Why Bees Matter: How Pollinators Power California's Food Supply

Why bees matter, in one sentence: they pollinate roughly one in three bites of food on the American plate, and in California specifically, they underwrite about $11 billion in annual crop value — including 80% of the world's almonds, nearly all of the country's avocados, and the bulk of the stone fruit, melons, berries, and seed crops grown between the Tehachapis and the Oregon border. Without bees, California agriculture as we know it does not function. Grocery store produce aisles get shorter. Prices climb. Entire categories of food move from staple to luxury.

This guide pulls that claim apart in detail — what the USDA, UC Davis, the Xerces Society, and the California Department of Food and Agriculture actually say about pollinator-dependent crops in California, how the Central Valley's food system is wired to bee biology, what realistic scenarios look like if pollinator populations keep declining, and what Sacramento residents can do in their own yards and neighborhoods to shift the trajectory. If you have ever wondered whether "save the bees" is hype or substance, the data is unambiguous: it is substance, and California is where the stakes are highest.

TL;DR — Why Bees Matter to California

• California produces about 80% of the world's almonds, and almonds are 100% bee-pollinated — the crop simply cannot exist at scale without honey bees.
• The USDA values bee pollination at more than $15 billion per year nationally, with California representing the single largest state share (approximately $11 billion in crop value).
• About 35% of global food production by volume depends on animal pollination, the vast majority of it performed by bees (FAO, 2023).
• California grows more than 400 commercial crops; approximately 100 of them require or strongly benefit from bee pollination, including almonds, apples, apricots, avocados, blueberries, cherries, melons, plums, and squash.
• Managed honey bee colonies in the U.S. have been losing 40–50% of their population annually since 2010 — a rate that experts call unsustainable.
• Native California bees (about 1,600 species) contribute billions more in pollination services and are in even steeper, less-reported decline.
• Sacramento sits at the ecological and agricultural crossroads: the Central Valley's pollinator hub, downstream of the bloom, and one of the few urban areas where homeowner action materially affects regional bee health.

The Numbers — Pollinators and California's Food Supply

Start with the scale of what pollinators do. Globally, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 75% of the world's leading food crops depend to some degree on animal pollination, and 35% of global food production by volume would be reduced or eliminated without pollinators. Of those pollinators, bees do the overwhelming majority of the work — honey bees (Apis mellifera) and the roughly 20,000 native bee species worldwide, compared to the much smaller contributions of flies, butterflies, moths, beetles, wasps, and vertebrate pollinators combined.

In the United States, the figure usually cited — that bees pollinate "one in three bites of food" — comes from USDA pollinator program data and the FAO. It is shorthand for a more specific claim: roughly 35% of global food production by volume, and a larger share by value, comes from crops that need pollinators. For micronutrient-dense foods like fruits, nuts, berries, and many vegetables, that dependence climbs to well over 50%. The foods that pollinators underwrite are disproportionately the healthiest ones.

California is where those global numbers get dense and specific. The state is the country's largest agricultural producer by value — more than $59 billion in farm-gate sales in the most recent California Department of Food and Agriculture report — and pollinator-dependent crops sit at the top of the leaderboard. Almonds, grapes (partially pollinator-dependent), strawberries, pistachios (wind-pollinated but benefit from bee activity), cattle and dairy (which depend on alfalfa seed, itself bee-pollinated), and dozens of others all flow through bee biology at some point in their production chain.

California Almond Pollination — The Flagship Case

No crop makes the case for why bees matter more starkly than California almonds. The state grows approximately 1.4 million acres of almonds, producing roughly 80% of the world's supply, and every single almond begins as a flower that has to be visited by a bee. No bees, no almonds. There is no chemical substitute, no hand-pollination workaround at that scale, no wind-pollinated alternative cultivar. The industry is built on bee biology from the ground up.

The logistics of California almond pollination are arguably the largest coordinated animal movement in agricultural history. Each February, commercial beekeepers from across the continent — Florida, Texas, Minnesota, the Dakotas, as far as Maine — truck roughly 2.5 million managed honey bee colonies into the Central Valley to pollinate the almond bloom. That is about 85% of all commercial honey bee colonies in the United States, converging on a single crop over roughly three weeks in late February and early March. The bees pollinate the blossoms, the growers pay roughly $200-225 per hive for the service, and the almond crop sets.

