Every February, thousands of trucks drive through the night toward California.

They're not carrying groceries or furniture or packages. They're carrying bees. Billions of them. Stacked in hives on flatbed trailers, moving across the country in the dark to arrive in time for one of the most precisely timed agricultural events in the world — the California almond bloom.

The bloom lasts just three to four weeks. Almond trees can't pollinate themselves and can't rely on wind. They need a bee to physically carry pollen from one tree to another. Without that, no almond grows. California produces about eighty percent of the world's commercial almond supply — and the bloom window waits for nothing.

California has about half a million resident bee colonies. The almond industry needs closer to two and a half million. So beekeepers from Fl ...