April 11, 2025 • 59 mins
Join us on the Good Growing podcast as we dive into the fascinating world of bees with horticulture educators Chris Enroth and Ken Johnson. In this episode, we explore the differences between honeybees and native bees, their roles in our ecosystems, and the ongoing debate surrounding their impact on agriculture and conservation.
Our special guest, Illinois Extension horticulture educator Sreelakshmi Suresh, shares their extensive experience in bee research, including insights into honeybee foraging, the waggle dance, and the challenges facing bee populations today. Discover how honeybees and native bees contribute to pollination, the economic implications of honeybee declines, and the importance of preserving native bee habitats.
Whether you're a beekeeper, gardener, or simply curious about bees, this episode is packed with valuable information and engaging discussions. Tune in to learn more about the buzz around bees and how you can support these vital pollinators.
Watch us on YouTube! https://youtu.be/RbTg_6SFYwE
Skip to what you want to know:
00:34 Hey Ken! How is spring treating us with the recent freeze?
01:52 Welcome, Sreelakshmi Suresh!
02:35 What is the difference between honeybees and North American native bees? Are they at odds?
04:11 Sreelakshmi's background and experience with bees
07:58 What is a honeybee waggle dance?
12:41 What's with the recent headlines of honeybee hives being lost at record rates?
16:16 What does the loss of honeybees mean for our food system, and should we all keep bees to help?
26:19 Do honeybees harm native bees?
37:58 Can honeybees and native bees coexist in a high-quality prairie?
45:56 Can honeybees' foraging preferences influence a native plant community?
50:33 How many species of bees are there in the world? In Illinois?
53:00 Talking about our favorite bees
55:51 Carpenter bee fun fact
57:22 Thank yous and see you next week!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Chris (00:06):
Welcome to the Good Growing podcast. I am Chris
Enroth, horticulture educatorwith the University of Illinois
Extension coming at you from MacOmb, Illinois, and we have got a
great show for you today, honeybees and native bees. Are these
the same thing? What's going onwith the honey bees these days?
We will find out today laterwith our special guest, but you
know I'm not doing this bymyself.
(00:28):
I'm joined as always everysingle week by horticulture
educator Ken Johnson inJacksonville. Hey,
Ken (00:33):
Ken. Hello, Chris. You enjoyed the cold spell we've
been having? Just how yourplants survive?
Chris (00:41):
I will say all of the plants are looking just fine
except our saucer magnolia wentfrom beautiful pinkish white
flowers to everything on theexterior this morning turned
brown after the frost evaporatedaway, but everything on the
interior is still nice andpretty on the inside. So we did
(01:06):
get hit by frost, did lose someflowers, Everything's doing fine
though. It's supposed to do thisin the spring. Right, Ken? How
are things going inJacksonville?
Do you lose anything?
Ken (01:17):
I don't I haven't noticed anything yet. I don't think we
have anything that's really Iguess some of the magnolias a
lot of those are losing petalsalready though because they've
been blooming for a while andwe've had lots of wind. So that
took care of a lot of them too.Have and as far as our yard,
everything is because everythingis blooming and supposed to be
(01:37):
blooming now and isn't isn'treally affected by what's going
on.
Chris (01:41):
Yes. It is Ken's yard. Only the hardiest shall survive.
So it's Pretty much.
Ken (01:48):
You need lots of care. You're not gonna make it.
Chris (01:51):
Yeah. Oh my. Well, Ken, today is is your show today.
We've I have bored you and doledyou with plant stuff, but now
we're getting back to what youlove insects. We're gonna be
talking about bees, honeybees,native bees, kind of the the
conflict or the the debate goingon between the two, but also the
(02:14):
issues surrounding kind ofbringing together but dividing
them as well.
So we we do have our specialguest with us today, Shirlakshmi
Shuresh, horticulture educatorin Effingham. Shirlakshmi,
welcome to the show.
Sreelakshmi (02:29):
Hello. Thank you for having me.
Chris (02:32):
Well, we are happy to have you. So today we are
discussing bees, like honeybeeversus native bee, but should I
be using versus here? Like, Iguess, set the stage for us. Is
this honeybees versus nativebees these days?
Sreelakshmi (02:50):
So that's a really good question. I definitely hear
different opinions fromdifferent folks about honey bees
and native bees if the peoplespeaking are researchers, if
they're farmers, if they'rebeekeepers, if they're
conservationists. Everyone has aopinion about this, who's in the
(03:14):
conservation or farming game,and many of them I have found
tend to talk past each other or,they tend to have, disagreements
with each other when they're notactually having the same
conversation. There's definitelydifferences between honeybees
and native bees, but I would saypretty fundamentally, they are
(03:39):
kind of inhabiting differentparts of our ecosystem and that
becomes a lot of the issue withpeople trying to pit them
against each other. They bothhave a place in our environment,
in our ecosystems, and in ouragriculture.
(04:00):
Those places are by and largeseparate. There are some
overlap, but they each do theirown jobs pretty darn well.
Chris (04:11):
I guess also we need to get a little background about
you as well. So what is yourexperience in in dealing with
bees?
Sreelakshmi (04:23):
Yes. So I started way back in 02/2015. I was
looking for a summer job, as onedoes in undergrad, and I was
hired on to identify plants fora honeybee research lab. That
was Doctor. Reed Johnson's labat the Ohio State University and
(04:47):
it turns out I liked being thereand doing that sort of research
so much that I stayed there fora number of years and we fast
forward ten years later and I amstill talking about bees and
plants, so I have done beeresearch pretty actively for
(05:08):
about seven years, took a littlebreak, moved to Japan for a bit,
but once I came back, I was backon my bee business.
So I have done researchpredominantly in honeybee
foraging. I would say that I'm awaggle dance analysis expert. In
(05:31):
my thesis work and in myundergraduate work, would joke
that I'm the FBI because I wouldput cameras on these observation
hives, which rather than thestereotypical kind of little
square box that you would thinkof or even that skep hive that's
(05:53):
the kind of like dome shapedhive that you see on a lot of
vintage stuff, observation hivesare kind of they kinda look like
a display case. They're glass oneach side. I will say, no.
It is not great for the bees.However, it's really great for
us to spy on them, which is whatI did for a long time. I just,
you know, just overheard anddecoded all that they were
(06:17):
saying and listened into all oftheir conversations to figure
out where they were going. Andso a lot of my background is as
an ecologist trying to figureout where honeybees are going in
their landscape and with thatbackground, I also of course
encountered a lot of nativebees. My interest in native bees
(06:38):
definitely complements the workthat I've done on honeybees
because a lot of the resourcesthat they use, native bees and
honey bees both, those resourcesmight exist side by side.
Sometimes there's overlap andsometimes there isn't, and that
also gives me information too.My interest and background is
(06:59):
definitely as a pollinatorecologist. I'm really interested
in how bees, plants, and peopleinteract, and I put in people
because a lot of my passion andresearch has been driven by the
fact that I love being able tohelp people. I love being able
(07:22):
to talk to and help beekeepersor members of the public
understand what's going on withthe nature and the environment
around them. So I feel prettylucky to be in a position where
instead of holding my friendsand family hostage to talk about
bees, there are people thatactually come to this podcast
(07:44):
and do that.
And I'm sure, like, you know, myfamily is just alright. One day
that I don't have to deal withthem. So thanks for babysitting
me, guys. Appreciate it.
Chris (07:57):
I I do have a question. You mentioned waggle dance. I
think I I I I did it, but forour listeners, viewers, what's a
bee doing waggling around?
Sreelakshmi (08:10):
So honey bees and very specifically honey bees,
this one species does thiswaggle dance, is actually a
whole language. It's, as far asI know, the only insect language
that we humans know how tounderstand. So what it is is
(08:32):
that the honeybee, as do allinsects, have three parts of
their body, the head, thethorax, and the abdomen. The
thorax is kind of like ourchest, the abdomen is kind of
like our belly lower region. Sowhen the honeybee is in the
hive, let's say she goes out andfinds the best flower she's ever
(08:54):
eaten in her life.
Not only is there one, there'shundreds. She has to go back and
tell her sisters. Right? Like,she'd just be a horrible
honeybee otherwise. Honeybeesare a lot nicer to their
siblings than most humans are, Ithink, probably.
Maybe not all of them, but manyof them. In any case, she comes
back and because bees don't havevocal cords, they can't talk.
(09:18):
They have a language where theydo this waggle dance. So they
have their abdomen that theyshake from side to side. They
waggle.
So when the honeybee does thewaggle dance, she's doing this
kind of figure eight motion. Shewaggles her abdomen, so that
lower part of her body for acertain amount of time, and for
(09:40):
however long she actually doesthat, this is going to be in
number of seconds, that'llactually correspond to how far
away the foraging resource herfood is that she's advertising
from the hive. So then she'llmake that turn in that figure
eight, and the angle that sheturns is actually the direction
(10:04):
that a sister of hers needs toleave the entrance of the hive
to fly to get to the food, andshe'll continue doing that
figure eight. And if she keepsdoing that over and over and
over again, I tell people it'skind of like she's yelling.
(10:24):
She's like, this is the bestfood ever.
You guys gotta get some of this.I've seen these really
determined bees like they willnot shut up and they will keep
doing the same dance for, aminute, two minutes. Usually,
these bees are not really gonnadance for longer than a minute.
(10:44):
If there's, like, you know,like, hey. You know, there's a
flower down the street.
Okay. I guess. Check it out. Iif you want. She'll do that
waggle dance maybe once ortwice, but when it's a really
valuable resource, and this isvaluable in the brain of a
honeybee.
We can talk about nutrition andwhat honeybee is like a little
(11:08):
later, but in the little beebrain, whatever she thinks is
the coolest food stuff of theweek, she might yell about. And
as you get more foragers, sothese are honeybees that leave
the hive to get resources tobring back, the more foragers
that leave and go to resources,they might start coming back and
(11:31):
doing that dance too. So a lotof times when I was doing this
analysis and I would be watchingvideos of bees dancing, I might
see five different bees dancingfor the same resource. They're
all going to the same placebecause they're like, man, a
(11:53):
Costco just opened up down thestreet. Like, you have got to
try the Costco pizza.
Caveat, Illinois Extension doesnot endorse the products of
Costco or Costco pizza. This isa personal opinion of Sri
Laxmi's Reyes pretending to be ahoneybee.
Chris (12:13):
But now I wanna go to this Costco.
Sreelakshmi (12:15):
Right. Right. And in the honeybee world, this
might be a soybean field. Itmight be a clover field. There
are certain things that they areattracted to that are just very
large resources.
The nutrition that is there mayor may not be great, but you
sure can buy things in bulk.
Chris (12:36):
Yeah. Yes. Well, that's fascinating. The waggle dance. I
love it.
