FIGURE 2.48 Bees, almonds, and ethanol. Flowering almond trees in California are pollinated by high plains honeybees, which live in hives (the white boxes shown in the picture) that are usually trucked in from South Dakota, where they flourish among the fields of wildflowers that have sprung up on abandoned farmland. However, California’s almond industry has recently struggled to find enough bees as the fields in South Dakota are being brought back into corn production to satisfy the demand for ethanol fuel made from corn, reducing the amount of land available for wildflowers for the bees. With the wildflowers gone, bee populations will decrease rapidly.