In re "Almonds"...

>> growers must be able to show a receipt 
>> for the rental of two hives per acre in 
>> order to collect on crop insurance.

> Get a good quality IR camera and have the 
> grower inspect the delivered load.

No he won't ever do that -  step back a bit - the grower doesn't CARE.
Either he has no intention of getting a decent yield, or he is freeriding on
the rental of decent hives in the neighboring groves.  Either way, he pays a
low price, and he gets exactly what he pays for, with a wink and a nod.

I had a slightly different approach, as science majors were forced to take
some marketing over at Sloan, and I remembered my schooling.  I got paid at
harvest, not in spring. I got paid a percentage of the value of the crop in
terms of actual sale price.  This did 4 things: (a) it earned me all kinds
of "bonuses", as growers are a lot more generous when they just got paid
than they are when they are having to borrow money to fund spring expenses;
(b) by financing pollination at 0% interest, it improved grower cashflow
without hurting mine at all, as I did not need to borrow; (c) it eliminated
all the mutual suspicion and adversarial  stuff, as I was a true partner in
the success of the crop, and was motivated to make sure everything went
well.  (d) it gave me a voice that had to be listened to, so when I said
"cut the understory", they got the bushhog out and mowed.  They did not want
to go find themselves a new beekeeper, as nobody else offered the kind of
deal I offered.

Was there some risk in this?  Of course, but taking on a small amount of
risk is easier when it is divided up among dozens of apple growers spread
along hundreds of miles of ridgeline.  Nothing could affect them all, so the
low-yield crops were balanced out by the bumper crops and the fads where one
variety of heirloom apple could command better prices than another for a few
years.

But in the almonds, the orchards can absorb entire operations, making for
more risk. In apples, I had my bees spilt into 2 or 3 battalions,
leapfrogging each other steadily northward with the bloom, so no one grower
had all my bees.

Of course, my approach was based on the assumption that everyone wanted to
grow apples, rather than collect on crop insurance.  You can tell when
someone stops really caring about their orchard, as pruning, cutting
understory, and bloom thinning are labor-intensive, costly, time-consuming
and not auditable on the books, but are easily seen by the beekeeper as
"Excellent", "Good", or "He Went Fishing".

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