The scale matters for two reasons. First, it quantifies what bees are worth: pollination fees alone for the almond bloom now exceed $500 million per year, which is a market price for pollinator labor that no alternative technology can undercut. Second, it reveals how thin the margin is. The almond bloom requires about two hives per acre for effective pollination; at 1.4 million acres, that is close to 2.8 million hives of demand against a national supply that has not grown meaningfully in 30 years. If managed bee populations decline by even 15-20%, almond pollination becomes mathematically impossible to fully service.

That dependency runs in both directions. For commercial beekeepers, almond pollination is their single largest income event of the year — for many operations, 50% or more of annual revenue. A weak almond bloom or a year with shortened pollination contracts (as happened in 2023 and 2024 when California bloom was disrupted by atmospheric rivers) cascades into beekeeper bankruptcies, which further reduces colony availability for other crops. The system is tightly coupled; when one side stresses, the other follows.

Why almonds alone cannot solve the bee problem

The almond industry funds substantial pollinator research through the Almond Board of California and works actively with entomologists at UC Davis and USDA ARS to improve bee health outcomes during the bloom. Those investments matter. But almonds are also a contributing stressor: concentrating nearly every commercial hive in the country into a single two-week monoculture exposes every one of those colonies to whatever pathogens, mites, or sub-lethal chemical loads exist in the valley that spring, which then disperse nationwide when the hives go home. The good news and the bad news are braided together.

Stone Fruit, Avocados, Berries — The Rest of the California Bee Portfolio

Almonds get the attention, but the pollinator-dependent portfolio in California is much broader. The Central Valley and coastal growing regions produce the bulk of America's stone fruit (peaches, plums, nectarines, apricots, cherries), avocados, and berry crops, and every one of those crops is bee-dependent to a measurable degree.

Stone fruit — cherries, peaches, plums, apricots

California produces roughly 90% of the country's canned peaches and apricots and a significant share of the fresh stone fruit market. These crops bloom shortly after almonds, typically late February through April in the Central Valley, and they depend on bee pollination for fruit set and fruit quality. Poorly pollinated stone fruit results in misshapen or undersized fruit that packs out at a lower grade, even when overall yield looks acceptable. UC Davis research shows that supplemental native bee presence — orchard mason bees, mining bees, bumble bees — meaningfully improves fruit quality beyond what honey bees alone achieve, because native species are more efficient pollinators of early-season blooms and work in cooler, cloudier conditions when honey bees stay in the hive.

Avocados — 90%+ of U.S. production

California produces more than 90% of the avocados grown in the United States, almost entirely from coastal counties (San Diego, Ventura, Santa Barbara) rather than the Central Valley. Avocado flowers have an unusual "protogynous dichogamy" bloom pattern — they open as female on one day and male on the next — which makes them particularly dependent on active pollinator visits to move pollen between trees at the right moment. Honey bees do most of this work, with native bees supplementing, and fruit set is directly correlated with hive density during bloom.

Berries and vegetables

California is the country's leading producer of strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries, and a major producer of pollinator-dependent vegetables including squash, melons, cucumbers, and tomatoes (tomatoes are technically self-pollinating but are substantially improved by bumble bee "buzz pollination"). Strawberry fields in the Watsonville and Oxnard regions lease bumble bee colonies from commercial breeders every spring specifically because honey bees are not effective strawberry pollinators. That fact alone — that entire crop categories require specialty native or native-like bees — illustrates why "just more honey bees" does not solve the pollinator problem. We need bee diversity, not just bee quantity.

The Sacramento Angle — Why This City Sits at the Center

Sacramento is not usually thought of as an agricultural city, but geographically and ecologically, it is the capital of the world's most pollinator-dependent farming region. The Sacramento Valley stretches north from the city into rice, prune, walnut, and almond country. The San Joaquin Valley stretches south into the densest almond, stone fruit, and specialty crop acreage on the continent. Every truckload of pollinator hives moving into California for bloom passes through the Sacramento region. Every major pollinator research institution in the state — UC Davis Department of Entomology, the USDA Bee Biology and Systematics Laboratory on the Davis campus (the largest native bee collection in the western U.S.), the Haagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven — is within 20 miles of downtown.

