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[dramatic piano music]
[music intensifies]
First and foremost, I want to thank
everybody for being here.
This is, by far, the biggest turnout
I've seen in helping us track down Franklin's Bumblebee.
Franklin's Bumblebee was last seen just up the road,
where we're gonna head in a couple of minutes, in 2006.
And the more boots on the ground, the more people
we have looking for this particular critter,
the better the chances are.
Even though it hasn't
been observed recently, I am optimistic
that it's still out there, we just haven't found it.
[Ellen] If I see a bee with a black abdomen,
I'm gonna suspect it's Franklin's.
[Tyler] It's as black as they get, really.
We gotta get-we gotta show this one to Linc, too.
-[Ellen] Hey Linc! -[Tyler] Linc, come here.
-[Lincoln] Uh-oh! -[Tyler] I think we got another
-good one, here. -[Lincoln] Yes, Tyler,
did it again.
[intense orchestral music]
[dramatic string music]
[narrator] The bumblebee.
Known by its scientific name, Bombus.
There are over 250 species harvesting nectar and pollen
from flowering plants across the globe.
Bumblebees populate the flowers
that produce some of our richest crops.
Such as blueberries, raspberries,
cucumbers and tomatoes.
I like bumblebees because they're charismatic and lovable.
I even love their name.
I mean, think about it, the people who gave them
the name "bumblebee", they were onto something.
Because when you watch them, they're big, they're buzzy,
they're fuzzy, they're not especially elegant.
They're kind of bumbling along
as they go from flower to flower
but it's part of that awkward, clunky, large behavior,
their-- their flight on flower after flower after flower,
that makes them good pollinators
because they are so buzzy and big
that they are good at transferring pollen
from flower to flower.
[narrator] Over the past thirty years,
there has been a steep decline of the number
of bumblebees observed in the wild.
This recent decline is concerning,
due to the important role that plays to our agriculture
and flowering plants that occupy our landscape.
♪
Around a quarter of the bumblebees in North America
are facing some degree of extinction risk
and the indication that we have there
is that they're just not found in the--
in the areas where they used to be.
[David] Many of the bumblebee species
are struggling to keep their place in the world.
[narrator] In the past twenty years alone,
25% of North America's bumblebee species
are considered endangered.
This same trend is being observed
all around the world by research scientists
and conservationists.
Here's a bumblebee.
Yep, going too fast, it's gone.
[narrator] Professor David Kleijn
has been studying the bumblebee
for several decades and is one of the world's
most knowledgeable experts on the bumblebee.
[David] This is the bee hotel.
So, most of the solitary bee species
nest in the soil and many of them
like these vertical walls.
[sentimental string music]
They are such a cool study group to work with
because on one hand, they're incredibly important
for people functionally because they pollinate
all our plants, they pollinate the crops.
And on the other hand, they are threatened
in their existence in the Netherlands
about 56% of the species
are on the national red list,
indicating that they are threatened in their existence.
Of all the bumblebee species, you have a couple that do
really well and are still amongst the most common
wild pollinators that you can find out there
and then you have this big other group that struggle,
that go extinct, that decline severely.
Of course, then, the researcher in me
becomes really interested, I want to know why.
Currently in the United-States, there's two bumblebees
that're protected under the Endangered Species Act.
There's the Rusty Patch Bumblebee
which lives in the upper Midwest and the northeast.
Most recently, Franklin's Bumblebee
has been added to the endangered species list.
Getting a species listed actually takes a long time
and, get this, the average time it takes is 12 years.
Frankly it's an unacceptably long time,
species are supposed to be listed after one year.
There have been 47 species that have gone extinct
while waiting to be put on the protection list.
[Rich] Something like the Rusty Patch Bumblebee,
which upon a time lived roughly from North Dakota,
to Maine, south to Georgia,
roughly think about that as a triangle.
That was it's historic range and it's now disappeared
from, you know, probably 90-97% of it's range.
It's just not found in any of the areas
where it once was and that's-- that's how we know
that some species are in decline.
[narrator] Several bumblebee species
are being observed by the scientific community
as slowly disappearing.
Or, like one particular species, Franklin's Bumblebee,
is possibly extinct.
Good morning everybody, my name is Jeff Everett.
I'm a biologist with the Fish and Wildlife service.
I'm the lead biologist for Franklin's Bumblebee.
The species expert, Robin Thorpe,
who passed away unfortunately a couple of years ago,
believed that the best way to find Franklin's Bumblebee
was to intensively survey the last known location
at what is historically the peak of colony activity.
When, in theory, the colonies are at their largest,
the most number of workers are out on the landscape
and our detectability is highest.
Franklin's was relatively easy to find,
back when it was abundant on the landscape
in the 80's, into the 90's
and then about the early 2000's,
the species started for decline
and for reasons that are pretty poorly understood.
There are several hypotheses
about what exactly happened to Franklin's,
in that it was a combination of introduced disease
and a variety of other threats
to the species that, acting synergistically,
just kinda wiped them out over time.
There's over, about 200 species of bumblebees
in the world and depending on where you draw
certain taxonomic lines we have 46 or 48
here in North America.
Franklin's Bumblebee is unique compared to all
the other bumblebees in that it is very narrowly endemic,
which means it was only ever found in a very small area.
Three counties here in southern Oregon
and two in northern California.
Most bumblebees are very, very widespread
across their native habitats.
Franklin's was always narrowly endemic
and it's something that we didn't understand.
Why was it not more widespread?
It wasn't limited by geography 'cause it's been found
at mountain elevations like this,
at places higher than some of the passes
to the south and to the east and also to the north,
up into the Willamette Valley
so, it could have spread but it didn't.
Also, it wasn't tied to a specific host plant
like certain pollinator and plant interaction.
It's been documented using a variety of floral species,
many of which are found across the western United-States.
So it wasn't held here by geography,
it wasn't held here because of some special habitat niche
or forging requirement or something like that.
So we really don't know why Franklin's
was always extremely limited on the landscape,
compared to all the other bumblebees that we have,
most of which are really quite widespread.
[tense, somber music]
Even with a relatively narrowly distributed bumblebee,
something that uses a variety of habitats,
even though we're only talking about an area
that's about 13,000 square miles,
there's a lot of this habitat that is higher elevation,
federally-owned and has never been
systematically searched for bumblebees.
So Franklin's could still be out there,
it's just that we're not necessarily looking
in the right places at the right times.
This survey that we do this week is again carrying
on Robin's tradition of looking at the last known location,
at the peak of colony activity when you'd think
detectability would be at its greatest.
♪
I wanted to introduce Lincoln Best,
from the Oregon Bee Atlas.
And I also wanted to point out Joe Angler,
who is all camouflaged up over here.
These two gentlemen are some of your taxonomic authorities,
if we find something that looks like
what we are after, or something that you can't identify,
these guys can help you out.
