Walter "Wally" Thurman

And that leads to this unambiguous theoretical conclusion that we should subsidize the production of apples and the keeping of bees.

Well, going back even earlier than Mead, famous British economist A.C.

Pagu said you tax those activities that generate negative externalities.

If you have too much smoke coming out of a factory, the factory owner is senseless to the harm that the factory is doing, so you tax them per unit of output or per unit of smoke.

That would be a pretty standard economic prescription for the problem.

The story about reciprocal positive externalities really rests on these two parties not being able to influence each other, not being able to transact with each other, and maybe not even being aware of each other.

What Chung found was that if you go to rural Washington state towns and open the yellow pages of the phone book,

you would find advertisements for pollination services from beekeepers.

So not only did apple growers and other farmers know about beekeepers in the area, they could call them up and pay them a certain amount per colony to come over and pollinate their crops.

So I would say this was Chung's aha moment was there were transactions going on.

So at least to him, there was a prima facie case that some of this positive externality was being internalized.

Well, that's a great question.

And if you fast forward to the modern beekeeping industry and modern commercial practices, bees are moved around.

They're migratory.

That is not by means of their flight, but beekeepers move them around in trucks.

And there are times of the year –

when bees are placed on crops like almonds where the demand for pollination services is very high and the pollination fees run from farmers to bees.

There are other times of the year in late summer where beekeepers will sometimes pay landowners for the privilege of putting their bees on the farmer's land because the land is such good honey forage.

So it can and does go both ways.

It's seasonal to start with.