That puts Sacramento residents in a structurally interesting position. The yards, parks, school grounds, and easements inside the city limits represent one of the only large urban habitat buffers around the most intensively farmed pollinator-dependent region on earth. Native bee populations that cannot survive in monoculture agriculture can survive in a well-planted Sacramento neighborhood, and from there they reseed the surrounding habitat. Our guide on honey bees vs native bees unpacks why that distinction matters for the Central Valley specifically.

Sacramento is also where much of California's pollinator policy gets made. The California State Assembly and Senate meet here. The California Department of Pesticide Regulation is headquartered here. The California Department of Food and Agriculture is across the river in West Sacramento. When California bans a pesticide, restricts a class of chemical, or funds a pollinator research program, the decision is almost always made in a building within a mile of the Capitol. Sacramento residents who contact their representatives on pollinator issues are, by geographic accident, closer to the decision-makers than almost anyone else in the state. Our neonicotinoids and Sacramento bees article walks through the specific pesticide regulations currently under debate.

What Would Happen Without Bees — The Realistic Scenarios

The "what would happen without bees" question gets asked a lot, and it usually gets answered badly. The cartoon version — humanity starves, civilization collapses — is not what the data actually supports. Wind-pollinated staple crops (wheat, rice, corn, oats, soy) would continue. Grass-fed ruminant protein would continue. Root vegetables that we eat before they flower (carrots, potatoes, onions) would continue. So the dystopian "no food" scenario is inaccurate.

The realistic scenario is worse in a different way: California agriculture — and the diversified, produce-rich food system it underwrites — would not. About two-thirds of California's $59 billion in annual farm-gate value comes from crops that are pollinator-dependent to some degree. Remove the bees and the state reverts toward a smaller, coarser agricultural base dominated by wind-pollinated grains and forage, with greatly reduced output of almonds, avocados, stone fruit, berries, and the specialty vegetables that define the California food economy. Prices for those crops would spike. Imports would fill part of the gap. Nutritional diversity in the American diet — which public health researchers are already worried about — would measurably worsen.

Several careful studies have tried to quantify this. A 2020 paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, using 131 commercial farms across North America, found that wild bee decline was already limiting crop yields for apples, blueberries, cherries, and other pollinator-dependent crops — meaning the scenario is not hypothetical; it is happening at the margins right now. A separate 2022 PLOS ONE analysis estimated that insufficient pollination is already responsible for roughly 3-5% of global mortality from reduced fruit and vegetable intake, through its downstream effect on diet quality. Small reductions in pollinator populations do not produce small consequences; they produce compounding losses across yield, quality, and the nutritional density of what is available in stores.

Three plausible scenarios for California

• Status quo trajectory: Managed honey bee colonies continue losing 40-50% annually, native bee populations continue declining, almond and stone fruit yields stay flat or decline, pollination fees rise (currently near $225 per hive for almonds, projected to reach $300+ by 2030), and produce prices climb faster than general food inflation.
• Accelerated decline: A compound event — major disease outbreak, pesticide regulatory failure, or sustained drought — triggers a 20-30% colony shortfall during almond bloom. Growers leave acreage unpollinated. Almond production drops 15-25% for 2-3 years, with cascading effects on stone fruit and berries. Global almond prices spike. Several beekeeping operations exit the business.
• Stabilization and recovery: A combination of pesticide reform, habitat restoration, improved bee genetics, and urban pollinator corridors (Sacramento included) halts the decline. Managed colony losses return to pre-2000 levels of 15-20%. Native bee populations recover in buffered regions. California agriculture continues on current pollinator-dependent trajectory with tighter margins but no catastrophic collapse.

Which scenario plays out depends on decisions being made over the next five to ten years — at the farm, at the state capitol, and, yes, in Sacramento yards. We cover the broader drivers in more depth in our companion article on the 2026 bee crisis.

Native Bees vs Honey Bees — Why Both Matter to California

The phrase "save the bees" is usually interpreted as "save honey bees," and that interpretation undersells the problem. Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are a non-native European species that have been managed in North America for about 400 years. They are excellent generalist pollinators and they do the bulk of the commercial pollination work in California. But they are not the whole story.

