Transcript: Podship Earth Episode 53: BEES
JARED BLUMENFELD: Welcome to Podship Earth. This is your host Jared Blumenfeld. Unless you've been in a time capsule for the last few years, it would have been hard to miss the news that our pollinator friends are in big trouble.
News Reporter 1: The bees are dying and they're taking everything else with them, and that's a serious issue because this last winter, 33% of all the honeybee colonies in the US died. That is double the acceptable natural amount and entomologists are warning that we're getting dangerously close to the point where we don't have enough bees to meet our country's pollination demand.
News Reporter 2: Beekeepers and researchers say this is already the worst winter for honeybees in at least a decade.
News Reporter 3: Without pollination, there won't be any fruit. A lot of the crops that we rely on you, they wouldn't be commercially viable. Okay? Does that make sense to you?
News Reporter 4: And now some bad news for bees. There is new evidence that they are being harmed by some widely used pesticides.
JARED BLUMENFELD: I meet up with Laurie Adams, the president and CEO of the Pollinator Partnership, whose mission is to promote the health of pollinators critical to food and ecosystems through conservation, education and research. The Pollinator Partnership is the world's largest nonprofit devoted solely to the health of all pollinators. Laurie was a key consultant with the Obama White House on the Presidential Memorandum on Pollinators and instrumental in the development of the National Strategy to promote the health of honeybees and other pollinators. I stopped by asking Laurie how her work on pollinators began.
LAURIE ADAMS: About 30 years ago, I was approached by someone who wanted to do a museum of biodiversity in San Francisco, and the museum was going to be very experiential and one of the experiences you would have in our planning, was to pollinate a flower. To drive into a big flower with maybe a velcro suit and have a lot of balls attached to you and so forth. The museum did not fly.
JARED BLUMENFELD: But I love the idea though. It sounds like, I think it was like Borat or someone who wore a velcro suit. It's, it's really a good idea.
LAURIE ADAMS: Absolutely. You would identify yourself as a prey or as a predator when you entered the museum and different exhibits would respond to you differently. I mean, I started exploring pollination and how we could get people connected to conservation through food because everybody cares about what they eat. And because pollination is so connected to not just foods we like, but foods we need, it really brought it home to everyday people back then.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Back then, how were you thinking about pollinators? Just as simply a way of kind of getting people engaged in the environment?
LAURIE ADAMS: That was part of it. But pollinators are in some ways the lost leaders for plants. I mean bees don't have very good PR or didn't, but plants really didn't have good PR. So, pollinators connect with plants. This whole concept of pollination interested people because of the mechanical process. Early on, people said you can't use the word pollinator. Call it a butterfly garden because people don't like bees and they might like butterflies, but pollinators, it'll never fly.
JARED BLUMENFELD: But you didn't give up.
LAURIE ADAMS: We kept pursuing and persevering and now a fifth-grade class will send me a photo that they took, all standing out in a field all dressed as butterflies and bees with a big sign that says, “welcome pollinators.”
JARED BLUMENFELD: That’s awesome. I love it.
LAURIE ADAMS: This is the human expression of connection and if you can get that going, who knows where it's going to lead. Very exciting.
JARED BLUMENFELD: So, what are pollinators?
LAURIE ADAMS: There's about 200,000 species of pollinators worldwide. So, it's all kinds of animals that are interacting with plants and moving the genetic material around. Sometimes from plant to plant, sometimes just inside the flower, but they're creating food for us, food for wildlife. They're stabilizing ecosystems, they're fundamental, and it was kind of under the radar back then.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Why do plants need animals to pollinate them? Like how did that, from an evolutionary perspective, how did this whole thing come about?
LAURIE ADAMS: It's a pretty cool design. Not all plants need them. Angiosperms do need some sort of pollination. Sometimes it's wind, sometimes it's water. But for about 70% of all flowering plants, it's some other vehicle, like an animal that comes in, moves the pollen, and moves to the next flower. Now, the animal isn't thinking, I’m pollinating. They're coming in for carbohydrate and protein through nectar and through pollen. So, they're getting a resource from all these floral resources, but the flower is benefiting, and flowers have done amazing things to try to attract pollinators. I mean there are, there are flowers that only bloom once in the Amazon and the pollinator comes from many miles away because of a very strange odor that this plant puts out. They have UV landing strips on certain plants and flowers because birds can see ultraviolet light. So, they have these things that guide you right where you want to be. And the phonology is really interesting because a beak will match a flower that's tubular or a long tongue will match a flower that has certain pollen that has to be gathered from the sides. But it's birds and bats and butterflies and beetles and flies and lemurs and all these animals doing this work. For them, it’s food, for us, it's a healthy planet.
