Business

The Beekeepers Who Don’t Want You to Buy More Bees

Published

2 years ago

August 21, 2023

The Beekeepers Who Don’t Want You to Buy More Bees

When the B&B Hotel in Ljubljana, Slovenia, decided to reinvent itself as an eco-friendly destination in 2015, it had to meet more than 150 criteria to earn a coveted Travelife certificate of sustainability. But then it went step further: It hired a beekeeper to install four honey bee hives on the roof.

“Keeping wild animals is a great way to show that we have a connection to nature,” said the general manager, Adrijana Hauptman Vidergar. “And we’ve had great feedback from guests who go up there and take a look.”

The hives are managed by Gorazd Trusnovec, a 50-year-old with a graying goatee who is the founder and sole employee of an enterprise called Najemi Panj, which translates to “rent-a-hive.” For a yearly fee, he will install a honey bee colony on the roof of an office, or in a backyard, and ensure that its bees are healthy and productive. Customers get the honey and the pleasure of doing something that benefits bees and nourishes the environment.

That, at any rate, was Mr. Trusnovec’s original sales pitch. In recent years, he and other beekeepers, as well as a broad variety of leading conservationists, have come to a very different conclusion: The craze for honey bees now presents a genuine ecological challenge. Not just in Slovenia, but around the world.

“If you overcrowd any space with honey bees, there is a competition for natural resources, and since bees have the largest numbers, they push out other pollinators, which actually harms biodiversity,” he said, after a recent visit to the B&B bees. “I would say that the best thing you could do for honey bees right now is not take up beekeeping.”

It’s like Johnny Appleseed announcing, “Enough with the apples.” That’s a jarring message, and not just because honey bees play a crucial role in the food chain, pollinating about one-third of the food consumed by Americans, according to the Food and Drug Administration. It’s also because there is a widespread and now deeply rooted belief that the global population of honey bees has been running dangerously low for more than a decade.

The notion has spurred a boom in beekeeping, most notably among corporations eager to demonstrate their green bona fides.

But the urge to acquire a hive comes from the simplification of some complicated facts, says Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation in Portland, Ore.

A malady originally dubbed disappearing disease had been afflicting honey bees for decades. In the fall of 2006, an American beekeeper named Dave Hackenberg checked on his 400 hives and found that in many, most of the worker bees had disappeared. Other beekeepers started to report that they were losing upward of 90 percent of their colonies. The phenomenon was renamed colony collapse disorder. The cause remains unclear, but experts tend to blame pesticides, an invasive parasite, a reduction in forageable habitat and climate change. An alarm was sounded, and “save the bees” became a rallying cry.

“It was the first time that a large number of people started talking about pollinators, which was great,” Mr. Black said. “The downside was that there was no nuance. All anyone heard was that bees were declining, and so I should get a hive.”

Honey bees, it turns out, are a commercially managed animal — essentially livestock, like cows — and large beekeeping operations are remarkably adept at replacing colonies that die. In the United States, about one million hives are trucked each year to places like California, where honey bees pollinate almonds and other crops, Mr. Black said. It’s a major industry.

While techniques for nurturing hives have improved, honey bees remain vulnerable animals. As of a few years ago, nearly 30 percent of commercial honey bees still did not survive the winter months, says the Environmental Protection Agency. That’s a large number and one that puts a financial strain on commercial beekeepers.

“But that’s an agriculture story, not a conservation story,” Mr. Black said. “There are now more honey bees on the planet than there have ever been in human history.”

Figures from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations underscore the point. The number of beehives around the world has risen by nearly 26 percent in the last decade, to 102 million from 81 million.

Still, the save-the-bees narrative persists. Its longevity stems from confusion about what kind of bees actually need to be rescued. There are more than 20,000 species of wild bees in the world, and many people don’t realize they exist. That’s because they don’t produce honey and live all but invisibly, in ground nests and cavities like hollow tree trunks. But they are indispensable pollinators of plants, flowers and crops.

Researchers have found that many species of wild bees are, in fact, declining. So trying to save them makes eminent sense. But hobbyists and corporations, not to mention luminaries like Beyoncé and Queen Camilla, are drawn only to the seven or so species of honey bees — the one group supported by a multibillion-dollar agribusiness and that doesn’t need the help.

Hives are now getting installed at what beekeeping association leaders say is a record pace. As with the B&B Hotel, they are typically motivated by an impulse to do something positive for the environment that is also highly visible — an apiary form of greenwashing. (Hivewashing?)