California is home to approximately 1,600 species of native bees — more than any U.S. state. These include more than 25 species of bumble bees, hundreds of species of sweat bees, mining bees, mason bees, leafcutter bees, carpenter bees, and others. Many of them are solitary rather than social; most nest in the ground or in wood cavities rather than hives; and collectively they do an enormous share of the pollination work on crops like squash, melons, blueberries, tomatoes, and stone fruit. For several of those crops, native bees are measurably more effective than honey bees — they forage earlier in the morning, work in cooler and cloudier conditions, and perform behaviors (like buzz pollination) that honey bees simply cannot do.

The problem is that native bees do not have industry advocates. No one trucks them into the almond bloom. No one pays a pollination fee for their work. Their decline does not trigger a commodity-price event that forces regulatory action. And yet a 2020 assessment by the Xerces Society found that more than 25% of North American native bee species are at some level of extinction risk. Two California bumble bees — the Crotch's bumble bee (Bombus crotchii) and the Western bumble bee (Bombus occidentalis) — are formally candidates for protection under the California Endangered Species Act as of 2022.

The practical takeaway for Sacramento homeowners: when you plant for pollinators, you are planting for a much larger and more fragile community than the honey bees you see on your rosemary. The ground-nesting mining bee in bare soil on the side of your house, the mason bee in a hollow stem in your native planting, and the metallic green sweat bee on a sunflower are all part of the pollinator infrastructure California agriculture runs on. See our ground-nesting bees guide and native plants Sacramento bees love for practical identification and habitat tips.

The Four Stressors Undermining California's Pollinators

Every serious analysis — USDA, UC Davis, Xerces, the California Department of Pesticide Regulation — converges on the same four interacting stressors. No single one is sufficient to explain the decline. They compound each other, and the compounding is what matters.

1. Pesticides, especially neonicotinoids

Neonicotinoid insecticides are systemic — they are absorbed by the plant and expressed in pollen and nectar, which means bees foraging on treated crops ingest them. Sub-lethal doses do not kill bees outright but impair navigation, memory, immune function, and reproduction. The European Union banned outdoor use of three major neonicotinoids in 2018. California restricted some uses in 2024. Enforcement remains patchy. For a full breakdown of the regulatory timeline and what is currently allowed in California, see our article on neonicotinoids and Sacramento bees.

2. Habitat loss and forage scarcity

Bees need diverse, continuous forage — different plants blooming from early spring through late fall. Suburban sprawl, monoculture agriculture, and the replacement of native meadows with turf grass have stripped that forage continuity. In the Central Valley specifically, the almond bloom produces a sudden enormous pulse of resources in late February followed by a "forage cliff" in March when there is effectively nothing left to eat across millions of acres. Hives that are not moved to alternative forage after almonds can starve within weeks.

3. Pathogens and parasites — especially Varroa destructor

Varroa mites are parasitic mites that feed on honey bee fat bodies and vector at least 11 known viruses. First detected in the U.S. in 1987, Varroa is now present in virtually every managed colony in the country. Without treatment, a colony typically dies within one to three years. Resistance to common miticides is growing. Varroa does not affect most native bee species, but it is the primary ongoing mortality driver for managed honey bees, which in turn drives up pollination costs across California agriculture.

4. Climate stress — heat, drought, phenological mismatch

California's shifting climate — hotter summers, more extreme droughts, earlier and more compressed bloom windows — stresses pollinators in multiple ways simultaneously. Heat shuts down foraging above roughly 104°F. Drought reduces or eliminates nectar flows. Earlier blooms arrive before ground-nesting native bees have emerged from their overwintering cells, producing a phenological mismatch that can crash local populations within a few seasons. We cover this in detail in our Sacramento drought and heat article.

What Sacramento Residents Can Actually Do

Individual homeowners cannot fix the almond-pollination system or rewrite California pesticide regulations on their own. But bee conservation is one of those unusual environmental problems where individual action scales. Every Sacramento yard that becomes pollinator-friendly adds forage and nesting habitat to a regional corridor. Every yard that drops pesticides removes a small amount of sub-lethal chemical pressure. The actions are not abstract; they are measurable in bee counts within a single growing season.

Plant California natives, and plant for bloom succession

The single highest-leverage action is putting the right plants in the ground. California native flowering plants — ceanothus, manzanita, California lilac, buckwheat, salvias, gum plant, toyon, California poppy — evolved alongside native bees and provide forage that non-native ornamentals largely do not. Aim for something blooming every month from February through October. Our guides on creating a bee-friendly garden in Sacramento and native plants Sacramento bees love list specific species, bloom windows, and where to source them.

