2020 was the year when all of us started to pay closer attention to logistics.

Shortages of everything from N95 masks to toilet paper, bicycles, even weird

pasta with a hole in the middle made it clear that behind the products of

everyday life are these complex supply chains. Today we're revisiting an

episode about the mind-boggling logistics behind pollinating fruit and nut

trees. The story originally ran in 2017. Hope you like it. This is Planet

Money from NPR.

Imagine you are a bee, a honeybee, and every morning you wake up in the greatest

place on earth. Hawaii. Not Hawaii, you are bee. You are waking up in rural

Louisiana. You got your cypress trees, you got your flowering plants and legumes,

you see your blue verveine, you see your buckwheat vine, you see your tallow

trees. That is the voice of your boss, Wes Card. Well technically you work for

the queen bee and she works for Wes, but the job you have is pretty cush. You're

collecting nectar, making honey. Wes takes your honey, sells your honey, you're

like a team. It's idyllic, but in February one night while you are sleeping you

hear a forklift coming for your hive and all of the surrounding hives. And we

start picking them up and moving them around and setting them on new palettes and

we then come in with the machines and stack them onto the truck and the

journey begins. The journey. The truck will be taking you and 15 million of your

closest-to-be friends on a road trip. Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and

California. 2000 miles in all to the almond fields in the Central Valley where

you will have a new job pollinating the almond flower, making little almond

...