August 18, 2025 • 37 mins
On this episode, we are taking a look at one the smallest, often overlooked, but essential pieces of our ecosystem: pollinators. With effects ranging from agricultural yields and native plant success, down to something as specific as the hunting quality on your family's property, pollinators play a huge role in all of it. Come along as we get hands-on experience with a beekeeper and have a great conversation with author and environmental historian, Sara Dant.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife,
wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to
conserving both. I'm your host, Lake Pickle. On this episode,
we're going to learn about one of the most vital
but commonly overlooked elements of our ecosystem, pollinators. Now, if
(00:38):
you're sitting there thinking, man, that sounds awful lot like
a beehive, well then I would say to you, that's
a keen ear you got there, because it is definitely
a beehive. And if you're also sitting there thinking it
sure sounds like that, dude's awful close to it, then
I would say, well, you might as well be an
NHL goalie, because nothing's getting past you today. I am
(00:58):
indeed very close to it. It's a beautiful mid July morning,
roughly seven thirty am, and I am on a mission
to learn more about pollinators and their vital role in
our wild ecosystems. And I thought to myself, what better
way to do that than get some hands on experience
with the most widely known pollinator in all the land,
(01:18):
the honey beee.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
So this is a this is a frame that you
at hardest okay, because it is one hundred percent cap.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Luckily for me, I didn't have to look far to
get this experience. The mother of my wife's lifelong best friend,
Miss Linda Easterling, has been beekeeping for the better part
of a decade, and she was nice enough to have
me over one morning, lend me a beekeeping suit and
give me a crash course in this unique hobby.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
So when the nectar that they put in the seals
is ready, they cap.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
It has to be a certain.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Water content to it.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Gotcha.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
When that wonderful content drops, then lay it's ready to cap.
They know somebody's in the hive, so they are starting
to store. They're loading up on honey in case something
happens to their house.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
I see, sir, now, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
How you can feel it with love hands.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Miss Linda and I just opened up a beehive and
now she is showing me a honeysuper that is ready
to harvest. You'll be able to see this interaction fully
on the YouTube video, but for my audio only listeners,
imagine a rectangular box lined across with wooden slats that
maybe have an inch spacing between each of them. These
(02:40):
wooden slats are honeysupers. They match the box's length and
depth and essentially provide framing for the bees to make
and store honey. We pulled a fully capped super to
get a closer look. The most shocking thing for me
holding this in my hands, you know, besides the hundreds
of bees flying around my head, was the weight of it.
An empty Honeysuper weighs maybe three to four pounds, but
(03:04):
this fully capped honeysuper weigh closer to thirty pounds. These
bees had been busy, pun very much intended.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Oh yeah, I would not expect it to be that heavy. Yea.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
So it's here. Isn't that amazing? How that's and since
I am kind of messed it up a little bit,
they're on your microphone too, you hear some jim buzzen.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
That's what I was hoping for.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Can I Can I take this and hold it in
front of the camera there?
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Okay, yeah, tostally honey honey production.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
Yea, easier to see the breard and that box.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Go to that box.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Once we get through looking at this full honeysuper, Miss
Linda wants to show me a different, smaller hive that
will have much less honey production and will allow us
to see the brood. It was when we went to
the next time that we had a little bit of excitement.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
That's the part and make people nervous when they're coming
up with your veil, your kind.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Of get seeded. One's in my veil.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
This then weird.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
Yeah, I'm gonna back up and let her out.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Yep, you heard that correctly. A single bee has broken
the force field and is now inside the veil of
my bee suit. Thankfully, Miss Linda walked me through what
to do in case this very thing happens. I'm supposed
to back away from the hive, pull open my veil
and calmly waft the bee out of there without getting stung.
Is the key part of all this. Let's see how
(04:27):
this goes.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
We're still down there. Yeah, if she hadn't stung me,
come on, sweet to get out of there.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
She's right there.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
Say her bread.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Here, I thought.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
I'm sorry, you can't relate.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Despite our best attempts, we just can't seem to get
this single bee to fly back out. And at that
point is when we get another little dose of excitement.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Won't chip almost has another one getting in now that
one just got eat right right, turgoes wanting, but there
goes one day.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Then, unbeknownst to us, a few bees followed me over
when I backed away from the hive, and when I
opened the veil of my face mask up to let
the bee out, more flew in. At one point I
had three bees inside of my face net at once,
and I am more than happy to report that I
managed to get out of this small snaffoo with zero stings.
(05:25):
The key component to all of this was just staying calm.
Small side mission of this episode. I will always and
forever have a soft spot for critters that are often misunderstood.
And while the main premise of this episode is to
explain why pollinators are of crucial importance to our landscape,
I also want to rid the mindset of every bee
(05:47):
U se is on a mission to sting you. They
most definitely are not. At one point, one of those
three bees landing right on top of my ear and
it's still withheld fire. I think my point proves itself.
I spent the rest of the time with Miss Linda,
with no more bees inside my head net and taking
a look into the rest of the bee hives. That
(06:07):
she had on her property. And let me tell you,
if you ever get to experience what I experienced that morning,
you'll never wonder again where common terms like busy as
a bee or that person's a regular worker bee comes from.
These hives are constant work in motion, bees making and capping,
honey bees constantly flying in and out of the hive.
(06:28):
One of the coolest parts was watching some of the
bees fly back into the hive with visible poland that
they had collected and brought back to work for them.
Really never stops. Big shout out to Miss Linda Easterling
for giving me such a cool experience. If any of
y'all ever get the chance to tag along with the
bee keeper, I promise you it's worth your time. But
let's zoom out on all of this. You may be
(06:50):
sitting there wondering why I'm making such a big deal
about pollinators and honey bees in particular. You've probably heard
people mention that pollinators are important, but have you ever
heard the ants than as to why. I've learned over
the years that in many areas of wildlife and habitat management,
the smaller the organism is, the easier it seems to
be for us to overlook it, regardless of how important
(07:11):
of a role it plays. So sit back, turn the
volume up a notch, and listen in because you're about
to learn how vital these little bugs are to not
just our wildlife and wild places, but to our own
health as well. I promised you this. At the very least,
by the end of this episode, you'll never feel the
same about going and picking up a jar of honey,
that's for sure. Sarah Dant is an American historian that
(07:42):
specializes in the environmental history of the American West. She's
also a distinguished professor and experienced beekeeper, and the author
of one of my new favorite books, Losing Eden. Truly,
it's a fascinating read. Y'all should check it out. I
want to open up the conversation with Professor Sarah Dant
coming right out the gate with the fact about honey
bees that most people don't know and are very surprised
(08:05):
to learn.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
Honey bees in particular are unique. There were no native
colony building bees in the Americas prior to the arrival
of Europeans. You know, you do have like small groups
of bumblebees. They tend to live, but only in groups
of like ten or fifteen. Nothing like the big honey
(08:28):
producing palm building chives and colonies that you see with
honey bees. Those are European bees that came over with Europeans.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
I'm sure y'all heard that the first time, but just
in case you didn't, or you need to hear it
again for the sake of making sure you heard it right,
I'm going to repeat it for y'all. Honey Bees one
of the most famous insects in the entire country, one
of the few bugs that proliferate themselves in American pop
culture by being mentioned in nursery rhymes, folklore, and song lyrics.
