Bitter Honey

An evening with Jennie Durant in conversation with Jeanne Merrill.

Every February, one of the largest and least visible migrations in America takes place.

Semi-trucks loaded with honey bee colonies travel to California’s Central Valley, carrying nearly 99 percent of the nation’s domesticated bees. For a few extraordinary weeks, billions of bees descend upon millions of acres of almond trees in bloom. Then they move again across the country to pollinate apples, berries, and countless other crops that make their way onto our tables.

It is an astonishing feat of industrial agriculture. It is also a system under enormous strain.

In Bitter Honey, journalist Jennie Durant takes us inside this hidden world, following the bees, beekeepers, farmers, and advocates living at the center of one of the most consequential and fragile systems in our food economy. Bees face parasites, disease, pesticides, climate extremes, and the relentless pressures of an agricultural system built around scale and efficiency. Beekeepers routinely lose enormous portions of their colonies each year simply trying to keep their operations alive.

And yet Bitter Honey is not only a story of crisis. It is also a story about imagination. Because to ask what is happening to the bees is ultimately to ask a much larger question: What kind of food system are we building, and what kind of relationship do we want with the living systems that sustain us?

Jennie will be joined by Jeanne Merrill, Executive Director of the Berkeley Food Institute, for a conversation about bees and biodiversity, industrial agriculture and ecological resilience, California’s Central Valley, and the people working to imagine another way forward.

The evening will begin with a short introduction from cultural anthropologist Cari Borja, placing Bitter Honey within the larger conversation about the hidden infrastructures and invisible labor behind the food we eat. Because the story of the bee is never just about the bee. It is about the hidden systems that sustain us. The people whose labor we rarely see. The landscapes we have transformed. And the possibility that, even now, we might choose to build something different.

Join us for an evening of conversation about bees, food, agriculture, and the fragile, interconnected world beneath every meal.

Jennie Durant is a writer and researcher focused on bees, agriculture, and the environment. She earned her PhD from UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. Her writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Grist, LitHub, Live Science, Glamour, San Francisco Chronicle, and HuffPost. Her book, Bitter Honey: Big Ag's Threat to Bees and the Fight to Save Them, was published by Island Press/Princeton University Press in May 2026.

Jeanne Merrill is the Executive Director of the Berkeley Food Institute. She has more than 25 years of experience in food systems advocacy, policy analysis and development, and nonprofit leadership. She is a co-founder and former Policy Director with the California Climate and Agriculture Network (CalCAN). She has held several state and federal appointments, most recently to the U.S. EPA’s Farm, Ranch and Rural Communities Advisory Committee. Ms. Merrill holds a B.A. in political science from U.C. San Diego and an M.Sc. in Land Resources from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She began her career in community organizing, where she partnered with communities in California impacted by pesticides to win local and state protections. Her greatest passion lies in empowering people with the tools needed to affect democratic change and work together to achieve resilient and equitable food and farm systems.