What's up everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. We're back again with

Peter Nelson, the cinematographer behind the Pollinators documentary, which if you

are listening to this on the actual day

that this episode is out you can go catch it if you are in Newport Beach at the

Newport Beach Film Festival so today will be May 1st. You can go catch it. I would highly

recommend it. Really, really awesome watch. So today we're going to talk about

managed bees for agriculture, which of course we touched on yesterday. We kind of

did an overview of the problem. Not even the problem, but just sort of the scenario that a lot of our crops are in where they need to have bees trucked in to pollinate them because of some of the issues we're talking about today.

So I guess the big question that I want to start with, Peter, is why does this exist at all and

why not just allow an orchard an almond field etc to just

pollinate itself the way that nature would would normally do?

Yeah well thanks Kevin it's it's it's it's really is the do. Yeah, well, thanks, Kevin.

It's really is the reason that they are moving bees around is because the changes in agriculture.

And as our agriculture has become more simplified and move more towards monocultures.

And the reason why agriculture does that is because it's cost effective, right?

So if you grow strictly corn or if you grow strictly soybeans or strictly almonds, it's a lot easier than having a diversification in terms of your production.

There's more risk involved in it that way, but there's also more

reward, economic reward I think for it because it is simple and not to vilify

almonds, but almonds is a great example of that they take an orchard and it's entirely

almonds so there's very little habitat for a lot of the native bees to to live in

there's some people that are making inroads in that to change it and add hedgerows

and forage for more native bees. But if you just have one crop of any crop, and it't matter what it is that blooms once a year then any bee,

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