“It was a garden full of life and color,” Janet told me. “It was beautiful.” Her sister advocated for native plants and encouraged them to think about pollinators and avoid pesticides. Their endeavor eventually lured butterflies, bees, goldfinches and sometimes snakes to a thrumming oasis at the edge of Cedar Lane Park in Columbia, Maryland. But it also stirred the anger of a neighbor who, aided by the local homeowner association (HOA), demanded the Crouches revert to the norm. People’s yards are for lawns, they insisted, and little else.

“We got a cease and desist letter from the HOA’s attorney, which was shocking, telling us to rip it all out,” said Janet, who works for the U.S. Department of Health. The neighbor argued that their biodiverse garden was an unsightly mess that was attracting unwanted visitors like deer and rodents to what was otherwise a sea of prim suburban lawns.

“He was fairly sincere that you’re just not supposed to do that,” Jeff told me. “He was brainwashed that we should only have grass.” Janet added: “When we didn’t immediately comply, he started creating all these narratives around us that we were crazy.”

In 2017, the HOA demanded that the Crouches restore their grass lawn or risk fines or worse. The couple was undaunted. A years-long battle ensued. “You can’t let the bullies win,” Janet said. “And that’s what it felt like: We were being bullied on our own property.”

The Crouches had unwittingly stumbled into a little-known battle over tidy neighborhood lawns. Celebrated in modern American suburbia, tended lawns have become a prized avatar of the American dream of home ownership, a key backdrop to neighborhood rituals and a symbol of order and calm and safety — of a good life. The moral rectitude around lawns has been given muscle through HOAs — which govern neighborhoods home to more than 75 million Americans — and town and city ordinances that stipulate how long grass can be and how often people should trim it.

Those who draw the ire of their neighbors by cultivating something other than a grass monoculture can face stiff penalties: Last year, authorities in Catskill, a bucolic town in New York, took a resident to court and threatened her with fines of $1,000 a day for not mowing her pollinator-friendly natural garden.

How did the American lawn become the site of such vicious disagreements? American culture embodies a zeal for individuality and property rights — of the idea that people should be able to conduct their own affairs in their own territory without the neighbors or the government imposing their views and forcing conformity. Like so many other cultural quarrels, the lawn has this deep contradiction at its heart.

The roots of this American obsession with a neat lawn are surprisingly shallow, initially imported from European sensibilities. Defenders of castles in medieval England and France would often cut back vegetation near the fortification to enable clear sight lines of potential invaders, an unintentional aesthetic that was later replicated in grand, sweeping lawns of aristocratic country estates.

Such vistas did not greet the early European colonists in America, with the native grasses on the eastern seaboard mostly broom straw, wild rye and marsh grass — varieties that didn’t have the lush, carpet-like look of those seen in Europe. Native Americans had already altered this landscape for hunting, but white settlers then upended it with the introduction of grazing cattle, sheep and goats that decimated the local grasses and opened terrain for favored types of imported replacement grass.

Paintings of the period often show dwellings surrounded by wildflowers or dirt. Having a vegetable patch or a few animals nearby was more attainable than the back-breaking maintenance required to plant and tame a lawn, which was the preserve only of the wealthy, aspirational elite who could afford teams of scythe-wielding servants. Thomas Jefferson had a celebrated lawn — which comes from the French word “launde,” meaning glade or cleared area — at his Monticello estate, while George Washington employed English landscape gardeners to achieve the same at Mount Vernon.

As the 19th and then 20th centuries unspooled, though, the idealized lawn came within reach for more Americans. The invention of lawnmowers in the first half of the 19th century and, later, sprinklers reduced the amount of labor needed to nurture a lawn, and a new vision of park-like suburbia started to bloom, partly spurred by Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect famous for creating New York City’s Central Park. In 1868, Olmsted was tasked with designing one of the country’s first planned suburban communities near Chicago, with each house set back 30 feet from the street and the connected lawns giving the impression of a flowing park rather than the high walls that often separated homes in England.

