Numlock Sunday: Andrew P. Collins on the bee armada

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Andrew P. Collins who a few weeks ago wrote That Big Rig You're Passing Might Be Full of Bees. Here's what I wrote about it:

The bee business is an exciting one, with mercenary apiaries going from town to town, ronin style, taking out pollination contracts in a life on the road. Bees, which are technically speaking livestock, are trucked all over the country to facilitate the vast pollination needed to make the American fruit and nut business function. It takes 31 billion bees to pollinate the 90 million almond trees in California each year. Since there aren’t enough natural pollinators for the job, bees are trucked around the country — to Massachusetts for cranberry pollination, to the Pacific Northwest for apples, to Georgia for peach season — for…