JARED BLUMENFELD: So, it's moving pollen from one place to another. Tell me more about how that works.
LAURIE ADAMS: So, there's two things that happen. Sometimes it's just moving the female material to the male part within the flower, but sometimes it's moving the genetic material from plant to plant. And there are obviously crop species where you need a male and a female to actually pollinate it. So, you actually need to move from plant to plant, but not always. But really what it is you've got pistils and stamen within the flower and you have to move the pollen from one to the other. So, it's the male and the female. It’s sexual reproduction basically. It's sex in the garden. I think that's why they call it the birds and the bees.
JARED BLUMENFELD: I've never thought about that. I'm sure that is the reason. I like that, the birds and the bees. That's very cool. So, they perform this incredibly important function. Help us understand from a quantification perspective what percentage rely on pollination.
LAURIE ADAMS: It's about 70% of all flowering plants. So, pine trees, confers, they don't need this. There are certain fruits and products that we benefit from like almonds where you don't get an almond unless you get a bee visit, which is why almond pollination is the highest export from the state of California. That's why almond pollination is such a big deal within the honeybee industry. And almost 70% of all of the bees in the United States are trucked to California in February for this early bloom that requires pollination.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Tell us a little bit more about where these bees are coming from and the whole mechanics of bees moving around the country to help almonds in California.
LAURIE ADAMS: Well, and it isn't just almonds in California, it's pears and cherries in the Pacific northwest. And then you move over to Michigan again for cherries and apples. You go all the way up to Maine for blueberries and you bring those same bees often down to Florida or Texas or South Dakota for the summer. It's a monstrous undertaking. And these beekeepers who are such hardworking folks travel at night, they put these bees on their trucks with forklifts. They keep the bees cool. They have to be very careful that they don't show up someplace where they have to be crossing into an inspection area. They have to make sure it's cool and there's water for the bees. It's hard on the bees. It's hard. Beekeepers have learned how to manage this. And it also means that bees from very many places are comingling within these fields because of this confluence that then has a diaspora that goes everywhere and can spread disease. Beekeepers have worked really hard to make sure that they take good care of their bees, but it is not a natural process and possibly not a sustainable process going forward. So, some farms, including some almond farms, large ones, almond orchards in California have their own bees now and they actually have the bees just stay there and they have beekeepers on staff. There are people working on almonds that don't require pollination. My job has much more to do with all pollinators. So, there are 4,000 species of bees in the United States.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Wow.
LAURIE ADAMS: There's 20,000 in the world. There's 4,000 in the United States. But I pay attention to the bats and the butterflies, the monarch butterfly, those amazing migrations that we have across the United States that are unique in the world. I pay a lot of attention to those. We do a lot of outreach school garden kits, wonderful, wonderful efforts from every level of society.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Laurie, from the beginning of time, humans have loved honey. So, what's the history of honeybees in the United States?
LAURIE ADAMS: Honeybees, which are non-native to the United States, they're not invasive, but they were introduced with the colonists. They came over with the early colonists to the United States and they were actually called the “white man's flies” by the Indians because they weren't here. And the native bees, the other 3,999 species that are here, some of which are in trouble, some of which we don't even know their status because we study the honeybee. We sometimes study bumblebees, but everything else kind of gets short shrift because there's not enough time or money to go around to really have a good assessment of their status.
JARED BLUMENFELD: So why are bees in trouble?
LAURIE ADAMS: It's lots of reasons, but obviously pesticides, parasites, pathogens that have been introduced from other species. But the biggest problem that everyone can agree on is real estate. They don't have a place to forage for food, and they don't have good food sources available to them. And almost anyone who is well nourished can handle some pesticides, some pathogen, some parasite. But if you are starving at the same time, you can't handle any of this. And little scruffy areas of the world, the lots that don't exist anymore that use to provide food, are gone. The plants that we plant are often ornamental and not providing the pollen in the next year that they need. So, we work with farmers to put in hedge rows and cover crops and floral resources that will support this sort of amazing army of workers that we are not paying attention to. Cover crops also can restore nitrogen to the soil and are often just planted to be then turned and enriching the soil. But rich soil is important for many of the bees in this country because they're their ground nesters, and they actually, the digger bee for example, turns the soil for us. These, these animals are providing ecosystem services everywhere, and we're all the beneficiaries. They have taken good care of us, and we now need to return that favor.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Tell us a little bit about on the list of the first p’s, the pesticides.