Within a few decades, a manicured lawn had become a fetishized status symbol. In “The Great Gatsby,” Jay Gatsby is so perturbed by the difference between the lavish grounds of his mansion and the scruffy yard abutting Nick Carraway’s nearby rented house that he sends his own gardeners to tame the unruly patch. “We both looked at the grass — there was a sharp line where my ragged lawn ended and the darker, well-kept expanse of his began,” Carraway concedes.

Then, as government loans helped millions of soldiers returning from the ravages of World War II to obtain their own homes, the model of identikit suburbia, complete with a swatch of emerald lawn, became the norm. “A fine lawn makes a frame for a dwelling,” said Abraham Levitt, the pioneering architect who, with his two sons, built the first Levittowns, the planned suburbs that became the desired template for American middle-class life. “It is the first thing a visitor sees. And first impressions are the lasting ones.”

The growing popularity of golf, with its courses’ trimmed grass aesthetic, and the spread of car culture helped push Americans deeper into a cult of civilized lawns. New, hardier types of grass, such as Kentucky bluegrass — which, despite its name, is usually thought to have arrived with the Spanish — became ubiquitous. The lawn care industry began to heavily market an American sense of pride in the home and disciplined yard work as a leisure pursuit. Lawn care became entwined with neighborliness and even a measure of whether the homeowner was a solid, dependable provider. As Ted Steinberg, a history professor at Case Western Reserve University and an authority on the advancement of the lawn, put it in his book “American Green,” “The perfect lawn rose to become an icon of the American Dream.”

“The American lawn is a thing, and it is American, deeply American,” Paul Robbins, an expert in environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of the book “Lawn People,” told me. “There becomes a kind of local social pressure to make sure you’re not letting down the neighborhood — you’re keeping up the property values. Those then become morally normative.”

This devotion has turned the U.S. into the undisputed global superpower of lawns. Around 40 million acres of lawn, an area almost as large as the state of Georgia, carpets the nation. Lawn grass occupies more area than corn. Each year, enough water to fill Chesapeake Bay is hurled collectively onto American lawns, along with more than 80 million pounds of pesticides, in order to maintain the sanitized, carpet-like turf. In aggregate, this vast expanse of manicured grass rivals the area of America’s celebrated national parks.

It’s a waste of space, Douglas Tallamy, an entomologist at the University of Delaware, told me. More biodiversity on American lawns could soak up carbon, better mitigate floods, support pollinators that propagate our food and host the insects that form the crucial early threads of the terrestrial food web. “But lawns do none of those things,” Tallamy said. 

The typical suburban lawn is zealously mown, raked and bombarded with chemicals. Flowering plants that would typically appear in an untended meadow are sparse. For insects, reptiles, birds and many other creatures, these places are hostile no-go zones. Closely cut grass is neither habitat nor food for most insects.

Allowing dandelions and clover to sprout in lawns could help support a diversity of U.S. bees, studies have found. In North America, nearly a quarter of all native bees are threatened, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, and native bees are doing much critical pollination.

Lawns that are friendly to insects are critical for a whole cascade of creatures up the food chain. North America’s bird population has shrunk by 3 billion — about one in four of all birds on the continent — since the 1970s. “That’s a genocide, a birdicide,” said Robbins. “And that comes from a cascade of all kinds of landscaping decisions.”

Part of the problem is the myriad of foreign plants that now festoon suburban flowerbeds. Native insects evolved with native plants and cannot feed upon the waves of Bradford pear, burning bush, English ivy, ginkgo and porcelain berry that have found their way to the U.S. Worse, many of these imports become invasive after escaping yards and crowd out other plant life in public spaces. “They are what I call ecological tumors,” said Tallamy. “They get everywhere and are devastating our natural areas.”

