Steve Levitt

The bees are helping the apple orchard and the apple orchard is helping the beekeeper to have more honey and better tasting honey.

So it's not actually completely obvious ex ante which way the payments should go.

You could imagine that maybe the beekeepers would have to pay the owners of the apple orchards or vice versa.

So why do you think it turned out that it's the apple farmers who are paying the beekeepers?

And from an economist's perspective, what determines which way the flow of money goes?

The vast majority of the world's almonds are grown in California.

And all those almonds need to be pollinated in a narrow window of about three weeks in late February and early March.

This almond pollination event and the subsequent pollinations around the country are so important to beekeepers that they've changed the economics of the industry.

This again is Chris Hyatt, professional beekeeper and past president of the American Honey Producers Association.

What share of your annual revenue would come from pollinating the almonds versus selling honey?

Back in 2006, a new phenomenon in the beekeeping industry started making waves.

It was referred to as colony collapse disorder.

This, again, is economist Wally Thurman.

And so as a researcher, you heard about this colony collapse disorder and it caught your attention.

And what did you find when you looked at the data?

But how do you make sense of that?

That seems contrary to normal intuition.

Now, you said that when colony collapse disorder came and many more bees were disappearing, that nothing happened.

But one thing changed, right?

The fees that were being paid by the almond growers to the beekeepers, those went way up, right?