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Okay, welcome to another episode of
the Crimepace. A boutany does it doesn't.

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I'm here with Sam Drogi, who's
a bee scientist. You work with

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USGS or I work with USAS.
But to be safe here, I'm going

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to say that I'm not representing right
right, all opinions expressed there. My

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home just me and Joey. But
yeah, and I want to say your

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home too, is like I'm blown
away. So I like the tunnel of

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flowers, the tunnel of plants and
vegetation. You have to walk through there.

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You should see it when it's in
bloom. So that's one of the

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scrubby Prunus species and it's just a
curtain of flowers for a week and a

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half. Well yeah, and the
Sylphium and the Helianthus. I mean it's

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like it's it's it's nice to see
that. So okay, well, thanks

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for doing this with me. We're
sitting in a room filled with boxes of

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bees, and none of them seem
to be European honeybees, which is amazing,

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which is what I love to see. I'm so tired of seeing that

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species. So so where to start? So I I watched you got a

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Ted Talk, which I watched.
It was ten minutes. I could have

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watched three fucking hours of that thing. It was absolutely just fascinating stuff.

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But there's a couple of things I
wanted to ask you about. I guess

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what, you know. The thing, it's got to be annoying for you

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to constantly when you talk about bees, the things that most people think of

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as honey bees. Like you ask
a kid to draw a picture of a

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bee, it's gonna be a honey
bee if you see. That's what comes

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to most people's minds. But that's
like the least interesting thing. It's like

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being in the plants, like you, I talk about plants and someone thinks

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of like a tulip, and that's
all they know about plants, And they

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actually mostly draw yellow jackets. Yellow
jackets look more like honeybees. And when

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they say, oh I had,
I had, I have, I hate

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bees. You know, I was
mowing my lawn and all these bees came

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out and stung me, and I
go, those are never bees. Those

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are always yellow jackets. So yeah, there's a very shallow understanding of the

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breadth of bee dumb out there.
But for me, what's what's been interesting.

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Why I wanted to talk to you
is because I mean when I'm out

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looking at plants, that's what I
see all the time. I mean,

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I'm always seeing, you know,
because after a while being in the botany,

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you catch up that there's not going
to be any plants without the things

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that pollinate them, and there's all
these really cool What fascinates me are the

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specialist syndromes where it's this thing evolved
with this with this plant, you know,

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with the specific species of plant,
and it's it's you know, like

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I was, I got really interested
in what was pollinating peyote because that's one

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of the coolest plants where I live, along with you know, astrophyte and

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star cactus all these other I mean, there's myriad other cool species where I

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live that that's the only place in
the United States that they grow. And

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so I was I would just be
it. It started to occur to me

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and then a friend of mine,
Peter Bernhard, he's a botanist. He

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is working at Mobile now is always
doing pollination studies and I love looking at

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I mean, there's so many plants
that have weird anthro morphology, you know,

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like poricytal anthers and solenam. I
want to ask you about that,

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because tomato require something special, right, you get the Melastoma tasi. Who

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knows what the fuck is I mean, we know what is going on there,

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but it's very the first time you
see a flower and a member of

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the melostonmatasi, you're like, what
the fuck is that? Two different kinds

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of stamens anthropores, all this weird
stuff. So that's where my fascination came

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from. But I want to I
guess we'll just start right off and this

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conversation will be all over the place. We're starting off with the specialist relationships

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that you see out there. What
are some because there's, like you were

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just telling me about castania, the
chestnuts had a specialist species to be that

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pon an. What's up with that? Well, so like let's use chestnut

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as a starting point. But the
way to really the big picture is to

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think of plants not as as important
as the botanists think of themselves, but

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just as platforms for biodiversity. So
each plant species in a way can be

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thought of as working with a select
group of highly specialized often members of you

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know, let's talk insects, but
also viruses and bacteria and fungi, and

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it sometimes is individual species, the
individual species, but a lot of times

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it's at a genus level or groups
of members of a genus having some relationship

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with some insect, and then all
these other things. Was they know very

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little about. So you know what
one hundred million years ago start of flowering

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plants and almost immediately why are they
flowering? Is relating to moving away from

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wind pollinated to insect pollinated and efficiencies. Right, we should talk about that

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too, because I wanted to ask
you when bees evolved, because you know

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Jurassic and the plants have roughly evolved. It's one twenty five million years ago.

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There's you know, we got the
smoke from the smoking gum, but

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we don't have the gun yet.
There's micropollen and fossils and stuff. But

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is that about the time one five
million years ago that that bees started to

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ev over? Well, yeah,
that's so somewhat controversial or just being evolving

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in itself in terms of being able
to backtrack and determine through molecular work mostly

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these days, and also some fossil
work. There's fossils out there too.

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Amber is a great place to look
at weird things, And the number you

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hear the most is one hundred million
years ago, and the story you hear

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the most is it started with beatles
and then I don't know about bees per

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se in terms of it's probably pretty
close. But bees are just wasps,

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so they're vegetarian wasps, so they
derived out of that clade pretty it seems

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pretty certain because all wasps are generally
predatory, right, yeah, again exceptions.

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So there are actual official wasps that
are also pollen feeders. Most of

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those are Western. I'm forgetting the
genus name at the moment, but yeah,

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So there's a couple of bee species
that are feet on carrion. They

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know, no bees actually attack other
insects. But there's a group of bees

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in a I think they're melopennines.
So these are the stingless bees in the

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tropics that it's tropical and stuff.
Yeah, fucking incredible. And that's where

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they get their protein rather than from
the you know, pollen kit or the

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stuff that's wrapped around pollen. Now
that's put there by plants, which would

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be the protein source. So they
all need some kind of protein and mostly

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they're getting it from pollen. So
all bees, even the parasitic bees are

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using the protein part of the equation
from these plants as a source of you

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know, part of the needs with
you know, again not my lane,

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so I can't give you all of
them, but fats and lipids and amino

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acids. They go for starts at
all. That would be nectar, right

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or sometimes oil so or they can
create that component some poind some pond produces

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a lot of starts too, could
be I don't know. But but regardless

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of so beatles were doing this that
beatles maybe were pollinating some plants in the

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Jurassic before angiosperms evolved. They're the
generally older group, but bees really took

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off what about a hundred million years
ago. It's I'm going to say,

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really, not my lane. So
yeah, that's the that's the number where

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you generally toss around when people ask
that question. But I'm sure there's others

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that can be more different. But
like oldest fossil bee, we have a

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we know it off hand now,
but but generally around the time angiosperms started

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to get gone, yeah, yeah, and so, but regarding these these

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specialist relationships like with the cat with
the chestnut, like what what was that

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species of being. Did it disappear
when chestnuts started to disappear or what happened.

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Yeah, it didn't really disappear,
obviously, because we can find it

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again. But it became super like
if you look at collections, it's like,

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hey, this Andrena Rennie, which
at the time we didn't realize was

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a chestnut specialist or really a Castanaea
specialist. It was like, this is

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one of the missing bees of the
Eastern United States, which we had a

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paper on saying like, oh,
you know, we can't find these.

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It was about as far as you
can go in terms of determining status on

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bees, and subsequently a big chunk
of those bees we found. It's just

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they're rare and specialized and if you
don't look, you don't find them.

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And that's the biggest problem now.
So the chestnut bee was there a bunch

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of records Andrena Rennie is the name
from one hundred years ago, and then

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it pretty much dropped off a cliff. There's some in between records that may

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or may not actually be identified correctly
from places that we wouldn't expect to see

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it, because really, chestnuts are
are the chickapins aren't there. So three

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Castanea has in the East, well
everywhere, I guess, no in the

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East, because they're in Europe ben
Asia. Two three species so ozar Kansas,

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Pumla, and Dentata, kind of
being the American chestnut. And so

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we found one day walking along power
lines. Oh, here's a chinkapin blooming

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and I had heard that they had
been good for bees, so I collected

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the bees. That's a handful off. This one scraggly, obviously unhealthy one,

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but blooming may. It was right
next to the lab as a matter.

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Wow. Again, there's chinkapin throughout, mostly as an understory tree and

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which never blooms because they're understore.
They're waiting for an opening. But in

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a few places they'll creep out into
the edge or in a power line that's

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managed for brush, and they get
the blight and then they die back and

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the sprout. Yeah, the pumela
and Ozarkansas also get the blight, but

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they have a faster cycle time,
so they're still reproducing and putting out viable

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seed. Not very I guess people
are concerned about their status and working on

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that, just like chestnut. But
that's not they have none of the glory

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of the chestnut tree. And only
recently did people realize that there's all these

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specialist insects well the tree, the
botany people realize that. So there's a

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great paper by a great paper by
Paul Oppler from the seventies who just lists

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all the highly specialized insects that are
on chestnut. And he didn't know about

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andrena or renny at the time.
But there's weavils, there's bores, there's

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leaf miners, all kinds of things
that basically you don't have chestnut. Those

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things are gone, and some of
those species seem maybe completely gone. Now

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that's crazy, because one in every
four trees on the East Coast was a

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chestnut tree or in some of the
East Coast forts. From what I've heard,

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I mean that's saying right, that's
another whole Right, it depends.

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There's a lot of nuanced that.
It depends what kind of landscape you're on,

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what the you know, there's multiple
factors. What the But one of

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the interesting things about that group is
if you and about let's talk about bees

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and forests. So in the spring, if you the highest density of naturally

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occurring bees is in bottomland forests,
in the spring, or let's call it

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richwood forests. So we've got a
vernal understory of herbaceous plants and we've got

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a subshrub bloom. And then if
you have edges, you know, even

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more action is going on there because
the sun's coming in and they're really pumping

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their bloom into that. And then
you have actually a tree layer, so

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you have all the everything's blooming,
so even some trees. And this is

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this is before the trees have really
leafed out like this. Are we talking

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like spring ephemerals mostly? So spring
ephemerals, yes, So starting in March

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there's action in there and then the
densities really build up, like think of

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spring. Beauty's that carpet of spring. Yeah. Yeah. And so there's

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a Claytonia specialist bee super abundant in
those environments. So this is the bee

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that only pollinates clayton Only on Claytonia. There's Juvuleria specialists there. So if

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Claytonia were to suffer something that happened
to the American chestnut, you lose this

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bee. Yes, and it is
because the evil lesser Celandine, which is

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a vernunculous name. I always forget
but it's imported European species completely taking over

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the bottom lands. Have some crazy
invasives here. What is that wavy basket

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density of propagules and invasives, wavy
basket gress, waved basket just moving into

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the where I work at the refuge. I haven't seen it here. And

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that's a new one, huh.
I mean that thing relatively new, young

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god, and it didn't I mean
it. Someone wrote me and they were

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like, we we saw this popping
up a number of years ago, like

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a decade or two ago, and
the guy he was working with some fondness

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and they let the NR no and
they were like, oh, they just

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kind of ignored it, and now
it's really fucking bad. Yeah, it's

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basically like still grass, so and
built in how it kind of works,

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but also in the fact that it
will completely carpet forest. It's weird too.

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Those seeds are like they're sticky and
if you touch your eyes or something

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afterwards, it burns its some fucking
weird. Really, Yeah, there's a

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there's something weird on that. Whatever
that exbit it is, smoke it.

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If you smoke wavy basker, I
wonder you probably burn your lungs or something.

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I don't know, but kind of
get a use for it. Yeah,

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who knows, man, But it's
a bad one. So yeah,

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So that's one of a huge list. When you go to the Midwest,

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and then maybe the West, I
don't know so much, but the Midwest

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has a much lower propensity to have, particularly forests, but pretty much everywhere

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this high density of invasive species here. That's the battle you keep them from

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English here too. Oh God,
there's so much true miscanthis too. That's

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another bad one. But what struck
me here was there's not much habitat.

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Like when we came to your lab. That was the first time I'd see

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like a mass. I'd seen a
mass of a bunch of native plants.

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Like there's the there's forests here,
and there's four Oh they're pretty on the

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sides of the roads, you know, sloping to a fucking eight lane road

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of cars. But there's not much
native plants. And you don't see that

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much habitat. I don't see it
in I don't see native plants in any

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kind of landscaping. I don't see
native plants in people's yards. It's really

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fucking, you know, ecologically death, that's really so different from the rest

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of the No, it's much like
a lot of the US. But I

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guess for some reason I thought it
would be a little different here. I

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see bacchariss helmafolia, But that's kind
of a recent Was that always here?