Ken (12:41):
Alright. So so bee populations, I guess, in
general, have been in the newsquite a bit. And and
specifically this year,honeybees have really been in
the news the last month or two.You wanna talk about a little
bit about the, I guess, the mostrecent honeybee declines we're
seeing potentially?
Sreelakshmi (12:59):
So we are hearing from project APSM, which
coordinates a bunch of honeybeeresearch and other folks that
are monitoring beehives,researchers, beekeepers,
etcetera. They send out a surveyevery year, usually in the
winter asking beekeepers, hey.Are you losing your hives? What
(13:19):
are you seeing in varroa mites?What are you seeing in diseases?
Which is a really great way forresearchers and beekeepers plus
the public to really understandhow honeybees are doing. And in
this past year, the loss rate ofhives was seventy two percent.
(13:42):
For context, in the ten years orso since I've been doing bee
research, that's the highestannual loss rate that I have
heard in almost ten years. Forthe past ten years, we've been
hovering around 50% annuallosses, which to be clear is
also very high in the days ofyore, so I'm talking probably
(14:10):
80s and earlier. In any case,when we were not doing as much
honeybee research, we'd onlyreally hear about maybe 30%
losses.
10 to 30% is the baseline thatwe would like to see. So when we
go from 10 to 30% of hives lostto 50% to suddenly 72%, that's
(14:39):
not good. You don't want to be afarmer or a business person
where you are losing 70% of allof your product every year that
you have to replace and regrow.Like, that's just not good and
that's not a great businessmodel. So, obviously, people are
(15:03):
concerned about this.
To quantify that 72% loss again,in economic impacts, beekeepers
are conservativelyconservatively estimated to have
lost about $225,000,000 inhaving to replace their bees,
(15:25):
and that's not including anylabor, feed, or treatments. It's
just their bees are dead. Interms of us here in The US
losing out on these pollinationservices, the economic impact of
this loss is expected, estimatedto be about $635,000,000. I
(15:50):
don't know about you, Chris orKen, but, $635,000,000 is not
pocket change to me. I I wouldlove if it were pocket change,
but it sure is not.
Chris (16:03):
This sounds like bad news. The question that we get
often is that, you know, theidea that we're using honeybees
to help us pollinate our cropsand, you know, know, folks that
know more about this know thatwe we truck them around the
country to crop to to pollinatevaluable horticultural crops
(16:26):
that are used in all manner ofof cooking, recipes, grocery,
all of that stuff. So thequestion that we often get is if
honeybees disappear or if theirpopulations decline to some
certain point, whatever thatpoint is, is our food system
going to collapse, and does thismean that we should all start
keeping honeybees to helphoneybees stay with a higher
(16:49):
population?
Sreelakshmi (16:51):
So good question. Good questions, really, because
I would say you just asked twodifferent questions. So I do get
a lot of people asking, should Ikeep honeybees to help the
population, and, will our foodsystems be in trouble? And I
(17:12):
think that second question kindof starts to get at the idea of
why people talk about honeybeesand native bees in different
ways and that is becausehoneybees are domesticated
livestock. So I say that insaying that honeybees are
(17:33):
classified the same way as youwould classify a cow, a sheep, a
goat, any of these things thatwe keep as livestock.
Honeybees, European honeybeesare livestock as well. They're
an agricultural problem. It's anagricultural issue. I don't know
(17:53):
if you two have been to thegrocery store recently, and
thought about picking up a dozeneggs because I definitely went
to the grocery aisle, saw thepack of eggs, and I was like,
you know what? I don't reallyneed eggs that much.
That's pretty expensive.Probably heard of avian flu
going around. That's notsomething that I will talk about
(18:16):
since that is while chickens dofly, they are not really bees,
so my experience there is prettylimited, but I'd say that to
mention that honeybees arelivestock too, so when we've got
these issues going on that'saffecting their survival and
their health, yes, we might seesome repercussions in our food
(18:40):
systems, but we're talking aboutlivestock here again.
Domestication refers to a verydistinct coevolutionary
mutualistic relationship betweena domesticator and the
domesticate. So between humansand honeybees.
Humans have been keepinghoneybees. We have written
(19:02):
records of humans keepinghoneybees for three thousand
years, but it's estimated thathumans have been managing,
keeping, domesticating honeybeesfor over nine thousand years. So
these, again, like people don'talways think of the honeybee as
a livestock livestock animal,but they definitely are. There
(19:25):
is some evidence that theirgenetics, their behavior, it's
different than that of the wildhoneybees that you might see.
Ken (19:35):
I think people have a hard time wrapping their heads around
just bees being animals, period,much less.
Sreelakshmi (19:41):
That that is very, very true. Yeah. I think I once
asked someone about if they sawany animals and I said, I just
saw five animals outside andthey're like, what? What do you
mean? And I start listening.
I'm like, yeah. I saw a ladybug.I saw a sweat bee. I saw this,
(20:01):
and they're like, those aren'tanimals. And I look at them and
I'm like, what are they?
Plants? And I could just seethat they just had like a like
an identity crisis happeningbefore me. But, yeah, they are
absolutely animals. Honeybeesare not wild animals though.
They are our friends on farms.
(20:23):
We keep them to do things thatwe want them to do. A lot of
people don't realize theseEuropean honeybees or Western
honeybees are called suchbecause they are originally from
the European area. They havebeen in The Americas, North
America, South America for lessthan four hundred years, which
(20:48):
is not really enough time forthem to evolve and really be
enmeshed in the localecosystems. It's very much just
they are a livestock animal thatwe brought over. I say we, but
European colonizers brought overto pollinate a lot of the
(21:12):
vegetables, the produce thatthey eat.
Because if you think about it, alot of the vegetables that we
eat here in The US are notnative to The US. Do you two
have any favorite vegetables youwanna name off for me? Or fruit.
You can name fruit too.
Chris (21:31):
Can't go wrong with an apple in my house.
Sreelakshmi (21:34):
Apples. Apples are native to Central Asia. They are
heavily, pollinated byhoneybees, also by native bees,
but they are not native to NorthAmerica. So there's one thing
immediately. I eat apples almostevery other day, not from North
America.
Ken, you got something?
Ken (21:57):
Trying to get stuff that has to be pollinated. We'll be
difficult. I'm going withpumpkins and squash.
Sreelakshmi (22:03):
Pumpkins. So pumpkins and squash, Penn has
decided to be difficult onpurpose. They are native to
North America. However, comma,pumpkins and squash are actually
best pollinated by our nativesquash bees. You really need our
(22:26):
native squash bees, soxenoglossa pruenosa to set fruit
in your cucumbers, in yourpumpkins, your zucchini, in your
whatever kind of squash.
Honey bees can do a slap dashokay job, but if you want the
job done and done well, youbetter be having some squash
bees. Ken, do you have a nondifficult answer?
Ken (22:54):
Will do maybe peppers or tomatoes since everybody likes
those.
Sreelakshmi (22:59):
So peppers and tomatoes, we think that they
came from, I believe, aroundSouth America. So not North
America either. We have a lot ofour tomatoes pollinated by
bumblebees. People will bring inthe common eastern bumblebee
bombus impatiens intogreenhouses for pollination of
(23:23):
tomatoes because honeybeescannot pollinate the flowers and
that's because if you ever getthe chance to look at a flower
in the nightshade family, whichis a pretty prolific family,
nightshades include deadlynightshade, of course, which is
the scary one, but includestomatoes, peppers, eggplant,
(23:47):
potatoes. A lot of fan favoritesare in the nightshade family,
and these flowers, they kind oflook like a star with if you've
ever seen a daffodil and seenthat kind of cup shape on it,
imagine if that cup shape werekind of closed into a point, so
it's this kind of star shapewith this cupped pointy bit and
(24:10):
inside are these stamens wherethe pollen, is.
Honeybees are not really good atgetting into, those stamens
trying to get that pollen off.However, bumblebees are big and
fat and they love to shake theirlittle butts and they do buzz
(24:30):
pollination, so they clamp on totomatoes, these tomato flowers,
and they will shake their bodiesto do buzz pollination and in
that buzz pollination, they'llactually get the pollen to fall
off of the tomato flowers and dopollination that way. They're
(24:51):
doing this to really gather thatpollen to take back to their
hive, but of course, if they'revisiting a greenhouse where
they've got hundreds of tomatoplants in a row, they're gonna
be pretty efficient pollinatorsalong the way. But again,
tomatoes, not something nativeto North America. So there's a
(25:12):
lot of examples like this.
We hear a lot about almonds.Almonds are produced in
California. We California is thenumber one global producer of
almonds in the world, and theyare pretty much exclusively
pollinated by honeybees, butalmonds are again not native to
(25:35):
North America. So Europeancolonizers brought over
honeybees, the European honeybeeor the western honeybee to be
able to have the foods that theywere, comfortable with, that
they were used to having. And sous fast forward couple
centuries, we're still eatingsimilar things, not all of the
(25:56):
same things, but a lot of them,and so we have come to really
rely on these livestock animalsfor the food that we eat in our
day to day.
Without honeybees, there are alot of foods that we wouldn't
have in our grocery storeswithout honeybees. And so they
(26:16):
are really crucial to our foodsystems as livestock.
Ken (26:20):
So with with honeybees being important for our food
supply, I think we still havethis you kinda have your, you
know, your native when it comesto home landscapes, have your
native purists, you have yourtraditional, and then everybody
in between as well. And I thinkthere's this conflict between,
you know, your your we'restrictly native people land,
(26:43):
like honeybees and, you know,getting into landscapes causing
issues with our nativepollinators and stuff. So do do
honeybees, I guess, negativelyimpact native bees?
Sreelakshmi (26:56):
So research on that is ongoing. It is definitely a
very hot topic. A lot of people,a lot of scientists around the
world are working on thatproblem, trying to figure out
what the case is for eitherside. I will say for a short
(27:17):
summary, it's looking like honeybees are generally negatively
impacting native bees for thesame reasons that, if you bring
in hundreds of livestock intolike if you had, let's say, a
(27:40):
national forest, know,Yellowstone, somewhere with open
grasslands, that's really nice.If you brought in hundreds of
cattle, to just graze that area,you're not going to have a lot
of food left for the otherthings in that area.
When you bring in a lot ofhoneybees to a protected area, a
(28:03):
lot of times they can competewith each other negatively, and
really I will say I know thatand I very strongly believe
honeybees and native bees bothhave their place. We need
honeybees for our food systemsand for our agriculture. They
can't go away because we wouldsuddenly be losing a lot of the
(28:26):
produce in our grocery stores,and that's just not realistic.
We need them too. But our nativebees are also really important
for our food systems andagriculture.