LAURIE ADAMS: Pesticides are very complex. Some of them are available so that we can actually get through really dire circumstances and everybody knows that when their kid gets head lice or when there's cockroaches in the kitchen. We say, oh wait, we've got to fix this. Farmers are trying to grow food, trying to make a living, not trying to poison the world or pollinators. So, in terms of pesticides, wise usage and using as little as possible and using something really smartly designated for the actual problem that you're trying to solve. We especially work with farmers who are organic and have already decided to do that, but we also work with farmers who have different crops or different perspectives. Our view is if we can bring everybody along, if we can make them go through that process of “do I need this, is this effective”? Is this going to actually solve my problem or create more problems? Because pesticide resistance is a huge problem in this country, where we've overused certain chemicals and it's no longer effective. The best way is to from the inside, look at the problem with the farmer, with the homeowner. Can you live with an ugly apple? You know, if we expect perfect fruit lined up in the grocery store, like the Rockettes, everyone exactly the same, we're asking for chemicals. If we're open to things that have a little shared value, maybe with someone else, some other critter or isn't a perfect shape, we open ourselves to more possibilities for sustainable, wholesome, organic growing.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Are there some pesticides that affect pollinators more than others?
LAURIE ADAMS: Those are usually the systemic pesticides. Neonicotinoids in particular, and they are being regulated, but probably not as fast as many people would like. The systemic pesticides are in seed treatments. So, in other words, there's no application, so you're not getting volatile chemicals that are moving. You're getting it planted in the soil and then it grows up within the plant so that a chewing insect is knocked out. It's actually a brain chemical that is changed by chewing the plant. Unfortunately, there are some studies that show that that also affects the pollen and the nectar and the coating liquid, which comes out of the plant itself. These are water soluble. So, they also move within the field. They can be carried by water if they're not absorbed up into the plant. This is very complicated and incendiary. Everybody has a strong opinion. And when I go to a cocktail party and someone comes up and says, tell me about clothianidin and other neonicotinoids.
JARED BLUMENFELD: You must be thinking, wow, I'm going to the wrong cocktail party because no one ever asked me that. Wow. The more I hear about this issue, the more I need a cocktail. On the good news front, which countries are leading the way when it comes to evaluating the impacts of pesticides on pollinators today?
LAURIE ADAMS: Today, the European Union banned a fungicide and many people in California had thought fungicides because pesticides are insecticides, fungicides, rodenticides, this fungicide had gotten kind of a free pass. But this just points out how we have a hard time really figuring out how to solve the problems. And we all want to do something, but I think we need to do it really with good science.
JARED BLUMENFELD: When I talked with farmers, they tell me that one of the best protective measures is making sure that they're not spraying any pesticides when the trees are in bloom.
LAURIE ADAMS: Bloom is what you want to avoid. If there's no bloom, you're not going to have any pests. Probably you are not going to have any pests, but probably you're also not going to have pollinators. So, bloom is the thing that you have to really take into consideration. And at that point you have to really modify your behaviors. But again, if we've got you thinking, do I need this application? Do I actually have a problem? Am I doing this just because I've always done it? That's what we want to avoid.
JARED BLUMENFELD: So, the next thing is pathogens. Tell us what are the pathogens that are affecting the colonies?
LAURIE ADAMS: Well, there's one called Nosema.
JARED BLUMENFELD: What are pathogens? Explain.
LAURIE ADAMS: Oh, bacteria, virus, disease.
JARED BLUMENFELD: And there's specific diseases that affect these.