201
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Is that? Well? Yes?
But so Baccharis hammifolia normally is a the

202
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backside is it often called is it
high tide or load tide bush? But

203
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it's the backside of salt marshes and
the estuary coastal Why is it along all

204
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our roads? Now? Salt We
salt the hell out of the roads.

205
00:15:07,679 --> 00:15:13,240
And so that's perfect much like solidago
semper veerans, which is people call it

206
00:15:13,279 --> 00:15:16,720
invasive in Chicago. I don't like
that. I don't like calling native plants

207
00:15:16,759 --> 00:15:20,039
invasive if they're only from a few
hundred miles away in the same content,

208
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because distributions have shifted over millions of
years and glaciation and then so but it

209
00:15:24,919 --> 00:15:30,080
does the same thing. It's a
coastal golden rod tolerant of salt. They

210
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use a ship ton of salt in
Chicago. You get that out competing any

211
00:15:33,559 --> 00:15:37,600
of the other native plants, but
only along the roads. Really, like

212
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you don't see it. I don't
see it invading non disturbed areas. There's

213
00:15:41,159 --> 00:15:48,600
a bunch of sort of backside estuary
salt marshy things, pluchia I can't remember.

214
00:15:48,639 --> 00:15:54,360
And yeah, and there's an annual
salt marsh aster and what's your what's

215
00:15:54,360 --> 00:15:56,879
your opinion of the coyote. But
I like the back wrist we call coyote.

216
00:15:56,879 --> 00:16:02,559
But it's a fucking pollinator all in
that habitat, particularly roads. It

217
00:16:02,559 --> 00:16:07,120
doesn't really leave the road sides.
So but along roadsides, you know,

218
00:16:07,159 --> 00:16:11,519
what's your option. There's almost nothing
else that will grow there that's not invasive.

219
00:16:11,600 --> 00:16:15,600
Particularly it's like kisses right up to
the road. If it's not mowan,

220
00:16:17,200 --> 00:16:22,440
it's a composite, and you know
it's not doesn't pretty much doesn't have

221
00:16:22,519 --> 00:16:29,879
any specialists on it, but it
has a ton of opportunity for pollen nectar.

222
00:16:29,919 --> 00:16:33,039
I'm not sure what people are gathering
there, insect people, but if

223
00:16:33,039 --> 00:16:38,000
we look at that, uh,
there's a lot going on very late in

224
00:16:38,039 --> 00:16:44,480
the season. So this leg so
it just finished blooming here maybe two weeks

225
00:16:44,480 --> 00:16:47,159
ago. Oh, it's still going
on some of the highways. It's great.

226
00:16:47,159 --> 00:16:48,759
I think it's great to see because
a lot of that is the females

227
00:16:48,799 --> 00:16:55,720
and it looks like they're it's just
it was just there the game because they

228
00:16:55,799 --> 00:17:00,279
put those hairs out of the female
flowers. It looks like yeah and so

229
00:17:00,559 --> 00:17:06,079
yeah, so it And then if
you look at it's native habitats, it's

230
00:17:06,119 --> 00:17:15,039
a very important dune slash salt marsh's
esterin plant that's providing uh, you know,

231
00:17:15,200 --> 00:17:18,000
resources for that end of the year. So for some bee species are

232
00:17:18,000 --> 00:17:22,359
out all year, right, so
not everything's a specialist, and so you

233
00:17:22,440 --> 00:17:26,279
want to have bloom throughout, so
they shift around. Think bumblebees, right,

234
00:17:26,359 --> 00:17:33,759
So bumblebees are out from March or
February sometimes these days, and then

235
00:17:33,240 --> 00:17:38,119
they're not they're done in November,
depending on the species. And so bageris

236
00:17:38,240 --> 00:17:41,880
great plant. Nothing else around.
Maybe it's not your number one like I'm

237
00:17:41,880 --> 00:17:45,400
going to go to it every day, but that's how things work. Will

238
00:17:45,400 --> 00:17:48,039
they grow in a garden here?
Like could you grow in in a garden?

239
00:17:48,240 --> 00:17:52,000
You know we're going to transplant some
to the lab so I'll be able

240
00:17:52,039 --> 00:17:55,599
to answer that. I don't see
why not. It's also you know,

241
00:17:55,799 --> 00:18:00,880
it's a decent quick growing right hedgerow? Oh yeah, and they get like

242
00:18:00,920 --> 00:18:04,519
eight feet tall privacy screen. There's
Backers neglecta in Texas, which is just

243
00:18:04,720 --> 00:18:10,519
fucking loaded with cool insects. If
it's got a good full sun's site,

244
00:18:10,680 --> 00:18:15,359
it will be year round blocking of
privacy or whatever you want to call it.

245
00:18:15,720 --> 00:18:18,079
Uh, it's as far as I
know, it's not in the trade,

246
00:18:18,480 --> 00:18:22,720
and I do see it. And
like on the Eastern Shore, near

247
00:18:22,960 --> 00:18:29,240
houses that are near roads that aren't
like Lottie dahouses will often have backris shrubs

248
00:18:29,279 --> 00:18:34,119
that just had adventifitiously volunteer and then
they're like, oh I got a shrub

249
00:18:34,119 --> 00:18:38,160
here. Yeah they're great, and
this yeah, late late summer, early

250
00:18:38,240 --> 00:18:44,000
fall, they're just loaded with fucking
poem. We dialed back to the castanea.

251
00:18:44,119 --> 00:18:48,119
So the one of the many cool
things about chestnut. So we have

252
00:18:48,200 --> 00:18:51,359
all this bloom in the very very
early spring. There's a series of trees,

253
00:18:51,440 --> 00:18:55,359
not too many, that provide pollen
and nectar, and there's a whole

254
00:18:55,440 --> 00:19:00,000
world up there in the canopy that's
only now just beginning to be studied.

255
00:19:00,079 --> 00:19:03,640
In terms of bees. Some bees
are really only up there or largely up

256
00:19:03,640 --> 00:19:07,480
there. And the thing about chestnut, first of all, it was,

257
00:19:07,519 --> 00:19:15,400
as you mentioned, common in Appalachian
Piedmont plus or minus area and fairly restricted

258
00:19:15,519 --> 00:19:22,559
range, but a big chunk of
the east had it. And it's the

259
00:19:22,680 --> 00:19:27,079
last thing to bloom, so it's
blooming late June early July. No other

260
00:19:27,200 --> 00:19:33,200
tree is blooming at that time that
is producing anything worthwhile for pollen and nectar.

261
00:19:33,799 --> 00:19:37,799
So one would imagine it was a
huge pollen and nectar source for bees

262
00:19:37,839 --> 00:19:41,079
that are, you know, working
the forest end of the spectrum. And

263
00:19:41,119 --> 00:19:45,599
if you're Andrena or any that's your
game, right, you know, you

264
00:19:45,640 --> 00:19:48,400
can't be like, well, I'm
out early in the spring with everything else

265
00:19:48,480 --> 00:19:52,359
is blooming, I'll just dip into
whatever. It's like, it's chestnut or

266
00:19:52,440 --> 00:19:56,720
nothing. Yeah, these these specialist
relationships are what's fascinating me the most because

267
00:19:56,720 --> 00:20:00,160
it's i mean, you see people
talking about Yeah we talked about this last

268
00:20:00,160 --> 00:20:03,519
time, the monarchs in the milk
weeds. That's great, but that's that's

269
00:20:03,559 --> 00:20:08,839
just a small microcosm of what nature
is. There's all these specialist relationships,

270
00:20:10,160 --> 00:20:14,000
both in plants and insects. Yeah, you know, and one thing you

271
00:20:14,039 --> 00:20:18,079
had mentioned too in that that Ted
talk, you said, specialization is really

272
00:20:18,119 --> 00:20:22,759
important in deserts. Why is it, you know, I'm not one hundred

273
00:20:22,799 --> 00:20:27,119
percent sure, but you think about
deserts and you have a much more unpredictable

274
00:20:27,640 --> 00:20:32,119
resource, right, much more extreme. Yeah, so there's there's going to

275
00:20:32,200 --> 00:20:36,759
be much more selection. Okay,
so yeah, we're talking about we talking

276
00:20:36,759 --> 00:20:41,599
about specialization in deserts. So it's
much more extreme environment. There's going to

277
00:20:41,640 --> 00:20:47,039
be more specific natural selection. But
but there's but there are a bunch of

278
00:20:47,160 --> 00:20:52,599
specialist bees that only associate with one
genus or even species of plant. So

279
00:20:52,559 --> 00:20:56,599
Kreaso bush is a good example.
I can't remember the exact number, but

280
00:20:56,599 --> 00:21:02,640
I'm going to say something like teen
different species of bees only go to kreosop

281
00:21:02,680 --> 00:21:07,640
bush. And I don't know that
that group. Well, it's a Western

282
00:21:07,680 --> 00:21:11,359
thing. Everything is different out west, and just like plants, and so

283
00:21:12,799 --> 00:21:15,599
I can't tell you how many species
are involved, but I think it's only

284
00:21:15,640 --> 00:21:22,000
one or two maybe in the US
of kreosot bush. And it's dominant,

285
00:21:22,160 --> 00:21:26,119
right, so it's all over the
place. It's one of the last things

286
00:21:26,160 --> 00:21:32,359
that can make it in the super
dry deserts, and it will produce something

287
00:21:32,559 --> 00:21:37,160
almost every year, and so it
provides I think a lot. What's going

288
00:21:37,200 --> 00:21:41,720
on is that some of these so
let's back up. Most bees that are

289
00:21:41,759 --> 00:21:47,720
specialized are not on annuals. They're
on perennials and shrubs, and then rarely

290
00:21:47,880 --> 00:21:52,440
you get a tree. Salex is
a good example, but most salecs are

291
00:21:52,440 --> 00:22:00,799
actually shrubs, not trees. There's
black black Salex nigra year in the east,

292
00:22:00,039 --> 00:22:06,079
but I digress on willows. But
the idea is that that's what's going

293
00:22:06,119 --> 00:22:11,359
on in the desert is you have
lots of shrub communities divided by mountain ranges,

294
00:22:11,880 --> 00:22:15,799
and you know, over time you
isolate, and you know you have

295
00:22:15,960 --> 00:22:21,640
you look for your predictability, so
you can't. So bees can also hang

296
00:22:21,680 --> 00:22:26,039
out for several years in the desert
underground without emerging just dormant. Yeah,

297
00:22:26,039 --> 00:22:30,759
they need to write because what if
it's like the super crappy year, everyone

298
00:22:30,839 --> 00:22:34,160
dies. You know, you're off
the off the you know, molecular chart.

299
00:22:34,240 --> 00:22:40,839
Then so there is that, but
you want to be yeah sort of,

300
00:22:41,200 --> 00:22:47,960
but you want to be have that
capacity and have some predictability so that

301
00:22:48,319 --> 00:22:52,519
you know you can raise your babies. Most annuals don't provide that predictability.

302
00:22:53,400 --> 00:22:57,640
Some of those hanging out in the
seed bank for I'm sure there's some specialist

303
00:22:57,680 --> 00:23:03,400
bees. That's nothing is coming to
mind. That is centrists on Crimeria.