We just don't quantify them asmuch, but there also are wild
animals that are necessary forour native landscapes. So when
people pet honeybees and nativebees against each other, a lot
(28:46):
of time they are talking aboutcompetition and pathogens. So
when we're talking abouthoneybees, we really talk about
the four p's that are affectingpopulations of honeybees that we
think that these four p's worktogether to really lead to these
(29:08):
drastic declines in honeybeesand these four p's are poor
forage, pesticides, pests, andpathogens. Poor forage being
food. If we look at sayIllinois, for example, back in
1840, there were over 22,000,000acres of prairie in Illinois.
(29:33):
I can tell you that that is notthe case in current day. If you
think about how much food andhow much is grown in Illinois,
how much farmland we have,that's not prairie. Those are
not flowers that are beingpollinated by native insects, so
when we talk about competition,when we talk about poor forage,
(29:56):
there's just really not enoughfood, and so you're fighting
over the last scraps in thelandscape, right, and so
honeybees live in these massivegigantic colonies. Almost no
other bees live at the size thathoneybees do, and so you just
get hundreds of these guyscoming in and cleaning out the
(30:18):
Costco and there's nothing lefton the shelves for anyone else,
so that's kind of what'shappening. It's not necessarily
that they would directly, youknow, fight each other or attack
each other necessarily.
It can often be there's only oneslice of cake left in the bakery
(30:42):
aisle and only one bee is goingto get it right in this analogy,
and so they're competing overthe same things. In terms of
pesticides, you know, thingsthat are going to kill honeybees
are going to kill the nativebees. That's because most of the
bees we have here in The US arein the family Apidae. Honeybees
(31:05):
also are in the family apidae,so it serves to reason the
things that would kill honeybeeswould also kill things that are
very closely related within thesame family, and so pesticides
are also a problem because whenyou have insecticides that are
killing honeybees, we don't havea lot of research on what native
(31:29):
bee declines are looking likebecause there hasn't been a lot
of background research. Youdon't have a baseline.
It's really hard to figure outwhat changes are if you don't
have that quote unquote normalto look at. But we do understand
that these things that aregenerally killing honeybees are
(31:51):
generally going to kill theseother bees too because they have
similar modes of action. When wethink about pests, there's a lot
that can go along with that. Wethink about Varroa mites in
honeybee as being a major pestin The US, but there's also
other mites that are comingalong now. We are starting to
(32:14):
see the spread of Tropezoleillapse mites, which is not great.
I hate to be the bearer of badnews and say, hey. Watch out for
this new honeybee pest. Butthere is one coming, so there's
that. So one of the pests thatcan infect honeybees that we see
(32:37):
some spillover into native bees,especially our bumblebees is
Nocema. So specifically, Nocemaceranae is a microsporidian, so
that means it's a small singlecelled parasite that we know now
to be kind of related to fungior mushrooms as people will
(33:01):
often think of them.
There's a lot more to fungi thanthe world of mushrooms, but you
can think of it as a similarkind of single celled little
parasite there. And then wethink about that fourth p of
pathogens, so that's disease.There is a lot of research
ongoing about honeybee diseasebecause of course they're very,
(33:24):
very valuable livestock. Thereisn't again as much research on
pathogens affecting native bees,but we can generally say that
having a disease is bad. I don'tthink that's a controversial
take, and so even though wedon't have a lot of baseline
(33:46):
knowledge, we don't know a lotof, say life history,
populations, how certain nativebees live, and how they kind of
interact or their behavior, wecan generally assume that having
a disease is bad and kind ofgetting the evidence to prove
(34:10):
the fact that having variousdiseases is bad is still
ongoing, and I'm beingpurposefully a little vague
because this is how scienceworks.
Right? We are learning newthings every day. We're learning
new things and having newadvances and making all these
really cool new tools, so it'spossible we might learn
(34:31):
something and I would love toretract one of these pieces
being a problem or one of theseissues I'm talking about, but
I'm doing my best to share withwhat we know now, and so what we
know now is honey bees andnative bees don't have a lot of
food, the food that they have toshare, there's a lot more
(34:54):
honeybees at the table thanthere are native bees, and so
it's just going to be hard toelbow those honeybees out of the
way when there's hundreds ofthem compared to just a couple
of native bees in the area.Pesticides are hurting them both
because they are made to kind ofhurt similar groups of insects.
(35:15):
Pasts that can spill over arealso again not good.
We might not know a backgroundof native bees as well as we do
honey bees, but as I mentionedwith pathogens, we can generally
say that having a disease,having a pest is bad. It's not
great to have somethinghitchhiking on you or something
(35:35):
that is making you sick Even ifwe don't know what your normal
or healthy looks like, we cangenerally say that it's not
great to be sick or have thesepests and also be dealing with
pesticides and poor forage. Whenwe talk about honeybee losses
and we talk about native beestoo, these four peas
interacting, so again, poorforage, pesticides, pests, and
(35:59):
pathogens, we are trying tofigure out as researchers how
these things interact to reducebee populations and really
affect them, which it kind ofmakes sense because if you think
about it, imagine someone'spoisoning you, the food that
you're eating has poison in it,That's not great, so you're not
(36:22):
doing great. Imagine that foodthat has poison in it. You also
don't have much of it, so you'rekind of also starving, and then
someone hits you with a newdisease.
So you're starving, the foodthat you have is not good for
you and is poisoning you, andsuddenly you're sick. That's
what a lot of our honeybees arefacing and that's what a lot of
(36:44):
our native bees are facing.Whether one of these things has
more impact than the other iskind of up to debate, but in
general, if you ask me to pickwhat is the biggest issue, what
is the worst pee, I'd say poorforage because I know when I'm
(37:05):
sick, I want a nice hot cup oftea, some nice I am drinking
fluids out the wazoo, and I'mmaking sure that I'm eating
something that's nutritious forme. If you are not getting that
good nutrition, you're not goingto be able to fight off poison
(37:26):
or any disease or sickness thatyou have, so having good food is
really the baseline of thatpyramid of needs, right? Don't
got good food, you're not havinga good day.
And bees are really not having agood day for a long time now
(37:47):
because they just don't have theoptions that they had over the
thousands of millions of yearsthat they were here originally,
especially when we're thinkingabout those native bees.
Chris (37:58):
So thinking about good food, and this is a specific
question I got last year. Alandowner got a proposition from
a beekeeper. This landowner hadhigh quality prairie, and the
beekeeper wanted to rent some ofthis prairie. And they came to
me. They wanna know, well, isthere any issues that could
(38:22):
arise from having a a honeybeecolony or multiple colonies,
hives in my prairie.
It sounds like it might not bethe best idea. I don't know.
She'll actually what? I I kindof just when I said to them,
what's your goal? Do you want anative only situation?
Then you probably don't wanthoneybees. If it's okay, then,
(38:45):
and I sent them, resources, butI don't what could did could
there be any problems here?
Sreelakshmi (38:53):
Right. And so that, I think, gets back to the like,
is the landowner's goalconservation or is it supporting
local agriculture? Those areboth respectable goals to have,
either one of them. I don'tthink one is necessarily more
important than the other, but ifyour goal is conservation, then
(39:14):
you don't necessarily need tohave livestock in that area
because if instead of abeekeeper, let's say the
landowner was approached by adairy farmer like, hey, can I
get my cattle to graze yourprairie? If that landowner would
be like, heck no, you're goingto just kill all my prairie,
(39:35):
probably doesn't want honeybeesthere either then because also
the fact of the matter is a lotof the thesis work that I did, I
was finding pretty much over andover again, honeybees are eating
things that we think of asweeds.
A lot of Queen Anne's lace, sothat stachys corota, it's a wild
(39:57):
carrot, non native introducedfrom Europe, white clover,
Trifolium repens, alsointroduced from Europe, And
there's a couple of other thingsthat honeybees are eating, but I
can tell you that the vastmajority of the things these
honeybees are feeding on arethings that are evolutionarily
(40:21):
familiar to them. Things thatthey have evolved with over
thousands, over millions ofyears in their European habitats
that we know or think of asweeds here are what honeybees
are eating. That said, there'sresearch coming out. I did my
master's with Doctor. AdamDolezal at the University of
(40:44):
Illinois and some of the workthat he has done with his
colleagues has also includedthat we're seeing that prairie
can lead to good nutrition forthese honeybees in the late
season and the late fall seasonwhere they're kind of dealing
with lack of food, poisoningdiseases, pests kind of, they
(41:08):
kind of ramp up as we get closerto that winter season and he was
finding that the nutrition fromnative prairie plants can
actually be very good and helphoneybees survive or do a little
better at least than honeybeesthat didn't get access to that
(41:28):
pollen.
That said, kind of their lastlast choice. Honeybees are kind
of going to whatever they can. Ialways say honeybees are really
like humans in a way thatthey're lazy. They'll go to like
whatever is closest to them.Done a lot of work on honeybees
(41:52):
forging on soybean for instance,and that's because when you have
a soybean field next door thatis in full bloom, soybean,
soybean nectar doesn't have alot of nutrition, but it's a lot
of energy.
It's a lot of carbohydrates. Andso it's kind of like having a
(42:13):
Costco of potato chips nextdoor. So you can go next door
and get a week supply of potatochips to feed you and you just
have to walk next door or youcan drive, or you can fly, you
know, two miles down and getthis high this high nutrition,
really nice organic prairie feedand no. You know, most people
(42:37):
are just gonna go to the grocerystore next door that's super
easy and has, you know, a lot ofstuff in bulk, and they're just
gonna grab that and go. They'renot gonna waste their time going
all the way across town to getfood that's better, and some
people will and will supplementtheir diets, of course, because
(42:59):
I'm using a metaphor here ofhoneybees.
In general, they're going totake that easy route, and so
they're just trying to see whatis most available in terms of
number. You often get a lot ofwhite clover, you often get a
lot of dandelion, you often geta lot of soybean, that's what
(43:22):
they're going to be eating. Evento the fact if the landowner
wanted to support honeybees andlocal agriculture, I don't know
that that would be the placewhere the honeybees would be
feeding. Anyways, it's certainlypossible that they go there, but
(43:42):
in my research, given options,given the choice between
different agricultural anddifferent ecosystems, honeybees
tend to go for what we think ofas weeds, and I just pulled up
some of my thesis work and overtwo years of quantifying what
(44:07):
honeybees were bringing back totheir hive, 51% of all the
pollen that I identified wasintroduced to The US non native.
So half of everything that ahoneybee was eating, bringing
back to the hive for the hivesthat I was monitoring wasn't
even native to North America.
(44:27):
Natives were only 40% of whatthe honeybees were bringing back
to the hive, and the last 9%were cultivated. And by
cultivated, I mean things likesoybean, we're growing on
purpose. And what I found wasreally interesting, so of the
half of the stuff that 51%introduced pollen that the
(44:51):
honeybees were bringing back, afull third had some sort of
invasive control status to them.30% of that 51 were listed as
invasive and 4% in total werelisted as noxious weeds with
(45:12):
laws in Illinois about legalcontrol. The point here I'm
trying to make is thathoneybees, yes, will absolutely
go to Prairie.