So, one of the things we'd like not to do,
is further the spread of pathogens
throughout our bee communities
and so we will be up the road here,
setting up a station where you can sanitize your nets.
If you haven't already done that,
it's just a quick bleach, soak and a rinse
and then air-dry, which won't take long today.
And we also have alcohol wipes available to sanitize
capture-vials and those kinds of things.
So we wanna do what we can to limit
the spread of pathogens amongst the bee communities.
I haven't seen a rattlesnake up here
but it's not outside the realm of possibility,
so just be mindful of where you're stepping.
Alright, I think we're in pretty good shape.
[tense, adventure music]
You don't have to do it all day,
you can do it for an hour, it doesn't really matter,
but when you're counting the bumblebees,
you wanna count every bumblebee you see.
So we can look at the bumblebees of conservation concern,
of course we have two museum specimens.
A Bombus Franklini, from the 1950's
and we have a worker and a male
and so the tail has a little bit of off-white
on the very tip of the abdomen and then,
on top of the thorax the yellow extends
about two thirds of the way back.
And those are the diagnostic features
that we're looking for today.
♪
[Jeff] Great turnout, this is really pretty exciting
to have this many people looking and this many people
interested in what we're doing and why we're here.
First time I did this we had maybe 20 people
join us and we're close to 70.
It gets a little bit bigger every year,
and really like the diversity of it, too.
There's the federal biologists
and conservation organizations but there's also grassroots,
local land-owners, local conservation organizations.
Just citizens, scientists, volunteers,
a couple students and the state agencies
are quite well represented this year as well,
so it's really exciting to see the enthusiasm.
♪
[indistinct chatter]
[man] The way to identify Franklin's,
he was saying, the main thing to look for
was a little bit of sparse whiteness on the tip
of the tail, the last couple segments.
They're kind of, usually notched,
like usually black in the middle.
[Lincoln] But just, the fact that the "L" comes further back
than just the shoulders,
but it's probably hard to recognize
in a lot of cases.
So in Occidentalis and a lot of the other bumblebees here,
it's just the interior of the shoulders, really,
but on Franklin's, that yellow extends
two-thirds back on the thorax.
And so, it's not easy to recognize, really,
but if you see something like that then bring it back
and we'll take a look and see what it is.
Yeah, there's tons of, you know, convergence
in their mimicry in this region, so.
There's like, eight species that look almost all the same.
[laughs]
It's really challenging to tell bumblebees apart.
They have big, bright colors,
they're a big bee but you have to look really closely.
Sometimes for some of them,
they have perfectly black abdomens
with a yellow stripe right across the tip
in exactly the same place
and they're two different species.
You actually have to look under a microscope
and see how long their cheek is,
the difference from their eye to their jaw
and on a bumblebee that's really small-- [laughs]
--so telling the difference,
it takes-- it takes looking at hundreds and hundreds
of bees and then, suddenly,
your brain is-- you know, it learns.
It figures out how to see what you're seeing.
If I see a bee with a black abdomen
and virtually no color on the abdomen,
I'm gonna suspect it's Franklin's
and then I'm gonna take it to Linc.
[laughs]
You know, Linc's the man, so, we'll, uh, always confirm.
So, trust but verify, right?
[laughs] Yeah.
[uplifting string music]
[Lincoln] If you guys wanna go hike,
it's-- there's a bowl down there, it's super nice.
The vegetation should be, like-- it's really nice.
Yeah, tons of flowers, beautiful,
and if you're adventurous, you can go down to the bottom
of the bowl where there's different plant communities.
Just be loud.
There's bears, it's okay, just, you know, make some noise, and--
Don't try and, sus-- you know, surprise them.
Ha, that's a bear!
There's a big ol' black bear that lives down here.
So, there's often a lot of, um, black bear activity,
especially down near the bottom.
You can see where they've been rolling logs,
foraging for ants.
Well, you can see it's a big one.
[laughs]
-[woman] There? -[Lincoln] Yeah. Full size.
♪
I do, or I certainly think it can be.
It inhabited a really wild and diverse region
of the country in which relatively few people live.
And the areas that we've searched for it are really,
for the most part, the most highly impacted areas
where bees probably generally aren't doing that great.
But there's a bunch of mountains in northern California
that are wilderness, that haven't been touched
by agriculture and there's really no--
you know, no reason why we would expect a rapid population crash.
I'm hopeful that someone will re-find this bee.
[Jeff] Franklin's Bumblebee is important
because if we can figure out exactly what happened to it,
why did we see that really steep decline
in the bee and what changed in how this critter
interacted with it's habitat
and learn what happened,
we can then apply meaningful conservation
from the lessons that we learn
towards other pollinator species,
including a couple of bumblebees that we're concerned about.
♪
[Jeff] One of the other bumblebees
that we're interested in is Western Bumblebee,
which we still have on the landscape
but has seen significant declines
and we do find them here most years.
Not every year but most years.
Yeah, two years ago, this--
I found the Western Bumblebee,
like, right over the edge of this little ridge here.
The Western is very rare out here,
in the western side of Oregon and Washington, it's very few.
I was the only one to find a Western Bumblebee here,
out of everybody like two years ago
and we didn't find the Western Bumblebee at all last year.
But overall, it's population is down
something like 95% across its range,
which really spans the whole western United-States.
[Jeff] And then, Suckley's Cuckoo Bumblebee
is another bee that we've been petitioned to list
under the Endangered Species Act and that hasn't been seen
in Oregon in the last five or six years.
[Lincoln] And here comes Mr. Bushman
with something in his net.
Do you got a bumblebee?
Let's take a look.
So, everyone, watch your footing,
it is-- uh, it's pretty steep.
[birds tweeting]
So, male bees don't have stingers
and so I can tell this is a male bumblebee
because it has really long antennae.
It's got long, skinny hind legs
and it has an extra long and skinny abdomen.
This is a male Cuckoo,
so the female Cuckoos are really big.
Their bodies are really thick and well-armored
and, like a Cuckoo Bird, they sneak into the nest
of their host and lay an egg and then the host's
workers raise the Cuckoo's egg for them.
What do you got, Henry?
[Henry] It's interesting.
[Lincoln] This is the female Cuckoo Bumblebee,
all of the females of this species look like this.
They'd all be large and all be capable of invading a nest.
[Jess] These Cuckoo Bumblebees
are rare and special and they're also in decline.
Which is why the center's petitioned for protections
for Suckley's Cuckoo and the Variable Cuckoo Bumblebee.
[Lincoln] If we catch a female Bombus Flavidus,
which is the other kind of Cuckoo Bumblebee up here.
It has a big stinger but it also has S6,
the apical sternite modified into a big,
curved spine and presumably to open
the abdominal segments of the queen it's battling,
to be able to sting it more effectively.
So, Cuckoo Bumblebees don't collect pollen,
they don't really manage their own nest,
it's just reproductive females and males.
And so, this is one of the males and we can just let him go.
[gentle music]
When there's tons of forage around, you don't travel far.