Are not native to America. So how did they get here?
(09:02):
Did the European settlers bring them here? On purpose?
Speaker 3 (09:05):
Absolutely? They did, absolutely brought bees. Because you think about it,
some of the most addictive substances that we know of
are sugar and salt, and sugar is not naturally occurring
in any kind of great quantity commodity in the natural world.
(09:27):
It's one of the reasons we crave it because it's
such a great source of energy, and we forget that nowadays.
You know, with high fruit toase, corn syrup and Halloween
and soda pop and McDonald's, we forget that if you
think about it, in nature, sugar is really rare. And
so when people I mean, and we're talking about people
(09:49):
as far back as Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, they're
cultivating bees because bees make honey, and honey is delicious,
and if sugar is a rare commodity, then you want
to do whatever you can to facilitate your access to it.
(10:10):
So when Europeans came to the Americas, starting with the Pilgrims,
are really who we think are one of the first
groups to bring honey bees with them. Absolutely, they deliberately
brought them because they wanted to bring with them that wonderful,
rare source of sugar. But bees being bees, they swarmed
(10:33):
and moved away from human habitation into the wild. So
you have both. You have wild bees and you have
kept domestic bees by colonists, and they're so successful that
native people actually call them English flies because they absolutely
(10:55):
associated the presence of honeybees with the arrival of Europeans.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
That really is some wild information we just got there.
Humans have been colonizing bees for the collection of honey
for thousands of years, with evidence dating back to the
ancient Egyptians. Bees were so successful when they were brought
to the Americas by the European settlers that native Americans
referred to them as English flies. And here's one factor
I want to focus on next. In that last bit,
(11:24):
you heard Professor Dant use the term swarming. Her exact
words were they swarmed and moved away from human habitation.
That fact is very important to the whole point of
this story. And let's break down the many reasons why
a swarm of bees is oftentimes brought up in a
negative connotation, usually associated with people getting attacked, stone and
(11:45):
all sorts of other horrors, when in fact, bees swarms
serve a very specific purpose that has nothing to do
with such horrors, and I think we should learn what
that actually is.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
Well, one of the things that I think some people
may be familiar with is a bee swarm and why
do bees swarm? What does it mean? All of that?
To me, that's that's really interesting, and it's it's one
of the for me, it was always one of the
great teaching moments when I would get a call for
(12:16):
a swarm, because actually what I did was I gave
my name and number to a couple of pest control
companies and the nine one one people, because people would
either call them and say, oh my god, you're gonna
come spray these bees, or they would call nine one one,
oh my god, we were being invaded. And fortunately all
(12:38):
those groups would say, okay, let me give you somebody
a call, and so I would I would go out
and get the swarm. And it was a great opportunity
to interact with people who were completely freaked out that
there was this big wad of bees in the tree
in their yard and here's this girl with no gloves
on and a veil just kind of walk out there
(13:00):
in jeans and not freak out at all with efty
thousand bees buzzing around, and yeah, it sort of makes
you feel like superhero. So what happens is in a hive,
they'll get really two crowded. They've been successful, they're too
many bees in a hive. They need to split up.
(13:22):
So the queen that's in the hive will take a
portion of the bees and they'll fly usually somewhere within
one hundred yards or so of the hive itself. So
when you see a big, you know, basketball of bees,
what you're seeing is solid bees, and in the middle
(13:45):
is the queen. They're all around her. She's in the middle,
and they're just hanging out, usually literally in a tree,
and they've got scouts going out all over the kind
of side looking for a new home. In the meantime,
in the hive, they have started the process of making
(14:08):
a new queen. And you have to feed baby bees
a certain substance called royal jelly, and if you keep
feeding it to them, don't grow into queens. You can
only have one queen in a hive, and so whicheverone
comes out first, goes through the hive, finds every other
(14:29):
ges stating queen and kills her. So I'm number one
and that's it, and then she becomes the new queen.
But at that point she's infertile. So the swarm is
up in the tree with the original queen, a lot
of bees, and at this point they're they're most vulnerable.
(14:49):
They're also pretty easy to manipulate because they don't have
anything to lose except the queen. So if you've ever
seen the thing where somebody does like a beard of bees,
that's what they're doing. They're messing around with a swarm
they don't have a hive, they don't have honey, they
don't have brood, they have nothing that they need to protect.
So they're up in a tree. They've got scouts going
(15:12):
out looking for a good place to go. And when
one of the scouts comes back and says, I found it.
This is the place. Bring them young, like, this is
the place we got to go, then they all fly
and so if you've ever seen a swarm, it's pretty exciting.
In a tree, they're just kind of up there like
a basketball. But then when they decide to go, they
(15:35):
all go, and the din is incredible. It's really loud.
They're all moving, and then they'll be gone. So the
moral of that story is if you see a swarm,
you don't have to panic because they're not gonna stay.
They're looking for a new place and that the most
they're gonna be there for two or three days. They
(15:56):
don't have food, they don't have water. They're sending people
out to get that, but they don't have that, so
their motivation is to find a new house.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Important honey bee fact number one, and it's mainly tied
to a function bees swarm when they're trying to move
to a new home or a new hive might be
a better term. And we heard earlier that bees were
so successful when brought to the Americas that they swarmed
and left places of human habitation. And here's why that's interesting.
Think briefly back to the last episode on Mississippi Black Bears, right,
(16:29):
Remember the historical record we read from the book by
James T. McCafferty. It had a documented Delta pioneer making
use of wild honey in the eighteen hundreds. Think about
that for a second. I don't know about y'all, but
that leads me to ask the question, how quickly can
these tiny bugs spread?
Speaker 3 (16:48):
Probably the Pilgrims bring bees with them. I don't think
the Spanish conquesitors did, who would have come before that.
But the first Pilgrims come in Jamestown is in the
early sixteen hundreds, and we do know that by the
eighteen fifties their bees in California. So it just does
(17:10):
not take very long at all for them to move,
and to move pretty efficiently and quickly across the continent.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Not only is a swarm the bees function for spreading,
but it's an incredibly efficient function for spreading By that
quick math. It means that honey bees managed to cover
the entire country from east to west in around two
hundred and fifty years time. And when you think about
how tiny those bugs are, that's quite an impressive feat.