They get benefits from Prairie.It's really good nutrition, but
it's not really their firstchoice. Right? It's kind of to
them, their home cooked food ormom's cooking are things like
(45:38):
clover and dandelions. It's notgoing to be our nice goldenrods
or our cone flowers necessarily.
They'll eat it, but that's kindof like, ah, yes. I want to get
Italian or Korean today,stretching out that food
metaphor I have.
Ken (45:56):
So I guess, though, that being said, and and you've kind
of hinted at this to someextent. So, you know, if we've
got honeybees foraging in a in aprairie, is there a chance that
maybe they over time couldchange the kind of look at that
that prairie? If they're kindathey're preferring to have these
non native plants that they'refeeding on, you know, those are
(46:20):
getting pollinated and those areproducing seed. Do do we have
the chance of that maybeshifting that plant community
over time?
Sreelakshmi (46:28):
That's a great question. And research is
ongoing. I know that's like myfavorite thing to say this this
whole session is research isongoing. We just don't know.
Ken (46:38):
It depends. But
Sreelakshmi (46:42):
Of course, there's a we just don't know. The but
here is that I have seen a fewstudies done within the past
five years showing that whenhoneybees are visiting native
plants, they are not effectivepollinators of native plants.
Honeybees are generalists, whichmeans they will eat whatever is
(47:06):
easiest for them, whatever theycan get in bulk. They're not
picky eaters. Native bees, wecontrast them, are often picky
eaters because their offspring,the larvae, are obligate feeders
(47:26):
so that means if they don't eata certain thing, they will die,
so a lot of these guys, thesenative bees are going to be
visiting particular things andover the course of thousands of
years or over the course ofmillions of years, we got pretty
dang good at their jobs ofgetting pollen and nectar out of
certain things.
We come back to Xenoglossaprunosa or that squash bee, they
(47:50):
are really, really good atgetting pollen and nectar out of
pumpkin plants. Honeybees cannothold a candle to how efficient
they are. The honeybees kind oflike, you know, a new grad
intern that you just hired offthe street, whereas the the
squash bee is like, you know,it's like Ken or Chris here
who's been on the job for awhile, and they they know what
(48:12):
they're doing. They're not me.Or at least when it comes to
bees, the tables turn when itcomes to pollinators perhaps,
but honeybees are just not up tosnuff.
They they do something, but theydon't do jobs well. So I've seen
a couple of studies in the pastcouple of years showing that
(48:33):
when honeybees do visit nativeplants, the native plants
actually see reduced seed setand the physiology or the
reproduction of the plants arenegatively affected by honeybees
(48:54):
as compared to the native beesthat have traditionally,
evolutionarily been pollinatingthese plants. So yes, we're also
seeing that honeybees are notgreat for the native plants
either, But again, I I know thatthis whole topic is near and
(49:18):
dear to a lot of people'shearts. It's near and dear to my
own heart, having been aprofessional beekeeper. I I
forgot to mention in myintroduction, I was for a year
the lab manager for the OhioState University's bee lab up in
Worcester.
So I was in charge of 45 hivesdoing and leading research
(49:40):
experiments, also in charge ofmaking sure these colonies were
doing well, over the year. Andso I have a soft spot for honey
bees, sure, but I also have aspot soft spot for native bees
knowing that they're the wildanimals in our ecosystems that
are doing a lot of the work thatare just not really credited for
(50:04):
it. They're the behind thescenes kind of doers that make
things happen. I've seen nativebees on raspberries, on
strawberries, on pretty muchanything I would see a honeybee
on, see native bees on too. AndI know some of these native
bees, especially if they'veevolved together, they're gonna
do a lot better job than thehoneybee that's the new bee that
(50:26):
is doing its best but doesn'treally have the experience to do
the best job of pollination.
Chris (50:33):
I guess a another if we we get started in our journey of
learning about bees, I mean, howmany bees are we talking about
here? We've we've divided theminto two groups, a honeybee and
a native bee. How you know, isthere like five of these or 10?
Like, how many are we talkingabout here?
Sreelakshmi (50:51):
So I'm gonna totally turn this question on
you. Mhmm. How many bees do youthink there are? I'm not asking
Ken because I think he knows.So, Chris, you're under the
spotlight.
I want you to tell me how manybees you think there are in the
entire world. We'll start there.World. In the entire world. How
many species of bees are thereon planet Earth?
Chris (51:14):
Okay. I've done I've done oh gosh. I've done a few
pollinator classes. I've saidthe North American number, but
the world number, 15,000species.
Sreelakshmi (51:30):
Not bad. The answer is 20,000. Are 20,000 different
kinds of bees in the world. Howmany bees are there in Illinois,
Chris?
Chris (51:45):
No. I thought you're gonna ask North America.
Sreelakshmi (51:49):
I have to make this hard for you. Where where's the
fun in making it easy? I don'twanna ask you anything you can
you can do.
Chris (51:57):
I'll go with 500.
Sreelakshmi (52:00):
Oh, right on the money. You are correct. Ding
ding ding. Have 500 differentspecies of bees in Illinois of
which the honeybee is only asingle kind of bee. We have four
ninety nine different species ofbees that have completely
(52:22):
different life histories andbiologies than the honeybee.
Of course when I talk aboutnative bees and honeybees, I'm
doing a lot of generalizationhere because honeybees are a
single species and four ninetynine other native bees belong to
(52:43):
not only different species, butdifferent genera and different
families. So there's a lot ofvariation here.
Chris (52:55):
I I love the I love the carpenter bees, though, because
there's the small carpenterbees, this teeny tiny little
thing, and then there's just thecarpenter bee, the, like, this
massive thing flying around. Andprobably I I would say my
favorite, if I had to pick afavorite, is probably the
carpenter bee, the largecarpenter bee. I love the males
(53:17):
that I can
Sreelakshmi (53:17):
just Oh, yes.
Chris (53:18):
Push I just take my finger. I was like, go away.
Leave me alone. And then thekids are like, what are you
doing? I'm like, nah.
They explained to him thedifference between, like, you
know, the males that don't havestingers. I'm not worried about
being stung. So, yes. Doactually, do you have a favorite
bee? Is this I you never asked.
(53:39):
Okay. Here we go. No.
Sreelakshmi (53:41):
No. I I definitely have a favorite bee. My favorite
family of bees are themegachilids, the leafcutter
bees. For folks that have notseen these or the likely cases
you've seen them and not knownthat they were a bee, many of
these megachilids, what they dois they cut leaves as is in
(54:03):
their common name. They takethem back to align their nests
in these little leaves and alsoinstead of having their pollen
collecting hairs on their legslike most bees do, megachilids
actually have their pollencollecting hairs on the
underside of their abdomen.
(54:24):
So let me tell you my favoritebee not only sleeps in leaf
blankets like a little fairy, italso has a fuzzy butt. What more
Mhmm. Could you want? What morecould you want in an insect?
Perfect.
Fuzzy butts and leaf blankets.Doesn't get much better than
that.
Chris (54:42):
It's got, like, a hoodie pocket to put all its pollen in.
Like, that's that's sounds socozy. Yeah. It's kinda what
you're thinking of. Right?
What I'm thinking of right here.So
Sreelakshmi (54:51):
Yeah. There's also it doesn't live here, but there
is a leafcutter bee in Turkeythat exclusively uses flower
petals to line its nests, sothere are these absolutely
precious photos that you canlook up of the Turkish
leafcutter bee and there's justthis little little tube of
(55:16):
flower petals and just thislittle guy sticking their little
head out, being so fuzzy andcute, sleeping in flower petals.
I'm like, come on. If you everbelieved in fairies, that's what
leafcutter bees are. Livingleaves and flowers and they're
just fuzzy and cute.
I love them. They're alsoefficient and important native
(55:39):
pollinators, of course.
Chris (55:40):
Of course. Ken, do you have a favorite bee?
Ken (55:46):
Think I do. They're they're all good in their own special
way.
Sreelakshmi (55:51):
Oh, Chris, I have something fun to tell you about
carpenter bees. So as Imentioned, I lived in Japan for
about two years, and so I pickedup the language. I had this
great opportunity where abeekeeper sponsored me to come
out to Japan and speak to localbeekeepers two years ago now,
(56:12):
but some of the one of thecutest things I learned. So in
Japanese, the Japanese carpenterbee is called kumabachi, which
is literally bear bee because,you know, like, big and stocky
like bears. They just it's veryliterally kuma is bear and bachi
(56:36):
is is bee or wasp.
It's just bear bees, and I justI love that. I think that's so
fun.
Chris (56:43):
Love it. Yes. Thank you for sharing that. That was
great.
Ken (56:46):
I Sort of petition to change their names.
Sreelakshmi (56:49):
Yes. But we should start calling them bear bees. I
mean, you know, common names arejust like that. Right? If we if
the three of us decide thatwe're gonna call them bear bees
and, you know Mhmm.
It catches on, we we havesomething here. We can we can be
the change we wanna see in theworld.
Chris (57:06):
From now on. Yes. Social language after all.
Ken (57:09):
It could be carpenter bear bee, and it'll just slowly drop
the carpenter.
Sreelakshmi (57:13):
Oh, yes. Excellent. Ken has a plan. Alright,
listeners. You know what to do.
Chris (57:20):
Bear bees.
Sreelakshmi (57:21):
Bear bees.
Chris (57:22):
Well, that was a lot of great information about
honeybees and native bees. Mymind is is full of information
now. I'm going to have to goprocess this. Well, the Good
Growing podcast is a productionof University of Illinois
Extension, edited this week byme, Chris Enroth. A special
thank you to our special guesttoday, Sherlaxmi.
Thank you so much for being heretoday. I there's so many fun
(57:47):
little, like, tidbit facts thathave come out of today. I'm
going to be, like, rewatchingthis thing over and over again
and learning something new everytime. Thank you.
Sreelakshmi (57:58):
Chris. Chris, would you say that you're buzzing with
excitement?
Chris (58:04):
Oh, I'm oh, beat me to it. Oh, yes. I'm buzzing right
out of this chair practically.No. It's this was a lot of great
information.
So you shined a wonderful lighton also, you know, the story
that's happening betweenhoneybees and native bees. Just
yes. Thank you very much. Thisis a wealth of knowledge. Thank
(58:26):
you.
Sreelakshmi (58:26):
Thanks for having me. And, of course, I am always
happy to talk to people aboutbees. You are saving my friends
and family from having to hearabout them again. So always feel
free to reach out. Yeah.
Email or otherwise.
Chris (58:42):
Thank Ken, as always, thank you for hanging out with
me. You had a pretty good ideathis week, you know, these bees.