LAURIE ADAMS: Yes, and there are specific diseases that are specific to geographic areas and sometimes, they get transferred by bringing in a queen or bringing in some stock that is infected with a bacteria or a virus. There's also a huge mite issue. There's this mite called the Varroa destructor. Virtually every hive in the United States has Varroa Destructor. Varroa. If you and I, if we had these mites, we'd have sort of maybe about as big of as a little hedgehog or a mole that sat on our shoulders and drove us crazy. And every one of us would have one and it would hop off of us and go and eat our children. And it was introduced from China, from someone who brought a queen and it's everywhere. It's a vector for all these vector borne pathogens. So, there's also an issue of a contaminated bee landing on a flower and leaving the pathogen there. And then the next be that comes along is now a carrier. So, these are the things that are- they fuel alcohol sales more than anything. You just feel bad. How can we ever solve this? So, what we like to emphasize is planting really good food plants, reducing or eliminating all your chemical use, making sure that you support those that are offering you foods that have been cleanly raised and are products of their passion for the land.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Actually, I got a flyer the other day from someone that will come and put a beehive on your roof, and they'll maintain it and get the honey. It's hard for people to sort out if that is actually helpful? Does that help bees?
LAURIE ADAMS: A lot of people say to me, I really want to do something for the bees. I'm going to become a beekeeper and in hobbyists beekeeping, most people last about three years. What your flyer said is a great deal. If somebody wants to put a beehive on your roof and you want to support them and they'll take care of it, I think that's great. The bees pollinate the plants that are all around here, they'll go two miles from your rooftop for resources and it isn't just little flowers that they want. They want flowering trees; they want maples and willows. But if you really want to help bees in your neighborhood, you plant the plants for the natives because they specifically want those plants. Honeybees are generalists. That's why they're so helpful in agriculture. They'll go to many, many plants pretty successfully, but the native plants that are in your areas specific to where you live in San Francisco. And San Francisco has at least five different eco regions. Those plants will help the local guys and gals. Now, a lot of people in San Francisco only have a terrace or maybe they have a balcony, put out potted plants. You will actually see butterflies and bees. Wherever you work, wherever you go to school, wherever you go to worship. Those are places where you can get people together and it's amazing. You can maybe pause and look at a butterfly coming in or look at a bee or a hummingbird. This morning, a hummingbird was in my backyard looking at some salvia.
JARED BLUMENFELD: And they're pollinators. What does the relationship that we have to bees and pollinators tell us about our relationship to nature in general?
LAURIE ADAMS: Well, we've sort of lost a lot of our relationship to nature and in urban settings, this can bring us back to something that's so fundamental and so exciting. This sense of wonder. This amazing connection we have to the universe, and we have a lot of symbolic relationships with different pollinators. Let's say butterflies, the whole life cycle of going from an egg to a caterpillar to a chrysalis to emerging. That is a powerful, powerful image for us spiritually. It helps us connect.
JARED BLUMENFELD: Is climate change also impacting bees and other pollinators?
LAURIE ADAMS: Everything we do that might degrade the environment affects them first. They don't have a place to go to adapt to climate change. They tell time by temperature. If the plant that they need for their resources emerges at the wrong time, or if we have these extreme weather conditions that take away the plants, that change things that have bloomed and then had frost, these things affect them first on. What they try to do is shift their range if they can so that they can move to a place where things are more hospitable, but they can't, and we can't do without pollination. What we need is to take care of what we have, and this world is changing because of our behavior. Most people recognize that they don't see as many butterflies as they used to when they were kids, or they don't see as many bees as they used to just in their own environment.
JARED BLUMENFELD: What are the key ingredients to winning the battle to protect bees?
LAURIE ADAMS: The number one thing I think we need to do is get along with one another. That's number one because if we can't listen to each other, we can't talk to each other, we are suspect of everything, we're going to have a really hard time doing the actions that we need to take right away. The Endangered Species Act is a really good process to keep things in check. There is a lot of science that has to go into it. There's a lot of review that has to go into it. The monarch, let's just take that for an example. There are at least two major migrations in the United States. There's this California migration. Numbers are way low on that. We know where the overwintering spots are. They are all across the coast. Our organization has a project called Monarch Wings Across California, and we're putting what we think is the migratory pattern. We're putting plants along that and we're testing it.
JARED BLUMENFELD: What about labels for “bee friendly” farmers?
LAURIE ADAMS: So, we have a bunch of folks that have “bee friendly” farming stickers on their wine bottles or on their produce, and we've worked with them to ensure that they set aside 3- 6% of their property just for pollinators. It's not easy to find really solid things because it's a very complex picture.
JARED BLUMENFELD: But Laurie, no one wants complexity.