You wanna forage really efficiently, um,
and so, you know, up on Mount Ashland here,
we have tons of great flowers
and so, these bees shouldn't really need to,
you know, travel kilometers on a foraging bout.
Um, they'll stick as close to home as they can.
Are these huge things Delphinium?
Wow! These are all giant Delphinium
and they're probably still
a week away from blooming as well
but these things will go six feet high.
Red flowers are usually not for bees, however, y'know,
bees, bumblebees and solitary bees will visit
the Red Paintbrush and yesterday, y'know,
I was suspicious that any bees visited Columbine.
Yesterday, we were up at Table Mountain
and we saw a little Sweat Bee crawl up the corolla
of the Columbine, so, y'know, in some cases; yes.
♪
The story of Franklin's Bumblebee is really interesting.
[Jeff] They declined very quickly over a very short amount
of time and we don't know exactly how abundant
the overall population-- how healthy the populations were,
until we started noticing that the species
was becoming rarer and rarer and harder to find.
[David] And this we see, for many, many species and this sort
of confirms our belief that many of the bumblebee species are
struggling to sort of, y'know, keep their place in the world.
[Jess] Even though it hasn't been observed recently,
I'm optimistic that it's still out there,
we just haven't found it.
♪
[Lincoln] It's one of my favorite things to do,
to be honest, is to go out and, like, hunt for this bee.
I'm looking at thousands of bees every day,
trying to look for this one bee that's, like,
just a little bit different from all the rest of them.
That would just be so exciting, if we found,
I think that-- I feel like that's front page news.
♪
So there's not a single issue that explains the decline
of bumblebees, it's a complex of factors.
Most important ones are: habitat destruction and loss.
So simply, y'know, natural habitat
has been converted into built-up areas or herbland.
The second one is: pests and diseases.
The third one is: loss of food.
So, the disappearance of flowers from the countryside and,
more recently, it's exposure to pesticides.
And the reasons for bumblebee decline are
poorly understood and very complicated because
it's not any one particular thing.
If you take a colony of bumblebees and you load
that colony with a number of diseases,
bumblebees fall victim to a number of pretty nasty stuff.
There's mites and parasites and fungus and all
kinds of other things.
All of which act to weaken the bee,
make it's job harder to do.
Make it sick, make it harder to forage
and fly, all those things.
And then you throw pesticide applications,
broad-spectrum insecticides and those kinds of things.
Many of which are really bad news for our bees.
You're beating up their immune systems,
you're beating up their ability to interact
with their landscape and grow and reproduce and then,
you throw competition for managed bees on top of
it and a number of other factors: large-scale habitat
alterations and those kinds of things and it's
sort of a "death by a thousand cuts" over time.
[David] Many of these bees are threatened because they fail to
reproduce successfully and then the numbers dwindle and decline.
They fail to reproduce because of lack
of floral resources within a foraging range of their nests.
Of course, y'know, bees are fixed to their nests,
so any food needs to be available within, say,
five hundred meters of their nests,
otherwise it becomes too costly to collect it.
An interesting fact that many people don't
know is that bees are just about the only species
group that rely on flowers for everything.
So they need the nectar themselves to fuel them and
they need pollen and nectar to feed their offspring.
It's the only thing they need, flowers, so it's increasingly
difficult for bumblebees to find food.
They have this colony that lives for two months up to six months
and throughout that whole period, there needs to be food.
If there's a gap of two weeks, for example, the colony dies
and then they won't produce a single new queen.
With other bee species, that's much simpler,
they can reproduce immediately but with bumblebees they need
this continuous period of time, with floral resources.
Bees are exceptionally important for the pollination of plants,
and pollination of plants simply refers to the process
where pollen from one flower is being transferred to
another flower and pollen is required to
fertilize the other flower and thereby produce
the seeds or the fruits with which the plants reproduce.
There's a number of statistics you can hear
when you start looking at pollinator conservation
that you hear soundbites like: "three out of every four
bites of food that we take are, in one way or another,
dependent upon bees." Whether it's honeybees,
or bumblebees or other species of managed bees.
And so pollination is fundamentally important to
the human existence because it provides such an incredible
ecosystem service in terms of food production for us.
[David] So, there is this statement
going around that if the bees go extinct,
then four years later people will go extinct.
It's not as black and white as that, fortunately for us,
but we will lose many, many wild plant species and we will
lose all kinds of animals that depend on these bees.
Yes, we will suffer as well because we have
a lot of the really nice foodstuffs.
Especially the fruits and the nuts and the oil crops,
that produce more when they are pollinated or produce
products of a better quality and that, of course,
will become worse if we don't have bees anymore.
[Jess] And it could be that some places will
become less suitable for bees in general because
there's not as many flowering species.
[David] If the bees disappear, then the plants don't
reproduce as well and then they might decline as well.
So sometimes, individual bee species just
forage on one single plant species and then you can imagine
that if you lose that species, then this particular
plant species will suffer the consequences.
It looks like we're pretty good for floral resources here.
This is corn lily, this is lupin.
[Lincoln] You can always tell when
something's foraging on the lupins because
they have these neon orange-red pollen stashes.
And there's a variety of other things blooming here.
The stuff over here that's got these little white flowers,
is a favorite of Western Bumblebee,
that's bistort.
That's a good place to look for target species.
If you're looking for Western Bumblebees, that's one
of the flowers you might pay pretty close attention to.
Not only is this the last known location for
Franklin's Bumblebee but as far as bumblebee habitat,
this is about as good as it gets in this area.
This is really high quality stuff.
'Cause higher elevation and federally owned,
there's a lot of naturally occurring wildflowers.
There's not a lot of disturbance, or anthropogenic
impacts, development, those kind of things.
There's also very little, if any, pesticide use and other
things that can really harm our bees but in particular,
at this elevation, this whole hillside here,
there's some naturally occurring springs that are in here and
the steeper slopes that have this kind of geography,
they tend to hold moisture very late in the growing season,
when a lot of this stuff dries out and the lupin can be as tall
as I am and the bees will pile into those areas.
♪
[Lincoln] Oh, here's a different bumblebee: a mixtus.
-[Ellen] You got a mixtus? -[Lincoln] Yeah.
And so, soon as we see this different kind of flower,
we get a different kind of bumblebee.
She has a pale tail but you can see, y'know,
compared to the bees we've seen so far,
which primarily just have yellow shoulders and then
some yellow markings near the end of the abdomen,
this one has extensive yellow on the thorax.
Although there's not hundreds of species of bumblebees,
there's tons of variation in their color-forms and so
that makes it actually really difficult to identify
a lot of bumblebees because you have to become
accustomed to seeing these subtle differences.
You hear me today talking about: "Oh,
this bumblebee has yellow shoulders."
Well, like eight bumblebee species
up here have yellow shoulders.
So just little differences that you can learn over time.