But now we have to address why that's important.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
I think the way we could sort of sum up
what we're going to talk about here today is like this,
pollinators need you, and you need pollinators. When we're talking
about pollinators, we're talking about a really broad group of
insects and even small mammals, of which bees are certainly
but you know, bats are pollinators, birds are pollinators, there's bees,
(18:05):
there's other kinds of insects, all kinds of animals pollinate.
They are so essential and that basic service that they
provide accounts for one out of every three bytes of
food that one of us takes. So you think about
that the next time you're at a meal and you go, okay,
(18:26):
one bite of food, two bye of food, third bite,
you have to say thank you pollinator. Every third byte
of food you have to be saying, man, thank you pollinator.
That's how essential they are to the world around us.
And they're not charismatic megafonn it you know. So if
you get an elk or a bear or something like that,
(18:48):
people want to type it this is a bug, and
it's a bug that stings you sometimes. So it's one
of those really essential things that people just k a
take for granted that Well, of course I have fruits
and vegetables and various cooking oils, and you don't ever
(19:11):
really stop to think, so what made that possible? And
the answer is if it came from something that flowers
or makes seeds, it needed a pollinator to make that happen.
You need pollinators because without them, suddenly most of the
food in the world is going to get shut off.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Okay, so we now know that honeybees and all pollinators
are important to us, and it truly affects everything facilitating
plant reproduction, food reproduction, agriculture, biodiversity, wild plant success, and
ecosystem health. As you can imagine, this affects a whole lot,
from something as large as row crop yields to something
(19:54):
as specific as the deer hunting quality on your property.
And that's no joke. But here's where the story or
it gets deeper and more nuanced. You already, I hope.
So because we're diving in. One of the first big
and interesting facts we learned about honeybees is that they
were not a native species to North America. And most
of the time, not always, but most of the time,
(20:15):
when you hear a story about an exotic species being
brought to North America, it commonly ends with a negative outcome.
But that's not the case with honeybees. And why is that.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
Made of pollinators in particular have been suffering for the
last one hundred years. I would say a lot of
that has to do with again development, agricultural expansion. You
used to pesticides and other kinds of poisons. But you know,
it's really hard when the plants that they evolve to
(20:55):
pollinate are not there, not there because we we've mowed
them down, we've plowed over them, we've paved over them,
or you know, again going back to this idea of
climate change, as the earth warms up, we're seeing plant
regimes moving. And when those plant regimes move, the pollinators
(21:20):
don't necessarily know to go with them. It's it may
be too far to fly, it may be all of
those things. And if it's warming, sometimes those plants are
blooming earlier than they used to before the pollinator has
typically whatever hatched out or moved into the area. So
(21:41):
we have these miskined bloom and fertilization issues that are
the consequence of climate change. And again we don't even
think about those kinds of things. But several species of
native bumblebees, for example, have declined in geographic range and
(22:01):
their numbers in the last twenty years. I think I
talked about in my book. For Western states now no
longer have bumblebees. Idaho, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Oregon they
don't have bumblebees. Bumblebees were native to the Americas prior
to the arrival of Europeans. Now they're gone completely in
(22:25):
those states, and that matters because the native plants that
they co evolved with now don't have this fundamentally important
elevator to go with them. And so honey bees, in particular,
the number of highs in the America is just, you know,
(22:45):
to sort of ball park it. Between the nineteen forties
and now, the number of managed hives has dropped by
about half. And that's in part because it's really straining
to be a bee keeper, even a hobby bee keeper.
Since about two thousand and six, as I wrote about
(23:07):
in my book, there is this phenomenon that scientists called
colony collapse disorder or CCD, and they're mystified by it,
not quite sure what causes it. Is it pathogens, is
it parasites, Is it pesticides? But and we don't know.
(23:31):
It could be again this kind of perfect storm of
all of them coming together. But what it means is
that every year, on the order of one third to
one half and sometimes as much as seventy five percent
of domestic bee hives don't make it every year. And
(23:53):
it's it just breaks your heart. You know, you go out,
you work your bees. One week in Likember, the hive
is thriving. You've got brood, you've got a queen, they've
got honey. Everything is good. And two weeks later to
go out to check on your high and there's nothing there.
They're just gone. And they can't leave in late September,
(24:20):
that's not when they swarm. They're not going to be
able to make a hive, gather enough food get themselves
through the winter. So they're all going to die. But
they don't die at your hives. They're just they're just gone.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
So why are we so focused in celebrating the success
of the honeybee, a non native insect, because our native
pollinators have been severely depleted. Some studies show up to
one fifth of our North American pollinators and an elevated
risk of extinction. And honey bees aren't exactly thriving right
now either. So what are the implications of this? Is
(25:08):
there anything we can do to combat it? And honestly,
why isn't it being talked about more? I run into this,
especially also when we were talking about quail. It does
seem like, you know, talking about it being you know,
them not being charismagmatic megafauna. There has to be some
sort of connection there, because it's like the smaller the object,
(25:30):
the smaller it seems in like objective life, Like there's
not people interacting with honey bees or bumble bees every day,
and so they're easy to forget about because they're so small,
and it's not it's not all the time in front
of us how beneficial they are to us in our environment.
And the thing is like one of the biggest eye
(25:50):
opening things for me and I even you know, I
knew what pollinators were. I knew that bees played a
huge role in our ecosystem, and an ecosystem, health and
native plans. But I other think for me was being
able to actually see it right. And the first time
that I saw it was a place that I get
to go to just about every year in South Florida,
(26:13):
in the Mayaka Prairie. And man, it's gonna sound like
I'm indulging the story a little bit. When you go
to a place like that, like they like they have bees,
they produce honey off that's called my Aka Prairie honey.
My friends at black Beard's Ranch put it out. It's
it's great stuff, obviously, but it's not just the bees.
Like that whole area like is permeated and it's just
(26:37):
teeming with life. The plants. There's gopher tortoises, there's turkeys,
there's ephemeral wetlands, and there's ducks in there. There's all
sorts of water birds and it just all like congruently
works with one another. The instant issue that I see
there is I'm like, man, I know what this does
to me when I see it, But you can't how
(26:59):
do you get everybody to see that? You can't walk
everybody in the world, and everybody that dwells in the
cities and everybody that doesn't know this stuff, you can't
walk them out to a prayer like that and go see.
I wish you could, but you can't.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
Well, and I think you're onto a really important idea
and it's something that you know. I certainly see that
you're doing with this entire podcast, which is people care
about what they know, but sometimes they don't know what
to pay attention to and why what they see might matter.
