“I pulled out a frame from a hive and the sound of the buzzing, the scent of wax and honey—it was intoxicating,” recalls Durant. That, combined with reading The Secret Life of Bees—novel in which beekeeping is a refuge and path to enlightenment—sparked an unexpected interest that begged to be explored.

The apiary visit set her on a new path that would lead her to keep bee colonies, dedicate her career to pollinators, and author the solutions-oriented book Bitter Honey: Big Ag’s Threat to Bees and the Fight to Save Them. Durant’s passion for bees developed just as news outlets around the world were first raising the alarm about the mysterious disappearance of bees, categorized then as colony collapse disorder.

With approximately 35 percent of the world’s food crops depending on pollinators, colony losses put our food systems in peril. Farming practices pose the greatest risk to bees, Durant discovered in nearly two decades of studying the bee crisis—first as a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley; then as a postdoctoral fellow with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA); and later as a science and technology policy fellow with the American Association for the Academy of Sciences (AAAS).

Much has been written about the bee crisis, and the focus tends to be on the harms of pesticides—neonicotinoids, in particular. Durant takes a broader systems approach in her book, highlighting the myriad ways industrialization has changed agriculture and altered the landscapes that bees inhabit.

Civil Eats recently spoke with Durant about the vulnerability of bees, their vital role in food systems, and emerging solutions to the crisis that could help both managed colonies and native populations thrive for generations to come.

How is Bitter Honey different from other books written about the threat to bees?

Some books have touched on the food system as an issue, but I think this is the first that really frames the industrial ag system as the primary driver of bee vulnerability and declines. The other thing that makes it unique is that I spent 14 years with this community and I highlight the voices of the beekeepers. In each chapter, you get close to a beekeeper and get to know their personal story. What also makes the book stand out are three chapters on solutions, showing what’s already happening on the ground.

What are the primary factors causing illnesses and untimely deaths for bee populations and other pollinators and insects?

Beekeepers use an expression called “The Four Ps” to talk about what’s affecting bees. I actually talk about five. The first is “pests.” The primary driver is the varroa mite, which attaches to bee bodies and transmits diseases. That relates to the second P, “pathogens.” Varroa mites are so dangerous because they feed on honey bees’ fat body tissue, which is important for energy storage, immunity, and detoxification. They also transmit deadly diseases like deformed wing virus and acute bee paralysis virus.

The third is “pesticides.” We are seeing a big issue with neonicotinoids, which can affect a bee’s ability to forage or navigate and the queen’s ability to reproduce. The fourth is “poor nutrition” because of monoculture farming. Instead of the varied nutrition a pollinator gets in a field of wildflowers, they’re exposed to just one crop.

And the fifth P I add is “bad policy.” We don’t have enough information about which chemicals are toxic to bees. Under the Trump administration, we’re also seeing funding cuts to programs that support critical research and conservation programs. That has real impacts for bees and beekeepers. One example is the Beltsville Agriculture Research Center in Maryland, which the administration has threatened to shut down. And this is happening after last year, when we had some of the biggest honey bee losses we’ve ever had—beekeepers lost on average 60 percent of their colonies, largely due to viruses transmitted by mites.

What was your process for researching Bitter Honey?

I wanted to understand how beekeepers had changed their management practices to pollinate for the almond industry. Around 90 to 95 percent of all commercial colonies come to California for the almond bloom. If that many beekeepers have configured their whole operations for this industry, what’s the connection to honeybee vulnerability?

I focused on beekeepers who pollinated almonds with operations of any size, ranging from 50 colonies to 90,000. I went down into California’s Central Valley for the almond orchards around there and up to Chico, where a lot of queen breeding happens. Forty percent of all commercial bee colonies go to the Midwest, so I also went to North Dakota and interviewed beekeepers there.

Then I ended up in Washington, D.C., for a year as a fellow on pollinator policy, where I had a 50,000-foot view of federal policy and worked closely with people in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and USDA, understanding this landscape of policy that beekeepers have to navigate. I saw how there are—or were, before the DOGE cuts—many committed people inside USDA working to support beekeepers, but honey and beekeeping receive less institutional support than other major commodity and livestock sectors.

What is the meaning behind the name Bitter Honey?

It’s the honey that bees produce when they are in almond orchards, which has an acrid flavor due to naturally occurring chemical compounds in almond nectar, so it’s not commonly sold. Beekeepers tend to leave it in their hives for the bees to consume. It speaks to that Faustian bargain that beekeepers have made to pollinate for the almond industry.

They truck bees across the country and push them hard. Almonds bloom in winter, when the bees would normally do winter clustering—a kind of hibernation—so they have to feed the bees supplements and manage mites. They’re also breeding more productive queens, but the subspecies that are most productive are also most susceptible to the mites. So, beekeepers are doing everything they can to have these really productive colonies, but it comes at a real cost.

In the history of the relationship between humans and bees, when did the almond industry’s shift toward pollination take place?

Humans have been seeking out honey for thousands of years, but it took time to figure out how to domesticate bees. Around the 1850s, the Langstroth hive was invented, allowing beekeepers to remove frames to harvest honey for commercial businesses. During World War I and II, beekeepers provided honey and wax for the war efforts.

After the war, farming shifted toward using war chemicals for agriculture, like nitrogen for fertilizers and other war chemicals for pesticides, and we started this transition to monoculture farming. Now you have these landscapes that are feast or famine—you’ve got this single crop that provides a lot of blossom and then, once the bloom is over, there’s no nectar or pollen to feed the bees. Because of agrochemicals, urbanization, and monoculture farming, native bees [began to decline], and beekeepers started trucking in bees for pollination since there weren’t enough native colonies.