Yo! Technology! What is it all about?

That is the sound of bees.

50,000 of them.

And I am in a bee suit, swarmed by angry insects, standing next to a giant

almond orchard in central California. As you can hear, the bees were not very happy to be

disturbed. You can hear them kamikazeing every now and then into the microphone.

So what am I doing here? Long-term listeners of Danny in the Valley will recall that around this

time last year, we had on a guy called Matias Viel, a 28-year-old from Argentina, who's the founder of a startup called

BeeFlow. And BeeFlow had created compounds that helped bees be better pollinators. They flew

longer, pollinated more flowers during a given window, and could even be trained to pollinate

certain flowers based on the formulation of these special superfoods that bee flow had created.

Basically, what they were working on was trying to create, in a way, bionic bees.

And that is potentially a big deal, because bees pollinate roughly a third of all crops.

And in America alone, they power some $20 billion of food production annually.

And the problem, as you may be aware, is that bees are dying in record numbers.

Colonies are collapsing for a variety of reasons, though no one is sure exactly why.

So beef flow is just one company that is trying

to help address this crisis. Now, a few listeners have suggested that we return to past guests

every now and then to see how they were doing or how they're getting on since they'd been on the show.

So that is what we did this week with Matias.

So I got up at the crack of dawn, drove two and a half hours into the heart of California almond country, which produces 80% of all almonds in the world.

To catch up with Matias, which is what you are going to hear right now.

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