Of all the things that Mike and Sian Pugh loved most about the ranch-style home they bought in Loudon County, Virginia, in 2005, the meadow at the rear of the property was foremost. Mike, who is a record producer, enjoyed periodically strolling out of the French doors into the pasture where cows once grazed. It had never been a lawn. The Pughs seeded the field with wildflowers and from their porch keenly watched the birds, deer and butterflies, especially the monarchs fluttering to the milkweed.

“I planted a few things,” Mike told me, “but mostly left it alone. It was a conscious decision — it was one of the reasons we got the house.” He would occasionally battle invasive grasses and mow the field, but he enjoyed the vibrancy of the meadow’s natural state. “When you get to fall and there are 14 different colors of yellow there, it’s stunning,” he said.

But someone complained about the chickens the Pughs were raising, contravening HOA edicts, and the dispute ramped up to include the meadow itself. Some neighbors, Mike told me, felt that the Pughs were not playing by the rules everyone else was: diligently trimming hedges, mowing lawns and painting fences black. It was a matter of fairness, they said.

At heated local meetings, the Pughs were accused of reducing nearby property values. “People would scream at us,” Mike said. “I was called a bully and a ‘fucking liar.’ The first time that happened, it was really upsetting. It became ridiculous. I think these people are huge hypocrites.” As Marcus Lopez, then the president of the HOA, told The Washington Post in 2018, the Pughs “upset a lot of people. There’s a principle involved. If you have one exception, how do you hold a neighborhood to a standard?”

The battle ended up costing the Pughs $40,000 in legal fees over five years. Ultimately, the two sides settled with an agreement in 2019 that the HOA rules would have to change in order to force the Pughs to cut the meadow. The Pughs moved last year to a smaller property in West Virginia, where they feel people are less likely to intervene over vegetation choices. 

Resistance to the imposition of lawns has gathered steam in recent years. They are increasingly viewed as a crucible of environmental breakdown. A growing number of homeowners, alarmed by a loss of nature that imperils birds and bees, have started to question whether their lawns need to be closely cut and strafed with chemicals. The National Wildlife Federation has reported a surge in the number of homes they’ve certified as wildlife gardens.

Some laws are shifting in response. After the Crouches came to a settlement with their neighbor and HOA in 2020 — agreeing to restore a strip along the property boundary but leaving the rest of the garden intact — the state passed groundbreaking legislation to curb the ability of HOAs to raze eco-friendly yards.

But as is often the case in the U.S., a change to an old status quo triggered a backlash. Defenders of the idealized postage stamp of emerald lawn aren’t backing down, seeking to overturn reforms aimed at allowing in wilder, more nature-orientated gardens.

Five years ago, Appleton, Wisconsin, embraced No Mow May, an initiative that grew popular in the U.K. that encourages people to ease off on cutting the lawn during May to allow flowering plants that provide nutrition to bees and other animals. But then last summer, Appleton reversed course, reinstating previous requirements for residents to keep grass to eight inches or less during May and instead offering more general pollinator-friendly guidance for a “slow mow summer.”

“There was a lot of feedback that it was sort of ridiculous, that we look like a shabby city,” said Sheri Hartzheim, an Appleton councilor who voted for No Mow May to be scaled back. “People were using it as an excuse to not maintain yards. Without rules, there is chaos.”

Hartzheim identifies as a libertarian but told me she considered neat lawns a sort of civic virtue, which she acknowledged could be inconsistent with her usual suspicion of onerous regulations. “I generally think government should stay out of people’s business,” she said. “But we live in a city, and there are rules for a reason; we have to live next door to folks. Letting yards go willy-nilly, having mice and voles everywhere — that isn’t something we should support.”

Grass is not the only thing about lawns that divides Americans. Filipine Hoogland, who advocates for reformed landscaping practices in New York, has been pushing for restrictions on leaf blowers due to their noise and environmental impact. “We get so many aggressive reactions,” she told me. “We’ve gotten death threats. They feel it’s overreaching.”

