This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

If you drive from Oakland to Los Angeles in February,

you'll pass through a spectacular scene,

neat symmetrical rows of trees covered with pink and white flowers stretching on for

hundreds of miles. This is the annual California almond bloom and it really is massive.

California almond trees take up a million acres of land in the Central Valley.

When the petals fall off, they carpet the road and create this sweet smell.

And the almond bloom also has its own distinctive sound.

You can actually hear it before you even walk into the orchard.

That's the sound of thousands of bees

from an orchard outside of Modesto, California. To create a single almond,

a blossom needs as many as a dozen bee visits.

That means you need roughly 80,000 bees

to pollinate an acre of almonds.

That's Adam Allington.

He's a reporter covering the environment for Bloomberg.

He also hosts the podcast, The Business of Bees.

When you think of bees in business, you're probably thinking of honey.

But in fact, honey has little to do with commercial beekeeping today. Every winter beekeepers from every

corner of the United States descend on California to pollinate almonds.

Almonds have a window of about two weeks for pollination to occur,

otherwise the blossoms won't turn into fruit. about two weeks for pollination to occur.

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