So now I'm all excited aboutinsects again. Here we go. It's
cicadas all over again.
We're just gonna be all beesthis year. Thanks again.
Ken (58:58):
Sounds good. And, yes, thank you, Shwakashmi, for a lot
of great information. And,Chris, let's do this again next
week.
Chris (59:08):
Oh, we shall do this again next week. We'll be
chatting about some fungardening horticultural topic,
and so just look forward to thatepisode next week. Well,
listeners, thank you for doingwhat you do best, and that is
listening. Or if you're watchingus on YouTube watching. And as
always, keep on growing.
Sreelakshmi (59:38):
Which I don't know about you, Chris or John, but
that or Chris or did I say John?Chris and Ken?
Chris (59:45):
He goes by many names. I've been called worse.
Sreelakshmi (59:49):
Yeah. I don't sorry, Ken.
Welcome to the Good Growing podcast. I am Chris
Enroth, horticulture educatorwith the University of Illinois
Extension coming at you from MacOmb, Illinois, and we have got a
great show for you today, honeybees and native bees. Are these
the same thing? What's going onwith the honey bees these days?
We will find out today laterwith our special guest, but you
know I'm not doing this bymyself.
(00:28):
I'm joined as always everysingle week by horticulture
educator Ken Johnson inJacksonville. Hey,
Ken (00:33):
Ken. Hello, Chris. You enjoyed the cold spell we've
been having? Just how yourplants survive?
Chris (00:41):
I will say all of the plants are looking just fine
except our saucer magnolia wentfrom beautiful pinkish white
flowers to everything on theexterior this morning turned
brown after the frost evaporatedaway, but everything on the
interior is still nice andpretty on the inside. So we did
(01:06):
get hit by frost, did lose someflowers, Everything's doing fine
though. It's supposed to do thisin the spring. Right, Ken? How
are things going inJacksonville?
Do you lose anything?
Ken (01:17):
I don't I haven't noticed anything yet. I don't think we
have anything that's really Iguess some of the magnolias a
lot of those are losing petalsalready though because they've
been blooming for a while andwe've had lots of wind. So that
took care of a lot of them too.Have and as far as our yard,
everything is because everythingis blooming and supposed to be
(01:37):
blooming now and isn't isn'treally affected by what's going
on.
Chris (01:41):
Yes. It is Ken's yard. Only the hardiest shall survive.
So it's Pretty much.
Ken (01:48):
You need lots of care. You're not gonna make it.
Chris (01:51):
Yeah. Oh my. Well, Ken, today is is your show today.
We've I have bored you and doledyou with plant stuff, but now
we're getting back to what youlove insects. We're gonna be
talking about bees, honeybees,native bees, kind of the the
conflict or the the debate goingon between the two, but also the
(02:14):
issues surrounding kind ofbringing together but dividing
them as well.
So we we do have our specialguest with us today, Shirlakshmi
Shuresh, horticulture educatorin Effingham. Shirlakshmi,
welcome to the show.
Sreelakshmi (02:29):
Hello. Thank you for having me.
Chris (02:32):
Well, we are happy to have you. So today we are
discussing bees, like honeybeeversus native bee, but should I
be using versus here? Like, Iguess, set the stage for us. Is
this honeybees versus nativebees these days?
Sreelakshmi (02:50):
So that's a really good question. I definitely hear
different opinions fromdifferent folks about honey bees
and native bees if the peoplespeaking are researchers, if
they're farmers, if they'rebeekeepers, if they're
conservationists. Everyone has aopinion about this, who's in the
(03:14):
conservation or farming game,and many of them I have found
tend to talk past each other or,they tend to have, disagreements
with each other when they're notactually having the same
conversation. There's definitelydifferences between honeybees
and native bees, but I would saypretty fundamentally, they are
(03:39):
kind of inhabiting differentparts of our ecosystem and that
becomes a lot of the issue withpeople trying to pit them
against each other. They bothhave a place in our environment,
in our ecosystems, and in ouragriculture.
(04:00):
Those places are by and largeseparate. There are some
overlap, but they each do theirown jobs pretty darn well.
Chris (04:11):
I guess also we need to get a little background about
you as well. So what is yourexperience in in dealing with
bees?
Sreelakshmi (04:23):
Yes. So I started way back in 02/2015. I was
looking for a summer job, as onedoes in undergrad, and I was
hired on to identify plants fora honeybee research lab. That
was Doctor. Reed Johnson's labat the Ohio State University and
(04:47):
it turns out I liked being thereand doing that sort of research
so much that I stayed there fora number of years and we fast
forward ten years later and I amstill talking about bees and
plants, so I have done beeresearch pretty actively for
(05:08):
about seven years, took a littlebreak, moved to Japan for a bit,
but once I came back, I was backon my bee business.
So I have done researchpredominantly in honeybee
foraging. I would say that I'm awaggle dance analysis expert. In
(05:31):
my thesis work and in myundergraduate work, would joke
that I'm the FBI because I wouldput cameras on these observation
hives, which rather than thestereotypical kind of little
square box that you would thinkof or even that skep hive that's
(05:53):
the kind of like dome shapedhive that you see on a lot of
vintage stuff, observation hivesare kind of they kinda look like
a display case. They're glass oneach side. I will say, no.
It is not great for the bees.However, it's really great for
us to spy on them, which is whatI did for a long time. I just,
you know, just overheard anddecoded all that they were
(06:17):
saying and listened into all oftheir conversations to figure
out where they were going. Andso a lot of my background is as
an ecologist trying to figureout where honeybees are going in
their landscape and with thatbackground, I also of course
encountered a lot of nativebees. My interest in native bees
(06:38):
definitely complements the workthat I've done on honeybees
because a lot of the resourcesthat they use, native bees and
honey bees both, those resourcesmight exist side by side.
Sometimes there's overlap andsometimes there isn't, and that
also gives me information too.My interest and background is
(06:59):
definitely as a pollinatorecologist. I'm really interested
in how bees, plants, and peopleinteract, and I put in people
because a lot of my passion andresearch has been driven by the
fact that I love being able tohelp people. I love being able
(07:22):
to talk to and help beekeepersor members of the public
understand what's going on withthe nature and the environment
around them. So I feel prettylucky to be in a position where
instead of holding my friendsand family hostage to talk about
bees, there are people thatactually come to this podcast
(07:44):
and do that.
And I'm sure, like, you know, myfamily is just alright. One day
that I don't have to deal withthem. So thanks for babysitting
me, guys. Appreciate it.
Chris (07:57):
I I do have a question. You mentioned waggle dance. I
think I I I I did it, but forour listeners, viewers, what's a
bee doing waggling around?
Sreelakshmi (08:10):
So honey bees and very specifically honey bees,
this one species does thiswaggle dance, is actually a
whole language. It's, as far asI know, the only insect language
that we humans know how tounderstand. So what it is is
(08:32):
that the honeybee, as do allinsects, have three parts of
their body, the head, thethorax, and the abdomen. The
thorax is kind of like ourchest, the abdomen is kind of
like our belly lower region. Sowhen the honeybee is in the
hive, let's say she goes out andfinds the best flower she's ever
(08:54):
eaten in her life.
Not only is there one, there'shundreds. She has to go back and
tell her sisters. Right? Like,she'd just be a horrible
honeybee otherwise. Honeybeesare a lot nicer to their
siblings than most humans are, Ithink, probably.
Maybe not all of them, but manyof them. In any case, she comes
back and because bees don't havevocal cords, they can't talk.
(09:18):
They have a language where theydo this waggle dance. So they
have their abdomen that theyshake from side to side. They
waggle.
So when the honeybee does thewaggle dance, she's doing this
kind of figure eight motion. Shewaggles her abdomen, so that
lower part of her body for acertain amount of time, and for
(09:40):
however long she actually doesthat, this is going to be in
number of seconds, that'llactually correspond to how far
away the foraging resource herfood is that she's advertising
from the hive. So then she'llmake that turn in that figure
eight, and the angle that sheturns is actually the direction
(10:04):
that a sister of hers needs toleave the entrance of the hive
to fly to get to the food, andshe'll continue doing that
figure eight. And if she keepsdoing that over and over and
over again, I tell people it'skind of like she's yelling.
(10:24):
She's like, this is the bestfood ever.
You guys gotta get some of this.I've seen these really
determined bees like they willnot shut up and they will keep
doing the same dance for, aminute, two minutes. Usually,
these bees are not really gonnadance for longer than a minute.
(10:44):
If there's, like, you know,like, hey. You know, there's a
flower down the street.
Okay. I guess. Check it out. Iif you want. She'll do that
waggle dance maybe once ortwice, but when it's a really
valuable resource, and this isvaluable in the brain of a
honeybee.
We can talk about nutrition andwhat honeybee is like a little
(11:08):
later, but in the little beebrain, whatever she thinks is
the coolest food stuff of theweek, she might yell about. And
as you get more foragers, sothese are honeybees that leave
the hive to get resources tobring back, the more foragers
that leave and go to resources,they might start coming back and
(11:31):
doing that dance too. So a lotof times when I was doing this
analysis and I would be watchingvideos of bees dancing, I might
see five different bees dancingfor the same resource. They're
all going to the same placebecause they're like, man, a
(11:53):
Costco just opened up down thestreet. Like, you have got to
try the Costco pizza.
Caveat, Illinois Extension doesnot endorse the products of
Costco or Costco pizza. This isa personal opinion of Sri
Laxmi's Reyes pretending to be ahoneybee.
Chris (12:13):
But now I wanna go to this Costco.
Sreelakshmi (12:15):
Right. Right. And in the honeybee world, this
might be a soybean field. Itmight be a clover field. There
are certain things that they areattracted to that are just very
large resources.
The nutrition that is there mayor may not be great, but you
sure can buy things in bulk.
Chris (12:36):
Yeah. Yes. Well, that's fascinating. The waggle dance. I
love it.
Ken (12:41):
Alright. So so bee populations, I guess, in
general, have been in the newsquite a bit. And and
specifically this year,honeybees have really been in
the news the last month or two.You wanna talk about a little
bit about the, I guess, the mostrecent honeybee declines we're
seeing potentially?
Sreelakshmi (12:59):
So we are hearing from project APSM, which
coordinates a bunch of honeybeeresearch and other folks that
are monitoring beehives,researchers, beekeepers,
etcetera. They send out a surveyevery year, usually in the
winter asking beekeepers, hey.Are you losing your hives? What
(13:19):
are you seeing in varroa mites?What are you seeing in diseases?
Which is a really great way forresearchers and beekeepers plus
the public to really understandhow honeybees are doing. And in
this past year, the loss rate ofhives was seventy two percent.
