A few years ago, while writing a story about beekeepers in New York City, our writer Josh Dzieza (“Save the Honeybee, Sterilize the Earth: Inside the Pollination-Industrial Complex“) talked to a local who said the sort of beekeeping he did—a couple dozen hives, making honey—was a tiny part of today’s beekeeping industry. “The money was in crop pollination, which was done by massive operations trucking thousands of hives around the country. That image stuck with me, and I started to wonder: If pollination was an industry, how has it responded to the much-publicized honeybee die-offs?” For his story, Dzieza, an editor at the Verge, spent weeks with of one of the nation’s biggest beekeeping operations in California’s almond orchards. “I was in a full bee suit the entire time. My cuffs and sleeves were duct-taped to my gloves, which made taking notes incredibly difficult.”
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