Recently, the Museum of Modern Art posted an image of four hives on its Instagram account, along with text that read, “We recognize the essential part bees play in our ecosystem and that’s why we are proud to provide a home to all these bees here at the Museum.” In London, the sheer quantity of hives poses a threat to other species of bees, says a report issued in 2020 by the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew. The city’s financial district is now overrun with what Richard Glassborow, the chair of the London Beekeepers’ Association, calls “trophy bees.”

“We’ve had companies from outside London come with plans to put 20 hives a year on roofs,” he said, “and persuade businesses that this will tick some kind of corporate responsibility box.”

New York City has a similar problem, says Andrew Coté, president of the New York City Beekeepers Association. In February, MoMA asked him to install the hives it recently showed off. He declined.

“The population is already overwhelming the finite floral resources,” he said. “We don’t need more honey bees here.”

People like Mr. Coté are in a peculiar spot. They lead a membership of honey bee enthusiasts in a place with too many honey bees. There are no regulatory limits on hives, so the law is no help. In London, all Mr. Glassborow can do is explain to current and prospective members that the last thing the city needs is more hives.

It usually works. Companies that confer with him often end up planting flowers, which increases the food supply for many pollinators. But most companies and hobbyists don’t call for a chat. With the number of hives rising, pressure is mounting on less charismatic insects, like moths, wasps and wild bees, which are essential to pollinating wild plants and many crops, and which academic studies have found are in decline. Apparently nobody wants 25,000 moths parked near the C-suites.

Today, hives are so ubiquitous in some places, especially urban areas, that the amount of honey each yields is dropping. Slovenia now produces less honey than it did 15 years ago, according to government figures, even though it has more than doubled the number of hives in the country. That’s because there is not enough nectar to go around, said Matjaz Levicar, a Slovenian beekeeping instructor, and honey bees are consuming it to survive rather than turning it into honey.

“It’s a tragedy,” he said. “In Slovenia, we need to feed honey bee colonies with sugar most of the year.”

Asking people to dial down their honey bee enthusiasm isn’t easy. They are the celebrities of the insect world, a source of fascination, for their uncannily efficient social structure, and referenced in nearly every world religion.

“Honey was seen as a gift from the gods,” said Sarah Wyndham Lewis, author of The Wild Bee Handbook. “Honey bees gave humans food, medicine and a trade which enabled people to improve their lives. It might have been the first source of alcohol, too, which let people go off their heads.”

Nowhere is honey more deeply ingrained in national culture than Slovenia, where beekeeping has been a national passion for generations. It is so deeply ingrained here that last year UNESCO called it “a way of life” and added it to the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, the same list that enshrines France’s connection to the baguette.

That history might explain why it took Mr. Trusnovec, the rent-a-hive beekeeper, a few years to realize that honey bees don’t need to be rescued. He came to beekeeping as a hobbyist in his mid-30s, when he earned a living as an architectural engineer and as a film critic. Both jobs left him staring at screens all day, and he pined for less sedentary work.

Then, one day about 15 years ago, he had a powerful memory of his grandparents’ idyllic house near Slovenia’s border with Italy, which was surrounded by a creek, acacia trees and beehives kept by an uncle.

“It’s a very Proustian story,” he said. “All of a sudden I remembered this smell, not quite honey but bees and pollen, a very complex and beautiful smell. I thought to myself, I must get in touch with bees somehow.”

He learned beekeeping from books, and started with two hives on his balcony. To his delight, he quickly realized he had an aptitude for the work — “the bees didn’t die,” as he put it dryly — and he had found a way to connect with nature while remaining in the city.

His first hive-renting client was a cultural center focused on dance. Other customers came calling — schools, corporations, hotels, banks, private citizens. One of his clients is the Petrol Group, Slovenia’s largest energy company.

Mr. Trusnovec plans to reduce the number of hives he keeps to 40 from 50, and perhaps an even lower number soon enough. To reach that goal, he is having delicate conversations with clients about the evolution of his thinking and the realities of the bee population. That it’s time to assist thousands of bee species that actually need help and end the love affair with honey bees, which don’t.

“It’s difficult,” he said. “If someone were to call me today, I would advise them to put up a hotel for solitary bees or boxes for bumblebees. Or plant some trees instead.”