(13:42):
For context, in the ten years orso since I've been doing bee
research, that's the highestannual loss rate that I have
heard in almost ten years. Forthe past ten years, we've been
hovering around 50% annuallosses, which to be clear is
also very high in the days ofyore, so I'm talking probably
(14:10):
80s and earlier. In any case,when we were not doing as much
honeybee research, we'd onlyreally hear about maybe 30%
losses.
10 to 30% is the baseline thatwe would like to see. So when we
go from 10 to 30% of hives lostto 50% to suddenly 72%, that's
(14:39):
not good. You don't want to be afarmer or a business person
where you are losing 70% of allof your product every year that
you have to replace and regrow.Like, that's just not good and
that's not a great businessmodel. So, obviously, people are
(15:03):
concerned about this.
To quantify that 72% loss again,in economic impacts, beekeepers
are conservativelyconservatively estimated to have
lost about $225,000,000 inhaving to replace their bees,
(15:25):
and that's not including anylabor, feed, or treatments. It's
just their bees are dead. Interms of us here in The US
losing out on these pollinationservices, the economic impact of
this loss is expected, estimatedto be about $635,000,000. I
(15:50):
don't know about you, Chris orKen, but, $635,000,000 is not
pocket change to me. I I wouldlove if it were pocket change,
but it sure is not.
Chris (16:03):
This sounds like bad news. The question that we get
often is that, you know, theidea that we're using honeybees
to help us pollinate our cropsand, you know, know, folks that
know more about this know thatwe we truck them around the
country to crop to to pollinatevaluable horticultural crops
(16:26):
that are used in all manner ofof cooking, recipes, grocery,
all of that stuff. So thequestion that we often get is if
honeybees disappear or if theirpopulations decline to some
certain point, whatever thatpoint is, is our food system
going to collapse, and does thismean that we should all start
keeping honeybees to helphoneybees stay with a higher
(16:49):
population?
Sreelakshmi (16:51):
So good question. Good questions, really, because
I would say you just asked twodifferent questions. So I do get
a lot of people asking, should Ikeep honeybees to help the
population, and, will our foodsystems be in trouble? And I
(17:12):
think that second question kindof starts to get at the idea of
why people talk about honeybeesand native bees in different
ways and that is becausehoneybees are domesticated
livestock. So I say that insaying that honeybees are
(17:33):
classified the same way as youwould classify a cow, a sheep, a
goat, any of these things thatwe keep as livestock.
Honeybees, European honeybeesare livestock as well. They're
an agricultural problem. It's anagricultural issue. I don't know
(17:53):
if you two have been to thegrocery store recently, and
thought about picking up a dozeneggs because I definitely went
to the grocery aisle, saw thepack of eggs, and I was like,
you know what? I don't reallyneed eggs that much.
That's pretty expensive.Probably heard of avian flu
going around. That's notsomething that I will talk about
(18:16):
since that is while chickens dofly, they are not really bees,
so my experience there is prettylimited, but I'd say that to
mention that honeybees arelivestock too, so when we've got
these issues going on that'saffecting their survival and
their health, yes, we might seesome repercussions in our food
(18:40):
systems, but we're talking aboutlivestock here again.
Domestication refers to a verydistinct coevolutionary
mutualistic relationship betweena domesticator and the
domesticate. So between humansand honeybees.
Humans have been keepinghoneybees. We have written
(19:02):
records of humans keepinghoneybees for three thousand
years, but it's estimated thathumans have been managing,
keeping, domesticating honeybeesfor over nine thousand years. So
these, again, like people don'talways think of the honeybee as
a livestock livestock animal,but they definitely are. There
(19:25):
is some evidence that theirgenetics, their behavior, it's
different than that of the wildhoneybees that you might see.
Ken (19:35):
I think people have a hard time wrapping their heads around
just bees being animals, period,much less.
Sreelakshmi (19:41):
That that is very, very true. Yeah. I think I once
asked someone about if they sawany animals and I said, I just
saw five animals outside andthey're like, what? What do you
mean? And I start listening.
I'm like, yeah. I saw a ladybug.I saw a sweat bee. I saw this,
(20:01):
and they're like, those aren'tanimals. And I look at them and
I'm like, what are they?
Plants? And I could just seethat they just had like a like
an identity crisis happeningbefore me. But, yeah, they are
absolutely animals. Honeybeesare not wild animals though.
They are our friends on farms.
(20:23):
We keep them to do things thatwe want them to do. A lot of
people don't realize theseEuropean honeybees or Western
honeybees are called suchbecause they are originally from
the European area. They havebeen in The Americas, North
America, South America for lessthan four hundred years, which
(20:48):
is not really enough time forthem to evolve and really be
enmeshed in the localecosystems. It's very much just
they are a livestock animal thatwe brought over. I say we, but
European colonizers brought overto pollinate a lot of the
(21:12):
vegetables, the produce thatthey eat.
Because if you think about it, alot of the vegetables that we
eat here in The US are notnative to The US. Do you two
have any favorite vegetables youwanna name off for me? Or fruit.
You can name fruit too.
Chris (21:31):
Can't go wrong with an apple in my house.
Sreelakshmi (21:34):
Apples. Apples are native to Central Asia. They are
heavily, pollinated byhoneybees, also by native bees,
but they are not native to NorthAmerica. So there's one thing
immediately. I eat apples almostevery other day, not from North
America.
Ken, you got something?
Ken (21:57):
Trying to get stuff that has to be pollinated. We'll be
difficult. I'm going withpumpkins and squash.
Sreelakshmi (22:03):
Pumpkins. So pumpkins and squash, Penn has
decided to be difficult onpurpose. They are native to
North America. However, comma,pumpkins and squash are actually
best pollinated by our nativesquash bees. You really need our
(22:26):
native squash bees, soxenoglossa pruenosa to set fruit
in your cucumbers, in yourpumpkins, your zucchini, in your
whatever kind of squash.
Honey bees can do a slap dashokay job, but if you want the
job done and done well, youbetter be having some squash
bees. Ken, do you have a nondifficult answer?
Ken (22:54):
Will do maybe peppers or tomatoes since everybody likes
those.
Sreelakshmi (22:59):
So peppers and tomatoes, we think that they
came from, I believe, aroundSouth America. So not North
America either. We have a lot ofour tomatoes pollinated by
bumblebees. People will bring inthe common eastern bumblebee
bombus impatiens intogreenhouses for pollination of
(23:23):
tomatoes because honeybeescannot pollinate the flowers and
that's because if you ever getthe chance to look at a flower
in the nightshade family, whichis a pretty prolific family,
nightshades include deadlynightshade, of course, which is
the scary one, but includestomatoes, peppers, eggplant,
(23:47):
potatoes. A lot of fan favoritesare in the nightshade family,
and these flowers, they kind oflook like a star with if you've
ever seen a daffodil and seenthat kind of cup shape on it,
imagine if that cup shape werekind of closed into a point, so
it's this kind of star shapewith this cupped pointy bit and
(24:10):
inside are these stamens wherethe pollen, is.
Honeybees are not really good atgetting into, those stamens
trying to get that pollen off.However, bumblebees are big and
fat and they love to shake theirlittle butts and they do buzz
(24:30):
pollination, so they clamp on totomatoes, these tomato flowers,
and they will shake their bodiesto do buzz pollination and in
that buzz pollination, they'llactually get the pollen to fall
off of the tomato flowers and dopollination that way. They're
(24:51):
doing this to really gather thatpollen to take back to their
hive, but of course, if they'revisiting a greenhouse where
they've got hundreds of tomatoplants in a row, they're gonna
be pretty efficient pollinatorsalong the way. But again,
tomatoes, not something nativeto North America. So there's a
(25:12):
lot of examples like this.
We hear a lot about almonds.Almonds are produced in
California. We California is thenumber one global producer of
almonds in the world, and theyare pretty much exclusively
pollinated by honeybees, butalmonds are again not native to
(25:35):
North America. So Europeancolonizers brought over
honeybees, the European honeybeeor the western honeybee to be
able to have the foods that theywere, comfortable with, that
they were used to having. And sous fast forward couple
centuries, we're still eatingsimilar things, not all of the
(25:56):
same things, but a lot of them,and so we have come to really
rely on these livestock animalsfor the food that we eat in our
day to day.
Without honeybees, there are alot of foods that we wouldn't
have in our grocery storeswithout honeybees. And so they
(26:16):
are really crucial to our foodsystems as livestock.
Ken (26:20):
So with with honeybees being important for our food
supply, I think we still havethis you kinda have your, you
know, your native when it comesto home landscapes, have your
native purists, you have yourtraditional, and then everybody
in between as well. And I thinkthere's this conflict between,
you know, your your we'restrictly native people land,
(26:43):
like honeybees and, you know,getting into landscapes causing
issues with our nativepollinators and stuff. So do do
honeybees, I guess, negativelyimpact native bees?
Sreelakshmi (26:56):
So research on that is ongoing. It is definitely a
very hot topic. A lot of people,a lot of scientists around the
world are working on thatproblem, trying to figure out
what the case is for eitherside. I will say for a short
(27:17):
summary, it's looking like honeybees are generally negatively
impacting native bees for thesame reasons that, if you bring
in hundreds of livestock intolike if you had, let's say, a
(27:40):
national forest, know,Yellowstone, somewhere with open
grasslands, that's really nice.If you brought in hundreds of
cattle, to just graze that area,you're not going to have a lot
of food left for the otherthings in that area.
When you bring in a lot ofhoneybees to a protected area, a
(28:03):
lot of times they can competewith each other negatively, and
really I will say I know thatand I very strongly believe
honeybees and native bees bothhave their place. We need
honeybees for our food systemsand for our agriculture. They
can't go away because we wouldsuddenly be losing a lot of the
(28:26):
produce in our grocery stores,and that's just not realistic.
We need them too. But our nativebees are also really important
for our food systems andagriculture.
We just don't quantify them asmuch, but there also are wild
animals that are necessary forour native landscapes. So when
people pet honeybees and nativebees against each other, a lot
(28:46):
of time they are talking aboutcompetition and pathogens. So
when we're talking abouthoneybees, we really talk about
the four p's that are affectingpopulations of honeybees that we
think that these four p's worktogether to really lead to these
(29:08):
drastic declines in honeybeesand these four p's are poor
forage, pesticides, pests, andpathogens. Poor forage being
food. If we look at sayIllinois, for example, back in
1840, there were over 22,000,000acres of prairie in Illinois.
(29:33):
I can tell you that that is notthe case in current day. If you
think about how much food andhow much is grown in Illinois,
how much farmland we have,that's not prairie. Those are
not flowers that are beingpollinated by native insects, so
when we talk about competition,when we talk about poor forage,
(29:56):
there's just really not enoughfood, and so you're fighting
over the last scraps in thelandscape, right, and so
honeybees live in these massivegigantic colonies. Almost no
other bees live at the size thathoneybees do, and so you just
get hundreds of these guyscoming in and cleaning out the
(30:18):
Costco and there's nothing lefton the shelves for anyone else,
so that's kind of what'shappening. It's not necessarily
that they would directly, youknow, fight each other or attack
each other necessarily.
