Steve Levitt

Back then, the biggest job was something else entirely.

Do you have a sense of what share of a church's budget would go to wax?

This huge demand for wax supported a thriving medieval beekeeping industry.

But then, like so many things in the medieval period, that changed with the Protestant Reformation.

Not long after the price of wax collapsed, beekeepers got hit with another devastating shock.

With the opening of sugar plantations in the Americas, Europeans suddenly had access to cheap and plentiful sugar for the first time.

Honey lost its spot as a major sweetener.

This is the sort of double whammy that modern beekeepers will face if the almond industry finds a way to lessen its dependence on bees for pollination, a trend that has already started.

In California, there are self-pollinating and self-fertile almond trees that have been introduced to orchards across the region,

for exactly that purpose.

And I don't think there's anything beekeepers can do to fight that trend.

Ultimately, if beekeepers want to survive, it will be by finding ways to stop adulterated honey from coming into the country.

But how will they do that?

I put that question to Michael Roberts, the food law and policy expert at UCLA.

It seems like it really, like so many things, it comes down to incentives.

That the agencies you're talking about just in many ways don't have that strong an incentive to deal with this problem because it isn't a life and death problem.

And ultimately, I think the strongest argument is

is the argument you made about the importance of the honeybees for the entire food chain, right?

The positive externalities that are associated with the honey.

And again, that creates a real problem because even the honey producers themselves aren't getting anything like the full economic benefit of the activity they're doing.