(27:35):
And so when people can know more about something as
simple as a honeybee or a pollinator bee, then this
start looking for it. And once you pay attention, you
see it. It's like when you learn a new word
and then all of a sudden, oh my god, the
(27:57):
thing is everywhere. It's just that you weren't paying attention before.
And so the great thing about pollinators and honey bees
in particulars you can see them anywhere. You can see
them out on a prairie, you can see him right
in downtown where you are, and if you don't see them,
that ought to be a good indicator that something's off here.
(28:20):
Bees and pollinators in general are really good ecosystem indicators.
They're the ones who tell you this is working or
it's not working, And I'll add my little anecdote to
your story. I got to go to Central Park in
New York City a few years ago, and it was
(28:40):
in the spring, and I mean the park was just
erupting in bloom, and the host that we were with
was just exclaiming about, Oh, this is so wonderful and
it's nature in the city and da da da da da.
So I was under a crab apple tree and it
was a it must have been one hundred and fifty
(29:02):
years old. It was huge into the air, the branches
draped all the way to the ground, and I was
surrounded by pink. The air was pink because of all
the blooms, and there was not a bee to be heard.
There was not and that thing should have just been humming.
(29:26):
So I'm at our place in Phoenix right now, and
in the backyard is an alverti tree that was just blooming,
covered in yellow flowers, and I mean, there's a din
from the bees up in that tree. It should have
been like that, but it was in the middle of
Central Park, and so I thought, yeah, it looks like nature,
(29:48):
but it's not complete nature, because you're missing this really
essential player. And so when people start to pay attention,
just like you're talking to When you pay attention, you realize, man,
that is so cool, look at this one. And then
when you pay attention you realize, Okay, there's six different
(30:09):
kinds of things working on these flowers. It isn't all
just a bee. It's lots of different things. So yeah,
I'd love to encourage people to pay attention because when
you do, you learn, and when you learn, you care.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
If you haven't caught on yet, one thing that I
really like to do when someone drops some seriously good
information on us is to key in on one or
two phrases that stick with me. Professor Dant said, people
care about what they know, and to pay attention because
when you do, you learn, and when you learn, you care.
I can tell you from a quick personal anecdote. When
(30:49):
my wife Lacy and I bought the home that we
currently reside in, it, like many other homes, consisted of
a front and back laan made up of completely exotic
plants that offered little to no value you to any
sort of wildlife, and in the springtime, when all of
it was in bloom, it was void of any bugs, birds,
or really anything living besides the plants themselves. In the
(31:10):
past few years, I've gotten rid of many of those
exotics and planted some native pollinator plants like butterfly weed,
blazing star, eastern cone flower, prairie flocks, and partridge peas.
And let me tell you something, it's borderline silly how
happy I get when I walk outside or look through
the window and see a beer moth buzzing around those plants.
(31:30):
It's a lot easier to appreciate and love something when
you understand it. I want to round this episode off
by letting Professor Dant give us her opinion on the
future of pollinators here in the US, as well as
things that we can all do to help preserve them.
(31:52):
And if it's all right with y'all, I then want
to go back to the beehives with Miss Linda.
Speaker 3 (31:57):
So, now that we know there's a problem, how do
we address it? And a good place to start is
with paying attention, where we actually consciously look for the
pollinators that are all around us, and we think about
what can I do to make a difference. And I
(32:20):
think a lot of people get really frustrated because they think,
oh my god, all these problems are so huge, and
I don't know how to solve them. And it's like, look,
I'm going to give you a get out of jail
free card. You do not have to solve climate change
the loss of pollinators. You didn't single handedly cause them,
so therefore you don't have to solve them. But the
(32:40):
idea is each of us does our part. It's what
I like to call the triumph of the commons, because
when we each do our part, then collectively we make
a real difference. And so it starts with paying attention
and caring about what you know. Pollinator Week is sponsored
by pollinator dot org and so you can go to
(33:02):
their website and they have all kinds of different resources
for people who are interested in pollinators, just you know,
a little bit or maybe a lot, and they're very
committed to this idea of providing information for people whose
livelihoods depend on the land. So if you're a farmer
or you're a rancher, this is not, oh, you guys
(33:24):
are the bad guys. Far from it. It's how do
we integrate pollinator planning into healthy agriculture, sustainable ranching, farming,
that kind of thing. And they also have just planting
for pollinators coming up with what are the native plants
that are from this region. And if you don't know,
(33:48):
this website has maps and ecozones that can tell you
about that. But you can plant for pollinators. You can
reduce or even eliminate your use of past the sides
and herbicides. But I would say another thing that a
lot of people don't think about is supporting your local beekeepers.
I mean, most of us live in places where there's
(34:10):
a farmer's market, and most of us have people who
show up with a farmer's market who are selling honey. Man,
if you have never had local honey, you're in for
a real treat. And it depends on the time of
year that you buy it. The honey that I would
collect in the spring would be this really light, thin,
(34:33):
I realize this sounds redundant, but very sweet honey because
it was all of the fruit trees that were blooming.
But then in the late summer when I would collect
and the bees were on the rabbit brush, the chinisa,
the sage brush that is like a dark amber beer,
(34:54):
is really almost spicy, is delicious and added bonus if
you suffer from allergies from any of the things that
are blooming in your area. If you get local honey
that was harvested roughly at the time that whatever makes
you sneeze was blooming, it acts as kind of a
(35:17):
natural antihistamine and helps you not sneeze. And we so
much I like to tell people to do their best
to buy local, support local farmers, local ranchers, people who
are doing good, honest, sustainable work on the land itself.
Those are the kinds of people who deserve our support.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
Plant a few cone flowers in your flower bed, buy
local honey from the farmer's market, and just pay a
little more attention to the world around us. That little
bit of effort from each of us could really make
a difference. And just to heads up some of the
most beneficial and popular land management practices like prescribe burning
helps promote native plants that help pollinators as well. To
(36:07):
wrap this up, like I mentioned earlier, I want to
go back to the bee hives with Miss Linda as
we watched honey bees come and go from the hive
carrying in new pollen to make honey. That's crazy to
me that that little bit'd bee will range out.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
Three miles two to three miles.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
That's wild.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
Hangding on what they're after. So they're out working something. Yeah,
and we may be able to see them bringing.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
Pollen in.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
Thought that one Randon had some, so something is blaming
and that's one of the things that you look at
in the springtime to make sure they're bringing in honey,
I mean or pollen.
Speaker 3 (36:45):
That one right there, they just went in there, had
yellow all over him.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
Like a bright yellow, and just fascinating little little creatures.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
That's cool.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
Fascinating little creatures indeed indispensable ones as well. I want
to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University
as well as Bear Grease in this country life. And
I want to give a big shout out to onex
Hunt for making this podcast possible. If you like this episode,
(37:19):
share it with the buddy or even a family member
that you don't like that much. They probably could benefit
from a good podcast episode anyway, and stick around because
if this podcast was a beehive, the honey is only
gonna get sweeter. We'll see y'all next time.
Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife,
wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to
conserving both. I'm your host, Lake Pickle. On this episode,
we're going to learn about one of the most vital
but commonly overlooked elements of our ecosystem, pollinators. Now, if
(00:38):
you're sitting there thinking, man, that sounds awful lot like
a beehive, well then I would say to you, that's
a keen ear you got there, because it is definitely
a beehive. And if you're also sitting there thinking it
sure sounds like that, dude's awful close to it, then
I would say, well, you might as well be an
NHL goalie, because nothing's getting past you today. I am
(00:58):
indeed very close to it. It's a beautiful mid July morning,
roughly seven thirty am, and I am on a mission
to learn more about pollinators and their vital role in
our wild ecosystems. And I thought to myself, what better
way to do that than get some hands on experience
with the most widely known pollinator in all the land,
(01:18):
the honey beee.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
So this is a this is a frame that you
at hardest okay, because it is one hundred percent cap.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Luckily for me, I didn't have to look far to
get this experience. The mother of my wife's lifelong best friend,
Miss Linda Easterling, has been beekeeping for the better part
of a decade, and she was nice enough to have
me over one morning, lend me a beekeeping suit and
give me a crash course in this unique hobby.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
So when the nectar that they put in the seals
is ready, they cap.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
It has to be a certain.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Water content to it.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Gotcha.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
When that wonderful content drops, then lay it's ready to cap.
They know somebody's in the hive, so they are starting
to store. They're loading up on honey in case something
happens to their house.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
I see, sir, now, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
How you can feel it with love hands.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Miss Linda and I just opened up a beehive and
now she is showing me a honeysuper that is ready
to harvest. You'll be able to see this interaction fully
on the YouTube video, but for my audio only listeners,
imagine a rectangular box lined across with wooden slats that
maybe have an inch spacing between each of them. These
(02:40):
wooden slats are honeysupers. They match the box's length and
depth and essentially provide framing for the bees to make
and store honey. We pulled a fully capped super to
get a closer look. The most shocking thing for me
holding this in my hands, you know, besides the hundreds
of bees flying around my head, was the weight of it.
An empty Honeysuper weighs maybe three to four pounds, but
(03:04):
this fully capped honeysuper weigh closer to thirty pounds. These
bees had been busy, pun very much intended.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Oh yeah, I would not expect it to be that heavy. Yea.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
So it's here. Isn't that amazing? How that's and since
I am kind of messed it up a little bit,
they're on your microphone too, you hear some jim buzzen.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
That's what I was hoping for.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Can I Can I take this and hold it in
front of the camera there?
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Okay, yeah, tostally honey honey production.
Speaker 3 (03:36):
Yea, easier to see the breard and that box.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Go to that box.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Once we get through looking at this full honeysuper, Miss
Linda wants to show me a different, smaller hive that
will have much less honey production and will allow us
to see the brood. It was when we went to
the next time that we had a little bit of excitement.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
That's the part and make people nervous when they're coming
up with your veil, your kind.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Of get seeded. One's in my veil.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
This then weird.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
Yeah, I'm gonna back up and let her out.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Yep, you heard that correctly. A single bee has broken
the force field and is now inside the veil of
my bee suit. Thankfully, Miss Linda walked me through what
to do in case this very thing happens. I'm supposed
to back away from the hive, pull open my veil
and calmly waft the bee out of there without getting stung.
Is the key part of all this. Let's see how
(04:27):
this goes.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
We're still down there. Yeah, if she hadn't stung me,
come on, sweet to get out of there.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
She's right there.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
Say her bread.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Here, I thought.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
I'm sorry, you can't relate.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Despite our best attempts, we just can't seem to get
this single bee to fly back out. And at that
point is when we get another little dose of excitement.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Won't chip almost has another one getting in now that
one just got eat right right, turgoes wanting, but there
goes one day.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Then, unbeknownst to us, a few bees followed me over
when I backed away from the hive, and when I
opened the veil of my face mask up to let
the bee out, more flew in. At one point I
had three bees inside of my face net at once,
and I am more than happy to report that I
managed to get out of this small snaffoo with zero stings.
(05:25):
The key component to all of this was just staying calm.
Small side mission of this episode. I will always and
forever have a soft spot for critters that are often misunderstood.
And while the main premise of this episode is to
explain why pollinators are of crucial importance to our landscape,
I also want to rid the mindset of every bee
(05:47):
U se is on a mission to sting you. They
most definitely are not. At one point, one of those
three bees landing right on top of my ear and
it's still withheld fire. I think my point proves itself.
I spent the rest of the time with Miss Linda,
with no more bees inside my head net and taking
a look into the rest of the bee hives. That
(06:07):
she had on her property. And let me tell you,
if you ever get to experience what I experienced that morning,
you'll never wonder again where common terms like busy as
a bee or that person's a regular worker bee comes from.
These hives are constant work in motion, bees making and capping,
honey bees constantly flying in and out of the hive.
(06:28):
One of the coolest parts was watching some of the
bees fly back into the hive with visible poland that
they had collected and brought back to work for them.
Really never stops. Big shout out to Miss Linda Easterling
for giving me such a cool experience. If any of
y'all ever get the chance to tag along with the
bee keeper, I promise you it's worth your time. But
let's zoom out on all of this. You may be
(06:50):
sitting there wondering why I'm making such a big deal
about pollinators and honey bees in particular. You've probably heard
people mention that pollinators are important, but have you ever
heard the ants than as to why. I've learned over
the years that in many areas of wildlife and habitat management,
the smaller the organism is, the easier it seems to
be for us to overlook it, regardless of how important
(07:11):
of a role it plays. So sit back, turn the
volume up a notch, and listen in because you're about
to learn how vital these little bugs are to not
just our wildlife and wild places, but to our own
health as well. I promised you this. At the very least,
by the end of this episode, you'll never feel the
same about going and picking up a jar of honey,
that's for sure. Sarah Dant is an American historian that
(07:42):
specializes in the environmental history of the American West. She's
also a distinguished professor and experienced beekeeper, and the author
of one of my new favorite books, Losing Eden. Truly,
it's a fascinating read. Y'all should check it out. I
want to open up the conversation with Professor Sarah Dant
coming right out the gate with the fact about honey
bees that most people don't know and are very surprised
(08:05):
to learn.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
Honey bees in particular are unique. There were no native
colony building bees in the Americas prior to the arrival
of Europeans. You know, you do have like small groups
of bumblebees. They tend to live, but only in groups
of like ten or fifteen. Nothing like the big honey
(08:28):
producing palm building chives and colonies that you see with
honey bees. Those are European bees that came over with Europeans.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
I'm sure y'all heard that the first time, but just
in case you didn't, or you need to hear it
again for the sake of making sure you heard it right,
I'm going to repeat it for y'all. Honey Bees one
of the most famous insects in the entire country, one
of the few bugs that proliferate themselves in American pop
culture by being mentioned in nursery rhymes, folklore, and song lyrics.