It can often be there's only oneslice of cake left in the bakery
(30:42):
aisle and only one bee is goingto get it right in this analogy,
and so they're competing overthe same things. In terms of
pesticides, you know, thingsthat are going to kill honeybees
are going to kill the nativebees. That's because most of the
bees we have here in The US arein the family Apidae. Honeybees
(31:05):
also are in the family apidae,so it serves to reason the
things that would kill honeybeeswould also kill things that are
very closely related within thesame family, and so pesticides
are also a problem because whenyou have insecticides that are
killing honeybees, we don't havea lot of research on what native
(31:29):
bee declines are looking likebecause there hasn't been a lot
of background research. Youdon't have a baseline.
It's really hard to figure outwhat changes are if you don't
have that quote unquote normalto look at. But we do understand
that these things that aregenerally killing honeybees are
(31:51):
generally going to kill theseother bees too because they have
similar modes of action. When wethink about pests, there's a lot
that can go along with that. Wethink about Varroa mites in
honeybee as being a major pestin The US, but there's also
other mites that are comingalong now. We are starting to
(32:14):
see the spread of Tropezoleillapse mites, which is not great.
I hate to be the bearer of badnews and say, hey. Watch out for
this new honeybee pest. Butthere is one coming, so there's
that. So one of the pests thatcan infect honeybees that we see
(32:37):
some spillover into native bees,especially our bumblebees is
Nocema. So specifically, Nocemaceranae is a microsporidian, so
that means it's a small singlecelled parasite that we know now
to be kind of related to fungior mushrooms as people will
(33:01):
often think of them.
There's a lot more to fungi thanthe world of mushrooms, but you
can think of it as a similarkind of single celled little
parasite there. And then wethink about that fourth p of
pathogens, so that's disease.There is a lot of research
ongoing about honeybee diseasebecause of course they're very,
(33:24):
very valuable livestock. Thereisn't again as much research on
pathogens affecting native bees,but we can generally say that
having a disease is bad. I don'tthink that's a controversial
take, and so even though wedon't have a lot of baseline
(33:46):
knowledge, we don't know a lotof, say life history,
populations, how certain nativebees live, and how they kind of
interact or their behavior, wecan generally assume that having
a disease is bad and kind ofgetting the evidence to prove
(34:10):
the fact that having variousdiseases is bad is still
ongoing, and I'm beingpurposefully a little vague
because this is how scienceworks.
Right? We are learning newthings every day. We're learning
new things and having newadvances and making all these
really cool new tools, so it'spossible we might learn
(34:31):
something and I would love toretract one of these pieces
being a problem or one of theseissues I'm talking about, but
I'm doing my best to share withwhat we know now, and so what we
know now is honey bees andnative bees don't have a lot of
food, the food that they have toshare, there's a lot more
(34:54):
honeybees at the table thanthere are native bees, and so
it's just going to be hard toelbow those honeybees out of the
way when there's hundreds ofthem compared to just a couple
of native bees in the area.Pesticides are hurting them both
because they are made to kind ofhurt similar groups of insects.
(35:15):
Pasts that can spill over arealso again not good.
We might not know a backgroundof native bees as well as we do
honey bees, but as I mentionedwith pathogens, we can generally
say that having a disease,having a pest is bad. It's not
great to have somethinghitchhiking on you or something
(35:35):
that is making you sick Even ifwe don't know what your normal
or healthy looks like, we cangenerally say that it's not
great to be sick or have thesepests and also be dealing with
pesticides and poor forage. Whenwe talk about honeybee losses
and we talk about native beestoo, these four peas
interacting, so again, poorforage, pesticides, pests, and
(35:59):
pathogens, we are trying tofigure out as researchers how
these things interact to reducebee populations and really
affect them, which it kind ofmakes sense because if you think
about it, imagine someone'spoisoning you, the food that
you're eating has poison in it,That's not great, so you're not
(36:22):
doing great. Imagine that foodthat has poison in it. You also
don't have much of it, so you'rekind of also starving, and then
someone hits you with a newdisease.
So you're starving, the foodthat you have is not good for
you and is poisoning you, andsuddenly you're sick. That's
what a lot of our honeybees arefacing and that's what a lot of
(36:44):
our native bees are facing.Whether one of these things has
more impact than the other iskind of up to debate, but in
general, if you ask me to pickwhat is the biggest issue, what
is the worst pee, I'd say poorforage because I know when I'm
(37:05):
sick, I want a nice hot cup oftea, some nice I am drinking
fluids out the wazoo, and I'mmaking sure that I'm eating
something that's nutritious forme. If you are not getting that
good nutrition, you're not goingto be able to fight off poison
(37:26):
or any disease or sickness thatyou have, so having good food is
really the baseline of thatpyramid of needs, right? Don't
got good food, you're not havinga good day.
And bees are really not having agood day for a long time now
(37:47):
because they just don't have theoptions that they had over the
thousands of millions of yearsthat they were here originally,
especially when we're thinkingabout those native bees.
Chris (37:58):
So thinking about good food, and this is a specific
question I got last year. Alandowner got a proposition from
a beekeeper. This landowner hadhigh quality prairie, and the
beekeeper wanted to rent some ofthis prairie. And they came to
me. They wanna know, well, isthere any issues that could
(38:22):
arise from having a a honeybeecolony or multiple colonies,
hives in my prairie.
It sounds like it might not bethe best idea. I don't know.
She'll actually what? I I kindof just when I said to them,
what's your goal? Do you want anative only situation?
Then you probably don't wanthoneybees. If it's okay, then,
(38:45):
and I sent them, resources, butI don't what could did could
there be any problems here?
Sreelakshmi (38:53):
Right. And so that, I think, gets back to the like,
is the landowner's goalconservation or is it supporting
local agriculture? Those areboth respectable goals to have,
either one of them. I don'tthink one is necessarily more
important than the other, but ifyour goal is conservation, then
(39:14):
you don't necessarily need tohave livestock in that area
because if instead of abeekeeper, let's say the
landowner was approached by adairy farmer like, hey, can I
get my cattle to graze yourprairie? If that landowner would
be like, heck no, you're goingto just kill all my prairie,
(39:35):
probably doesn't want honeybeesthere either then because also
the fact of the matter is a lotof the thesis work that I did, I
was finding pretty much over andover again, honeybees are eating
things that we think of asweeds.
A lot of Queen Anne's lace, sothat stachys corota, it's a wild
(39:57):
carrot, non native introducedfrom Europe, white clover,
Trifolium repens, alsointroduced from Europe, And
there's a couple of other thingsthat honeybees are eating, but I
can tell you that the vastmajority of the things these
honeybees are feeding on arethings that are evolutionarily
(40:21):
familiar to them. Things thatthey have evolved with over
thousands, over millions ofyears in their European habitats
that we know or think of asweeds here are what honeybees
are eating. That said, there'sresearch coming out. I did my
master's with Doctor. AdamDolezal at the University of
(40:44):
Illinois and some of the workthat he has done with his
colleagues has also includedthat we're seeing that prairie
can lead to good nutrition forthese honeybees in the late
season and the late fall seasonwhere they're kind of dealing
with lack of food, poisoningdiseases, pests kind of, they
(41:08):
kind of ramp up as we get closerto that winter season and he was
finding that the nutrition fromnative prairie plants can
actually be very good and helphoneybees survive or do a little
better at least than honeybeesthat didn't get access to that
(41:28):
pollen.
That said, kind of their lastlast choice. Honeybees are kind
of going to whatever they can. Ialways say honeybees are really
like humans in a way thatthey're lazy. They'll go to like
whatever is closest to them.Done a lot of work on honeybees
(41:52):
forging on soybean for instance,and that's because when you have
a soybean field next door thatis in full bloom, soybean,
soybean nectar doesn't have alot of nutrition, but it's a lot
of energy.
It's a lot of carbohydrates. Andso it's kind of like having a
(42:13):
Costco of potato chips nextdoor. So you can go next door
and get a week supply of potatochips to feed you and you just
have to walk next door or youcan drive, or you can fly, you
know, two miles down and getthis high this high nutrition,
really nice organic prairie feedand no. You know, most people
(42:37):
are just gonna go to the grocerystore next door that's super
easy and has, you know, a lot ofstuff in bulk, and they're just
gonna grab that and go. They'renot gonna waste their time going
all the way across town to getfood that's better, and some
people will and will supplementtheir diets, of course, because
(42:59):
I'm using a metaphor here ofhoneybees.
In general, they're going totake that easy route, and so
they're just trying to see whatis most available in terms of
number. You often get a lot ofwhite clover, you often get a
lot of dandelion, you often geta lot of soybean, that's what
(43:22):
they're going to be eating. Evento the fact if the landowner
wanted to support honeybees andlocal agriculture, I don't know
that that would be the placewhere the honeybees would be
feeding. Anyways, it's certainlypossible that they go there, but
(43:42):
in my research, given options,given the choice between
different agricultural anddifferent ecosystems, honeybees
tend to go for what we think ofas weeds, and I just pulled up
some of my thesis work and overtwo years of quantifying what
(44:07):
honeybees were bringing back totheir hive, 51% of all the
pollen that I identified wasintroduced to The US non native.
So half of everything that ahoneybee was eating, bringing
back to the hive for the hivesthat I was monitoring wasn't
even native to North America.
(44:27):
Natives were only 40% of whatthe honeybees were bringing back
to the hive, and the last 9%were cultivated. And by
cultivated, I mean things likesoybean, we're growing on
purpose. And what I found wasreally interesting, so of the
half of the stuff that 51%introduced pollen that the
(44:51):
honeybees were bringing back, afull third had some sort of
invasive control status to them.30% of that 51 were listed as
invasive and 4% in total werelisted as noxious weeds with
(45:12):
laws in Illinois about legalcontrol. The point here I'm
trying to make is thathoneybees, yes, will absolutely
go to Prairie.
They get benefits from Prairie.It's really good nutrition, but
it's not really their firstchoice. Right? It's kind of to
them, their home cooked food ormom's cooking are things like
(45:38):
clover and dandelions. It's notgoing to be our nice goldenrods
or our cone flowers necessarily.
They'll eat it, but that's kindof like, ah, yes. I want to get
Italian or Korean today,stretching out that food
metaphor I have.
Ken (45:56):
So I guess, though, that being said, and and you've kind
of hinted at this to someextent. So, you know, if we've
got honeybees foraging in a in aprairie, is there a chance that
maybe they over time couldchange the kind of look at that
that prairie? If they're kindathey're preferring to have these
non native plants that they'refeeding on, you know, those are
(46:20):
getting pollinated and those areproducing seed. Do do we have
the chance of that maybeshifting that plant community
over time?