Linc always laughs when the new OBA students
say: "Oh I'm gonna start on bumblebees 'cause they'll be
easy and to a person it's like: "Bumblebees are so hard!"
[Lincoln] Oh yeah, I think you can add this
one to your list too, look at how big this one is.
I don't think I've seen one quite so yellow.
It's a trophy, it's-- and it's also,
like a little bit bigger, so it feels like its "let's look!".
[Ellen] Do you think it's a queen or a worker?
[Lincoln] It's probably a worker, to be honest.
[Ellen] Oh, you think it's a ???
[Lincoln] It's appositus.
[Ellen] Yellow further down.
[Lincoln] Yeah, White-Shouldered Bumblebee.
The shoulders aren't super white on this one
but western Oregon sometimes has a novel
color form with more yellowy-orange shoulders.
[Ellen] What was your big tell on that?
[Lincoln] So, nevadensis has black on T4 and
T5 and this bee obviously has more yellow...
-Yeah it's yellow on-- -...apical on the abdomen.
Yeah, apical part of the [indistinct].
That's a big one and yeah, I've never seen-- I've seen
appositus before but never a big one--
This is actually an appositus worker,
so the queens are another a full size bigger,
-they're huge. -Holy moly.
♪
[David] What makes bees a bit vulnerable is
that they are tied to a nest.
So they, in the nest, they provide food
to their offspring, usually eggs and they have
to find food within foraging range of that nest.
This is usually no more than five hundred meters,
so if there are no flowers within that distance
from the nest entrance, then they will not survive.
We can find bumblebee nests,
colony sites but they're remarkably difficult to find.
[Lincoln] So this is it, it's just a little hole
into the ground and you might see bumblebees
going in and out of there.
And that's, y'know, could be the entrance to a colony.
[David] Many bumblebee species nest
below ground in abandoned vole's nests.
And, of course, in many parts in the world,
we don't have those anymore because we manage
the land with these big machines and they sort
of flatten everything down below.
And so, one of the things that makes
this high quality bumblebee habitat
is pretty granular, loose, easily dug soils.
It's really remarkably dry, as we know but there's a ton of
naturally occurring rodent activity here and so,
as we walk around and look through here,
you'll see lots and lots of rodent holes.
Those are primarily what a lot of these bumblebees
use for their nesting sites.
There we go, this would be a great
bumblebee nest right here.
They're not very deep, they don't have to be,
it could be just a couple of centimeters below the surface.
A fully grown bumblebee colony wouldn't
necessarily be any bigger than a softball.
[Rich] Over the last twenty years or so,
we've helped install y'know, in the neighborhood
of a million acres of pollinator habitat and
invertebrate habitat on farms throughout North America.
Bees and other pollinators need food,
they need shelter and they also need a place to over-winter and
that place to over-winter is different than their nest.
They actually will dig a hole, underneath the ground,
just a couple inches below the ground,
we believe under leaf litter, underneath pine needles and
that's where they spend the winter.
So, half of their life is sort of spent in this solitary life
phase and then they need these sites to be connected.
So, we need to be working not just at a homeowner scale
but we need to be working at a neighborhood, at a community,
at a city-wide, at a state-wide scale,
to allow connectivity between these islands of habitat.
Nesting is one of the big unknowns for bumblebees.
Like, we know almost nothing about--
especially at a species by species level,
we almost know almost nothing about
where they nest, what components are
important or where they over-winter.
Once a species is protected under
the Endangered Species Act, it regulates activities that can
happen in the spaces that they live.
Whenever a federal action has the capacity
to harm an endangered species.
So, like, you might think of road-building
or building a railroad or something.
These have the capacity to destroy habitat,
which might harm endangered species.
A species could be designated critical habitat, which protects
a certain piece of it's habitat from development or other harms.
And most of those impacts are where there's a federal nexus.
So, on a project that's being funded by the federal government
or on federal lands, those animals are protected.
♪
Well certainly, it's arguable that municipalities
have access to more idle lands that could be put to use
for bee conservation than most of us do and
these involve acres that are otherwise unoccupied.
It's the margins along a park, the margins along a fence row,
power right-of-ways, which tend to be mowed.
These could very easily be, instead, converted into bee
forages, perennial flowers, clovers at the very least,
that come back and re-seed themselves each year and provide
forage for land that's otherwise a pollinator desert.
This is a good thing municipalities can do:
the roadsides, the medians in between
four-lane highways could be converted into forage space.
Grass doesn't do pollinators any good but if it's this blooming
plant, like clovers, this is one step above just grass.
♪
[Lori] My daughter and I, Allie, thought: "We need this.
A community garden that will give to others.
We put together a business plan and what
it would take and materials and budget and
then we contacted somebody in the city.
He took it to the town council and the mayor,
they got behind it, set aside the land.
The garden reports to the tree commission,
within the city of Acworth.
If people donate money, we put it all into the garden
and then we take all the produce and we donate it to,
right now, we're supporting one subsidized
senior apartment complex; we hope to have two next year.
Mark has become our leader in plant health and happiness.
He is the reason we are at 1000 plus pounds this week.
His talent and his dedication to keeping this organic,
no-till garden alive and thriving through the heat and
the drought and the watering and the non-watering and his talents
help the garden take off at the other end.
[Mark] My background is almost entirely construction
but I've always loved to garden.
I've been gardening the entire time I've lived here,
gardened when I was a kid.
I got, I dunno, seventy or eighty house-plants,
I love plants and actually Lori set up a plant-swap,
take a plant, leave a plant kinda thing.
I came down there, they were signing up volunteers and I was
like: "Oh this is perfect, it's half a mile from my house."
And I came down here the first day when they were literally
building the beds and I guess I arrived way more prepared than
everybody else did, I had a full set of tools and, y'know.
'Cause I understand the plants and the construction.
Look at him, jumpin' right on the flower,
that'll be a raspberry in three days.
These were just a few seeds, you can see the stumps
that we had to cut, over there and over there.
That was okra, how tall was our okra?
-[Mark] Ten, twelve feet. -[Lori] Big,
gorgeous beautiful blooms
and we interspersed zinnias in it.
You can see the stumps, I mean, that's a massive
new okra plant.
We just threw so many seeds down,
I mean we're probably on seed overload but
it created such a full, thriving,
diverse pollinator section and some of the--
we get some campers here and we host little programs.
What I say to the kids is "the pollinator
bed is the party, it's the dance.
All the bees and the wasps and the butterflies and ladybugs,
they come to party and they party hard down here.
And then they're lookin around and they go 'Oh!
Hey! What's over there?'
And then they all move into the garden.
So it draws-- this big section, kinda draws them in
and they just hop on right through the fence.
[Mark] Hidden under some of this is the native
milkweeds and then we've got merit golds
-and I don't even know-- -[Lori] Zinnias.
-[Mark] Zinnias. -[Lori] Cosmo.
Eighty percent of everything here was grown by seed.
Those were just two little seeds that plopped in the ground.