Hoogland was born in the Netherlands and has spent decades in the U.S. She lamented the American attitude to lawns — “an enigma” to her. “Americans are more afraid of pests, and there is this infatuation with cleanliness — I don’t really understand it,” she said. On landscaping crews, with their armories of mowers and weed whackers and pesticide appliers, she said: “These aren’t gardeners — they are cleaning services. They have no clue about plants.”

Tallamy advocates for what he calls “homegrown national parks” — seeding native plants (oaks are an excellent choice for most places, he said) and reducing mowing and chemicals. Lawns can exist in this world, too, just not as the sole representative of green spaces. “It doesn’t mean we have to become slobs,” he said. “We can still have manicured lawns to line flowerbeds or driveways to show it’s intentional. We just have to have less of it. We need more plants and less lawn.”

On talks around the country, Tallamy said he gets a largely positive response to this message. “The culture is changing,” he said. “Just not fast enough. You still see a lot of lawn out there.” Cultural change is messy and can prompt a backlash. It may take the hard-edged limits of a changing environment and unyielding economics for lawns to recede from the norm of American life.

Geography may help. In the U.S. West, severe drought fueled by the climate crisis has spurred cities such as Las Vegas to tear out ornamental grass and reorientate more pragmatically to more parched surroundings. Homeowners in exclusive California neighborhoods have been shamed for dousing their lawns in water. “Water’s expensive; it’s harder to come by, and west of the Mississippi, it starts to seem like a really bad idea to use a whole lot of water on lawns,” said Robbins. Elsewhere, inflation and a potential labor shortage may make it less attractive for homeowners and municipalities to pour endless funding into machinery and toxins that obliterate every weed and wildflower.

But at our current political moment, the shift toward more natural landscapes and concern about pollinators may not happen quickly. “The future of the lawn depends on things that have very little to do with individual choice,” Robbins said, citing water availability, real estate markets and the cost of fertilizer and other chemicals. Fevered politics, too, will leave its mark. “I worry that a slow movement towards an agreement that may be a more diverse landscape is possible might bump up against our current political moment,” he said. “And that might be yet another way that lawns hang on for another 40 years.”

The post The Cult Of The American Lawn appeared first on NOEMA.

Every year, the bloom of thousands of almond trees in California spurs one of the world’s largest, albeit artificial, migrations of animals; as billions of honeybees are loaded onto trucks and sent to deliver lucrative pollination fees for their human keepers. This insect odyssey ensures paydays for often struggling beekeepers, the production of most of the world’s almonds, and increasingly, an opportunity for enterprising thieves.

Standing in the way of the bee rustlers — often alone — is Rowdy Freeman, a deputy at the Butte County Sheriff’s Office in California’s Central Valley. Freeman is a steely sort of bee detective. Angular, with a shaved head and fond of wearing wrap-around sunglasses, the taciturn deputy is a beekeeper himself and is aghast at how hive thefts have become so ubiquitous.

Last year, according to Freeman calculations, a record of more than 2,300 honeybee hives were stolen in the Central Valley. This year’s thefts could easily surpass that number, with Freeman recording nearly 2,000 hives stolen already. Despite the growing scale of this crime, Freeman is typically the only law enforcement officer working with beekeepers to track the stolen hives and their thieves.

“I’m trying to get more help for this because it’s become a major problem, it’s getting out of control,” Freeman said. While California has state branches devoted to stamping out the theft of horses or cattle, no such task force exists for bees, he notes with no small amount of envy and frustration. The federal government is also uninterested in the issue, despite what Freeman describes as clear-cut evidence that stolen hives have been transported over state lines.

“It’s just me,” he said. “The state of California has done nothing to help.”

The Honeybee Era

Horses and cattle may be the antecedents to bees in terms of human thievery, but the scale involved here is very different. Farmers have carpeted huge swathes of prime Central Valley land with serried ranks of almond trees. The annual budding of this sought-after nut and its burgeoning pollination needs means up to roughly nine out of every 10 commercial honeybee hives must be sent here from all corners of the U.S.