304
00:23:03,559 --> 00:23:06,839
That's what I think of the genus. Centris on Crimeria is a really weird

305
00:23:06,880 --> 00:23:11,599
fucking plant, and it's related to
krestod Actually it's in the order Zygophleles,

306
00:23:11,640 --> 00:23:15,240
but it's in its own family,
and it's a hemiparasite too, And you

307
00:23:15,279 --> 00:23:18,920
get them in Chile and then the
desert. So you get one species in

308
00:23:18,920 --> 00:23:22,599
Florida, but it grows in more
xeric areas, like drier areas. But

309
00:23:22,720 --> 00:23:26,119
I remember one in Chile that was
just fucking weird, and they got those

310
00:23:26,160 --> 00:23:30,519
pink orchid looking flowers and their petals
have been morphed into like these lipid producing

311
00:23:30,559 --> 00:23:34,160
plants too. Yeah, yeah,
so there's a I think we've talked about

312
00:23:34,160 --> 00:23:41,480
that before too. So oil producing
plants have co evolved with bees, like

313
00:23:41,559 --> 00:23:45,960
sixteen separate taxonomic times from the b
point of view, where that is,

314
00:23:45,440 --> 00:23:52,960
and so they're providing oils and I'm
not sure if it's instead of nector or

315
00:23:53,039 --> 00:23:59,200
in addition, but anyway, they
those bees are definitely specialists on oil producing

316
00:23:59,240 --> 00:24:04,000
plants. Maybe though they're like,
you know, this family's oil, this

317
00:24:04,359 --> 00:24:08,480
is fine as well as this family's
oil, but it's usually more complicated than

318
00:24:08,519 --> 00:24:12,039
that. And in the East,
the only oil collecting bees we have are

319
00:24:12,200 --> 00:24:21,759
Lysomachia specialists in the bee group acropis
what ischia again, so loose strife but

320
00:24:21,920 --> 00:24:26,839
the right yeah, yeah, yeah, And there's a couple out west,

321
00:24:26,880 --> 00:24:30,000
but I don't know that people have
found the bees out there. So most

322
00:24:30,000 --> 00:24:37,599
of the lysomachias are Eastern. And
it's also a group of plants and bees.

323
00:24:37,920 --> 00:24:41,160
Not so much the plants. The
plants you can still find, but

324
00:24:41,200 --> 00:24:45,319
the bees are that are the specialist
bees are really hard to find. And

325
00:24:45,359 --> 00:24:51,160
then there's a nest parasite of those
bees that was again on that list of

326
00:24:51,240 --> 00:24:55,640
like maybe it's gone because it hadn't
been seen in eighty years. There was

327
00:24:55,680 --> 00:24:59,279
a bee that was a nest parasite
of other bees. Yeah, twenty percent

328
00:24:59,440 --> 00:25:04,319
of all native bees are nest parasites. So they're coming in invading a nest.

329
00:25:04,599 --> 00:25:08,200
Lots of different strategies on how to
do this, lay their egg and

330
00:25:08,240 --> 00:25:11,839
then eat the young, or kill
the young and eat all the next door.

331
00:25:12,039 --> 00:25:17,119
Jesus Christ. That's always a good
story for people. And you know,

332
00:25:17,200 --> 00:25:21,720
talking to kids in elementary schools about
that, like just imagine if you're

333
00:25:22,200 --> 00:25:26,720
when you're born, your mom filled
your room with candy, but then close

334
00:25:26,759 --> 00:25:29,400
the door and turn out all the
lights, and then you're eating all your

335
00:25:29,400 --> 00:25:33,640
candy. Then suddenly you hear the
sound, and then the teacher is like,

336
00:25:33,920 --> 00:25:40,359
you know, giving you the Okay, that's enough, that's fucking hilarious,

337
00:25:40,680 --> 00:25:42,599
traumatizing kids. You leave. They're
all just sitting there, wide eyed

338
00:25:42,640 --> 00:25:47,519
and gate mouth legola good. I
could see a TV series on you know,

339
00:25:47,960 --> 00:25:55,799
analogs of insect biology of native bees
in the US. Do that they're

340
00:25:55,839 --> 00:26:00,960
nes parasitic? Yeah? Well worldwide, worldwide wide. Yeah, so anyway,

341
00:26:00,359 --> 00:26:06,319
so obviously the nest parasite is less
common than the host, and if

342
00:26:06,319 --> 00:26:10,160
the host is rare, that means
that the nest parasite is rare. And

343
00:26:10,200 --> 00:26:15,720
it appears that particular group, for
whatever reason, is less common than it

344
00:26:15,960 --> 00:26:18,960
was less commonly collected, which is
different, right, If you don't look

345
00:26:19,000 --> 00:26:22,640
for it, you don't find it. When we moved to our current place

346
00:26:23,319 --> 00:26:30,200
of where we work at Patuxent,
I was about thirty acres to play with.

347
00:26:30,319 --> 00:26:34,480
I was mowing a trail and I
looked over and I saw Lysimachi quadrifolia,

348
00:26:34,640 --> 00:26:37,400
one of the you know, it's
around kinds of things, and I

349
00:26:37,440 --> 00:26:41,119
said, thought, wouldn't it be
cool if I saw macropus on that.

350
00:26:41,480 --> 00:26:47,440
So I'm just on the lawnmower looking
over there, and I saw macropus.

351
00:26:47,519 --> 00:26:51,680
So we are one of the few
places in Maryland and we've been planting them

352
00:26:51,680 --> 00:26:55,960
in this past year. It's not
exactly the same location they actually showed up

353
00:26:55,960 --> 00:26:59,640
in our plantings. Do you think
I mean, since there weren't a lot

354
00:26:59,680 --> 00:27:03,079
of people paying attention to this except
bee biologists, and there's not in the

355
00:27:03,119 --> 00:27:04,680
popular culture. People are just so
ignorant to it, you'd think there have

356
00:27:04,720 --> 00:27:11,240
been a Do you think there were
species that were described or maybe not even

357
00:27:11,240 --> 00:27:14,480
described, and then when extinct,
they just disappeared because the habitat has been

358
00:27:14,480 --> 00:27:18,519
so thoroughly yeah, developed, could
be. We have, for example,

359
00:27:18,799 --> 00:27:23,720
a list of species that haven't been
seen in many years. But a lot

360
00:27:23,759 --> 00:27:27,880
of those when we look at that
they were rare to begin with. We

361
00:27:29,000 --> 00:27:33,359
refound a bunch others were taxonomically dubious, right, so there's not that much

362
00:27:33,400 --> 00:27:38,720
work. There's still many many undescribed
species of bees, particularly out west worldwide,

363
00:27:38,880 --> 00:27:44,720
huge numbers, so a lot of
this taxonomy came from one hundred years

364
00:27:44,759 --> 00:27:48,119
ago when we actually had a lot
of tax or fair number of taxonomists.

365
00:27:48,200 --> 00:27:55,000
They're more taxonomosts than there are now
in the United States. And they though

366
00:27:55,359 --> 00:27:59,720
they're communication, they didn't have the
Internet, right, so everyone was redescribing,

367
00:28:00,200 --> 00:28:03,880
like all one person described the male, another described a variant on the

368
00:28:03,960 --> 00:28:07,640
female, and there was those central
database. What would you because I think

369
00:28:07,640 --> 00:28:12,240
this stuff is totally fascinating now any
specialist relationship, any I pay so much

370
00:28:12,279 --> 00:28:15,640
attention to the insects I've seen now
than I did five years ago. What

371
00:28:15,640 --> 00:28:18,759
would you say to people that don't
get it? They're like, why is

372
00:28:18,759 --> 00:28:22,720
this important? Like someone's like,
you know, quasi racist grandpa, who's

373
00:28:22,759 --> 00:28:26,240
really mad that there's money being put
into this, Like how do you explain

374
00:28:27,039 --> 00:28:32,920
the depth of complexity and the food
chain and why the biosphere is important and

375
00:28:32,920 --> 00:28:38,079
why every block in that Jenga tower
is important? Yeah, so I don't

376
00:28:38,160 --> 00:28:41,279
use the Jenga tower, but I
use a brick house. Right, So

377
00:28:41,400 --> 00:28:45,759
if you have a brick house,
you can remove bricks. I a species

378
00:28:45,240 --> 00:28:52,440
for a while and then sections collapse. So that's a good analogy of what's

379
00:28:52,480 --> 00:28:56,200
going on. Additionally, like with
bees. We're in a much better shape

380
00:28:56,200 --> 00:29:02,200
than say with you know, leaf
mining insects. To put some dollars and

381
00:29:02,279 --> 00:29:06,359
cents on these things, yeah,
because they're pollinating things that we use.

382
00:29:06,480 --> 00:29:11,559
So no pollinator, you either have
a really expensive system where you're hand pollinating

383
00:29:11,640 --> 00:29:15,279
or you don't get it at all. Right, And so for the dummies

384
00:29:15,319 --> 00:29:17,920
that don't get it, you know, you have to put the monetary value

385
00:29:17,960 --> 00:29:21,319
on it. I just got it. So aggravating of the arrogance in that,

386
00:29:21,440 --> 00:29:23,279
like why is this important? It's
like someone taking a part of car.

387
00:29:23,319 --> 00:29:26,640
It's like me going into my fucking
truck and it's not working, and

388
00:29:26,680 --> 00:29:30,319
I'm like, what's wrong? Oh, something's wrong. I just start throwing

389
00:29:30,400 --> 00:29:32,319
fucking pieces out of it, you
know, And I'm like, well,

390
00:29:32,359 --> 00:29:33,559
all you need is the engine,
right, I mean, you know,

391
00:29:34,480 --> 00:29:38,400
completely oblivious to me. Yeah,
well nature is much better than your engine,

392
00:29:38,519 --> 00:29:42,599
right, Because one little thing goes
wrong with the engine, it's down.

393
00:29:44,200 --> 00:29:48,720
But with nature there's a lot of
capacity. So plant communities are obviously

394
00:29:48,759 --> 00:29:52,440
shifting all over the place. It
was only fourteen thousand years ago that this

395
00:29:52,480 --> 00:29:59,480
area was tundra, a glacial maximum, and so it's it's okay with a

396
00:29:59,519 --> 00:30:04,799
lot of chain and because of the
way the systems work, there's all this

397
00:30:04,920 --> 00:30:11,039
complexity. So there's one thing we
want to build back in that complexity into

398
00:30:11,079 --> 00:30:15,400
our used environments too, so we
have those buffers. It's a backup plan,

399
00:30:15,480 --> 00:30:18,119
right, That's what you mentioned in
your tongue there. It's good to

400
00:30:18,160 --> 00:30:22,200
have as many backup plans as possible. That's why you need biodiversity. The

401
00:30:22,240 --> 00:30:26,880
massive biodiversity is a fucking backup plan
should one or two things get knocked up

402
00:30:26,880 --> 00:30:30,359
by saying invasive pathogen or something else. Yeah, and you just I mean,

403
00:30:30,440 --> 00:30:34,960
just look through history. How we
think that we can solve something by

404
00:30:36,039 --> 00:30:40,920
removing a species or adding in a
predator like mongoose into Hawaii or something like

405
00:30:40,960 --> 00:30:44,079
that. Oh, that'll take care
of the rats. Oh, sorry forgot

406
00:30:44,119 --> 00:30:48,240
that. They are going to eat
all the native species ground nesting species too.

407
00:30:48,359 --> 00:30:53,640
So the difficulty is if you just
you know, shrug your shoulders and

408
00:30:53,680 --> 00:30:56,599
say nature is going to take care
of it. Well, maybe it will

409
00:30:56,640 --> 00:31:00,960
for a while if you have a
lot of natural enns and they're in pretty

410
00:31:00,000 --> 00:31:04,759
good shape. But now, as
you mentioned in the Maryland area and a

411
00:31:04,759 --> 00:31:10,400
lot of other areas, we're kind
of reaching the point where almost every natural

412
00:31:10,440 --> 00:31:15,079
area has to be consciously sustained and
maintained stewarded, right, because the invasives

413
00:31:15,079 --> 00:31:18,640
are so bad. Yeah, and
there's fire regimes. I mean, I

414
00:31:18,680 --> 00:31:22,640
saw that native smilax what do they
call it, greenbrier whatever. I don't

415
00:31:22,640 --> 00:31:26,240
know to comment, but it takes
over because it was adapted to fire.

416
00:31:26,279 --> 00:31:30,480
It's got these big tours. It's
a native. Yeah, so its technically

417
00:31:30,480 --> 00:31:33,839
can't be invasive, but it can
be very aggressive. And if fire isn't

418
00:31:33,880 --> 00:31:37,680
maintained, if you just let things, there's no stewardship there. Yeah,

419
00:31:37,799 --> 00:31:40,359
shit goes anyway. That's I mean, that really runs on the idea humans

420
00:31:40,400 --> 00:31:44,400
are part of nature. Yeah,
yeah, it's really So what we should

421
00:31:44,440 --> 00:31:49,240
be concentrating on probably is both working
out some of these taxonomies in life history.