Business

Venture capital investment is rising in Los Angeles — and not just for AI startups

Published

5 hours ago

June 6, 2025

Press Room

Venture capital investment is rising in Los Angeles — and not just for AI startups

Early this year, private equity firm Blackstone bet big on the future of artificial intelligence by investing $300 million in a Chatsworth company that’s been around for more than two decades.

The company, DDN, helps businesses store and manage the massive trove of data that powers AI systems — the lifeblood needed for chatbots, self-driving cars and more. DDN’s high-profile customers include chipmaker Nvidia, Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI, Google Cloud and Ford. DDN, short for DataDirect Networks, has roughly 1,000 employees.

“They have a trillion dollars of assets under management, and it’s a company that we thought would really move the needle for us in terms of extending our reach,” said Jyothi Swaroop, DDN’s chief marketing officer.

The investment was among the largest this year in the Greater Los Angeles region, which remains a hot spot for investments in both old and new tech companies poised for growth.

All told, venture capital investors and private equity firms poured $3.1 billion to fund 144 deals in the L.A. area in the first quarter of this year, up 15% from a year ago, according to research firm CB Insights. The area encompasses Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

While investment levels can fluctuate, funding in the greater L.A. region has steadily increased since 2023, when investment cooled following the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX.

Along with AI, investors also financed startups and established businesses in healthcare, e-commerce and defense technology, underscoring how investment in the L.A. market has diversified in recent years beyond ad tech businesses and video apps.

“Today it’s going into much more ambitious projects,” Mark Suster, a general partner at Santa Monica-based Upfront Ventures. “It’s going into satellites, alternate energy, national defense, drones, shipbuilding and pharmaceutical drug discovery. So it’s a lot more exciting than it ever has been.”

Los Angeles-area companies that received the most money in the first quarter include Torrance-based defense company Epirus with $250 million; and Thousand Oaks-based Latigo Biotherapeutics, which received $150 million, according to CB Insights. Latigo Biotherapeutics develops non-opioid pain treatments, while Epirus makes technology that helps defend against attacks from drone swarms.

Economic consulting firm Econic Partners raised the most funding with $438 million, according to CB Insights, which relied on a report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Econic disputed the total, saying it raised nine figures in the first quarter, but the company declined to say how much.

Masha Bucher, founder and general partner at Day One Ventures, said she views El Segundo as the most promising hub for “deep tech” startups tackling complex issues, such as, water scarcity.

Businesses in the L.A. area have access to a highly qualified workforce from aerospace and defense tech companies. The tech hub known as Silicon Beach also is close to the airport, making it easy for entrepreneurs to hop on a plane to raise funding in San Francisco.

“There is a power of community, and it’s definitely like a power spot on the map,” Bucher said. The firm’s investments include various AI startups and an eye-scanning crypto project backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman in which people verify they’re human.

Investors aren’t interested in only AI, however. Culver City-based Whatnot raised $265 million, one of the biggest deals in the L.A. area this year. The live shopping app allows people to buy and sell items such as clothing and collectibles. Potential customers can ask questions about products in real-time, find deals and bid for products shown in live videos.

Whatnot says it surpassed more than $3 billion in sales in 2024, and the company expects that figure to double this year. The startup, founded in 2019, says it isn’t profitable yet, but the TikTok rival has shown investors it’s growing fast.

“Live and social shopping has the potential to be an absolutely monstrous market,” Whatnot Chief Executive Grant LaFontaine said.

The company has roughly 750 employees across the United States and Europe. The funding will help market Whatnot to attract more users and hire people to improve the shopping experience, he said.

Like other businesses, Whatnot uses AI for customer service and to moderate content on the platform.

“I tend to be sort of a purist, which is that consumers don’t care about AI. They care about problems being solved,” LaFontaine said.

Businesses have been using AI long before the rising popularity of chatbots such as ChatGPT that can generate text, images and code.

But the frenzy surrounding what’s known as generative AI has meant that various industries are confronting how technology will disrupt the way they live and work.

Not surprisingly, investor interest in AI drove much of the nation’s venture capital commitments in the first quarter. San Francisco-based OpenAI secured the largest funding round of $40 billion, placing its valuation at $300 billion, according to CB Insights.

“There’s a ton of opportunity to rewrite the playing field on which people do business in everything from across verticals, across industries,” said Jason Saltzman, head of insights for CB Insights. “Everyone recognizes the promise, and … no one wants to miss out on the promise.”