LAURIE ADAMS: We have five things we tell people they need to do to be a good environmentalist. They need to first of all, understand everything's connected. Nothing is in isolation. Second of all, they need to know that nothing's free, not their air or their water or their food. It's going to take a price. The third thing is, it's up to you. You got to write a check. You got to lift a shovel. You got to get out there and talk to somebody. And the fourth is vote. I never tell anybody who to vote for. But if you care about the decisions on your landscape, you better vote for someone who also cares about those decisions. And the fifth thing, is that sense of wonder that I talked about. Just don't lose that.
JARED BLUMENFELD: A big thank you to Laurie Adams from the Pollinator Partnership for talking with Podship Earth today. Bees, butterflies, bats, birds, and thousands of species of pollinators work hard each day to make sure the world blooms. Now, they need our help from planting pollinator friendly flowers to reducing home use of pesticides, to buying organic fruit and vegetables, to protecting open spaces. We can help turn this around. Then in the process, make life a little sweeter. In the next episode of Podship Earth, we visit environmentalists on either side of the US/ Mexico border in the towns of Calexico and Mexicali and talk about how air and water pollution are some of the biggest challenges facing these communities. Thank you so much for being part of the Podship Earth journey. From the entire Podship Earth crew, sound engineer Rob Speight, executive producer David Kahn, and from me, Jared Blumenfeld, keep buzzing.
EPISODE 54
JARED BLUMENFELD: Welcome to Podship Earth. This is your host Jared Blumenfeld. This week we explore the tale of two cities that straddle the US/ Mexico Border: Calexico and Mexicali. Mexicali and Calexico are in reality one city divided by a massive border fence. On the California side, Calexico is a sleepy town of 40,000 with farmland to the north, while Mexicali is this sprawling metropolis of 1.5 million. Both these communities share a great deal, including very serious air and water pollution challenges. This week I meet with three community activists, Ana Lorena Moreno Garay, Esther Bejarano, and José Luis Olmedo Velez who are all on the front lines of protecting community health on the border. I start my journey in Mexicali, which is a two-hour dusty drive from San Diego. Ana Lorena kindly offered to talk with me while we drive around the city of Mexicali.
ANA LORENA MORENO GARAY: My name is Ana Lorena Moreno Garay. I'm an activist and we are in Mexicali, Baja, California.
JARED BLUMENFELD: So, when you look to the left, what are we seeing right there?
ANA LORENA MORENO GARAY: It’s the border. That's the border with California is Calexico, California.
JARED BLUMENFELD: I mean it's right there.
ANA LORENA MORENO GARAY: Yeah. Just a few steps from here. This is the capital of Baja, California and it's a binational town. I will say it because we are so used to the dynamic of being so close to the United States. So, we tend to be bi-cultural too. And we understand what's happening in our neighboring country and we also take care of our country too.
JARED BLUMENFELD: I came to Mexicali, I thought I was going to get the world's best tacos, but instead, what did we have?
ANA LORENA MORENO GARAY: Oh, Chinese food because that is our heritage. The founders of the city were Chinese. The first people that came here because of the railroad and the fields of cotton were Chinese people and the second wave of migration here were Mexicans.
JARED BLUMENFELD: It was pretty good fusion Chinese/Mexican/American food, I have to say. Tell us about what it was like growing up here.
ANA LORENA MORENO GARAY: It's an agriculture town that in time changed their vocation to maquiladoras in another economic model. I grew up here, went to school here, and it’s kind of boring actually. There's nothing much to do. I moved to California and then I went to Missouri, and from Missouri to Arkansas and that's where I spend most of my time, the middle of the US.
JARED BLUMENFELD: So, to most people they would think this is a happening town compared to Arkansas. What was it like being a Mexican American in Arkansas?
ANA LORENA MORENO GARAY: Well, first of all, I am not a Mexican American. I’m Mexican. I'm a resident. That's what allowed me to be in the United States and work in the United States and exercise my profession there. It was the time when the second wave of immigration arrived in the US, and there was a lot of cultural problems because immigration went to some really small towns where there they never had contact with people that didn't look like them.
JARED BLUMENFELD: So, what was it like?
ANA LORENA MORENO GARAY: The problems were very serious, and it was the beginning of the racism, you know, the second era of racism in US. I became bilingual myself over there. I learned English with close caption here. You know, like I said, you're constantly listening to TV and radio, like when you came in my car, you heard that I had NPR on, for example. We are constantly hearing and learning, but I actually learned how to speak by close captioned and I did it fast and that allowed me to help others.