US honey production

It is a curious fact, and one that ought to interest any student of the universe's sense of humour, that as one YouTube personality accumulated roughly forty million subscribers between 2016 and 2022, American beekeepers found themselves producing steadily less honey, as if the bees had collectively decided that their labour was no longer worth the effort. One might imagine the bees checking their phones.

What's genuinely fascinating here is that both trends probably track the same underlying current: the rise of streaming and digital attention during those years coincided with agricultural consolidation and real estate pressure on apiaries, particularly in California, which produces about a third of America's honey. MrBeast's exponential growth mirrors the winner-take-all economics of the 2010s internet, while honey production declined as small beekeeping operations sold out to developers or simply couldn't compete with imported honey—the same economic forces that made YouTube stardom possible made traditional farming less viable. A single California almond orchard now covers roughly 2,500 acres; the bees that should have been pollinating wildflowers were rented out to service monocultures instead.

We are, it seems, remarkably good at building intricate causal stories from the wreckage of unrelated events, much like someone hearing two separate conversations and becoming convinced they are secretly about the same thing. The correlation between MrBeast subscribers and honey production tells us nothing about either, but everything about how we search for meaning in a genuinely random world. Perhaps that is the real correlation worth noting.