I guess it must be about ten feet tall,
'cause our fence is eight feet tall to keep the deer out.
[Mark] Yeah, we do have a problem with the deer.
[Lori] So that was our biggest reason why we had to have such
a high fence and when you see this in full bloom
-it is just amazing. -[Mark] It is amazing,
and then we plant some in with the plants as well,
so there's always something
blooming because if there's always something
blooming there's always bees 'cause you want
those bees there 'cause they're really good for
tomatoes, melons, 'cause they need something
that really shakes it and bumblebees do that for sure.
And actually, they stay out here, in the cold
mornings you can come out here, they're asleep in the flowers.
They don't even leave the flowers,
they stay out here overnight and wait for the sun to come up
and come back to life and start eating again.
They'll sleep on the flowers, I've seen it all the time.
And in the afternoons, it's hundreds and hundreds of them.
They're everywhere, they're buzzin' around.
Clearly, the addition of the wildflowers
was the key right there.
The cucumbers did really well, we got 130 pounds of cucumbers
from that one eight by four bed.
'Cause cucumbers and everybody-- every member of that family has
male and female flowers and they're individual.
So, if a bee doesn't come along, hit your male flower and then
hits your female flower, you get no fruit and they are
covered in blooms, I mean, hundreds are open all the time.
They're not open that long, either, they're only open for,
generally three, four hours in the morning.
So, the bees getting at it first thing in the morning
is crucial to get in that fruit.
In the squashes here, any kind of squashes here, the flowers
are huge, there's a bee in every single bloom in the morning.
So we don't have to worry about comin' out
here and doing it ourselves.
♪
[Lincoln] So, what's this one, Jess?
[Jess] Oh, you're putting me on the spot here?
[Lincoln] Yeah, I'll put you on the spot.
[Jess] Oh man, I'm probably gonna get this wrong.
My first guess is melanopygus but...
[Lincoln] Yeah, so the local morph of melanopygus
looks very much like this but if you see
on the posterior thoracic band,
it's bisected with a little bit of black.
-[Jess] It is, yeah. -And this is a queen, too.
This is what was formerly known as bombus bifarius.
So now this would be considered bombus
vancouverensis and the subspecies nearcticus,
which is widespread through the west.
She's really mad about being in there.
-[Ellen] Oh yeah. -[Lincoln] She thinks she can
get out of there, but... so we're gonna let her go,
she was visiting this cool little flower that's
just covering this hillside.
There she is just crawling around,
crawling into the vegetation to escape.
Here's a good example of how the bumblebees will
use multiple different plants.
This bumblebee here has it's pollen baskets
full of lupin pollen but it's nectaring on this
other plant to get some carbohydrates.
The reason for that is, lupin's don't have any nectar,
so this bee is collecting the lupin pollen and then coming
over here to drink nectar and fuel up.
♪
[Jeff] It takes a lot of skill and control for this
thing to fly efficiently, so when we do find them resting
because bumblebee flight is very energetically expensive,
we also find them grooming as well.
It helps keep them as efficient and clean as possible.
Also, a lot of these bumblebees, like we were mentioning earlier,
have naturally occurring pathogen and parasite loads
and so grooming helps keep things down,
like mites and other nasty
things that tend to live on and hitch rides with bumblebees.
[Jess] The decline of Franklin's is interesting
and I think one major issue was definitely disease
spread from honeybees in the area.
[Jeff] They really started seeing widespread
population declines and losses of entire hives
and a lot of people who were paying attention to
the honeybees really started raising the alarm.
I think the first colony was thinkin' about swarming.
[Keith] Oh really? That would be a spectacle.
I think they are swarming!
This is a real-- you need to get this!
This is a rare event!
What we have happening here, is a honeybee colony
that is swarming and swarming means colony division.
It's a colony's way of splitting and forming a new one
and this colony is-- they have reared a queen,
this blue hive there on the end,
the new queen stays at the parent nest but the old
queen flies away with about half of the worker population.
And you can see that cloud of bees up in that tree,
they're forming a visual focal point and they're going to
consolidate on a limb up there and they will cluster
there temporarily for about an hour or so and then
the cluster will eventually move away to a more permanent site.
[Keith] When I started keeping bees in the 1970s,
it was standard for a queen to live four years.
We would have marked queens,
we knew her age and history, that lasts for four years.
Well this never happens anymore,
we're fortunate now if we get a queen to last one season.
So there's a hundred different reasons for this,
it's probably attached to the types of
things that are making bees decline in general.
Y'know, pesticides in the environment,
viruses that are spread by parasites and that all adds
up to poor longevity for queens as well.
[David] There're about five or six species
of honeybees worldwide.
All the other bee species, so the other 20,000
bee species, they don't make honey.
So they just collect the nectar from the flowers
and they feed it directly to their young.
[Keith] And, y'know, honeybee, for all the headlines
that we read about them, there's probably more honeybees
on Earth today at this moment than at any time in
natural history because of managed beekeeping.
[Keith] I'm gonna use the smoke just to kinda puff the bees and
let them know that I'm arriving and that disorients them,
so they're less likely to get excited.
This is a comb of honey, the freshest food product in
all agriculture is honey.
Honeybees are valuable pollinators because they're so
manageable and the techniques are worked out and they can be
cultured in the millions and commercial-scale beekeepers
will have thousands of colonies in one operation.
They're mechanized, they can be moved and hauled
with a lot of ease and facility, so it's for this reason
that honeybees are the standard pollinator but they're by no
means the most efficient on an individual basis.
And because they're year-long active colony, they are adapted
to visit a lot of types of flowers, they're generalists.
Whereas the solitary bees, who have a very brief
life-cycle, they are adapted to be very good
pollinators for whatever crop or plant is blooming at
the same brief window of the bees' active season.
One of the flagship examples we grow here at
the UGA horticulture farm and that's blueberries.
We have a native crop of blueberries that grow here at
the farm and throughout the south-east and we have
lots of native bumblebees that pollinate them very well.
[Jess] Bumblebees contribute, like, millions of dollars to
the agricultural economy every year and they live there
and provide pollination service; which is really important.
Bumblebees have value much beyond how they can
grow food for humans. Without bumblebees and a whole
community of bees, our natural ecosystems would
really become impoverished because there're so many
flowering plants that depend on bees for pollination.
And if they don't have that, they can't produce seed,
to continue to produce.
Bumblebees are absolutely better pollinators
for some plants compared to honeybees.
That's why in a lot of greenhouse situations,
the bumblebee is the preferred bee.
♪
[Rich] One of the main effects and leading,
sort of, hypotheses for the decline in
Franklin's Bumblebee and the Rusty Patch Bumblebee and
the Western Bumblebee, these bees that have been petitioned
for endangered species listing is actually a disease.
It's a fungal pathogen, that we believe has been spread
and amplified by the commercial bumblebee industry.
