Latif Nasser

Harold and his friend took pictures, and if you look at those pictures, you'll see the farmers holding little brooms.

This little pollen brush that they'd constructed using things like chopsticks and chicken feathers and cigarette filters.

And they'd have a little bottle filled with pollen.

And then what they do, they dip the brush into the bottle and they paint a flower blossom with the pollen.

They dip their brush back into the pollen and they paint the next flower blossom again.

And they dip the brush back in again and they paint again and they dip again and they paint again.

To make sure that all of the blossoms that they could possibly fertilize would be fertilized so that they would go on to produce fruit.

It was very strange to see humans doing the job of the bees.

God, what a pain in the ass that sounds like.

Yeah, the image of these Chinese orchardists standing up in these spindly trees traveled around the world through environmental circles.

And the message that it seemed to send was that

This is what happens if you lose biodiversity.

You end up standing in the trees doing the job that the bees used to do on the wing.

For free.

For free.

But then this guy enters the story.

This is Yin Sun Chen.

Yeah, human bees.

Four years ago, he traveled to Mao County to do a sort of economic analysis of just how much the loss of the bees was hurting the farmers of Mao County.

But what he discovered, weirdly, was that the trees were producing more apples than ever.