Word: hives
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...going on. They were definitely communicating something, but it wasn't clear what. So a number of trials were conducted where certain factors were controlled. One of the factors [that was] changed was the direction of the sun. And the bees' behavior changed. When they went back in the hive, they started wiggling about differently. The next step is to correlate the exact position of the sun with the direction in which they do their dance. It's detective work, basically. (Read about honeybees in California's almond orchards...
...starting to sour. Driven by surging global demand, California's almond growers have doubled acreage since 1981, forcing them to lean heavily on imported bees from as far away as Vermont. Drive along the unlined roads around Hughson, and it's easy to find 10 different almond farmers renting hives from 10 different states. Orin Johnson, whose family has been keeping bees around Hughson since the 1950s, remembers when beekeepers earned less than $10 per hive in pollination fees to supplement their main business: honey. "Almonds were nothing," says Johnson, examining some of his 700 hives, his snow white hair...
...industrial pollination may be starting to take its toll on the bees. Many keepers are feeding their colonies corn syrup, sugar and pollen substitute to artificially bulk up hives ahead of the almond season, while killing off parasitic mites with pesticides. Plus, parking the hives smack in the middle of this land of almonds "is comparable to us going to McDonald's every day for a month," says Johnson. "In the past, you'd have a blend of sources, and [the bees] seemed so much healthier." Johnson and many bee researchers believe this monocultural diet may have contributed...
Consequently, California's almond growers are getting stung. Dave Phippen, a partner in his family's farm in nearby Manteca, just paid $150 per hive to a Texas supplier. "If we didn't put any bees out here, I think we'd have a crop failure," he says, "and I'm not about to learn." Three years of record yields have depressed almond prices to half their peak; many growers will be lucky to break even this year. Meanwhile, a drought led Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to declare a state of emergency on Feb. 27. Some almond farmers didn't even...
...Merrill Lynch is shaky and that BofA will need billions more in federal assistance. Meanwhile, Citigroup is trying to stay one step ahead of the sharks, er, shorts, who have taken the stock down more than 20% in the past two days. Though Citi is moving aggressively to hive off assets and divisions - earlier this week it announced the merger of its Smith Barney brokerage unit with Morgan Stanley's Global Wealth Management division, a deal that will bring Citi more than $2 billion - investors are worried about worsening loan losses across the banking sector and also about Citi...