Their base judges them almost solely by their opposition to whatever Obama wants, so that’s what they give them. The nuclear option and its cousins are about all that Obama and the Democratic Party have left.

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How the Failure of Immigration Reform Might Pave the Way for Filibuster Reform

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