A Bee Mogul Confronts the Crisis in His Field

Between stops, he talks on the phone — when his cell gets a signal, that is. In one call, he spoke to his foreman about two trucks needing repair.

Then he called an independent trucker to see if he could move bees that night, diplomatically sidestepping the man’s request that he also hire a friend. “Well, I won’t know until tonight what’s needed,” Mr. Adee said.

After that, he called a lawyer, seeking counsel for a beekeeper who had lost his bees after the ranch across the street sprayed an organic phosphate. “It was an illegal application, and the county knows it,” he said. “But the county is dragging its feet. He needs some help.”

In 2006, David Hackenberg, another beekeeper with a large bee collection, lost 90 percent of them and coined the term colony collapse. Mr. Adee had no such problem that year. I in the documentary made that year, “The Vanishing of the Bees,” he can be heard saying,“We haven’t seen any of this colony-collapse disorder here.”

Shortly after the film came out, though, he also lost almost all the family’s bees.

“Still, I was convinced my problem was a virus, not what David had,” Mr. Adee said. “I thought it would take three years for it to run its course, and then we’d be done with it.”

But the losses stretched on, into a fourth and then fifth year. Last year, after having lost roughly half of his 90,000 hives, he joined Mr. Hackenberg, other beekeepers and environmental groups in a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency.

The suit contends that the E.P.A. broke the law by failing to require registration of seeds coated in pesticides, as many genetically engineered seeds are. “E.P.A.’s actions and inactions have caused both acute honeybee kills and chronic effects leading to excess bee colony mortality, excess bird mortality, nationwide water and soil contamination, and other environmental and economic harms,” the plaintiffs argued.

There is no federal insurance program to cover beekeepers. The federal 2008 Farm Bill did allocate $50 million in emergency assistance to cover losses in livestock, farm-raised fish and honeybees, but only through 2011.

A year later, the Agriculture Department estimated that beekeepers had spent $2 billion to replace the 10 million hives they had lost in the six years since bee colonies first began experiencing declines.

Here, the almond trees are just beginning to bloom. Mr. Adee’s bees work alongside their boss, who is working the phones.

Someone on the phone asked him to address a matter that had nothing to do with his bees. “I don’t know that I have time for that,” Mr. Adee said. “Or rather, I know I don’t have time.”