422
00:31:49,319 --> 00:31:53,079
So you just need people looking around
and saying, oh, look this

423
00:31:53,160 --> 00:31:59,119
bee was here and now it's not. Oh there's a so andrena rennie is

424
00:31:59,200 --> 00:32:04,200
a door of the species of tree
that you're trying to bring back, because

425
00:32:04,599 --> 00:32:07,519
it's basically like the panda bear of
trees. Right, they're not thinking about

426
00:32:07,559 --> 00:32:12,359
all the other creatures that are associated
with those trees. They don't really even

427
00:32:12,400 --> 00:32:15,720
care about them per se. But
they should because, for example, the

428
00:32:15,799 --> 00:32:22,559
bee is probably a really effective pollinator
of Castanea, which requires, if I

429
00:32:22,640 --> 00:32:29,079
recall it has to be outcrossed with
at least another another plant. Yeah,

430
00:32:29,119 --> 00:32:31,960
they flower, the male and female
flowers. Supposedly they're self fertile. I

431
00:32:31,960 --> 00:32:37,640
don't know about that, but certainly
the male flowers go off before the female

432
00:32:37,680 --> 00:32:40,960
flowers. They're protandrus and they and
if you're in one of these orchards,

433
00:32:40,960 --> 00:32:45,319
which they people seem to conveniently plant
with their back crosses, you can see

434
00:32:45,319 --> 00:32:49,960
that the flowering isn't all at the
same time, so you're getting that naturally.

435
00:32:51,279 --> 00:32:57,079
How cool is it to have one
thing called a andrena rennie that only

436
00:32:57,240 --> 00:33:00,559
runs between the chestnuts versus bees.
Was like, oh, look there's a

437
00:33:00,640 --> 00:33:05,400
chestnut. I'll take some pollen,
but now I'm going to go to a

438
00:33:05,440 --> 00:33:08,160
different plant or something. I think
just from a philosophical perspective, it's cool

439
00:33:08,200 --> 00:33:12,920
too. I mean, it's you
want the greater perspective, You want to

440
00:33:12,960 --> 00:33:15,000
be aware of everything that's going on. It's so fascinating, it's so cool

441
00:33:15,039 --> 00:33:19,480
these things evolve together. Yeah,
what else? What else? Yeah?

442
00:33:19,519 --> 00:33:22,880
And what else is there too,
and that specialized relationship that we're not aware

443
00:33:22,920 --> 00:33:27,440
of yet. Well, that's a
core core principle of how we should be

444
00:33:27,519 --> 00:33:30,880
thinking about living on the earth is
that everything is of equal value. Let's

445
00:33:30,920 --> 00:33:35,279
call it that way. So you
know, there's no like, well we

446
00:33:35,359 --> 00:33:39,839
like the species, we don't like
that species. They're all essentially philosophically have

447
00:33:39,960 --> 00:33:47,359
the same internal or the same value, just as every person does. Right.

448
00:33:47,559 --> 00:33:52,880
No one argues, well, I
guess they do sometimes right, that

449
00:33:52,160 --> 00:33:58,039
different populations are not as good and
right, Yeah, so every everyone has

450
00:33:58,079 --> 00:34:02,039
the same rights, so the same
thing would be true in a way at

451
00:34:02,079 --> 00:34:07,480
a core value if you're thinking about
morality. And then it hasn't really been

452
00:34:07,519 --> 00:34:14,239
built into ethics platforms, but that
everything is equal and then you can but

453
00:34:14,360 --> 00:34:21,079
that doesn't resonate necessarily with people,
but the but fundamentally and philosophically, that's

454
00:34:21,079 --> 00:34:24,480
where you want to be working from
as a conservationist. Yeah. And then

455
00:34:25,199 --> 00:34:30,800
but the next level that people get
is like, you don't even know what's

456
00:34:30,840 --> 00:34:34,280
important? Right, We know so
little, And that's why we need to

457
00:34:34,280 --> 00:34:39,679
continue these investigations because we find things
that are actually and that's why it's that's

458
00:34:39,679 --> 00:34:44,119
why it's arrogant to hear that old
grandpa being like, this is a lot

459
00:34:44,119 --> 00:34:45,519
of iya to study this. It's
like, man, you have no idea.

460
00:34:46,039 --> 00:34:51,360
You had no idea about any thes
like there could be something that down

461
00:34:51,400 --> 00:34:55,639
the line of this relationships, down
this domino trail of relationships that eventually has

462
00:34:55,679 --> 00:34:59,159
a great impact on your life.
You know, it affects you. And

463
00:34:59,239 --> 00:35:02,280
I just think I got a friend
who's obsessed with with diesel engines. He

464
00:35:02,400 --> 00:35:06,199
was like preparing them, you know, he was worked for the railroad for

465
00:35:06,199 --> 00:35:07,679
a while to do with you,
and I never got it, but I

466
00:35:07,800 --> 00:35:12,880
was like to see him. He
wanted to know everything about how these engines

467
00:35:12,920 --> 00:35:15,159
worked and it was just fascinated by
it. Every little piece and that machine

468
00:35:15,440 --> 00:35:19,639
had an integral part. And he
was just yeah, I just love it.

469
00:35:19,679 --> 00:35:21,719
I'm just so And you could tell
it was like the same way I

470
00:35:21,760 --> 00:35:23,599
am with plants but about engines,
and I was you know, it's like

471
00:35:23,639 --> 00:35:27,599
the same mentality. It's like,
well, that's going to be the person

472
00:35:27,679 --> 00:35:30,239
you want, you know, around
when it comes to issues that affect that

473
00:35:30,400 --> 00:35:35,360
machine. Like he understands every component
of it. We need to understand every

474
00:35:35,360 --> 00:35:38,199
component of these intricate living systems,
you know, in case shit goes awry

475
00:35:38,960 --> 00:35:42,920
in any way that you know,
we need to figure out. Yeah,

476
00:35:43,119 --> 00:35:49,239
just I do we need to foster
the obsessive natural history people and you know,

477
00:35:49,320 --> 00:35:54,079
maybe even give them a job.
But but those I'm going to agree

478
00:35:54,119 --> 00:35:58,599
with you. So you can look
at it as diesel engines and then lots

479
00:35:58,639 --> 00:36:02,559
of people have these kinds of paths, but in natural history, the people

480
00:36:02,559 --> 00:36:07,840
who are really doing the high end
work there, it's not a job.

481
00:36:07,039 --> 00:36:12,119
It's like their lifestyle wherever they go. So that's what it's like with me

482
00:36:12,159 --> 00:36:14,360
and plants. It's like, yeah, wherever they go, they're like,

483
00:36:14,559 --> 00:36:16,760
I see you later, I'm going
to go for a walk. And they're

484
00:36:16,800 --> 00:36:21,679
looking for their critter group and they're
collecting at home, they're collecting on weekends

485
00:36:22,159 --> 00:36:29,239
or looking or observing, and I
naturalist is a nice new place where that's

486
00:36:29,280 --> 00:36:35,280
being fostered, whereas before it was
you know, really you had to be

487
00:36:35,519 --> 00:36:40,280
very self motivated and kind of have
much more a realization of what was available

488
00:36:40,800 --> 00:36:44,920
to go out. Like when I
was a kid, which was a long

489
00:36:44,920 --> 00:36:47,119
time ago, in the sixties,
you know, we got to watch Wild

490
00:36:47,239 --> 00:36:52,840
Kingdom and at night as a special
thing, and that was very inspiring.

491
00:36:52,880 --> 00:36:55,800
But it was like, I don't
know anyone like that. Those are super

492
00:36:55,800 --> 00:37:00,000
special people. And you know,
I grew up in a blue collar neighbor

493
00:37:00,079 --> 00:37:02,599
hood and there was you know,
my I was my parents were in it

494
00:37:02,840 --> 00:37:08,920
in Lewisdale on the edge of Washington, d C. And so it was

495
00:37:09,039 --> 00:37:14,239
like, well, okay, that's
cool, but people, you know,

496
00:37:14,400 --> 00:37:19,199
Jim jumping on a back of a
crocodile and wrestling it like those are I

497
00:37:19,360 --> 00:37:22,199
never could be that, Like that
is not accessible to me. I can

498
00:37:22,280 --> 00:37:28,599
never become that person, you know, and because I have zero models surrounding

499
00:37:28,599 --> 00:37:30,199
me, and now I think,
you know, there are you know,

500
00:37:30,239 --> 00:37:36,480
one of the good things about social
media and media is kids in particular can

501
00:37:36,519 --> 00:37:43,760
find their group online and so like
I've got a thirteen year old who volunteers

502
00:37:43,760 --> 00:37:47,119
at the lab is one of the
is one of the best firefly experts in

503
00:37:47,159 --> 00:37:52,679
Maryland. He and another kid now
so he's maybe not a kid, but

504
00:37:53,760 --> 00:37:58,760
still, you know, they know
more than almost anyone else. And they're

505
00:37:58,800 --> 00:38:04,000
like curating the the Maryland Biodiversity site
and that's so cool. And how you

506
00:38:04,079 --> 00:38:07,119
had access to information if it wasn't
you know what I mean? So I

507
00:38:07,119 --> 00:38:12,800
think that's that's one of the positives
these days, is you because of your

508
00:38:12,800 --> 00:38:16,679
cell phone, you can find people, whereas before it was like when I

509
00:38:16,719 --> 00:38:22,559
did it, it was through the
library and then just through kind of persistence

510
00:38:23,320 --> 00:38:27,519
that I expl here. All right, quick story. So I would go

511
00:38:27,559 --> 00:38:30,639
to the library and I'd check out
one of the two copies of birds of

512
00:38:30,679 --> 00:38:34,239
Maryland District of Columbia, which was
a technical thing, but I was that's

513
00:38:34,239 --> 00:38:37,159
what I was interested is birds,
and so I'd have one out and at

514
00:38:37,159 --> 00:38:40,199
some point it's like, I need
to buy a copy of these because I

515
00:38:40,239 --> 00:38:45,920
don't want to go to the library
every two weeks. And so my dad

516
00:38:45,920 --> 00:38:49,239
said, well that was printed by
the government, the government printing offices in

517
00:38:49,360 --> 00:38:52,480
DC. When you call them,
so I called them, they said out

518
00:38:52,519 --> 00:38:58,400
of print. Then someone else mentioned
that they thought one of the authors,

519
00:38:58,480 --> 00:39:04,000
Chan Robbins, lived in the air
and I thought, okay, famous ornithologist

520
00:39:04,039 --> 00:39:07,039
lives in Washington, d C.
Looked him up in the telephone book.

521
00:39:07,079 --> 00:39:10,000
There was Chandler S. Robins.
I wrote him a letter because I wanted

522
00:39:10,039 --> 00:39:13,280
to buy a book from him.
I figured he had a stash in his

523
00:39:13,360 --> 00:39:19,320
basement and he wrote back, well, he didn't write back because it wasn't

524
00:39:19,639 --> 00:39:22,840
the chandler s Robins, it was
his cousin, and his cousin forwarded it

525
00:39:23,159 --> 00:39:29,800
Chan and then Chan wrote me back, and his wife invited me to the

526
00:39:29,800 --> 00:39:36,519
Maryland Ornithological Society meetings game on.
And I still work where Chan works at

527
00:39:36,519 --> 00:39:40,280
the production at Research Center. So
yeah, but it was a lot of

528
00:39:40,760 --> 00:39:45,039
it was a lot of. Yeah. I remember hanging out in libraries if

529
00:39:45,039 --> 00:39:45,880
I wanted, if I wanted to
use the Internet, I had to go

530
00:39:45,880 --> 00:39:49,599
to the library. We didn't.
I mean, I was on the road

531
00:39:49,599 --> 00:39:52,360
all the time. It's not the
internet. You guys what slide rules?

532
00:39:53,400 --> 00:39:57,360
Yeah, exactly. Oh god,
I know what is the microfe or something.

533
00:39:58,440 --> 00:40:01,639
It's how you did. You didn't
have calculators even like I'm old,

534
00:40:01,960 --> 00:40:09,320
so you've retained your youth though,
sir, you look great. Okay,

535
00:40:09,360 --> 00:40:16,159
So let's so let's talk about I
guess going back to specialization tomatoes. Yeah,

536
00:40:16,280 --> 00:40:19,480
or I didn't know that you mentioned
something that. I mean, I

537
00:40:19,519 --> 00:40:22,960
know Solanum the genus, which is
fucking huge. It's one how many different

538
00:40:22,960 --> 00:40:27,719
sections that aren't it. It's like
Euphorbia there's like eight hundred spees or something.

