China + India --> Almonds = Bee Recovery?

Broad framing the promising-but-conflicted boom in America's bee population

Jim Nuttle illustration from “America’s New Map”

This is how I described such causality in America’s New Map:

Globalization flipped that supply/demand power relationship thanks in part to the rise of the global middle class, who have unlimited demand for mobility, communications, education, entertainment, electricity, food, healthcare, pets, vacations, bandwidth, air-conditioning, and so on. As globalization exploded across the 1990s, that worldwide demand signal became the most powerful communication on the planet, reshaping all manner of markets. The business world likewise awakened to the purchasing potential of the “bottom of the pyramid,” economist C. K. Prahalad’s revolutionary reframing of the world’s working poor—located just beneath that global middle class in terms of daily income—as a surprisingly vast pool of discretionary spending.

Recall the old business bit, “If only I could sell one [product] to everyone in China!” Well, the radical expansion of Chinese mass consumption has clearly opened Pandora’s box. On the dark side: Chinese consumers desiring body parts from endangered species (e.g., elephant tusks, tiger penises); Chinese farmers being encouraged by the state to domesticate wild animals for meat production, expanding transmission of their viruses into the human population (zoonosis); and Chinese females being trafficked as unwilling brides in response to the nation’s gender imbalance. More benign: China’s love of pecans and walnuts blowing up US nut exports.

There’s your send of complex causality.

As for this recent — and highly relatable — bee development, count me among the amazed.

From a NYT story analyzing new data from the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS):

After almost two decades of relentless colony collapse coverage and years of grieving suspiciously clean windshields, we were stunned to run the numbers on the new Census of Agriculture (otherwise known as that wonderful time every five years where the government counts all the llamas): America’s honeybee population has rocketed to an all-time high.

We’ve added almost a million bee colonies in the past five years. We now have 3.8 million, the census shows. Since 2007, the first census after alarming bee die-offs began in 2006, the honeybee has been the fastest-growing livestock segment in the country! And that doesn’t count feral honeybees, which may outnumber their captive cousins several times over.

So, what has happened here?

This is all about honey, right?

Apparently not, as there is a huge discrepancy between the government’s census and honey production:

The plot thickens.

Is the government getting it wrong?

First clue: where in the US is this boom concentrated?

Turns out it is Texas, with a strong bias toward North Texas.

Hmmm.

Turns out this bee evangelist convinced the Texas legislature to pass a tax break if your farm was yea big and yea populated by yea many hives: to wit, “six hives on five acres plus another hive for every 2.5 acres beyond that to qualify for the tax break.”

That alone apparently triggers the huge boom in Texas bees.

So, why not a boom in honey production then?

Turns out it’s not honey that’s driving the demand. It’s almonds.