Are not native to America. So how did they get here?
(09:02):
Did the European settlers bring them here? On purpose?
Speaker 3 (09:05):
Absolutely? They did, absolutely brought bees. Because you think about it,
some of the most addictive substances that we know of
are sugar and salt, and sugar is not naturally occurring
in any kind of great quantity commodity in the natural world.
(09:27):
It's one of the reasons we crave it because it's
such a great source of energy, and we forget that nowadays.
You know, with high fruit toase, corn syrup and Halloween
and soda pop and McDonald's, we forget that if you
think about it, in nature, sugar is really rare. And
so when people I mean, and we're talking about people
(09:49):
as far back as Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, they're
cultivating bees because bees make honey, and honey is delicious,
and if sugar is a rare commodity, then you want
to do whatever you can to facilitate your access to it.
(10:10):
So when Europeans came to the Americas, starting with the Pilgrims,
are really who we think are one of the first
groups to bring honey bees with them. Absolutely, they deliberately
brought them because they wanted to bring with them that wonderful,
rare source of sugar. But bees being bees, they swarmed
(10:33):
and moved away from human habitation into the wild. So
you have both. You have wild bees and you have
kept domestic bees by colonists, and they're so successful that
native people actually call them English flies because they absolutely
(10:55):
associated the presence of honeybees with the arrival of Europeans.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
That really is some wild information we just got there.
Humans have been colonizing bees for the collection of honey
for thousands of years, with evidence dating back to the
ancient Egyptians. Bees were so successful when they were brought
to the Americas by the European settlers that native Americans
referred to them as English flies. And here's one factor
I want to focus on next. In that last bit,
(11:24):
you heard Professor Dant use the term swarming. Her exact
words were they swarmed and moved away from human habitation.
That fact is very important to the whole point of
this story. And let's break down the many reasons why
a swarm of bees is oftentimes brought up in a
negative connotation, usually associated with people getting attacked, stone and
(11:45):
all sorts of other horrors, when in fact, bees swarms
serve a very specific purpose that has nothing to do
with such horrors, and I think we should learn what
that actually is.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
Well, one of the things that I think some people
may be familiar with is a bee swarm and why
do bees swarm? What does it mean? All of that?
To me, that's that's really interesting, and it's it's one
of the for me, it was always one of the
great teaching moments when I would get a call for
(12:16):
a swarm, because actually what I did was I gave
my name and number to a couple of pest control
companies and the nine one one people, because people would
either call them and say, oh my god, you're gonna
come spray these bees, or they would call nine one one,
oh my god, we were being invaded. And fortunately all
(12:38):
those groups would say, okay, let me give you somebody
a call, and so I would I would go out
and get the swarm. And it was a great opportunity
to interact with people who were completely freaked out that
there was this big wad of bees in the tree
in their yard and here's this girl with no gloves
on and a veil just kind of walk out there
(13:00):
in jeans and not freak out at all with efty
thousand bees buzzing around, and yeah, it sort of makes
you feel like superhero. So what happens is in a hive,
they'll get really two crowded. They've been successful, they're too
many bees in a hive. They need to split up.
(13:22):
So the queen that's in the hive will take a
portion of the bees and they'll fly usually somewhere within
one hundred yards or so of the hive itself. So
when you see a big, you know, basketball of bees,
what you're seeing is solid bees, and in the middle
(13:45):
is the queen. They're all around her. She's in the middle,
and they're just hanging out, usually literally in a tree,
and they've got scouts going out all over the kind
of side looking for a new home. In the meantime,
in the hive, they have started the process of making
(14:08):
a new queen. And you have to feed baby bees
a certain substance called royal jelly, and if you keep
feeding it to them, don't grow into queens. You can
only have one queen in a hive, and so whicheverone
comes out first, goes through the hive, finds every other
(14:29):
ges stating queen and kills her. So I'm number one
and that's it, and then she becomes the new queen.
But at that point she's infertile. So the swarm is
up in the tree with the original queen, a lot
of bees, and at this point they're they're most vulnerable.
(14:49):
They're also pretty easy to manipulate because they don't have
anything to lose except the queen. So if you've ever
seen the thing where somebody does like a beard of bees,
that's what they're doing. They're messing around with a swarm
they don't have a hive, they don't have honey, they
don't have brood, they have nothing that they need to protect.
So they're up in a tree. They've got scouts going
(15:12):
out looking for a good place to go. And when
one of the scouts comes back and says, I found it.
This is the place. Bring them young, like, this is
the place we got to go, then they all fly
and so if you've ever seen a swarm, it's pretty exciting.
In a tree, they're just kind of up there like
a basketball. But then when they decide to go, they
(15:35):
all go, and the din is incredible. It's really loud.
They're all moving, and then they'll be gone. So the
moral of that story is if you see a swarm,
you don't have to panic because they're not gonna stay.
They're looking for a new place and that the most
they're gonna be there for two or three days. They
(15:56):
don't have food, they don't have water. They're sending people
out to get that, but they don't have that, so
their motivation is to find a new house.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Important honey bee fact number one, and it's mainly tied
to a function bees swarm when they're trying to move
to a new home or a new hive might be
a better term. And we heard earlier that bees were
so successful when brought to the Americas that they swarmed
and left places of human habitation. And here's why that's interesting.
Think briefly back to the last episode on Mississippi Black Bears, right,
(16:29):
Remember the historical record we read from the book by
James T. McCafferty. It had a documented Delta pioneer making
use of wild honey in the eighteen hundreds. Think about
that for a second. I don't know about y'all, but
that leads me to ask the question, how quickly can
these tiny bugs spread?
Speaker 3 (16:48):
Probably the Pilgrims bring bees with them. I don't think
the Spanish conquesitors did, who would have come before that.
But the first Pilgrims come in Jamestown is in the
early sixteen hundreds, and we do know that by the
eighteen fifties their bees in California. So it just does
(17:10):
not take very long at all for them to move,
and to move pretty efficiently and quickly across the continent.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Not only is a swarm the bees function for spreading,
but it's an incredibly efficient function for spreading By that
quick math. It means that honey bees managed to cover
the entire country from east to west in around two
hundred and fifty years time. And when you think about
how tiny those bugs are, that's quite an impressive feat.