Provide water and nesting habitat

A shallow bee water station with pebbles or marbles gives honey bees and native bees a safe place to drink during Sacramento summers. Leaving bare, sunny, well-drained patches of soil — even a few square feet — creates habitat for the roughly 70% of California native bees that nest underground. Hollow stems, small brush piles, and untreated wood blocks support cavity-nesting species. See how to build a bee hotel for a practical weekend project.

Eliminate pesticide exposure

Homeowner pesticide use matters more than most people realize, because it happens at the same height where bees forage and where ground-nesting bees emerge. Avoid neonicotinoids specifically (imidacloprid, clothianidin, thiamethoxam, dinotefuran — check product labels; they are often in big-box "all-in-one" lawn and garden products). Read labels. If you work with a lawn care service, ask what they apply and when.

Choose live removal over extermination

When bees show up on your property as a swarm or an established colony, the default response used to be pesticide spray and dead bees. It does not have to be. The Bee Conservatory runs a free live removal program across Sacramento County — we come out, collect the colony, and relocate it to a partner apiary at no cost to the homeowner. Our who to call for bees in Sacramento guide covers the full decision tree.

Support policy change

Because Sacramento is where California pollinator policy gets made, calls and emails to state legislators on pesticide reform, habitat funding, and pollinator protection bills have structurally outsized weight compared to constituent contact from anywhere else in the state. It takes five minutes. The California Department of Pesticide Regulation and the state Legislature both publish active comment windows on pollinator-related rules throughout the year.

The Economics — What Pollination Is Actually Worth

It is worth stating the economic value of bees plainly, because the numbers usually get softened to the point of meaninglessness. The best-available estimates from the USDA Economic Research Service and UC Agricultural Issues Center put the value of honey bee pollination to U.S. agriculture at $15-20 billion annually, with roughly $11 billion of that concentrated in California crops. Native bee pollination adds an estimated additional $3-5 billion nationally, mostly uncounted because it happens without a paid contract.

To put that in perspective: the annual economic value of bee pollination in California alone exceeds the gross state product of entire smaller U.S. states. It also exceeds the combined annual budget of every pollinator research and protection program at the federal and state level by roughly two orders of magnitude. We are protecting an $11 billion asset with roughly $60-80 million in annual public investment. No private-sector CEO would defend that ratio.

Pollination fees as a market signal

One of the cleanest price signals for pollinator scarcity is almond pollination fees. In the 1990s, California almond growers paid roughly $30-50 per hive for pollination services. By 2010, that figure had risen to $150 per hive. As of the 2024 bloom, fees were near $225 per hive and in some cases exceeded $250 for high-quality hives. That is a 400-500% real-dollar increase in 30 years, driven almost entirely by honey bee scarcity. When the price of a service rises faster than general inflation for three decades straight, the market is telling you something about supply.

Conclusion — What "Why Bees Matter" Actually Means

Stripped of the slogan, why bees matter comes down to a specific, unglamorous claim: California agriculture runs on pollinator labor that no current technology can replace at scale, and that labor is being delivered by a biological workforce in measurable decline. The almond industry knows this. The USDA knows this. The Xerces Society, UC Davis, and the California Department of Pesticide Regulation know this. The question is not whether bees matter. It is how many of the people living in the region that most depends on them decide to act accordingly.

If you live in Sacramento, you sit at the operational center of this system. A half-hour drive in almost any direction puts you in pollinator-dependent farmland. A bee in your yard is almost certainly a bee that, earlier in its season or later in its species' life cycle, will visit a crop that someone eats. Your yard, your neighborhood, your street, and your representatives at the Capitol are all closer to the heart of this question than almost anywhere else in the country. That is not a burden; it is a position of unusual leverage. Small local actions — one native shrub, one water station, one call to an exterminator that becomes a call to us instead — add up faster than people think.

The Bee Conservatory exists specifically to make that aggregation happen. We run free live bee removal across Sacramento County so that homeowner problems end with relocated colonies rather than dead ones. We restore pollinator habitat on schools, businesses, and residential properties. We train volunteers in citizen science, advocate at the state level on pesticide reform, and support the science coming out of UC Davis and Sacramento-area researchers. None of it is glamorous. All of it compounds.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do bees matter to California specifically?