If you're a farmer right now and you grow tomatoes in
a greenhouse, you can buy a box of
bumblebees from a lab and they'll ship it to you.
And it's believed that, in the mid 1990's that these
colonies had a fungal pathogen that was then spread
and amplified throughout North America and transmitted to
our wild bumblebees and likely caused the rapid declines
that we saw in these bees in the mid-1990's
and that industry is basically unregulated.
We have no idea where those colonies are being shipped,
we have no idea how many of them are being shipped around,
y'know, the industry's not
sharing this information with us.
In my mind, if the federal
government takes an interest in
pollination services, which, they should,
i's a billion-dollar industry and it's feeding
the people who live here, they should be interested in
pollinator conservation and regulating that industry,
at least understanding where those are being
shipped so that we can potentially track
disease outbreaks if they happen again in the future.
And then also establishing a clean stock program,
so that those animals are actually tested
independently before they leave the laboratory,
so the farmer can be sure that the colony that they're
putting on their farm, that's gonna interact with
their wild bees, isn't spreading diseases to them.
They should know that and right now, we don't.
There's no independent clean stock program out there
that's protecting native bees from these commercial bees.
[Jess] Many people bring their honeybees
out to public lands, just like grazing cattle,
it's a similar process for honeybees.
Unfortunately, bringing in honeybees,
which are effectively livestock, to an area where there
weren't honeybees before, they can out-compete the wild
bees in the area because there's just so many of them.
A honeybee hive can be millions of bees,
across multiple colonies.
In addition, the honeybees can bring in diseases with them,
which can be spread to wild bees.
[Sheila] For the extent of the decline that we've seen
for these bumblebees that are at risk of extinction,
the only real thing that explains it is probably
an introduced disease that they were not evolved with
because it happened so rapidly over such a large landscape.
It's still a little bit of a guessing game but in terms
of the amount of area where they've declined from,
something like COVID for bees makes the most sense.
And this has happened in so many other animals,
like Serengeti Lions and mad cow and bird flu,
it happens actually all the time,
where we see novel diseases
being brought in and it just wipes out wildlife.
So this is probably the leading hypothesis for these species.
They're being introduced through the use of managed bees,
so, managed bumblebees in greenhouses
and managed honeybees.
Honeybees are bringing in a whole bunch of viruses
from Asia and Europe, for example,
that our native bees have not co-evolved with.
[Rich] Taking that agricultural problem and bringing it to
our wild lands, our wilderness areas,
our national parks, our state lands that are refuges
for these animals and some of the last places that haven't
been impacted by, y'know, pesticides and
disease and agriculture is not the right solution.
Leave our natural wild areas for our wild bees,
we can't be bringing honeybees there and bringing diseases and
competing with our native bees in our public lands.
That's just, for me, for the most part,
a pretty clear no-no.
[Keith] You will find in garden centers,
oftentimes, bee houses which are little
blocks of wood that'd have had holes drilled in 'em
to invite tunnel nesting bees to nest in 'em.
This is good but you have to also be aware that the parasites
and diseases can accumulate in those tunnels as well.
So sometimes they may work for a season or two
but then be a death trap in later generations.
So, bee condos-- I mean, once people started caring about
honeybees, or bee declines, they popped up at CostCo right?
They became so mainstream, like, "Oh, you can just put this
out and you'll save the bees."
But a researcher here in Toronto
studied bee condos for three years and what they found
was that they tend to be non-native bees mostly
that are using them and that they are-- the native bees
that are in them are more highly parasitized.
So when you think about it,
you're basically making a buffet of bees.
The bees are in a more highly dense situation
than they would be in nature if they were just
kind of nesting in their own twigs.
There's a lot that needs to be figured out in terms of
cleaning them out and fungus growing inside those
things and parasites thriving in them.
So I would just be super cautious about any kind of
human-made solution that is not really scientifically supported.
There's this broad education out there,
I think people have learned the "save the bee" message and
they immediately start thinking about honeybees and,
like, the backyard honey bee industry has taken off.
And all of these things, probably,
are not good, like, ultimately right?
Keeping honeybees in your backyard is not a good
thing to do, it's not conservation.
Right, that would be like me saying: "Oh,
look at these chickens I have in my backyard,
this is bird conservation right?"
That is not what you do when you have chickens in
your backyard, you say: "Look, these are beautiful animals.
I learn from them, I get eggs from them
and that's great; that's why I'm doing this.
I'm not practicing bird conservation."
That's the same thing with honeybees in your backyard.
You get honey, you can have wax, they're beautiful animals,
you can learn from them and enjoy them and educate
your neighbors about them but it's not conservation;
there's no conservation that's happening.
In fact, they're probably competing
with the native bees that used to live
in your backyard and stealing pollen from them.
[Sheila] The reality is, anytime we manage any animal,
whether it's salmon, or cow, or chickens, or pigs,
there's always high levels of diseases.
The human species, we have not figured out how to
put a whole bunch of animals together and breed them
at high densities, much higher than are found in
nature and not have disease outbreaks happen.
So, if you look at honeybee hives in the U.S.
for example, it's over 95% that they will
have Varroa mite, or some other virus or something.
So beekeepers really just try to treat their honeybee hives,
keep those disease levels low but it doesn't stop the diseases
from being spilled over into the wild because honeybees
are not like chickens, they're not inside a coop but
the solution that the public and policy-makers have come up
with has been more honeybee hives in cities, for examples.
Like, how many sustainable initiatives for businesses are
throwing a honeybee hive up on the rooftop, right?
So, it actually made the number one threat
a lot worse and it's frustrating because these
people are actually thinking that they're helping.
The research that we've done and that others have done,
show that in many crop systems, that if there's enough
habitat on a farm, that there will be enough native
bees to provide 100% of the pollination services.
[Keith] Pollination is a strategic input in
modern food production.
In part because it increases yield,
think about it, so much of what we do
in agriculture is oriented at conserving losses.
Y'know, we worry about a pest,
so we spray to keep the pest pressure down
so that we don't lose more of a yield but pollination
is one of those inputs that actually raises yield.
The more pollination you get, the more yield you get.
♪
[dramatic orchestration]
♪
[Lincoln] Oh, I think I got a good one.
Black face but yeah, it's just like,
it's abdomen is almost entirely black but
there's, like, this little white patch.
If you're gardening for pollinators,
you can put a sunflower in your garden to get sunflower
bees to come to your garden, yeah, exactly like that.
I haven't looked at enough of the Franklin specimens
to really have a good sense of what they look like,
I just look for the black abdomen.
If we just get right over here, the ground is just
nothing but flowers.
-[Ellen] Pretty black. -[Jess] Yeah, I mean,
that's as black as they get, really.
[Ellen] That's really black.
[Jess] Oh, no, we gotta go-- we gotta
show this one to Linc, too.
-[Ellen] Hey Linc! -[Lincoln] Oh cool!
[Jess] Come 'ere.
[Lincoln] Uh-oh!