But now we have to address why that's important.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
I think the way we could sort of sum up
what we're going to talk about here today is like this,
pollinators need you, and you need pollinators. When we're talking
about pollinators, we're talking about a really broad group of
insects and even small mammals, of which bees are certainly
but you know, bats are pollinators, birds are pollinators, there's bees,
(18:05):
there's other kinds of insects, all kinds of animals pollinate.
They are so essential and that basic service that they
provide accounts for one out of every three bytes of
food that one of us takes. So you think about
that the next time you're at a meal and you go, okay,
(18:26):
one bite of food, two bye of food, third bite,
you have to say thank you pollinator. Every third byte
of food you have to be saying, man, thank you pollinator.
That's how essential they are to the world around us.
And they're not charismatic megafonn it you know. So if
you get an elk or a bear or something like that,
(18:48):
people want to type it this is a bug, and
it's a bug that stings you sometimes. So it's one
of those really essential things that people just k a
take for granted that Well, of course I have fruits
and vegetables and various cooking oils, and you don't ever
(19:11):
really stop to think, so what made that possible? And
the answer is if it came from something that flowers
or makes seeds, it needed a pollinator to make that happen.
You need pollinators because without them, suddenly most of the
food in the world is going to get shut off.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Okay, so we now know that honeybees and all pollinators
are important to us, and it truly affects everything facilitating
plant reproduction, food reproduction, agriculture, biodiversity, wild plant success, and
ecosystem health. As you can imagine, this affects a whole lot,
from something as large as row crop yields to something
(19:54):
as specific as the deer hunting quality on your property.
And that's no joke. But here's where the story or
it gets deeper and more nuanced. You already, I hope.
So because we're diving in. One of the first big
and interesting facts we learned about honeybees is that they
were not a native species to North America. And most
of the time, not always, but most of the time,
(20:15):
when you hear a story about an exotic species being
brought to North America, it commonly ends with a negative outcome.
But that's not the case with honeybees. And why is that.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
Made of pollinators in particular have been suffering for the
last one hundred years. I would say a lot of
that has to do with again development, agricultural expansion. You
used to pesticides and other kinds of poisons. But you know,
it's really hard when the plants that they evolve to
(20:55):
pollinate are not there, not there because we we've mowed
them down, we've plowed over them, we've paved over them,
or you know, again going back to this idea of
climate change, as the earth warms up, we're seeing plant
regimes moving. And when those plant regimes move, the pollinators
(21:20):
don't necessarily know to go with them. It's it may
be too far to fly, it may be all of
those things. And if it's warming, sometimes those plants are
blooming earlier than they used to before the pollinator has
typically whatever hatched out or moved into the area. So
(21:41):
we have these miskined bloom and fertilization issues that are
the consequence of climate change. And again we don't even
think about those kinds of things. But several species of
native bumblebees, for example, have declined in geographic range and
(22:01):
their numbers in the last twenty years. I think I
talked about in my book. For Western states now no
longer have bumblebees. Idaho, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Oregon they
don't have bumblebees. Bumblebees were native to the Americas prior
to the arrival of Europeans. Now they're gone completely in
(22:25):
those states, and that matters because the native plants that
they co evolved with now don't have this fundamentally important
elevator to go with them. And so honey bees, in particular,
the number of highs in the America is just, you know,
(22:45):
to sort of ball park it. Between the nineteen forties
and now, the number of managed hives has dropped by
about half. And that's in part because it's really straining
to be a bee keeper, even a hobby bee keeper.
Since about two thousand and six, as I wrote about
(23:07):
in my book, there is this phenomenon that scientists called
colony collapse disorder or CCD, and they're mystified by it,
not quite sure what causes it. Is it pathogens, is
it parasites, Is it pesticides? But and we don't know.
(23:31):
It could be again this kind of perfect storm of
all of them coming together. But what it means is
that every year, on the order of one third to
one half and sometimes as much as seventy five percent
of domestic bee hives don't make it every year. And
(23:53):
it's it just breaks your heart. You know, you go out,
you work your bees. One week in Likember, the hive
is thriving. You've got brood, you've got a queen, they've
got honey. Everything is good. And two weeks later to
go out to check on your high and there's nothing there.
They're just gone. And they can't leave in late September,
(24:20):
that's not when they swarm. They're not going to be
able to make a hive, gather enough food get themselves
through the winter. So they're all going to die. But
they don't die at your hives. They're just they're just gone.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
So why are we so focused in celebrating the success
of the honeybee, a non native insect, because our native
pollinators have been severely depleted. Some studies show up to
one fifth of our North American pollinators and an elevated
risk of extinction. And honey bees aren't exactly thriving right
now either. So what are the implications of this? Is
(25:08):
there anything we can do to combat it? And honestly,
why isn't it being talked about more? I run into this,
especially also when we were talking about quail. It does
seem like, you know, talking about it being you know,
them not being charismagmatic megafauna. There has to be some
sort of connection there, because it's like the smaller the object,
(25:30):
the smaller it seems in like objective life, Like there's
not people interacting with honey bees or bumble bees every day,
and so they're easy to forget about because they're so small,
and it's not it's not all the time in front
of us how beneficial they are to us in our environment.
And the thing is like one of the biggest eye
(25:50):
opening things for me and I even you know, I
knew what pollinators were. I knew that bees played a
huge role in our ecosystem, and an ecosystem, health and
native plans. But I other think for me was being
able to actually see it right. And the first time
that I saw it was a place that I get
to go to just about every year in South Florida,
(26:13):
in the Mayaka Prairie. And man, it's gonna sound like
I'm indulging the story a little bit. When you go
to a place like that, like they like they have bees,
they produce honey off that's called my Aka Prairie honey.
My friends at black Beard's Ranch put it out. It's
it's great stuff, obviously, but it's not just the bees.
Like that whole area like is permeated and it's just
(26:37):
teeming with life. The plants. There's gopher tortoises, there's turkeys,
there's ephemeral wetlands, and there's ducks in there. There's all
sorts of water birds and it just all like congruently
works with one another. The instant issue that I see
there is I'm like, man, I know what this does
to me when I see it, But you can't how
(26:59):
do you get everybody to see that? You can't walk
everybody in the world, and everybody that dwells in the
cities and everybody that doesn't know this stuff, you can't
walk them out to a prayer like that and go see.
I wish you could, but you can't.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
Well, and I think you're onto a really important idea
and it's something that you know. I certainly see that
you're doing with this entire podcast, which is people care
about what they know, but sometimes they don't know what
to pay attention to and why what they see might matter.
(27:35):
And so when people can know more about something as
simple as a honeybee or a pollinator bee, then this
start looking for it. And once you pay attention, you
see it. It's like when you learn a new word
and then all of a sudden, oh my god, the
(27:57):
thing is everywhere. It's just that you weren't paying attention before.