For some time at the start of each year, the Central Valley becomes a sort of giant, mechanized jamboree of honeybees, with 18-wheelers and semis bearing several million hives traversing this monoculture and depositing their cargo in orchards to propagate the crop. We are accustomed to aggregating sheep and cows and, to a lesser degree at home, our cats and dogs. But in terms of the sheer numbers — 2.7 million hives, according to Wenger, or a lowball estimate of some 54 billion bees to support this year’s almond crop — there is little to compare to the annual seething mass of bees clustered in California outside of enthralling wild scenes like the African migration of wildebeest. 

“It makes you think you’re reading an old western about moving 7,000 head of cattle across the high plains,” said Jacob Wenger, an entomologist at California State University, Fresno. “But even then, it wasn’t 90% of all the beef cattle in the United States.”

Despite the numbers of hives involved and the lucrative fees beekeepers can now charge growers for their tiny winged contractors, security around this enterprise is usually fairly lax. Hives are trucked in, often by third-party crews, and unloaded in orchards or holding lots that are rarely gated, fenced or guarded, and easily visible from the road. 

Amid the frenzy of this seasonal activity, semi-trucks will sometimes load or unload hives in the dead of night. Given Central Valley farmland’s sprawling, horizon-busting nature, a visitor might not even be seen at all. In such conditions, a truck, a smattering of local knowledge and opportunism is all that’s needed to spirit away tens of thousands of dollars of humming property.

In January, Victor Lazo, who has kept bees in the Houston area for the past decade, sent around 4,000 colonies to the Central Valley for almond season. After the truck crew dropped off the hives in an orchard, Lazo arrived to feed them and treat them for any disease; to his shock, he discovered a whole row — 168 hives in all — had vanished.

“My first reaction was that the guys had set them down in the wrong spot,” Lazo said. His hives didn’t have GPS trackers on them (a technological fix some beekeepers have resorted to), but the truck did, and the GPS showed it had stopped at the correct spot. The hives had vanished into the underworld of bee thievery and would likely reappear in a different guise when sold to a grower, or to supplement another beekeeper’s diminished stock.

“The growers don’t care where the hives come from as long as they have hives out there,” Lazo explained. “For now, I’ve just written them off. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack — it’s hard to catch a thief unless you catch them doing it. It’s been a really bad year in California for theft.”

Sometimes the bee rustling is bad enough that it wipes out a whole business. James Steinbrugger, 40, a California native who has kept bees since he was a 13-year-old, left his stash near the small town of Five Points to help a fellow beekeeper unload his hives last year. When he returned to his stash of bees, he was astonished to find every single one — some 408 colonies containing an estimated eight million honeybees — had been pilfered. 

“It basically put me out of the bee business,” said a dejected Steinbrugger, who now works on construction jobs. “It’s big money. These crooks didn’t have to do all the upkeep, the financials of it. They just get a truck, rip people off and get paid.”

Bee Thief Gangs

As a detective working these cases, Freeman looks for clues like tire tracks in the mud. But most leads come through the information bouncing around the fraternity of mostly male beekeepers who congregate in California each year. The reality is that given the specialized knowledge necessary to handle loading millions of buzzing flying creatures speedily and safely onto trucks at night, such thievery almost certainly involves an inside man — another member of this beekeeping brethren. 

Lately, the talk in beekeeping circles has been about whether the surging thefts are the work of the typical solo opportunists wanting to supplement a bad year, or a larger and more organized effort. The theft of hundreds of hives in one go, like in Steinbrugger’s case, pointed to the latter. Such an efficient heist points to a level of organization that only a criminal group, or gang, could pull off.

