Walter "Wally" Thurman

And I'll use almonds as the example because almonds are very early blooming crop.

Like right now, it's February and beekeepers from all over the country are moving their bees into almond orchards in California.

Pretty soon, by the end of February, 90% of every bee in the lower 48 states is going to be in California pollinating almonds.

And so there's a huge demand for pollination services.

Almond is a valuable crop.

And at the same time, almonds themselves don't provide good honey forage.

So in that instance, it's pretty clear that if you're going to get bees pollinating

In the almond orchards, you need to pay them because they're not getting much honey out of the deal and they have to travel all across the country to get there.

If you look back in the historical record, bees have been around in North America for centuries, even though they're not native to North America.

So beekeepers have dealt with honeybee diseases for a long time.

And you can go back into the...

beekeeping trade publications and see discussion of viruses and diseases and chemicals used to treat them.

But something did happen in the winter of 2006, 2007 that came to be known as Colony Collapse Disorder, CCD.

It was a sudden, odd disappearance of the adult bees from colonies all over the country.

One beekeeper first discovered it in Florida, but pretty soon there were reports from all over.

And it was an epidemic.

The key symptom of colony collapse disorder is that the adult bees actually disappeared.

There weren't dead bees lying around the hive.

And nobody knew what happened to them.

And to this day, I think it's not well explained.