[Jess] We got another good one, here.
[Lincoln] Jess Tyler, did it again.
Apparently so.
And so, there you go, that's a worker...
Western Bumblebee.
Yeah, they've become very rare out here,
we only find just one or two a year.
You can see the yellow shoulders and then
Western Bumblebees in this region have a novel color form.
So they don't have a long, white tail.
The ones in this area have the apical segments,
just T5 and 6 with the hairs off-white.
So it's a little hard to tell but the face is very round.
[Jess] Hmm, round face, yeah I haven't looked at them
-closely enough-- -[Lincoln] And the round face
is a consequence of having a short cheek and so,
like Franklin's,
bombus occidentalis, Western Bumblebee,
has a short cheek and relatively short tongue.
So if this was a Franklin's, it would be the exact same
except that yellow would extend further
between the wing bases, whereas between the wing bases
on this specimen, it's just black.
So this is a worker, so it means there's already an established
nest and that the queen was successfully mated and so,
I'm sure she's building up her workforce right now.
We don't know how big her colony is,
'cause we don't know where it is but this is the first
Western Bumblebee that we found, thanks to Jess.
We've seen hundreds and hundreds of bumblebees,
we've seen one occidentalis so far.
Good thing we have Jess with us.
So Kyle caught another species,
this is a bombus appositus, a White Shouldered Bumblebee.
Really kinda nice looking with white shoulders
and a more yellow, tawny body.
Y'know the Western Bumblebee we just saw was a worker and so
is this one but you can see the size difference, that this
bee is probably twice as big as the one we were just looking at.
Real beauty.
This bee is in the subgenus subterranean bombus and so there
are concerns worldwide for members of that subgenus,
that they're in decline, especially in Europe.
So we got-- how many do we have so far?
We've got vase, insularis, occidentalis,
appositus, mixtus, any others?
Yep, six species and so if we can detect six just
by swinging nets, there's probably nine or ten present.
Some of the other ones are just more difficult to find.
♪
Yeah, we-- yeah, as we're having this interview,
we've noticed across the street there's some
landscapers spraying pesticide and
mowing the neighbor's yard and as someone who really
appreciates wildflowers and bees I can see that this--
their lawn could have so much potential for pollinators.
Currently, it's a patch of green grass,
which really does nothing for wildlife.
You're right when you say that we shouldn't
be planting grass.
Native green grass provides basically
no habitat for native animals of any sort and,
in fact, may contribute to the invitation of non-native
species like ants and other animals into your home.
So planting native plants is the best thing you can possibly
do and even being a little bit messy with those native plants.
So, y'know, we like our gardens to look
really neat and tidy and I think sometimes it's okay to be
a little messy and that doesn't have to be
in your front yard, or in your showy garden
but in your backyard, create a space that doesn't look
different from where I'm sitting right now.
Don't mow it for a couple of months.
There's no reason necessarily that you need to.
And that's gonna just create
biodiversity and all of that biodiversity is going
to create benefits which ultimately will
also reduce the need for using insecticides.
The ecosystem works if we create all the different parts for it,
it's had millions of years to figure that out.
There are tons of alternatives out there,
that use less pesticides and rely more on natural enemies.
I'm hopeful that we can continue moving in that direction.
For decades, since the EPA's inception,
EPA has never consulted with Fish and Wildlife when it comes
to registering pesticides but things are changing thanks
to pressure to force EPA to consult with Fish and Wildlife,
to factor in endangered species when they think about what
pesticides should be allowed to use and what shouldn't be.
[Rich] Right now, the majority of testing happens
for these insecticides for approval to be used in
the United States on farms and backyards,
all that testing happens on European Honeybees but
European honeybees have a vastly different lifecycle,
a vastly different life history and a vastly different
physiologies than our native bees.
And so just testing European Honeybees and
using that as a proxy for our 3600 species of
native bees doesn't work.
[Jeff] And because bumblebees, unlike honeybees, go through
a complete lifecycle every year, their success depends
upon the survival of the next generation of
queens that begin diapause or hibernation late in the fall,
stay underground over the winter and then emerge
in the spring to start new colonies and so that's
a different reproductive strategy than honeybees.
[Jess] Pesticides are a huge issue for
bumblebees and the thousands of native bees.
[Rich] We need to actually find out the effects of these
chemicals on our native bees before we approve them
for broad use across the United States.
And I think the other thing we really need
to keep in mind there, is that our native bees,
because they live in the ground they have different
routes of exposure for these chemicals, right?
So anything applied on the ground, it doesn't only
affect their flowers, it affects their nests and
that's not tested in honeybees, right?
We're not spraying their nests with insecticides
and seeing how that impacts them.
So I think putting some changes like that,
could make a huge difference for understanding how these
chemicals affect bees and what, maybe, small or large things
that applicators could do to protect bees.
[Jess] We've been working to force the EPA to consider
endangered species specifically when they register pesticides.
If we can protect endangered species,
threatened with extinction, from pesticides that's gonna
benefit all kinds of other species,
as well as human health and water quality.
We've been looking specifically at how many
pesticides are found on farms and in wildflowers and in
nurseries and there're some concerning results that we found
in the level of pesticides that are being found in plants,
both horticultural and nursery plants as well as farm plants.
The science tells us that there are some pesticides
where the harms are really just too great to wildlife.
♪
I think it's important to recognize
that we've been talking about neonicotinoids for awhile.
Like that's the class of insecticides that we're
worried about, that a lot of people are talking about.
They're nicotine-based, they're a neurotoxin, so they're highly,
highly toxic for almost any animal that ingests them.
[Jess] Almost all neonic use in Europe,
for example, is restricted.
[Rich] Y'know in response to some of this
negative information about neonicotinoids,
these companies are now producing different chemicals
that are still systemic, still have the same mode of
action but have different active ingredients.
So we like to, instead of just using the term
"neonicotinoids", we're trying to just
use the word "systemic insecticides" at this point.
Systemic means that, if it's in the soil,
a plant will take up the pesticide and it will
travel throughout the tissue of the plant.
So it'll be in it's leaves and it'll be in
it's pollen and nectar.
[Rich] These are basically the most
broadly used insecticides on the market.
They're what would probably be recommended if any homeowner
went somewhere to find something and they're obviously
heavily marketed by pesticide companies to farmers as well.
One of the main issues with these chemicals because they're
water-soluble they're actually absorbed by the plant
tissues and expressed in every cell in the plant.
So every time a bee drinks nectar, or eats pollen,
which is their only source of food,
if that plant has been treated with that insecticide,
they're getting a microdose of that insecticide for
the entire life of the plant.
[Jess] Their nectar and pollen is contaminated and
that nectar and pollen is then brought back to the bee's nest.
[Rich] In fact, in some woody plants,
it's been shown that those chemicals can still be active
even up to seven years after a single application.
It's complicated, there are a lot of
factors involved, including obviously an industry
that makes money from selling these products,
that have a heavy lobby and have a lot of influence.