The closest police have come to breaking up such a gang was after Alexa Pavlov, a Missouri-based beekeeper, received a tip in 2017 that some of her stolen hives might be found in a patch of scrubby land a few miles outside Fresno, California. Pavlov jumped on a plane and went straight to the site, which police later described as a “chop shop for bees.” Clouds of bees flew around dozens of scattered boxes belonging to different beekeepers, some of which appeared to be in the process of being split apart. Nearby, a gaunt 51-year-old Pavel Tveretinov, was spotted tending to this Frankenstein-like apiary. Pavlov contacted police who subsequently arrested and charged Tveretinov along with an accomplice, Vitaliy Yeroshenko.

The haul was extraordinary. There were more than 2,500 hives, valued at nearly $1 million, belonging to a dozen beekeepers, stolen over several years.

Police indicated that the duo had traversed the Central Valley selling their stolen goods to unsuspecting growers for the previous three years and had been aided by the close-knit Ukrainian-Russian beekeeping community centered in Sacramento.

The detail stoked ugly, racist suspicions among some beekeepers. Yeroshenko ultimately pleaded no contest to receiving stolen property, and in 2021 was sentenced to four years probation and ordered to pay $13,000 in restitution. Tveretinov insisted he was innocent but then died of cancer in 2020 before the case against him concluded.

Denise Qualls, who works as a pollination broker — a sort of middleman connecting almond growers with beekeepers — noted that the ongoing organized thefts point to other criminal groups still at play.

“I do think it’s a collaborative effort,” Qualls said. “Back in the day it was sort of random, a few hives here and there. But when it’s a couple of hundred hives in multiple locations, it’s not your average agricultural crime tweaker looking to resell for drugs. It’s bigger than that.”

Qualls said she recently received a call from a beekeeper “of that nationality” who asked to inspect some bees she was overseeing at a holding yard in Stanislaus County. The man marched around the yard, which held around 1,500 hives belonging to various beekeepers looking to be matched with growers, pulling out frames and demanding that Qualls provide hives with a brood, or the eggs, larvae and pupae of honeybees to repopulate a colony.

This was unusual behavior, Qualls said, and she turned him away. “I just had a bad feel about it, and I said it wasn’t a good fit,” she said. Qualls was keenly aware of the yard’s lack of security — with no fence or cameras — as well as the toll taken by hive thefts. “He could just come back and take some,” she said. “Beekeepers are getting kind of tired of it, really. It’s your livelihood. It’s a lot.”

The Ideal Mobile Pollinator

The Western honeybee — or apis mellifera — is among the most successful of all migrants to America. First brought over on wooden ships by European settlers in the 17th century, honeybees have since established themselves not only as a crucial cog in the agricultural system, but they have also flourished in the public imagination. 

Conjure up thoughts of a bee and you’ll likely think of a black and yellow striped creature with a stinger that lives in a hive with thousands of comrades making honey. But that image of a honeybee is just one of around 20,000 species of bee, most of them solitary and wild. “There are relatively few bee species that get love and care from humans,” said James Nieh, a bee expert at the University of California, San Diego. “The word ‘bee’ is boiled down to honeybee.”

For agricultural workers, honeybees are the only bee worth thinking about. Apis mellifera are superb generalists, able to quickly learn how to pollinate more than 130 types of fruits and vegetables, from apples to cherries to pumpkins.

Thanks to the invention of the modern beehive — a usually wooden box with vertically hanging, removable frames into which bees build their honeycomb, devised by Ohio clergyman Lorenzo Langstroth in the 19th century — they can also be moved around relatively easily. These bees are the key to unlocking massive yields across American farmland that have been supersized and shorn of its natural surroundings, including wild pollinators.

“They are like the ideal mobile pollinator,” Wenger, the entomologist, said. “We built these large artificial food systems that are reliant on bees so then, yeah, honeybee ecology is going to become more and more artificial, further separated from its natural conditions.”

To grow a lot of almonds you need a lot of bees. The plants need plenty of cross-pollination and will keep producing nuts until they start falling off the tree. The global growth in demand has prompted farmers across the Central Valley to blanket the countryside with these distinctive, white-blossomed trees. Today, around 1.4 million acres, mostly in the Central Valley, is used to produce roughly 80% of the world’s almonds.