539
00:40:27,719 --> 00:40:30,960
But uh, they're pooricidal anthers.
You know, instead of you got

540
00:40:30,960 --> 00:40:34,679
a anther, it looks like a
banana. Instead of splitting, you know,

541
00:40:35,000 --> 00:40:37,880
longitudinally, it's just got a little
hole at the end of it.

542
00:40:37,159 --> 00:40:42,719
All solanums as far as I know
them, pepper shakers, right right,

543
00:40:42,800 --> 00:40:45,519
Yeah, I'd like to use the
analogy of the cereal dispenser at the roadside.

544
00:40:45,679 --> 00:40:49,920
Yeah, you know, ship motel
or whatever. But but uh,

545
00:40:49,960 --> 00:40:53,880
anyway, the point is, so
this being that they're buzz pollinated. Because

546
00:40:53,920 --> 00:40:59,360
poorricidal anthers are inherently buzz pollinated,
they need a specialist pollinator. So honey

547
00:40:59,440 --> 00:41:04,519
bees are not really efficient pollinators of
tomatoes. Huh uh, No, they're

548
00:41:04,559 --> 00:41:08,760
not. And so in greenhouse,
well you can't really put honey bees in

549
00:41:08,840 --> 00:41:15,400
greenhouse anyway. Okay, so the
dog just just tripped the wire and the

550
00:41:15,400 --> 00:41:20,360
the mics came off. But anyway, so, okay, we were talking

551
00:41:20,400 --> 00:41:25,920
about specialist pollination of tomatoes, and
so honey bees don't really they don't do

552
00:41:25,960 --> 00:41:30,119
the buzz pollination that that well oh
wait, let me I think that.

553
00:41:30,159 --> 00:41:34,119
Yeah, they're get your MinC that's
right. So what so what how are

554
00:41:34,199 --> 00:41:37,880
tomatoes pollinated that in a commercial let's
let's back up for a seconds. So

555
00:41:37,039 --> 00:41:42,840
a wide variety of plants, including
a lot of Irricasian shrubs and things use

556
00:41:43,239 --> 00:41:47,159
need to be buzz pollinated to effectively
pollinate. Right, They still can be

557
00:41:47,239 --> 00:41:52,559
pollinated without by insects that are not
doing buzz pollination, but that's the system

558
00:41:52,599 --> 00:41:59,840
of design to do that, and
it's not really a like many bees in

559
00:42:00,360 --> 00:42:04,440
western hemisphere do that, and they're
not necessarily specialist. So bumble bees which

560
00:42:04,440 --> 00:42:07,840
are not specialist bees, they can't
be right because they're out throughout the year,

561
00:42:07,960 --> 00:42:13,320
they do buzz pollination. But also
specialists do buzz pollination, So on

562
00:42:13,480 --> 00:42:16,920
vacciniums, there's a whole series of
bees that are specialists, and they also

563
00:42:16,960 --> 00:42:20,239
buzz pollen. Right, And if
you look at the anthers of any of

564
00:42:20,239 --> 00:42:22,320
the members of Eric Casey that do
this with a hand lens, you can

565
00:42:22,360 --> 00:42:24,719
see the little poor at the end, and if you hold a tuning fork

566
00:42:24,800 --> 00:42:30,559
up to them too the right frequency, it'll cause those That's how they often

567
00:42:30,719 --> 00:42:38,920
did or something similar mechanically. And
tomato production and greenhouses. So yeah,

568
00:42:38,960 --> 00:42:45,360
so the you know, the basic
story is I understand it is bees unhinge,

569
00:42:45,000 --> 00:42:52,320
whatever that means their wings and just
vibrate their muscles and it cause it's

570
00:42:52,360 --> 00:42:57,079
like singing the right you know note, so like your tuning fork. And

571
00:42:57,159 --> 00:43:02,079
then the pollen comes out and they
gathered up. Okay, there we go.

572
00:43:04,320 --> 00:43:08,159
All right. So so we were
talking, Yeah, we were talking

573
00:43:08,159 --> 00:43:13,239
about salina pollination, buzz pollination,
and tomatoes. So and you were saying,

574
00:43:13,280 --> 00:43:17,519
bumble bees generalists. A lot of
different groups of bees are capable of

575
00:43:17,519 --> 00:43:22,639
buzz pollination in eastern North America.
I don't know the exact ones. Bumble

576
00:43:22,639 --> 00:43:29,320
bees and a bunch of the andrena
are obvious examples. And but it's not

577
00:43:29,760 --> 00:43:37,280
like porcidal anthers. Doesn't automatically mean
that a specialist bee is going to visit

578
00:43:37,360 --> 00:43:42,079
you if you define it as I
only go to tomatoes, right right right.

579
00:43:42,079 --> 00:43:45,239
But let's say you're like a commercial
you got no interest in botany or

580
00:43:45,239 --> 00:43:47,679
bees an stuff. You're a commercial
tomato grower. Honey bees are not going

581
00:43:47,679 --> 00:43:50,880
to cut so what do you gotta
what do you have to do to get

582
00:43:50,880 --> 00:43:55,559
these? So people now in terms
of uh what and again my understanding is

583
00:43:55,639 --> 00:44:01,119
tomatoes can self, but if you
want really like bigger and more tomatoes,

584
00:44:01,199 --> 00:44:05,480
then you need to bring in a
pollinator. Obviously that has to be true

585
00:44:05,519 --> 00:44:09,559
because people are paying good money to
purchase colonies of bumblebees, which now can

586
00:44:09,599 --> 00:44:15,360
be raised year round in warehouses.
So bumblebees as opposed to honeybees, and

587
00:44:15,559 --> 00:44:22,519
they use the native bumble bees or
European ones well, so complicated answer.

588
00:44:22,719 --> 00:44:30,199
So in the United States you can
only use Bombus impatience and other native species

589
00:44:30,199 --> 00:44:35,599
that are now being developed out west, different species. There was some messing

590
00:44:35,639 --> 00:44:42,480
around as usual with moving bumblebees between
the continents. Bombas terrestris of different species

591
00:44:42,559 --> 00:44:45,599
in Europe is used for the same
mean when you say you can only use

592
00:44:45,639 --> 00:44:50,119
you mean legally like per regulation.
Yeah, but there was some moving of

593
00:44:50,199 --> 00:44:53,039
bumblebees around when they were trying to
develop this, and there wasn't again this

594
00:44:53,119 --> 00:44:58,519
sort of notion that would be a
problem. And we got a series of

595
00:44:59,480 --> 00:45:05,840
bumblebee viruses at least that seems to
be the most logical conclusion on the patterns

596
00:45:05,840 --> 00:45:10,400
that we see and the virus showing
up at that same time that it was

597
00:45:10,440 --> 00:45:17,360
brought in from these visitations across the
Atlantic, five bumble bees moving back and

598
00:45:17,360 --> 00:45:22,880
forth Tasmania, and there's European honeybees
down there we were like a Cradle Mountain

599
00:45:22,960 --> 00:45:27,079
National Park in Tasmania. They got
European honeybee. They also have European oh

600
00:45:27,119 --> 00:45:29,960
but yeah, I will say they
also have European bumble bees. So does

601
00:45:30,000 --> 00:45:35,920
New Zealand, so does now throughout
South America, and they have problems.

602
00:45:35,960 --> 00:45:40,159
There's problems with that, both in
terms of disease vectors for these pathogens that

603
00:45:40,239 --> 00:45:46,920
are crashing some of the native bumblebee
populations. The only endangered species on the

604
00:45:46,960 --> 00:45:52,360
books in the lower forty eight that's
a bee is Bomba saphanus, which was

605
00:45:52,400 --> 00:45:55,960
one of the most common bumblebees,
but the pathogens took it down and now

606
00:45:55,960 --> 00:46:01,800
there's only two populations remaining. And
then there's a another bumblebee. I don't

607
00:46:01,800 --> 00:46:06,639
know how this works, but they
haven't found it in years that is basically

608
00:46:06,760 --> 00:46:09,679
extinct out west. Same problem.
What was do you know much about that?

609
00:46:09,800 --> 00:46:15,280
The Rusty patch bumblebee that was endangered
in Illinois? Really yeah, Bombas

610
00:46:15,320 --> 00:46:22,199
alpinush So that's one of the So
the Four Corners area Iowa, Illinois,

611
00:46:22,639 --> 00:46:30,199
Wisconsin, Minnesota is it the Four
Corners But that's where Bombas alphanus. That's

612
00:46:30,199 --> 00:46:35,880
the biggest population of remaining Bombas halfinus, and weirdly, they often end up

613
00:46:35,880 --> 00:46:42,079
in cities, so Minneapolis has populations
and there's but they're in the countryside too.

614
00:46:42,199 --> 00:46:45,800
There was a spot in Rockford there
was a prairie, little Bellbull prairie

615
00:46:45,840 --> 00:46:50,360
that they've so fucking obscene. It's
like it's like something out of a Simpsons

616
00:46:50,400 --> 00:46:53,039
cartoon. It's so cynical. But
they demolished this prairie to build like a

617
00:46:53,119 --> 00:46:59,480
landing strip for Amazon so people can
get their fucking inflatable dolls or whatever dumb

618
00:46:59,480 --> 00:47:02,119
shit there were, or you know, the fucking Sharper Image kettle. Yeah,

619
00:47:02,119 --> 00:47:05,880
I guess, so they demolished it
for it was insane, like there's

620
00:47:05,880 --> 00:47:08,800
no you guys couldn't pick another fucking
spot, you know, and this huge

621
00:47:08,840 --> 00:47:15,159
flat state it was obviously wastelam.
Yeah, there's no houses, fucking so

622
00:47:15,760 --> 00:47:19,480
ship for brain man God and that
that bee was there. But I guess

623
00:47:19,519 --> 00:47:22,480
it's been popping up, like someone
told me it popped up in Evanston too,

624
00:47:22,480 --> 00:47:24,440
And so what took what took this
down? This was a pathogen or

625
00:47:24,480 --> 00:47:31,880
what? Yeah, so not absolute, but all the vectors of evidence points

626
00:47:31,920 --> 00:47:39,599
to the I said, of European
pathogens that were likely showed up in America

627
00:47:39,800 --> 00:47:43,639
because they were moving bumble bees back
and forth. Damn, this is why

628
00:47:43,679 --> 00:47:46,559
we don't move shit around. I
don't meet invasive species deniers too much anymore,

629
00:47:46,960 --> 00:47:50,039
but they're still out there. You
find a lot of them in like

630
00:47:50,119 --> 00:47:53,400
permaculture community who don't haven't really learned
ecology yet, you know. Yeah,

631
00:47:53,440 --> 00:47:58,639
it's usually because and the reason you
hear that is there's sort of a shallow

632
00:47:58,719 --> 00:48:02,480
understanding, right the problem with this
it's got bees on it provides. That's

633
00:48:02,519 --> 00:48:06,760
another thing I want to ask you, mister sam Is. So we we

634
00:48:06,880 --> 00:48:08,079
talk about you hear that ship all
the time. Are you here like this,

635
00:48:08,519 --> 00:48:10,519
Well, this plant we shouldn't get
rid of it. It might be

636
00:48:10,559 --> 00:48:15,320
a basive, but it's provided it's
got bees on it. It's fucking eighty

637
00:48:15,360 --> 00:48:16,679
percent honey bees. And then you
look at it and you're like, well,

638
00:48:17,119 --> 00:48:21,760
well wait, our native plants produce
flowers too, Why is this better?

