Almonds, Honeybees, North Dakota and High Corn Prices

Yeah, that's a lot of things tied together.  All Things Considered fills us in.  First, on the almonds, and the bees:

In fact, it's one of the great success stories of California agriculture. Twenty years ago, the state produced a modest half-billion pounds of almonds each year. "We hit a billion pounds and it just never stopped. This past year it's the better part of 2 billion pounds," says McFarlane. The Central Valley of California actually grows two-thirds of all the almonds in the world.
But here's where we get into all those not-so-obvious connections. These superproductive almond trees are needy creatures. They need lots of water and fertilizer. And they also need big, vigorous insects to carry pollen from one blossom to another.
  They need honeybees — billions of honeybees. And those bees have to come from somewhere else. That's why California's almond orchards have become "ground zero in commercial beekeeping," says Zac Browning, a beekeeper.
I met Browning in the middle of a huge almond orchard near the tiny town of Snelling, Calif. His beehives — 6,000 of them — were lined up as far as I could see along a dirt road down the middle of the ranch. The hives had just arrived from a storage building in Idaho where they'd spent the winter. They were carted in on a caravan of trailers with 480 white wooden boxes per load.
This was just a small part of a great national bee migration that connects California to the northern Plains. During the few weeks this month when the almond trees are in bloom, 1.6 million beehives flood the state's almond orchards, many of them trucked in from the Midwest.

The thing is, when the bees are done in California, they go other places to find food.  One very popular place for the bees is North Dakota, where lots of land in the CRP program means lots of clover, alfalfa and wildflowers growing.  With high corn prices, ground is going out of CRP and into corn.  Now scientists are wondering how that will affect the bees.  Interesting stuff, at least to me.