Troubling Times For Bee Shepherds

The industrialized honeybee has replaced the bucolic image of honey-producing homesteaders. Each honeybee hive can now command up to $225 in pollination fees, a sizable jump on what it once was. 

But while there are financial rewards for beekeepers, it’s harder for the bees. Almond pollination occurs in January and February when the hives’ bees are at the groggiest and weakest points in their lifecycle; they must be spurred into shape by a procession of treatments and feeds. The bees are loaded onto trucks to make their prolonged journeys to the Central Valley, in some cases traveling more than 1,000 miles. This forced migration, with its fumes and vibrations, can also harm the tiny passengers.

This is all occurring as more honeybees die over the winter months. In the past decade, beekeepers have lost as much as 40% of their bee populations during these coldest months, as a growing list of ills assails the species. Wildflower habitat is being torn up, depriving honeybees of nutrition beyond single monoculture crops like almonds; the hives themselves have been attacked by diseases, widespread crop pesticides and afflictions such as the varroa mite — a parasite that feeds on the bees’ young, causing malformations and weakness and in some cases completely wiping out colonies.

“My biggest stress is keeping my employees alive,” said Jeffrey Lee, a beekeeper in North Carolina who estimates that he loses 10% of his bees each time he sends them to California. Lee describes himself as a “bee shepherd,” who guides his indentured workers on a tour around the country for different pollination demands — blueberries in Maine, almonds in California, then cucumbers back in North Carolina. 

It’s getting harder to maintain bee numbers, according to Lee, with the endless routine of medical treatments, supplemental feedings and occasional mishaps, like drunk drivers barreling into hives or tractors running them over, only adding to the stresses. Operating costs are already high so many beekeepers don’t want the added expense of security for their hives. 

In addition, the insect population is also declining, and scientists warn this could threaten basic ecological functions, including food production, due to habitat loss, chemical use and the climate crisis. There is already evidence of falling blueberry crop yields in the U.S. due to a lack of pollinators, while in parts of China, workers have had to use paintbrushes daubed in pollen at orchards to make up for the lost bees. 

Unlike wild bees, honeybees have been mostly shielded from catastrophic colony loss by their human guardians. Meanwhile, the American bumblebee, once the most commonly observed bumblebee in the U.S., has suffered an 89% drop in abundance and vanished from at least eight states over the past two decades, according to a 2021 petition filed by the Center for Biological Diversity and a group of Albany Law School students arguing that the American bumblebee should be listed as an endangered species.

Honeybees may be a good mascot for a campaign to save the bees, but they’re “kind of like the chickens of the bee world,” Wenger said. “They really are bred for human purposes. It’s like saying we are protecting bird diversity by putting in more chicken farms.”

Still, it’s a bad idea to have a food system hinge on a single pollinator species. Scientists have worked on creating self-fertilizing almond trees, engineering so-called Frankenbees or pesticide-resistant honeybees, and looking at maybe even deploying pollinating robotic bees or drones. But ultimately, it’s measures that help all insect life and ecosystems such as cutting carbon emissions, rewilding sterile farmland and slashing pesticides and other poisons that may provide a longer-term solution.

In the meantime, the wheels of Central Valley industry continue to turn. Some farmers have eyed the dip in the global almond price, plus concerns over prolonged drought and new state rules over groundwater use that could make it harder to grow this thirsty nut, and started thinking about the next cash crop; perhaps pistachios, since they are pollinated via the wind. That would leave less work for the bees, and possibly decrease the amount of beehive theft. But until a more drastic change, the crimes continue to rise.

For beekeepers contemplating whether it’s worth cashing in on the still lucrative Central Valley pollination market, Freeman frames their dilemma: “You’ve got to weigh your odds — do you want to gamble on making some money and hope your hives don’t get stolen?”

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