639
00:48:22,199 --> 00:48:25,400
There's it's got all these other things. It's invading habitat and who cares

640
00:48:25,400 --> 00:48:30,119
if it's producing a little bit of
nectar or colin benefit? What about our

641
00:48:30,199 --> 00:48:35,000
native plant? Is it true that
native plants generally work better with the native

642
00:48:35,239 --> 00:48:40,400
insects because they've evolved him as opposed
to Yeah, Doug telling me it is

643
00:48:40,440 --> 00:48:44,440
another good person to look into you. In fact, you should talk and

644
00:48:44,599 --> 00:48:45,320
I tried to. We've reached out
to him. I don't know if he's

645
00:48:45,360 --> 00:48:49,360
just super busy or if he's just
doesn't like the crime beaze. Maybe he's

646
00:48:49,400 --> 00:48:52,559
he cold shouldered us. Oh,
really interesting, who knows? I like

647
00:48:52,639 --> 00:48:55,320
Doug. He I think he's just
so busy. Yeah, that's what I

648
00:48:55,360 --> 00:48:59,480
think. He's really on call because
he's written sever I mean, it's Chicago

649
00:48:59,519 --> 00:49:01,320
a tang. I think people don't
like me and to be fair somewhere though

650
00:49:01,320 --> 00:49:06,360
they might not. But but you
know, it's always a little more inflated

651
00:49:06,360 --> 00:49:09,079
in my you know, I know
anyway, But well, Doug's from New

652
00:49:09,159 --> 00:49:16,239
Jersey, so not that I'm saying, but the way, so it's the

653
00:49:16,239 --> 00:49:21,880
same thing. So Doug is looking
at plants through a lens of caterpillars,

654
00:49:21,960 --> 00:49:25,960
moths, and butterflies mostly mods,
and then I'm looking at plants through a

655
00:49:27,039 --> 00:49:32,800
lens of bees, and many other
taxonomic groups will look also at plants like

656
00:49:32,920 --> 00:49:38,960
leafhoppers highly specialized on our native grasses. And the thing about invasives is when

657
00:49:39,000 --> 00:49:45,000
you look take your little lens out, you look at your marvel butterflies and

658
00:49:45,159 --> 00:49:51,880
lepidoptera, and you'll see that they, you know, there's almost nothing on

659
00:49:51,920 --> 00:49:54,920
them like there are there might be
some like bagworms on some of the weird

660
00:49:55,280 --> 00:50:01,280
leland Cyprus, but then a pest
kind of operat And then you'll look at

661
00:50:01,920 --> 00:50:05,320
the bees and it's like, oh, yeah, they're bees, and maybe

662
00:50:05,320 --> 00:50:07,880
a lot, but they're all,
you know, honey bees and a couple

663
00:50:07,960 --> 00:50:13,239
generalists of the native species. They're
not supporting. They're attracting, but not

664
00:50:13,280 --> 00:50:20,039
supporting species. And so they're one
taking up space that could be occupied by

665
00:50:20,119 --> 00:50:29,480
something that is providing a valuable component
to the native environment. And then also

666
00:50:30,239 --> 00:50:37,440
a lot of the species of native
plants are the only source of food.

667
00:50:37,599 --> 00:50:40,760
Let's call it for a whole suite
of native insects, so they can't be

668
00:50:40,800 --> 00:50:45,639
like, well I was on chestnut, now I'm gonna, you know,

669
00:50:46,760 --> 00:50:51,599
work on you know, ilanthus.
So it just doesn't work like that.

670
00:50:51,760 --> 00:50:54,280
But you can still find things critters. But if you're not looking at it

671
00:50:54,519 --> 00:50:59,280
at any depth, then ilanthus,
you know, it blooms, it's got

672
00:50:59,280 --> 00:51:02,760
bees come to I don't you know
that? And it's like, uh,

673
00:51:04,400 --> 00:51:07,679
you know, a tree that is
growing somewhere pretty tough, So maybe we

674
00:51:07,719 --> 00:51:16,639
should just embrace right right now.
It's the main host for what's the flying

675
00:51:16,840 --> 00:51:22,239
sucking in the insect that I can't
just came in. Oh lantern, Yeah,

676
00:51:22,320 --> 00:51:27,079
lantern fly that everyone hates. Yeah, so you know, on and

677
00:51:27,119 --> 00:51:30,239
on yeah, yeah, And it
makes complete sense when you think about it.

678
00:51:30,320 --> 00:51:34,639
I mean, who knew that eighty
million years of separation between Europe the

679
00:51:34,639 --> 00:51:38,480
European continent in North America would mean
that, you know, each one of

680
00:51:38,480 --> 00:51:43,760
those contents has its own specialized ecosystems
that all relate to each other, but

681
00:51:43,920 --> 00:51:46,840
not to other, you know,
the one across the ocean. I mean,

682
00:51:47,119 --> 00:51:52,199
uh, it's you know, it's
been developed over one hundred and twenty

683
00:51:52,199 --> 00:51:57,039
five one hundred and twenty million years. Like something complicated is going to happen,

684
00:51:57,440 --> 00:52:00,159
and you can't just like it's not
legos. Yeah again to use the

685
00:52:00,280 --> 00:52:04,119
car analogy, and I think I'm
going to start doing that more because that's

686
00:52:04,159 --> 00:52:07,519
the easiest way, you know,
for like the lowest common denominator for people

687
00:52:07,679 --> 00:52:10,280
to understand it. You can't take
a piece from a Honda and try to

688
00:52:10,320 --> 00:52:14,800
put it in a Chevy. It's
not gonna it doesn't work, like duh,

689
00:52:14,840 --> 00:52:17,880
Like that's like completely obvious to a
lot of people who are, you

690
00:52:17,920 --> 00:52:22,239
know, ecologically illiterate. But it's
the same with ecosystems. You know,

691
00:52:22,360 --> 00:52:30,760
it's they're not and are not part
and not supporting the many, many complex

692
00:52:30,840 --> 00:52:35,000
systems. They're breaking it apart.
And so what do you do you,

693
00:52:35,199 --> 00:52:37,880
I mean, do you see more
people doing the this that, like the

694
00:52:37,960 --> 00:52:40,320
killer long thing with your yards get
rid of their their grass here being like,

695
00:52:40,320 --> 00:52:43,760
well, we want to support pilonaires
And maybe they don't really understand the

696
00:52:43,840 --> 00:52:45,400
native thing at first, but then
they eventually get into it. Like that's

697
00:52:45,679 --> 00:52:49,639
a couple I interviewed that just changed
the lag. They were like, we

698
00:52:49,719 --> 00:52:51,960
just wanted to have gardens. You
know, those guys were great. I

699
00:52:52,039 --> 00:52:54,360
was actually shocked that worked. But
good for them and that. But now

700
00:52:54,360 --> 00:52:57,800
they're all about natives too, and
they're like, yeah, we want to

701
00:52:57,840 --> 00:53:00,320
take this out. It's not like
they have the great mertle. I want

702
00:53:00,360 --> 00:53:02,760
to take this out. It's not
really made the way to really get a

703
00:53:02,840 --> 00:53:07,800
measure of that, because of course, both you and I probably don't talk

704
00:53:07,880 --> 00:53:10,119
to the average person an awful lot
to get you know, we're not doing

705
00:53:10,119 --> 00:53:16,000
surveys of the mentality, but is
you look at nursery providers, like the

706
00:53:16,039 --> 00:53:22,960
commercial nursery groups and the commercial garden
centers and things, and you're seeing native

707
00:53:23,000 --> 00:53:30,920
plant sections come in. You're seeing
them that the growers have a have people

708
00:53:30,079 --> 00:53:37,079
now who are are developing their native
plant line and you and so I've talked

709
00:53:37,079 --> 00:53:40,599
to that groups now and then they
basically said, like, yeah, twenty

710
00:53:40,679 --> 00:53:45,920
years ago, there was zero,
like there was no interest in It was

711
00:53:45,960 --> 00:53:52,400
all about, you know, the
usual suspects in terms of what what's got

712
00:53:52,480 --> 00:53:57,440
thrown. Maybe a couple of them
have a have roots in native speace,

713
00:53:57,519 --> 00:54:02,280
but that was just an accident.
Right now, it's a conscious effort to

714
00:54:02,440 --> 00:54:07,679
use grow and for a lot of
people, it's like they're beginning to get

715
00:54:07,679 --> 00:54:15,000
the message that it's important to put
native species back into these environments. And

716
00:54:15,039 --> 00:54:17,559
I think probably the people you talk
to might have mentioned that there's now bigger

717
00:54:17,679 --> 00:54:23,320
legislation where the state has h I
don't know what, at well level mandated

718
00:54:23,360 --> 00:54:27,800
the use of native plants within municipalities
and oh yeah, yeah, I know

719
00:54:27,920 --> 00:54:30,039
a friend of mine in Miami just
did that in his little neighborhood. It's

720
00:54:30,079 --> 00:54:36,039
they can't the city can't plant anything
except natives, now, which is fucking

721
00:54:36,039 --> 00:54:37,440
great. I mean, that's incredible. I'm not even sure what they would

722
00:54:37,440 --> 00:54:43,480
plant anymore. Like Miami has had
certain bee species and those that might be

723
00:54:43,519 --> 00:54:49,519
one of the places that we can't
find some of these bees but are so

724
00:54:49,920 --> 00:54:52,960
devastated there's nothing left. Yeah,
well, right, good to Fort Lauderdale,

725
00:54:53,039 --> 00:54:59,599
Miami, and you have like good
luck finding anything native. It's all

726
00:54:59,719 --> 00:55:02,400
and it it's something that could be
native. It's just mode to an inch

727
00:55:02,440 --> 00:55:08,920
of its life so that you don't
get, you know, an alligator coming

728
00:55:09,000 --> 00:55:13,239
up on you or whatever. Yeah, but then you have to go to

729
00:55:13,360 --> 00:55:15,159
the Everglades, which have their own
set of problems. Yeah. Yeah,

730
00:55:15,199 --> 00:55:19,320
I just I laugh because I hear
this shit and it's just so shit for

731
00:55:19,360 --> 00:55:22,360
brain to me. I mean,
I that's an ineloquent way to put it,

732
00:55:22,360 --> 00:55:23,679
but you know what I mean,
it's just so, you know,

733
00:55:23,719 --> 00:55:27,840
like the mowing thing, like just
people just love the most and people just

734
00:55:27,880 --> 00:55:30,239
it's like a thing you do.
I think a lot of suburban guys that

735
00:55:30,320 --> 00:55:36,000
probably gives them a sense of duty
in an otherwise maybe empty life. I

736
00:55:36,039 --> 00:55:37,480
don't know. I don't know,
but but yeah, we went to Lauren's

737
00:55:37,599 --> 00:55:40,760
Natives, which is in Elacott City, Yeah up here, and it's fucking

738
00:55:40,840 --> 00:55:44,639
She's like, we can't keep up
with the man we're running. I mean,

739
00:55:44,679 --> 00:55:46,280
it's fucking great to hear. It's
like Jesus Christ, that's amazing.

740
00:55:46,559 --> 00:55:51,159
So I'll jump in on the mowing
thing. So, you know, there

741
00:55:51,199 --> 00:55:55,199
is this interest now and doing flipping
lawns and putting in a pollinator garden and

742
00:55:55,280 --> 00:56:00,599
things. But the you know,
a bigger impact area for people to look

743
00:56:00,639 --> 00:56:07,360
into involves working with municipalities, maybe
some legislation kinds of things, and that

744
00:56:07,480 --> 00:56:13,320
is mowing regimes. So the if
you look at transmission lines, you look

745
00:56:13,360 --> 00:56:21,199
at road sides, utility lines.
So the utility companies are almost always like

746
00:56:21,239 --> 00:56:22,719
nobody wants them, right, they
don't want them in their backyards. So

747
00:56:23,039 --> 00:56:28,440
they're very responsive, usually responsive to
the surrounding owners and a lot of times

748
00:56:28,719 --> 00:56:32,559
what they hear is mowing, like
we want it to look like our suburban

749
00:56:32,639 --> 00:56:38,880
backyards. So and then municipalities,
for a variety of reasons, haven't quite

750
00:56:39,239 --> 00:56:45,800
got onto that dandwagon of native plants. And then when they do, they're

751
00:56:45,840 --> 00:56:47,960
like, well, at our headquarters, we put in a native plant garden,

752
00:56:49,360 --> 00:56:52,360
you know, and that's good because
it probably was a million acres of

753
00:56:52,440 --> 00:56:57,639
lawn and at least one acre is
not. But the bigger picture is stop

754
00:56:57,840 --> 00:57:02,800
mowing in the middle of the growing
season because you're basically whatever could be growing

755
00:57:02,840 --> 00:57:08,960
there is mowed down, like you're
mowing down all the flowers up. Shift

756
00:57:09,000 --> 00:57:15,039
to these areas that have to be
kept open to a winter mow. So

757
00:57:15,079 --> 00:57:21,199
that that means working with the contractors, That means working with the communities and

758
00:57:21,239 --> 00:57:24,199
saying, look, we're going to
do a big pollinator effort, which is

759
00:57:24,320 --> 00:57:29,639
something that people are more and more
aware of and have positive feelings about.

