Joe asked yet again:

> What crop matures in 18 days?

Weeds.
As I explained, one wants to burn weeds before they go to seed.
It was jumping to conclusions for you to presume that the growers 
were burning an active field.
Clearly, they were burning a fallow field.
There is no other scenario where a burn would be done so close to
a bloom.  So, the weeds in the fallow fields were the nectar source 
of interest to the beekeepers.

> And please do tell us your experience farming 

I will, and challenge you to do the same.
But you won't, will you?

I grew 550 acres of top-grade horse hay for more than 15 years, 
or, if rain came 'tween cut and bailing, top-grade cow hay.
Two years out of three, I was lucky, and had horse hay to sell.
I also had a quarter-acre each of blackberries and raspberries,
several acres of heirloom apples, and a kick-ass little veggie
garden.  Wanns see the state fair ribbons?

> or trucking bees around 

Over 15 years of doing apples along the blue ridge of VA.
Not as glamorous as Almonds, but it does include lots of
entertainingly steep gravel roads.

> that you can speak with such high authority on the matter? 

Well, lets see... farming paid off the farm in less than a
decade, so I must have been doing something right.  :)

Randy chimed in:

> I sure didn't detect any confusion.  Seemed more like 
> pointing out inconsistencies in a long stretch.

I can understand your problem - living in California means 
that you've never seen a field burn, except when the several 
thousand acres around the field were also burning.

But don't argue with me, argue with the translator of the
document I merely quoted.  Or, argue with Bill Truesdell, 
over here:
http://listserv.albany.edu:8080/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0806c&L=bee-l&T=0&P=612
7


So, to summarize - beekeeping is sustainable.  
So is almond pollination.

Anyone who uses the term "sustainability" has an agenda that involves
telling you and I how we "should" keep bees, most often involving 
practices that won't scale up beyond a few dozen hives, or
mystical magical approaches that have yet to be verified by any
sort of controlled study.

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