Bitter Honey traces how industrial farming pushes bees toward collapse

industrial farming’s – Jennie Durant’s “Bitter Honey” argues that industrial honey production—refrigerated storage, sugar-fed colonies, mass trucking to pollinate crops, and pesticide-laced landscapes—has driven US honeybees toward repeated collapse. The book points to the almond in

A honeybee’s work can look almost effortless—until you follow the system behind it.

In “Bitter Honey: Big Ag’s threat to bees and the fight to save them. ” social scientist and environment writer Jennie Durant describes a version of modern agriculture where honeybees are treated less like living colonies and more like industrial units. Instead of keeping bees in seasonally stable habitats. US honeybee colonies are. in her telling. industrialised through refrigerated storage and feeding regimes built on sugar syrup drips and protein bars. Every year. about 3 million colonies of honeybees are shuttled around the country on flatbed trucks. rented out to pollinate farmers’ crops. Durant says these colonies often teeter on the edge of collapse and must be regularly replaced—an outcome she links to wider strain on food systems.

The argument lands with particular weight because it’s not framed as a distant ecological tragedy. Durant spent several years in the field with industrial beekeepers. and her book leans on insider knowledge of the conundrums these families face. Many have been in the business for generations. They can walk miles to find lost hives. read a hive’s health by its hum. and still lose everything when the surrounding farms make their work harder.

One of the sharpest moments comes from her description of a beekeeper who lost half his hives after he and his bees were sprayed with a concoction of fungicides and insecticides by a farm pest control adviser.

Durant’s account goes back further than the modern pollination market. Humans have managed bees for at least 8000 years. and she points to a cave painting in Spain showing someone hanging from a cliff with one hand and scooping honey out of a hive with the other. Over time, practices intensified. She also notes how Indigenous Americans called honeybees “white man’s fly. ” because swarms from domesticated bees often arrived before human colonisers.

As honeybees spread, Durant says, their impact reshaped native populations. In the US, honeybees began outcompeting native bee species—species whose populations would be 50 times bigger than they are without honeybees’ consumption of nectar and pollen.

The shift to livestock, she argues, accelerated with technology and then with industrial crops. Artificial hives—introduced in the 19th century and still closely tied to most hive designs today—helped transform bees into a managed commodity. But the book reserves its biggest blame for the agricultural model that grew around them: monocrops sprayed with pesticides. landscapes devoid of wildflowers. and the combined pressures of pathogens. mites and poor nutrition. Durant writes that this mix wiped out more than a third of honeybee colonies in the US in the mid-2000s.

What followed was not, in Durant’s view, a correction—at least not at the root. Beekeepers and farmers, she writes, joined a “pesticide treadmill,” further weakening colonies rather than addressing the underlying drivers.

There is also an economic pressure built into the story. Durant suggests beekeepers can’t be blamed for all of what happened. When cheap and adulterated honey from overseas flooded the US market in the 1990s, many beekeepers had to turn to offering pollination services to stay afloat.

That pull—survival in a harsh market—brings her to a central target: the almond industry. Durant argues the almond industry is the main culprit. When selling honey became unprofitable. beekeepers turned to the booming California almond industry. which is worth $4 billion a year in exports. Each February, 99 per cent of domesticated bees in the US are trucked to the state to pollinate almond trees.

The almond crop, though, is not treated as a one-off. Durant frames almonds as the latest step in a long chain of industrialised crops that maximise yields and profits while minimising ecological diversity and resilience.

Beyond crops, she argues that the infrastructure of global food also makes the situation worse. Fossil fuels that power global food systems, she writes, harden the conditions bees face. Refrigerated warehouses—used to manage irregular seasons and climate extremes—were a strategy to deal with climate pressures. but Durant says the move can end up adding “more plasters to a deep wound.”.

She paints a bleak picture, but not a closed one. In a second section of the book, Durant offers solutions, including innovative planting, regenerative farming and rewilding. There is space for wildflowers between the long monocultures of almond trees—or beneath solar panels. She also points to managed burns, rooted in Indigenous land-management practices, as a way grasslands can bloom again. For Durant, those changes could give honeybees and their native cousins a fighting chance.

The catch is scale, and she does not pretend it is easy. Applying these ideas widely often depends on whether the US government is willing to invest—or whether farmers are prepared to make less profit. Durant sometimes goes deep into state-level environmental policies. and she uses those details to show how complex and frustrating it can be to shift away from practices already known to be harmful.

The book’s themes also press against the reader’s everyday life. From climate change to water scarcity. Durant writes about environmental challenges that can have simple solutions that are hard to implement without overturning entrenched. outmoded economic systems. She encourages gardeners and farmers to reconnect with the land. but she “never seems to really challenge the status quo.” In one sharply personal moment embedded in the review material accompanying the book. the writer points out that. as they read. a pack of cheap almonds grown in the US. processed in Germany and sold in the UK sits on their desk.

Still, Durant’s practical premise doesn’t disappear. Transforming a back garden can change biodiversity, even when people are met with lawsuits from monoculturally minded neighbours. She introduces a “rebel gardener” who, in 2017, turned her barren lawn into a wildlife haven. It’s in these kinds of spaces. the book’s ideas suggest. that new relationships form—with bees. and with other creatures—relationships that can make the distance between humans and other animals feel less absolute.

Durant’s focus on bees is meant to deepen that shift. Closely watching bees decide which flowers to visit. and then seeing how they communicate that environmental knowledge to the rest of the hive. is presented as a reminder of the bees’ intrinsic value. not just their usefulness as crop pollinators. The book’s closing emphasis is on what that perspective might change about where people place their attention.

Durant writes: “Plant flowers. Limit pesticide. Share the land.” And, in the accompanying reflection, the reader is invited to add: “Make friends with creatures.”

Three more great books on nature (and saving it)

“The Mind of a Bee” by Lars Chittka explores whether bees are smart, with basic emotions, and even consciousness.

“Staying With the Trouble” by Donna J. Haraway urges readers to “stay with the trouble,” rejecting both the belief that all is lost and the belief that tech will solve everything.

“The Book of Wilding” by Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell tells the story of the Knepp Estate in southern England being transformed from barren clay to a blooming marvel, offering tips intended to be useful even without a vast estate.

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