760
00:57:30,159 --> 00:57:34,320
And our effort is going to be
huge. We're shifting to winter mowing.

761
00:57:34,559 --> 00:57:43,639
We will produce on unbelievable acreages and
impacts and native plants and bloom and pollinator

762
00:57:43,639 --> 00:57:46,920
species and by the way, a
million other kinds of things because we're just

763
00:57:47,039 --> 00:57:52,800
going to not mow them down.
And I don't think that's a I think

764
00:57:52,840 --> 00:57:57,920
a aha for people because they think
I have to plant to do this.

765
00:57:57,920 --> 00:58:02,079
This this whole thing about native plants
and pollinators and gardens and saving them means

766
00:58:02,360 --> 00:58:07,119
I have to go plant something,
and true good, but it's really difficult

767
00:58:07,199 --> 00:58:13,079
to plant things in any kind of
acreage. Thing. And many of these

768
00:58:13,159 --> 00:58:19,639
transmission lines are going through poor soils, crappy areas. They are full of

769
00:58:19,880 --> 00:58:27,360
uncommon repressed plants and propagules that if
you stopped mowing, or I mean stop

770
00:58:27,400 --> 00:58:30,800
mowing in the summer, would perform
miracles. Yeah, rare thing. You

771
00:58:30,840 --> 00:58:35,199
find a lot of cool native perennials
coming up in these, like the milk

772
00:58:35,239 --> 00:58:37,159
weeds or the less bit these I
see less but these on the freeways here,

773
00:58:37,159 --> 00:58:44,400
that that pee, that leg that's
mostly Lesbidisa cirica or whatever, which

774
00:58:44,480 --> 00:58:50,840
is the I don't know, Korean
Lesbidesa's super invasive. Oh my god,

775
00:58:51,199 --> 00:58:55,840
there aren't natives. But you usually
have to go to the extreme edges like

776
00:58:57,159 --> 00:59:01,880
super drowdy sandy to see someone brought
that over just in a garden. You

777
00:59:01,880 --> 00:59:06,280
know, it's used commonly still.
I think you can buy like a million

778
00:59:06,280 --> 00:59:09,800
pounds of it for your cattle ranch. Jesus Christ. But it's a really

779
00:59:10,079 --> 00:59:16,079
tough plant, like it'll live in
sod as a repressed little being that is

780
00:59:16,159 --> 00:59:19,679
just waiting for you to stop mowing
it all the time. Oh god,

781
00:59:20,199 --> 00:59:24,039
and alters the soil chemistry. I
got you guys have an invasive one on

782
00:59:24,159 --> 00:59:29,840
here. I was thinking it was
cuneata. The damn that's wow, it's

783
00:59:30,320 --> 00:59:36,119
it's a nasty oh my god.
Well anyway, yeah, I guess there

784
00:59:36,199 --> 00:59:37,719
was another thing you stated in that
Ted talk was that the big issue for

785
00:59:37,760 --> 00:59:43,400
wild bees is and pesticides is primarily
habitat loss. Like the whole neo the

786
00:59:43,519 --> 00:59:47,119
continoid thing, that's the neocontinents,
that's all that's mostly affecting honey bees or

787
00:59:47,159 --> 00:59:52,360
what well, so neo nicks as
they are often called. But pesticides in

788
00:59:52,440 --> 01:00:00,199
general are an impact where you have
bees and the pesticides cross paths, so

789
01:00:00,719 --> 01:00:04,440
in suburban areas. Yes, one
of the big problems now are all the

790
01:00:05,280 --> 01:00:15,519
mosquito companies that come and sort of
work off the hypochondriac like every mosquito is

791
01:00:15,559 --> 01:00:20,159
carrying xecovirus, going to kill my
darlings, and the neighbors are doing it.

792
01:00:20,480 --> 01:00:24,639
So whereas formerly that was a subsidized
floral environment in my opinion, where

793
01:00:24,639 --> 01:00:30,559
you had a lot of bloom in
the summer when it declines here and as

794
01:00:30,639 --> 01:00:35,039
good for pollinators and at least the
generalists now it's a question mark because of

795
01:00:35,079 --> 01:00:37,800
that. What was good for pollinators? What do you mean, well suburbs,

796
01:00:38,000 --> 01:00:42,800
Oh yeah, yeah, flowers in
the summer want flowers. Now what

797
01:00:42,880 --> 01:00:47,039
they were is variable. But you
know, there's all this new interest in

798
01:00:47,199 --> 01:00:52,400
native plants and stuff. So what
kind of problem is it when you have

799
01:00:52,760 --> 01:00:58,840
your quarter acre lot filled with native
plants but your neighbors all spray for mosquitoes

800
01:00:59,000 --> 01:01:04,119
and those these are not like I'm
only staying here though, it's the spray

801
01:01:04,239 --> 01:01:07,039
is drifting over, so I'm going
to move out saying that that's the thing

802
01:01:07,079 --> 01:01:09,360
I mean. I saw that at
a at a big box store in Texas.

803
01:01:09,400 --> 01:01:14,320
There were these uh yeah, fuck, what the fuck? You just

804
01:01:14,480 --> 01:01:19,320
nuke the You just nuke the surrounding
biosphere with right, Well we did that

805
01:01:19,400 --> 01:01:22,480
during DDT. What a great chemical. When you spray it, everything is

806
01:01:22,559 --> 01:01:25,920
dead and it's cheap. So you
did every two weeks you would spray r

807
01:01:27,000 --> 01:01:30,800
orchard. Everything died and then oh
darn it. There are these other consequences,

808
01:01:30,960 --> 01:01:36,800
God, this biosphere collapse, Man's
right. Other So, but to

809
01:01:36,880 --> 01:01:42,519
carry on the pesticide conversation, if
you look in where other pesticides are being

810
01:01:42,559 --> 01:01:46,719
sprayed, Yes, sometimes there's a
problem like mosquito control kinds of things also

811
01:01:46,840 --> 01:01:52,000
very unknown as to what the impacts
are. But a lot of the other

812
01:01:52,119 --> 01:01:58,079
pesticides are in agricultural crops which are
generally really poor for pollinators to begin with.

813
01:01:58,639 --> 01:02:01,800
Some need pollinators, or like soybeans, if you have pollinators, your

814
01:02:02,000 --> 01:02:07,119
crop increases. So we can make
arguments that you should try and minimize that.

815
01:02:07,519 --> 01:02:12,760
But the if you look at what
bees are in those environments, they're

816
01:02:12,760 --> 01:02:16,559
basically crow and sparrow bees like those
As a species, those bees are going

817
01:02:16,639 --> 01:02:22,119
to be fine. You're not getting
bees of conservation concerned because the area is

818
01:02:22,199 --> 01:02:30,679
so altered already that it's completely mastered. Like corn, soybeans will have bees

819
01:02:30,719 --> 01:02:35,639
in them, but it's just the
toughest of the natives and a bunch of

820
01:02:35,639 --> 01:02:40,360
invasives and so yeah, so they
get sprayed. Not good nothing, you

821
01:02:40,400 --> 01:02:45,400
know, you don't want to see
anything die. But as at a species

822
01:02:45,519 --> 01:02:51,119
level and a conservation level, it
doesn't matter, right, So what matters

823
01:02:51,159 --> 01:02:55,400
are these residual natural areas, whether
it's a strip or a prairie or a

824
01:02:55,480 --> 01:03:02,679
roadside, and those are largely not
sprayed. But everything else is problematic.

825
01:03:02,800 --> 01:03:08,519
You know, from invasives to lack
of fire, lack of disturbance, and

826
01:03:08,760 --> 01:03:12,519
you know, the list goes on. Too many deer in the east,

827
01:03:12,599 --> 01:03:15,840
or what do they eat? They
don't eat invasives. They because invasives are

828
01:03:15,920 --> 01:03:20,559
invasive, because they taste bad.
They are eating all the natives, right,

829
01:03:20,599 --> 01:03:23,880
And you know, it goes on
and on, and then we dissect

830
01:03:23,880 --> 01:03:30,239
the habitats up a whole lot.
But a good thing though bees native bees

831
01:03:30,320 --> 01:03:35,280
number one, very good dispersers,
and number two they're small. They don't

832
01:03:35,280 --> 01:03:37,800
need a lot of acres. So
your backyard can be a great place and

833
01:03:37,880 --> 01:03:45,920
sustain some really uncommon populations. And
we can go to weird, little wooded

834
01:03:45,960 --> 01:03:51,599
habitat islands in DC and other places
and we'll find all these vernal bees,

835
01:03:51,800 --> 01:03:55,880
you know that you would think would
be not there because it's a sea of

836
01:03:55,960 --> 01:04:04,840
suburbian what'snal bee for anyone listening,
so vernal spring and they're usually using it.

837
01:04:05,199 --> 01:04:10,559
So in the east, you know, the dominant theme to habitats would

838
01:04:10,599 --> 01:04:14,920
be deciduous for us. And then
on the eastern shore you get a good

839
01:04:15,000 --> 01:04:19,360
conifer component, which is really a
disturbance component, but circling back and more

840
01:04:19,400 --> 01:04:26,760
acidic over there, but the spring
bee community is very distinctive, so some

841
01:04:26,840 --> 01:04:30,800
of those bees are generalists, some
are specialists on these spring blooming plants.

842
01:04:30,119 --> 01:04:34,480
But they that community of bees just
disappears. Where do they go, Like,

843
01:04:34,480 --> 01:04:38,280
where are they going in the summer? Well, they don't. They've

844
01:04:39,400 --> 01:04:44,320
so average bee, including honey bees, flyers around about five weeks before they're

845
01:04:44,360 --> 01:04:48,559
eaten or just worn out. Tips
of their wings wear off, and many

846
01:04:48,719 --> 01:04:53,199
of the spring bees are out because
there's a huge amount of pollen in an

847
01:04:53,199 --> 01:04:57,920
actor all over the place, and
also a subset or like my plant only

848
01:04:57,960 --> 01:05:02,960
blooms in the spring, so they
come out, reproduce, produce, you

849
01:05:03,000 --> 01:05:06,000
know, babies and cells wherever they're
going to do it, mostly in the

850
01:05:06,039 --> 01:05:12,079
soil, and then they're done.
They die, and then the young eat

851
01:05:12,119 --> 01:05:15,480
all the pollen and nectar right away
so it doesn't spoil or get eaten by

852
01:05:15,519 --> 01:05:19,400
something else. And then they sit
there until the next spring, or if

853
01:05:19,440 --> 01:05:23,559
it's a fall species, till the
next fall. So they just for three

854
01:05:23,639 --> 01:05:28,159
quarters of the season. Mostly they're
underground animals if you look at what are

855
01:05:28,159 --> 01:05:33,039
you doing throughout the time period,
But their active time is full of danger

856
01:05:33,519 --> 01:05:41,000
and it's hard and that's when we
see them. But and actually, you

857
01:05:41,000 --> 01:05:44,360
know, functionally, that's when they're
functioning in the ecosystem. The rest of

858
01:05:44,360 --> 01:05:46,840
the time they're just they really are
just sitting there, wow, thinking,

859
01:05:47,199 --> 01:05:54,159
just kind of just kind of what
I had when I when I was living

860
01:05:54,159 --> 01:05:58,639
in West Texas for a minute,
I'd see these xylo Copa californiicas flying around,

861
01:05:58,679 --> 01:06:02,440
beautiful like black and almost navy iridescent
bumblebee packs of means thing, as

862
01:06:02,440 --> 01:06:08,119
I found out trying to get one
out of my house and I had these.