Globally, $121 billion of venture capital was raised in the first quarter, with 20% of the deals received by AI companies — the highest amount ever, according to CB Insights. Nationally, $90.5 billion in venture capital was raised last quarter, with the bulk of the money going toward startups in Silicon Valley, which brought in $58.9 billion, the research firm said.

Venture capital investments in Q1 2025, L.A. area vs Silicon Valley

San Francisco has experienced a surge in AI startups expanding or opening up offices, drawn to the city’s swath of talent and the Bay Area’s universities. AI leaders including OpenAI and Anthropic also are based there.

OpenAI said it would use the money raised in the first quarter toward building its tools and investing in talent.

“People understand that this is a transformative technology,” said Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s vice president of global affairs in an interview. “It’s going to permeate virtually every aspect of life.”

Silicon Valley remains the far leader in venture capital AI investments, but other cities such as New York have attracted AI funding. There’s also global competition from countries such as China. As legislators weigh whether to introduce laws that could regulate AI, some tech lobbying groups have raised concerns on how those bills could affect innovation in the state.

Suster said he doesn’t think venture capital dollars will leave California.

“The opportunity set is so great here,” Suster said. “Do we occasionally get backwards-looking bills that try to overregulate how industry works in California? Of course, we do. We find ways to work around them.”

Business

Paramount chair Shari Redstone has been diagnosed with thyroid cancer

Published

23 hours ago

June 5, 2025

Press Room

Paramount chair Shari Redstone has been diagnosed with thyroid cancer

Paramount Global chairwoman and controlling shareholder Shari Redstone is battling cancer as she tries to steer the media company through a turbulent sales process.

“Shari Redstone was diagnosed with thyroid cancer earlier this spring,” her spokeswoman Molly Morse said late Thursday. “While it has been a challenging period, she is maintaining all professional and philanthropic activities throughout her treatment, which is ongoing.

“She and her family are grateful that her prognosis is excellent,” Morse said.

The news comes nearly 11 months after Redstone agreed to sell Paramount to David Ellison’s Skydance Media in a deal that would end the family’s tenure as major Hollywood moguls.

However, the government’s review of the Skydance sale hit a snag amid President Trump’s $20-billion lawsuit against Paramount subsidiary CBS over edits to an October “60 Minutes” broadcast.

Redstone, 71, told the New York Times that she underwent surgery last month after receiving the diagnosis about two months ago. Surgeons removed her thyroid gland but did not fully eradicate the cancer, which had spread to her vocal cords, the paper said.

She continues to be treated with radiation, the paper reported.

The Redstone family controls 77% of the voting shares of Paramount. Her father, the late Sumner Redstone, built the company into a juggernaut but it has seen its standing slip in recent years. There have been management missteps and pressures brought on by consumers’ shift to streaming. The trend has crimped revenue to companies that own cable channels, including Paramount.

Redstone has wanted to settle the lawsuit Trump filed in October, weeks after “60 Minutes” interviewed then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump accused CBS of deceptively editing the interview to make Harris look smarter and improve her election chances, a charge that CBS has denied.

The dispute over the edits has sparked unrest within the company, prompted high-level departures and triggered a Federal Communications Commission examination of alleged news distortion.

The FCC’s review of the Skydance deal has become bogged down. If the agency does not approve the transfer of CBS television station licenses to the Ellison family, the deal could collapse.

The two companies must complete the merger by early October. If not, Paramount will owe a $400-million breakup fee to Skydance. Redstone, through the family’s National Amusements Inc., also owes nearly $400 million to a Chicago banker and tech titan Larry Ellison, who is helping bankroll the buyout of Paramount and National Amusements.

Business

How Hard It Is to Make Trade Deals

Published

2 days ago

June 5, 2025

Press Room

President Trump has announced wave after wave of tariffs since taking office in January, part of a sweeping effort that he has argued would secure better trade terms with other countries. “It’s called negotiation,” he recently said.

In April, administration officials vowed to sign trade deals with as many as 90 countries in 90 days. The ambitious target came after Mr. Trump announced, and then rolled back a portion of, steep tariffs that in some cases meant import taxes cost more than the wholesale price of a good itself.

