Almond growers plant wildflowers to help bees

From:  The Modesto Bee, by JOHN HOLLAND
"The rented bees arrived to find quite a feast in Mike Silveira’s almond orchard north of Oakdale.
He had sown mustard seeds between the tree rows in the fall, and by mid-January, they had burst out in flowers full of pollen and nectar for the bees to eat. This helped them gain strength for the almond pollination, now well under way up and down the Central Valley.
Silveira is among about 150 almond growers taking part in this research effort for the bees, which have struggled with disease and other challenges over the past decade.

'If you have this for a month before the almond bloom, then you build up a lot of bees,' said pollination researcher Christi Heintz, executive director of the sponsoring group, Project Apis m. It is named for Apis mellifera, the scientific name for the European honeybee, the species at issue..."

Read the Article featuring the Executive Director of Project Apis m., Christi Heintz, Here