Unless you haven’t touched a newspaper, watched the TV news or listened to the radio for the past three years, you’ve probably heard about a mysterious condition called Colony Collapse Disorder—CCD for short.

Don’t worry, this isn’t a disease that’s going to affect you — unless you like to eat, that is. CCD devastates honey bees, which are the principal pollinators of a whole host of crops, including almonds and other nuts, berries, fruits and veggies. In fact, about one mouthful out of every three in our everyday diet directly or indirectly benefits from honey bee pollination. The California almond crop alone uses about 1.3 million honey bee colonies annually to pollinate its orchards.

But when CCD hits a hive, the honey bees disappear. It’s not that beekeepers go out to their hives and find dead bees lying hither and yon; they don’t find bees at all, because the bees have simply vanished.

The scientists of the Agricultural Research Service have teamed up with university and industry colleagues to try to find the cause of this mysterious malady and thus discover ways to stop it. They believe that the answer isn’t going to be a single “smoking gun” cause, but instead a combination of factors affecting bee health, including harsh environmental conditions, pesticides, disease-causing organisms and parasites, bee nutrition, and even bee stress (those managed bee colonies that pollinate the California almond orchards are often hauled hundreds, if not thousands, of miles to “get to work”).

But with fewer bees to carry the load, what if there were other ways to reduce that stress, such as, for example, self-pollinating almond trees?

That’s no scientific pipe dream; ARS scientists in California have pulled this one off. They’ve developed new and improved self-pollinating almond trees that can produce a bountiful harvest without the benefit of insect pollinators.

Brief disclaimer here: Self-pollinating almonds are not unheard of. In fact, there’s a variety called Tuono, originally from Spain, that’s been around for centuries. But Tuono has its drawbacks.

For one thing, its seed coat has a hairy texture—and yes, you can actually feel that hairiness on your tongue when you pop the Tuono almonds in your mouth. That’s a major turn-off for those of us who are used to the silky texture of California almonds such as Nonpareil.

And Tuono is a tough nut to crack, literally. It has a very thick, hard shell, so only about 32 percent of the nut is edible kernel, compared to Nonpareil’s 60 to 65 percent edible portion.

But Tuono has its pluses, too, including that super-hard shell. That gives the nut more resistance to navel orangeworm which, despite its name, is actually the primary pest of almonds in California.

So the ARS scientists in California decided to take the best of both worlds—the old and the new. Beginning with seedlings first planted in 1996 and every year thereafter, the scientists used Tuono as the male parent (the pollen source) in conventional plant hybridizations with California-adapted almond cultivars and selections.

The scientists made the crosses as the almond trees were blooming, and came back at harvest time to collect the nuts. Then they grew out those nuts into seedlings, and surrounded the seedlings’ branches with insect-proof nylon bags to exclude any insects that might serve as pollinators. The seedlings bloomed, some produced nuts inside the bag, and voila: self-pollinating almond trees!

The early harvests from those seedlings were small, but by 2006, the trees had begun producing good harvests. In November 2008, the ARS scientists were able to present eight very promising self-pollinating selections to the Almond Board of California for evaluations of taste and appearance.

The new almonds share a lot of favorable characteristics with the favorite Nonpareil, which currently accounts for 37 percent of all California almonds grown. But what’s different, of course, is that these new almonds don’t need honey bees’ pollination services.

Naturally, there will still be plenty of pollination chores for the honey bees—but these ARS scientists are well on the way to giving those beleaguered bees a much-needed break!

The Agricultural Research Service is the chief in house scientific research agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

You can read more about ARS discoveries at http://www.ars.usda.gov/news.