The 90-day goal, however, is a tenth of the time it usually takes to reach a trade deal, according to a New York Times analysis of major agreements with the United States currently in effect, raising questions about how realistic the administration’s target may be. It typically takes 917 days, or roughly two and a half years, for a trade deal to go from initial talks to the president’s desk for signature, the analysis shows.

Roughly 60 days into the current process, Mr. Trump has so far announced only one deal: a pact with Britain, which is not one of America’s biggest trading partners.

He has also suggested that negotiations with China have been rocky. “I like President XI of China, always have, and always will, but he is VERY TOUGH, AND EXTREMELY HARD TO MAKE A DEAL WITH!!!” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday. China and the United States agreed last month to temporarily slash tariffs on each other’s imports in a gesture of good will to continue talks.

Part of what the president can accomplish boils down to what you can call a deal.

The pact with Britain is less of a deal than it is a framework for talking about a deal, said Wendy Cutler, the vice president of the Asia Society Policy Institute and a former U.S. trade negotiator. What was officially released by the two nations more closely resembled talking points for “what you were going to negotiate versus the actual commitment,” she said.

During his first term, Mr. Trump secured two major trade agreements, both signed in January 2020. One was the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which was a reworking of the North American free trade treaty from the 1990s that had helped transform the economies of the three nations.

U.S.M.C.A. is an all-encompassing, legally binding agreement that resulted from a lengthy and formal process, according to trade analysts.

Such deals are supposed to cover all aspects of trade between the respective nations and are negotiated under specific guidelines for congressional consultation. Closing the deal involves both negotiation and ratification — modifying or making laws in each partner country. The deals are signed by trade negotiators before the president signs the legislation that puts it into effect for the United States.

Mr. Trump’s other major agreement in his first term was with China, in an echo of the current trade war. The pact, unlike previous deals, came about after Mr. Trump threatened tariffs on certain Chinese imports. This “tariff first, talk later” approach, said Inu Manak, a trade policy fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is part of the same playbook the administration is currently using.

The result was a nonbinding agreement between the two countries, known as “Phase One,” that did not require approval from Congress and that could be ended by either party at any time. Still, it took almost one year and nine months to complete. China ultimately fell far short of the commitments it made to purchase American goods under the agreement.

A comparison of the two first-term Trump deals shows the drawn-out and sometimes winding paths each took to completion. Fragile truces (including ones made for 90 days) were formed, only for talks to break down later, all while rounds of tariffs injected uncertainty into the diplomatic relations between countries.

The Times analysis used the date from the start of negotiations to the date when the president signed to determine the length of deal making for each major agreement dating back to 1985 that’s currently in effect. The median time it took to get to the president’s signature was just over 900 days. (A separate analysis published in 2016 by the Peterson Institute for International Economics used the date of signature by country representatives as the completion moment and found that the median deal took more than 570 days.)

With roughly one month before the administration’s self-imposed deadline, Mr. Trump’s ability to forge deals has been thrust into sudden doubt. Last week, a U.S. trade court ruled he had overstepped his authority in imposing the April tariffs.

For now, the tariffs remain in place, following a temporary stay from a federal appeals court. But in arguing its case, the federal government initially said that the ruling could upset negotiations with other nations and undercut the president’s leverage.

In a statement on Wednesday, Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, said that trade negotiators were working to secure “custom-made trade deals at lightning speed that level the playing field for American industries and workers.”

But in other recent public statements, White House officials have significantly pared back their ambitions for the deals.

In April, Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, hedged the number of agreements they might reach, suggesting that the United States would talk to somewhere between 50 and 70 countries. Last month he said the United States was negotiating with 17 “very important trading relationships,” not including China.

“I think when the administration first started, they thought they could actually do these binding and enforceable deals within 90 days and then quickly realized that they bit off more than they could chew,” Ms. Cutler said.

The administration told its negotiating partners to submit offers of trade concessions they were willing to make by Wednesday, in an effort to strike trade deals in the coming weeks. The deadline was earlier reported by Reuters.

The current approach to deal making may be strategic, Ms. Manak said. One of the benefits of not doing a comprehensive deal like U.S.M.C.A. is that the administration can declare small “victories” on a much faster timeline, she said.

“It means that trade agreements simply are just not what they used to be,” she added. “And you can’t really guarantee that whatever the U.S. promises is actually going to be upheld in the long run.”

Data and graphics are based on a New York Times analysis of information from the Congressional Research Service, the U.S. Trade Representative, the Organization of American States’ Foreign Trade Information System and public White House communications.