Probably a lot more influence than you and
I would like to actually admit.
[Jess] The EPA often says that they, y'know,
they look at the best available science but the truth
really is that they often ignore independent, even peer-reviewed,
literature studies that look at the impact of pesticides.
They almost entirely rely on studies that come from
the companies that want to register these pesticides.
So you can see that there's a conflict of interest.
In reality, the EPA is a captured agency,
especially the pesticide office.
The companies that want to get a pesticide approved,
pay a fee to get a pesticide registered.
[Rich] If you're a farmer and you have
an economic threshold for your livelihood,
that's a separate conversation that I'm willing to have.
Still, we shouldn't be using them prophylactically,
y'know we should have some threshold at
which we say: "Okay, there's a danger here,
we should apply them."
Farmers generally want to help
bees and if they actually know that they don't need to use
pesticides and can be assured that they can still
make a living managing their lands in different ways,
then they probably would be allies for bee conservationists.
Pesticides like Dicamba,
which is a really popular herbicide.
It's incredibly volatile, so when it's applied
on one piece of land it can just blow over to
a neighboring farm and it can harm the crops there.
But more than that, it has the ability to just blow
into a more natural environment and then poison wild vegetation
and wildlife that relies on these little bits of habitat.
But right now, farmer's are--
they're on seeds and they're treated
before the plants are even in the ground.
Before there's a pest to treat, the plants have already been
treated and it's really having a profound impacts on
invertebrate communities throughout the world.
Next to a farm field that's been pretreated with
these insecticides, the weeds that are growing there
that once provided important food for bumblebees and other
pollinators is now laced with these toxic chemicals because of
how easily the move through the environment.
I think that's kind of an elephant in the room,
the fact that we are so reliant on artificial
systems to produce food.
Whether that's through irrigated water,
herbicides, fungicides, insecticides.
We need to look at more sustainable ways to
get their benefits without the toxic collateral effects.
[Rich] We've made some steps but largely,
you can buy these over the counter at most home
improvement stores and apply them without a license and...
it's dangerous, it's really, honestly quite dangerous.
♪
[Jess] Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring",
one of the books that started the environmental movement,
celebrated it's sixtieth birthday this year.
If you could bring Rachel Carson back from the dead and ask her
how we're doing right now, she would be disgusted.
We have made strides to get rid of some of the worst
ones but we still have a long way to go.
And there's been a very promising study out of Canada,
using canola growers and these scientists were able to
show in this particular system that farmers could take certain
numbers of their canola acreage out of production,
convert that acreage into pollinator habitat
and in the end of the season,
the grower would still gain more profit than in
the conventional system of putting it all in production.
That's remarkable. Think about that,
if you're a farmer: "Wait a minute, you're asking me
to take some of my acres out of production just for the bees?"
Well yes, yes, we think this would
work under these conditions.
Think about that as a win-win.
The farmers are saving the bees, protecting the environment
and making more money; that's what I call a win-win.
♪
Several species, like the Rusty Patched and
the American Bumblebee, their declines have been
really steep in only the last several decades.
They don't rely on native prairie,
so they're actually really adaptable.
Trying to pull apart this puzzle about why they're declining,
it's not just habitat, it's not just invasive species,
it's really this combination of factors.
I think it's no coincidence that the decline
of the bumblebees, that's also at the same point
that the use of neonic pesticides has really gone up.
Like, neonics started being used in the 1990's
and they really ramped up production after 2000.
So this widespread adoption of this insecticide
that is really toxic, it has all kinds of affects.
It impairs their immune systems, it alters their macro-biome,
then they have-- it modifies their behavior, like,
all these things are known and you add
the introduction of honeybees,
which are unfortunately able to spread disease.
So unfortunately it's really this combination.
[Keith] We have to have a fundamental
reckoning of the way we use toxins.
At the end of the day, we're still unloosing into
a habitat with, far less than complete
knowledge of its outcome, acute toxins that do have
non-target effects and none of us likes this situation but
we do need to be aware that these consequences are
accumulating and we just have to ask ourselves what kind of
a world are we gonna pass on to our children or grandchildren.
Do we like that picture,
or would like to maybe start changing it now?
When we start talking about systemic solutions to
these problems, none of them, of course, are easy, are they?
I mean, we're talking about changing a system,
changing the way we produce food and that's not gonna happen
overnight, it's not gonna happen easily but the kinds of systemic
changes that need to happen are making our habitats
less hostile to pollinators and other beneficial organisms.
To at the very least be mindful of their life history needs,
for nesting sites and for forage and to give it to them.
Whether through private practices of leaving fence rows
un-mowed or, y'know, government agency level
through lands set aside or incentivization programs.
To incentivize farmers to make their lands
friendly for pollinators.
[Jess] If we can all work together on this,
I'm hopeful that we can help them and a lot
of species can make a comeback.
♪
We're holding out hope that we're gonna find Franklin's,
it's definitely-- could be out here and I think
that's what brings all these people together to
come look for this species.
We know it needs help and if we find it,
then that means it can get the help
that it needs to potentially recover.
Until we find it, it's potentially extinct
and that's just...
it's unfortunate but unfortunately we just never
studied it well enough before to...
Yeah, we don't know as much about its biology or
its populations as we could have.
I think moving forward, there are a collection of insects
specifically that are waiting to be listed under the act.
So that's, like, the Monarch Butterfly,
the Western Bumblebee, the American Bumblebee
and then a few others.
These, I think, are really special species that have seen
broad declines across their huge [indistinct].
Like, the Monarch Butterfly travels from Mexico all
the way to Maine and into Canada
every year and so it touches, like, every single state.
And it's the same for the American Bumblebee,
previously found in forty-seven of the lower forty-eight states.
So having one of these species protected under the act
would have huge benefits to all kinds of species along the way.
♪
[Jess] Just such a great habitat up here,
we've already found about have a dozen species already and
there's potentially several more that we haven't found yet.
[Jess] Yeah, Franklin's Bumblebee
will probably be the first species to have
gone extinct in North America.
Franklin's was really unique but it doesn't mean that we can't do
something positive for the other 45 bumblebees
in North America and I think through raising
awareness through regulation, through the intentional habitat
restoration, I think we can have a lot of positive impact.
It will take a lot of effort and time but, we're workin' on it.
♪
[buzzing]
♪
[Keith] So let's keep looking and see if we find a queen.
It's congested but-- that's mature broods.
See that cardboard colored stuff in the middle?
That is--
[woman] It's ready to get out of here.
[Keith] It is. Well, it's broods.
-These are baby bees. -Oh, okay.
So, I'm going to show you a baby bee.
You can kind of tell from their appearance.
See this one right here?
She's kind of white-- white-ish.
I'm going to stop her, pick her up.
-See how she's white? -Oh, yeah!
Her hair is still matted.
[woman] Yeah, she does look like a baby.
♪