California grows about a third of the country's vegetables and two-thirds of the country's fruits and nuts, and the most valuable of those crops — almonds, stone fruit, berries, avocados, melons — are bee-pollinated. Bees underwrite roughly $11 billion in annual California crop value. Almonds alone, at 80% of world production, are 100% dependent on honey bee pollination. No other U.S. state has this level of pollinator dependency concentrated in a single growing region.

How does California almond pollination actually work?

Every February, roughly 2.5 million commercial honey bee colonies — about 85% of the U.S. managed bee supply — are trucked into the Central Valley from across the continent to pollinate the almond bloom over a three-week window. Growers pay approximately $200-225 per hive for the service, which totals more than $500 million per year in pollination fees alone. It is the largest coordinated animal movement in agricultural history, and the almond crop literally cannot set without it.

What would happen without bees in California?

California would not lose all agriculture — wind-pollinated crops (wheat, rice, corn) and forage crops would continue. But the pollinator-dependent portfolio, which represents roughly two-thirds of the state's farm value, would collapse. Almond, stone fruit, avocado, and berry yields would drop dramatically. Prices would spike. Imports would fill part of the gap at higher cost. Nutritional diversity in the American food supply would measurably worsen. The state would not starve; it would become a smaller, coarser agricultural producer with significantly reduced output of the healthiest food categories.

Are honey bees or native bees more important?

Both, in different roles. Honey bees do the bulk of the commercial pollination work because they are easy to transport, manage, and deploy at scale. Native bees (about 1,600 species in California) are more effective per-visit pollinators for many specific crops — blueberries, squash, stone fruit, tomatoes — and they work in conditions honey bees will not (cool, cloudy, early morning). A healthy California agricultural system needs both. "Saving the bees" is not only about honey bees; it is also about the native species that do uncompensated, often-overlooked pollination work.

Why are bees declining?

Four interacting stressors: pesticide exposure (especially neonicotinoids), habitat loss and forage scarcity, pathogens and parasites (especially Varroa destructor mites in managed honey bee colonies), and climate stress (heat, drought, and phenological mismatch between bee emergence and plant bloom). No single factor explains the decline. The factors compound — a colony weakened by sub-lethal pesticide exposure is more vulnerable to Varroa, and a Varroa-stressed colony is less able to survive a drought year. Addressing only one stressor rarely moves the trajectory.

What can I do in Sacramento to help bees?

Five actions, in rough order of impact: (1) plant California native flowering plants with bloom coverage from February through October; (2) avoid neonicotinoid pesticides and work with lawn services that can commit to the same; (3) leave bare, sunny soil patches and untreated wood for native bee nesting; (4) call for live bee removal (we do it free) rather than extermination when bees appear on your property; (5) contact your state legislators on pollinator policy — Sacramento residents have outsized proximity to the decision-makers. See our bee-friendly Sacramento garden guide for step-by-step planting advice.

How much is a bee worth?

Economically, a commercial honey bee colony provides roughly $200-225 in almond pollination value alone each year, plus additional value from subsequent crop pollinations. USDA and UC Agricultural Issues Center estimates place the aggregate value of honey bee pollination in California at approximately $11 billion per year, with native bees contributing billions more in uncompensated pollination services. Ecologically, a bee is worth the continuation of a one-in-three-bites-of-food pattern that has operated globally for most of recorded agricultural history.

The California Bottom Line

Why bees matter is not a sentimental question in California. It is an infrastructure question. An $11 billion agricultural portfolio, 80% of the world's almonds, two-thirds of the state's farm-gate value, and the nutritional quality of the American food supply all run through pollinator biology. The decline is real, the stakes are concrete, and the levers of response — habitat, pesticide reform, live removal, native bee protection — are tractable. Sacramento residents are uniquely positioned to pull those levers, because of where they live and whom they live next to.

The work is not dramatic. It is a native shrub in the ground, a water dish on the patio, a phone call that saves a colony instead of killing it, an email to a state senator. Repeat across a few hundred thousand yards in Sacramento County and the aggregate is meaningful — measurable, even — at the scale of the Central Valley pollinator corridor. California's food supply is worth that effort.