Sreelakshmi (46:28):
That's a great question. And research is
ongoing. I know that's like myfavorite thing to say this this
whole session is research isongoing. We just don't know.
Ken (46:38):
It depends. But
Sreelakshmi (46:42):
Of course, there's a we just don't know. The but
here is that I have seen a fewstudies done within the past
five years showing that whenhoneybees are visiting native
plants, they are not effectivepollinators of native plants.
Honeybees are generalists, whichmeans they will eat whatever is
(47:06):
easiest for them, whatever theycan get in bulk. They're not
picky eaters. Native bees, wecontrast them, are often picky
eaters because their offspring,the larvae, are obligate feeders
(47:26):
so that means if they don't eata certain thing, they will die,
so a lot of these guys, thesenative bees are going to be
visiting particular things andover the course of thousands of
years or over the course ofmillions of years, we got pretty
dang good at their jobs ofgetting pollen and nectar out of
certain things.
We come back to Xenoglossaprunosa or that squash bee, they
(47:50):
are really, really good atgetting pollen and nectar out of
pumpkin plants. Honeybees cannothold a candle to how efficient
they are. The honeybees kind oflike, you know, a new grad
intern that you just hired offthe street, whereas the the
squash bee is like, you know,it's like Ken or Chris here
who's been on the job for awhile, and they they know what
(48:12):
they're doing. They're not me.Or at least when it comes to
bees, the tables turn when itcomes to pollinators perhaps,
but honeybees are just not up tosnuff.
They they do something, but theydon't do jobs well. So I've seen
a couple of studies in the pastcouple of years showing that
(48:33):
when honeybees do visit nativeplants, the native plants
actually see reduced seed setand the physiology or the
reproduction of the plants arenegatively affected by honeybees
(48:54):
as compared to the native beesthat have traditionally,
evolutionarily been pollinatingthese plants. So yes, we're also
seeing that honeybees are notgreat for the native plants
either, But again, I I know thatthis whole topic is near and
(49:18):
dear to a lot of people'shearts. It's near and dear to my
own heart, having been aprofessional beekeeper. I I
forgot to mention in myintroduction, I was for a year
the lab manager for the OhioState University's bee lab up in
Worcester.
So I was in charge of 45 hivesdoing and leading research
(49:40):
experiments, also in charge ofmaking sure these colonies were
doing well, over the year. Andso I have a soft spot for honey
bees, sure, but I also have aspot soft spot for native bees
knowing that they're the wildanimals in our ecosystems that
are doing a lot of the work thatare just not really credited for
(50:04):
it. They're the behind thescenes kind of doers that make
things happen. I've seen nativebees on raspberries, on
strawberries, on pretty muchanything I would see a honeybee
on, see native bees on too. AndI know some of these native
bees, especially if they'veevolved together, they're gonna
do a lot better job than thehoneybee that's the new bee that
(50:26):
is doing its best but doesn'treally have the experience to do
the best job of pollination.
Chris (50:33):
I guess a another if we we get started in our journey of
learning about bees, I mean, howmany bees are we talking about
here? We've we've divided theminto two groups, a honeybee and
a native bee. How you know, isthere like five of these or 10?
Like, how many are we talkingabout here?
Sreelakshmi (50:51):
So I'm gonna totally turn this question on
you. Mhmm. How many bees do youthink there are? I'm not asking
Ken because I think he knows.So, Chris, you're under the
spotlight.
I want you to tell me how manybees you think there are in the
entire world. We'll start there.World. In the entire world. How
many species of bees are thereon planet Earth?
Chris (51:14):
Okay. I've done I've done oh gosh. I've done a few
pollinator classes. I've saidthe North American number, but
the world number, 15,000species.
Sreelakshmi (51:30):
Not bad. The answer is 20,000. Are 20,000 different
kinds of bees in the world. Howmany bees are there in Illinois,
Chris?
Chris (51:45):
No. I thought you're gonna ask North America.
Sreelakshmi (51:49):
I have to make this hard for you. Where where's the
fun in making it easy? I don'twanna ask you anything you can
you can do.
Chris (51:57):
I'll go with 500.
Sreelakshmi (52:00):
Oh, right on the money. You are correct. Ding
ding ding. Have 500 differentspecies of bees in Illinois of
which the honeybee is only asingle kind of bee. We have four
ninety nine different species ofbees that have completely
(52:22):
different life histories andbiologies than the honeybee.
Of course when I talk aboutnative bees and honeybees, I'm
doing a lot of generalizationhere because honeybees are a
single species and four ninetynine other native bees belong to
(52:43):
not only different species, butdifferent genera and different
families. So there's a lot ofvariation here.
Chris (52:55):
I I love the I love the carpenter bees, though, because
there's the small carpenterbees, this teeny tiny little
thing, and then there's just thecarpenter bee, the, like, this
massive thing flying around. Andprobably I I would say my
favorite, if I had to pick afavorite, is probably the
carpenter bee, the largecarpenter bee. I love the males
(53:17):
that I can
Sreelakshmi (53:17):
just Oh, yes.
Chris (53:18):
Push I just take my finger. I was like, go away.
Leave me alone. And then thekids are like, what are you
doing? I'm like, nah.
They explained to him thedifference between, like, you
know, the males that don't havestingers. I'm not worried about
being stung. So, yes. Doactually, do you have a favorite
bee? Is this I you never asked.
(53:39):
Okay. Here we go. No.
Sreelakshmi (53:41):
No. I I definitely have a favorite bee. My favorite
family of bees are themegachilids, the leafcutter
bees. For folks that have notseen these or the likely cases
you've seen them and not knownthat they were a bee, many of
these megachilids, what they dois they cut leaves as is in
(54:03):
their common name. They takethem back to align their nests
in these little leaves and alsoinstead of having their pollen
collecting hairs on their legslike most bees do, megachilids
actually have their pollencollecting hairs on the
underside of their abdomen.
(54:24):
So let me tell you my favoritebee not only sleeps in leaf
blankets like a little fairy, italso has a fuzzy butt. What more
Mhmm. Could you want? What morecould you want in an insect?
Perfect.
Fuzzy butts and leaf blankets.Doesn't get much better than
that.
Chris (54:42):
It's got, like, a hoodie pocket to put all its pollen in.
Like, that's that's sounds socozy. Yeah. It's kinda what
you're thinking of. Right?
What I'm thinking of right here.So
Sreelakshmi (54:51):
Yeah. There's also it doesn't live here, but there
is a leafcutter bee in Turkeythat exclusively uses flower
petals to line its nests, sothere are these absolutely
precious photos that you canlook up of the Turkish
leafcutter bee and there's justthis little little tube of
(55:16):
flower petals and just thislittle guy sticking their little
head out, being so fuzzy andcute, sleeping in flower petals.
I'm like, come on. If you everbelieved in fairies, that's what
leafcutter bees are. Livingleaves and flowers and they're
just fuzzy and cute.
I love them. They're alsoefficient and important native
(55:39):
pollinators, of course.
Chris (55:40):
Of course. Ken, do you have a favorite bee?
Ken (55:46):
Think I do. They're they're all good in their own special
way.
Sreelakshmi (55:51):
Oh, Chris, I have something fun to tell you about
carpenter bees. So as Imentioned, I lived in Japan for
about two years, and so I pickedup the language. I had this
great opportunity where abeekeeper sponsored me to come
out to Japan and speak to localbeekeepers two years ago now,
(56:12):
but some of the one of thecutest things I learned. So in
Japanese, the Japanese carpenterbee is called kumabachi, which
is literally bear bee because,you know, like, big and stocky
like bears. They just it's veryliterally kuma is bear and bachi
(56:36):
is is bee or wasp.
It's just bear bees, and I justI love that. I think that's so
fun.
Chris (56:43):
Love it. Yes. Thank you for sharing that. That was
great.
Ken (56:46):
I Sort of petition to change their names.
Sreelakshmi (56:49):
Yes. But we should start calling them bear bees. I
mean, you know, common names arejust like that. Right? If we if
the three of us decide thatwe're gonna call them bear bees
and, you know Mhmm.
It catches on, we we havesomething here. We can we can be
the change we wanna see in theworld.
Chris (57:06):
From now on. Yes. Social language after all.
Ken (57:09):
It could be carpenter bear bee, and it'll just slowly drop
the carpenter.
Sreelakshmi (57:13):
Oh, yes. Excellent. Ken has a plan. Alright,
listeners. You know what to do.
Chris (57:20):
Bear bees.
Sreelakshmi (57:21):
Bear bees.
Chris (57:22):
Well, that was a lot of great information about
honeybees and native bees. Mymind is is full of information
now. I'm going to have to goprocess this. Well, the Good
Growing podcast is a productionof University of Illinois
Extension, edited this week byme, Chris Enroth. A special
thank you to our special guesttoday, Sherlaxmi.
Thank you so much for being heretoday. I there's so many fun
(57:47):
little, like, tidbit facts thathave come out of today. I'm
going to be, like, rewatchingthis thing over and over again
and learning something new everytime. Thank you.
Sreelakshmi (57:58):
Chris. Chris, would you say that you're buzzing with
excitement?
Chris (58:04):
Oh, I'm oh, beat me to it. Oh, yes. I'm buzzing right
out of this chair practically.No. It's this was a lot of great
information.
So you shined a wonderful lighton also, you know, the story
that's happening betweenhoneybees and native bees. Just
yes. Thank you very much. Thisis a wealth of knowledge. Thank
(58:26):
you.
Sreelakshmi (58:26):
Thanks for having me. And, of course, I am always
happy to talk to people aboutbees. You are saving my friends
and family from having to hearabout them again. So always feel
free to reach out. Yeah.
Email or otherwise.
Chris (58:42):
Thank Ken, as always, thank you for hanging out with
me. You had a pretty good ideathis week, you know, these bees.
So now I'm all excited aboutinsects again. Here we go. It's
cicadas all over again.
We're just gonna be all beesthis year. Thanks again.
Ken (58:58):
Sounds good. And, yes, thank you, Shwakashmi, for a lot
of great information. And,Chris, let's do this again next
week.
Chris (59:08):
Oh, we shall do this again next week. We'll be
chatting about some fungardening horticultural topic,
and so just look forward to thatepisode next week. Well,
listeners, thank you for doingwhat you do best, and that is
listening. Or if you're watchingus on YouTube watching. And as
always, keep on growing.
Sreelakshmi (59:38):
Which I don't know about you, Chris or John, but
that or Chris or did I say John?Chris and Ken?
Chris (59:45):
He goes by many names. I've been called worse.
Sreelakshmi (59:49):
Yeah. I don't sorry, Ken.
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