Latif Nasser

McKinnon, who says the story begins... In Mao County in central China, rural area, fairly remote.

And apple orcharding was the main business.

And according to J.B., in the 1990s... The wild bees of Mao County slowly started to disappear.

And there was a few different reasons given for that.

It could have been the destruction of the habitat that the bees nested in, the heavy honey harvesting that wasn't leaving enough food for the bees.

But the prevailing theory is actually an economic one, because in the 1990s, as China was shifting to a market-based economy, apple producers were under pressure to produce more apples.

So they started spraying pesticide.

Probably it was a constellation of all of those things and a few others.

End result is the bees stopped buzzing in Mao County.

Which, if you are an apple farmer, that's a disaster.

As bees travel from flower to flower in search of nectar, they're dusted with pollen, which is the means by which flowers engage in sexual intercourse.

So if you don't have the bees making the birds and the bees on the blossoms, then you don't get fertile flowers to turn into fruit.

And obviously, if you're a fruit farmer and you have no fruit to sell, you have no income.

So what do you do?

If you're an apple farmer and you don't have bees, then you need to find some other way to pollinate the flowers.

And I guess they concluded, well, we'll have to do that ourselves by hand.

A couple of years ago, he heard about the apple farmers in Mao County.

So he flies to Chengdu and he and a friend hop in a car.

the fields, and we actually saw that there were lots of farmers in the trees, like on the apple trees.

Straddling up on these often thin and spindly branches, men and women that I've seen in photos in any case.