And so the great thing about pollinators and honey bees
in particulars you can see them anywhere. You can see
them out on a prairie, you can see him right
in downtown where you are, and if you don't see them,
that ought to be a good indicator that something's off here.
(28:20):
Bees and pollinators in general are really good ecosystem indicators.
They're the ones who tell you this is working or
it's not working, And I'll add my little anecdote to
your story. I got to go to Central Park in
New York City a few years ago, and it was
(28:40):
in the spring, and I mean the park was just
erupting in bloom, and the host that we were with
was just exclaiming about, Oh, this is so wonderful and
it's nature in the city and da da da da da.
So I was under a crab apple tree and it
was a it must have been one hundred and fifty
(29:02):
years old. It was huge into the air, the branches
draped all the way to the ground, and I was
surrounded by pink. The air was pink because of all
the blooms, and there was not a bee to be heard.
There was not and that thing should have just been humming.
(29:26):
So I'm at our place in Phoenix right now, and
in the backyard is an alverti tree that was just blooming,
covered in yellow flowers, and I mean, there's a din
from the bees up in that tree. It should have
been like that, but it was in the middle of
Central Park, and so I thought, yeah, it looks like nature,
(29:48):
but it's not complete nature, because you're missing this really
essential player. And so when people start to pay attention,
just like you're talking to When you pay attention, you realize, man,
that is so cool, look at this one. And then
when you pay attention you realize, Okay, there's six different
(30:09):
kinds of things working on these flowers. It isn't all
just a bee. It's lots of different things. So yeah,
I'd love to encourage people to pay attention because when
you do, you learn, and when you learn, you care.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
If you haven't caught on yet, one thing that I
really like to do when someone drops some seriously good
information on us is to key in on one or
two phrases that stick with me. Professor Dant said, people
care about what they know, and to pay attention because
when you do, you learn, and when you learn, you care.
I can tell you from a quick personal anecdote. When
(30:49):
my wife Lacy and I bought the home that we
currently reside in, it, like many other homes, consisted of
a front and back laan made up of completely exotic
plants that offered little to no value you to any
sort of wildlife, and in the springtime, when all of
it was in bloom, it was void of any bugs, birds,
or really anything living besides the plants themselves. In the
(31:10):
past few years, I've gotten rid of many of those
exotics and planted some native pollinator plants like butterfly weed,
blazing star, eastern cone flower, prairie flocks, and partridge peas.
And let me tell you something, it's borderline silly how
happy I get when I walk outside or look through
the window and see a beer moth buzzing around those plants.
(31:30):
It's a lot easier to appreciate and love something when
you understand it. I want to round this episode off
by letting Professor Dant give us her opinion on the
future of pollinators here in the US, as well as
things that we can all do to help preserve them.
(31:52):
And if it's all right with y'all, I then want
to go back to the beehives with Miss Linda.
Speaker 3 (31:57):
So, now that we know there's a problem, how do
we address it? And a good place to start is
with paying attention, where we actually consciously look for the
pollinators that are all around us, and we think about
what can I do to make a difference. And I
(32:20):
think a lot of people get really frustrated because they think,
oh my god, all these problems are so huge, and
I don't know how to solve them. And it's like, look,
I'm going to give you a get out of jail
free card. You do not have to solve climate change
the loss of pollinators. You didn't single handedly cause them,
so therefore you don't have to solve them. But the
(32:40):
idea is each of us does our part. It's what
I like to call the triumph of the commons, because
when we each do our part, then collectively we make
a real difference. And so it starts with paying attention
and caring about what you know. Pollinator Week is sponsored
by pollinator dot org and so you can go to
(33:02):
their website and they have all kinds of different resources
for people who are interested in pollinators, just you know,
a little bit or maybe a lot, and they're very
committed to this idea of providing information for people whose
livelihoods depend on the land. So if you're a farmer
or you're a rancher, this is not, oh, you guys
(33:24):
are the bad guys. Far from it. It's how do
we integrate pollinator planning into healthy agriculture, sustainable ranching, farming,
that kind of thing. And they also have just planting
for pollinators coming up with what are the native plants
that are from this region. And if you don't know,
(33:48):
this website has maps and ecozones that can tell you
about that. But you can plant for pollinators. You can
reduce or even eliminate your use of past the sides
and herbicides. But I would say another thing that a
lot of people don't think about is supporting your local beekeepers.
I mean, most of us live in places where there's
(34:10):
a farmer's market, and most of us have people who
show up with a farmer's market who are selling honey. Man,
if you have never had local honey, you're in for
a real treat. And it depends on the time of
year that you buy it. The honey that I would
collect in the spring would be this really light, thin,
(34:33):
I realize this sounds redundant, but very sweet honey because
it was all of the fruit trees that were blooming.
But then in the late summer when I would collect
and the bees were on the rabbit brush, the chinisa,
the sage brush that is like a dark amber beer,
(34:54):
is really almost spicy, is delicious and added bonus if
you suffer from allergies from any of the things that
are blooming in your area. If you get local honey
that was harvested roughly at the time that whatever makes
you sneeze was blooming, it acts as kind of a
(35:17):
natural antihistamine and helps you not sneeze. And we so
much I like to tell people to do their best
to buy local, support local farmers, local ranchers, people who
are doing good, honest, sustainable work on the land itself.
Those are the kinds of people who deserve our support.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
Plant a few cone flowers in your flower bed, buy
local honey from the farmer's market, and just pay a
little more attention to the world around us. That little
bit of effort from each of us could really make
a difference. And just to heads up some of the
most beneficial and popular land management practices like prescribe burning
helps promote native plants that help pollinators as well. To
(36:07):
wrap this up, like I mentioned earlier, I want to
go back to the bee hives with Miss Linda as
we watched honey bees come and go from the hive
carrying in new pollen to make honey. That's crazy to
me that that little bit'd bee will range out.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
Three miles two to three miles.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
That's wild.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
Hangding on what they're after. So they're out working something. Yeah,
and we may be able to see them bringing.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
Pollen in.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
Thought that one Randon had some, so something is blaming
and that's one of the things that you look at
in the springtime to make sure they're bringing in honey,
I mean or pollen.
Speaker 3 (36:45):
That one right there, they just went in there, had
yellow all over him.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
Like a bright yellow, and just fascinating little little creatures.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
That's cool.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
Fascinating little creatures indeed indispensable ones as well. I want
to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University
as well as Bear Grease in this country life. And
I want to give a big shout out to onex
Hunt for making this podcast possible. If you like this episode,
(37:19):
share it with the buddy or even a family member
that you don't like that much. They probably could benefit
from a good podcast episode anyway, and stick around because
if this podcast was a beehive, the honey is only
gonna get sweeter. We'll see y'all next time.
Host
Clay Newcomb
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