863
01:06:08,199 --> 01:06:11,400
I found that that they like to, you know, burrow into the

864
01:06:11,599 --> 01:06:15,519
yucca inflorescences, the rods and the
des delirium soto and stuff. So I

865
01:06:15,519 --> 01:06:17,280
was like, I gotta go fucking
collect a bunch of these. So I

866
01:06:17,280 --> 01:06:20,199
brought a bunch of those to my
house, just lean them against the wall

867
01:06:20,199 --> 01:06:24,119
in a corner, and then I
would see the bees just drilling into there.

868
01:06:24,119 --> 01:06:26,800
What are they doing? How long
they hang out there for? Well,

869
01:06:26,920 --> 01:06:30,760
okay, so carpenter bees, everything's
interesting, right, But carpenter bees.

870
01:06:31,119 --> 01:06:36,000
First of all, here's a cocktail
tip. Largest bee egg in the

871
01:06:36,000 --> 01:06:44,239
insect world are laid by carpenter bees, and so and they're on the remember

872
01:06:44,320 --> 01:06:49,000
the art of K spectrum, where
you know, are our factor species are

873
01:06:49,079 --> 01:06:54,119
just you know, throwing out tons
of proper ules and and then K like

874
01:06:54,320 --> 01:06:57,280
us, you know, we're devoting
a lot of time to our offspring,

875
01:06:57,400 --> 01:07:02,199
right, So they actually tend babies, and whereas almost all of the other

876
01:07:02,239 --> 01:07:05,199
bees are like, here's a big
lump of pollen and nectar, I lay

877
01:07:05,199 --> 01:07:08,840
an egg on it, I wall
you off, and they're on your own.

878
01:07:09,360 --> 01:07:13,519
Good luck. Yeah, And they
will overwinter in those stems their little

879
01:07:13,519 --> 01:07:17,519
family groups. Every once in a
while, a female will make it through

880
01:07:17,599 --> 01:07:21,719
a second year, which is almost
never happens in the native species up here.

881
01:07:21,960 --> 01:07:26,079
They're even bumblebees. All the queens
die at the end of the year.

882
01:07:26,559 --> 01:07:30,119
Wow, and so. And they
actually bring food to the nests and

883
01:07:30,159 --> 01:07:39,239
sequentially provision very unusual. And so
they each carpenter bee species has its own

884
01:07:39,320 --> 01:07:42,800
jam in terms of where it lives. So in the east Eastern carpenter bees,

885
01:07:42,800 --> 01:07:45,639
which is what everyone around here is
used to, will drill into wood.

886
01:07:45,760 --> 01:07:50,360
So it drills into the softer woods, including people's decks, which annoys

887
01:07:50,360 --> 01:07:55,480
them. And but they're doing the
same thing that in general, which is

888
01:07:55,920 --> 01:08:00,480
they're making a set of cells with
and filling with pollen and nectar, laying

889
01:08:00,519 --> 01:08:05,800
an egg and then young is produced. So that but so what would someone

890
01:08:05,880 --> 01:08:10,199
do, Like, what's it if
you want to see these these guys in

891
01:08:10,239 --> 01:08:12,960
your yard more you live out west, what's something you could do? You's

892
01:08:13,000 --> 01:08:16,239
got to provide those poles for what
else is good? Yeah, so I

893
01:08:16,239 --> 01:08:20,239
am no expert on western Zayla copa, so you would, but if you

894
01:08:20,279 --> 01:08:25,479
want them, you have to have
both their food source or the food source

895
01:08:25,479 --> 01:08:28,399
has to be in the neighborhood.
But probably if you want them in your

896
01:08:28,479 --> 01:08:30,439
yard, you would look at,
well, what are they nesting in?

897
01:08:30,800 --> 01:08:33,319
And I know that some of the
western species are also wood nesters, So

898
01:08:33,840 --> 01:08:38,239
you want a very soft wood like
redwood is sort of like that's why they're

899
01:08:38,239 --> 01:08:42,319
going for yucca poles or so tall. Well, the yuka species would only

900
01:08:42,359 --> 01:08:45,000
be going for you. You could
like give them redwood till the day is

901
01:08:45,039 --> 01:08:47,520
long, and they're like, no, I'm looking for a yucca stem or

902
01:08:48,319 --> 01:08:56,239
whatever. So some of them are
specialized, yeah shit, so, and

903
01:08:56,279 --> 01:09:00,239
some are like I'm looking for dry
wood. Oh, look at the these

904
01:09:00,319 --> 01:09:05,000
square things that humans have wrecked full
of dry wood. I'm going to use

905
01:09:05,000 --> 01:09:10,119
that right, right, can you
get the suburban dad coming out to just

906
01:09:10,239 --> 01:09:13,520
nuke everything? It's right, you
know? All right. So a lot

907
01:09:13,520 --> 01:09:15,960
of people are interested in how do
I control these things that are in my

908
01:09:15,000 --> 01:09:17,960
deck? I say, well,
first of all, don't use you know,

909
01:09:18,159 --> 01:09:21,560
soft wood, use you know,
these plastic boards and things like that,

910
01:09:23,000 --> 01:09:26,760
if you really don't. The second
is they it takes almost forever of

911
01:09:26,760 --> 01:09:30,920
them for them to do structural damage
because they can't build really long tunnels.

912
01:09:31,399 --> 01:09:35,079
So you know, maybe six inches
or something a year, but every year

913
01:09:35,159 --> 01:09:41,000
thereafter a female will go in that
hole and then build a sub channel off

914
01:09:41,039 --> 01:09:44,680
there. So plug them up when
you see them. They don't plug up

915
01:09:44,680 --> 01:09:46,640
their their exterior hole, no,
but you got to plug them up.

916
01:09:47,359 --> 01:09:51,720
Yeah, So your strategy is a
whole strategy because there's an infinite number of

917
01:09:51,760 --> 01:09:56,720
carpenter bees out there, so you
can do all your crazy thing. My

918
01:09:56,840 --> 01:10:02,359
brother would shoot them with twenty two
birdshot, and he said it was great

919
01:10:02,640 --> 01:10:06,760
fun for him, except that he
would blow holes in the vinyl sighting of

920
01:10:06,760 --> 01:10:11,880
his house. Well, he would
shoot the bees. What the fuck?

921
01:10:12,520 --> 01:10:16,439
Well, seems like I have a
problem that those bees are eating my deck.

922
01:10:16,479 --> 01:10:18,199
I'm gonna kill them. So what's
the thing to do? Just go

923
01:10:18,239 --> 01:10:20,960
plug up the holes? I got
the holes. You have to realize that

924
01:10:21,000 --> 01:10:26,840
you're plugging little families of carpenter bees
in there, and you can't use foam

925
01:10:26,880 --> 01:10:31,159
because they'll dig it out. So
the best one that I've heard is a

926
01:10:31,159 --> 01:10:35,880
big roofing nail which has a head
that is about the size of the hole,

927
01:10:35,920 --> 01:10:39,840
and you just drive it in there
and then you calwk over it.

928
01:10:40,600 --> 01:10:44,760
Or wood puddy what about wood puddy
wood putty? Yeah, if you're using

929
01:10:44,760 --> 01:10:48,359
the strong wood putty, yes,
but you know they can probably dig out

930
01:10:48,359 --> 01:10:51,600
of that and then throw them a
bone baby till like get some luget along

931
01:10:51,720 --> 01:10:54,920
get like well they go into an
old log or something. You know,

932
01:10:55,000 --> 01:11:00,319
it's weird. It's very difficult to
find them in native trees. They obvious.

933
01:11:00,359 --> 01:11:03,840
They do mostly like fallen over pine. Yeah so they But yeah,

934
01:11:03,880 --> 01:11:08,560
so at the lab, I don't
you probably didn't notice. We have just

935
01:11:08,760 --> 01:11:12,640
bunches of old boards that we attached
to the fence. We drilled them to

936
01:11:12,720 --> 01:11:17,520
the side of the metal siding of
our thing. We have little structures like

937
01:11:17,520 --> 01:11:20,359
like a two by four, what
kind of Yeah, so they drill a

938
01:11:20,399 --> 01:11:26,479
half inch hole and so it doesn't
And you know, interestingly, they never

939
01:11:26,520 --> 01:11:29,520
make a mistake. It's not like
they're in a two by four and then

940
01:11:29,560 --> 01:11:31,319
they're like digging their hole and then
they're like, oops, I went out.

941
01:11:31,840 --> 01:11:35,800
They're always they can keep right down
the middle of that. So I've

942
01:11:35,840 --> 01:11:40,159
seen them in Oh they go lengthwise. They don't go with oh wow,

943
01:11:40,279 --> 01:11:44,239
yeah yeah, yeah, No,
the swin from underneath and then they tunnel.

944
01:11:44,720 --> 01:11:47,279
So a three quarter inch board.
I've seen them in signs and all

945
01:11:47,359 --> 01:11:50,399
kinds of stuff. So they go
for the longer what's got more depth to

946
01:11:50,479 --> 01:11:55,600
it what you're say, much So
I've seen them in but like if you

947
01:11:55,680 --> 01:11:58,479
got foot board, if well,
in other words, if it's a two

948
01:11:58,479 --> 01:12:00,760
by four, they're going for the
four inch, they're going for the length,

949
01:12:00,840 --> 01:12:05,840
right you're saying. So whatever piece
of wood it is, they're coming

950
01:12:05,880 --> 01:12:14,359
in from underneath. So if you
have, for example, we have shelves

951
01:12:14,399 --> 01:12:18,920
let's call them outside built into the
side of an overhang, and they are

952
01:12:19,319 --> 01:12:23,199
made out of two way fours,
and they're coming up on the flat side

953
01:12:23,279 --> 01:12:26,800
underneath, and then they turn and
then they run the length. That's why

954
01:12:26,800 --> 01:12:30,000
I say they never like it's not
like us with a drill bit like we'd

955
01:12:30,000 --> 01:12:32,479
go all we would go all the
way through. They're like we come in,

956
01:12:32,520 --> 01:12:38,960
they know to turn, they just
run the internal. But in terms

957
01:12:38,960 --> 01:12:44,920
of structure, a circle going through
a piece of wood is you don't you

958
01:12:45,000 --> 01:12:48,960
don't damage. That's a very structurally
sound hole. Let's call it to put

959
01:12:49,000 --> 01:12:53,680
into wood. So you can do
an awful lot of that before you basically

960
01:12:53,880 --> 01:12:58,800
compromise structurally anything. And they'll keep
returning to it like another one. Like

961
01:12:58,840 --> 01:13:01,399
the next thing. An email comes
in and she says, oh, look

962
01:13:01,399 --> 01:13:03,359
there's already one. Dug. All
I got to do is go on.

963
01:13:03,439 --> 01:13:06,800
She's now hidden, all right,
she's on the inside, so it's easier

964
01:13:06,840 --> 01:13:11,720
for her to build. So that's
why hole plugging is effective. One you

965
01:13:11,800 --> 01:13:15,359
really don't have any structural issues then, and it takes them a lot more

966
01:13:15,359 --> 01:13:17,880
work to initiate the hole. Once
the hole is done, it's like,

967
01:13:18,239 --> 01:13:21,800
you know it's going to be used
every single year. Wow, that's so.

968
01:13:23,640 --> 01:13:27,840
But the time the plug then would
be what so you're never plugging somebody

969
01:13:27,880 --> 01:13:30,199
in there. You're always you know, especially always plugging something in. Oh,

970
01:13:30,239 --> 01:13:33,800
because they're overwintering, the overwinter in
family groups, so you don't know.

971
01:13:34,520 --> 01:13:40,239
But the other thing is just ignore
it. Like the kinds of places

972
01:13:40,279 --> 01:13:44,600
they're doing is like you're railing,
which is using me out a fur or

973
01:13:44,640 --> 01:13:49,680
your picnic table or your gazebo or
the sawfets, depending on what you make

974
01:13:49,720 --> 01:13:55,880
it. And then the worst is
if you have like seedar siding that's three

975
01:13:55,960 --> 01:14:00,720
quarter inch thick. And then it's
not the bees that are problem. It's

976
01:14:00,760 --> 01:14:05,239
the woodpeckers because they realize that they're
in there and they'll just strip. You're

977
01:14:05,279 --> 01:14:09,000
not going to come in through the
hole. They're just going to go right

978
01:14:09,039 --> 01:14:15,520
through the wood, and so they
just tear. Once one woodpecker realizes this,

979
01:14:15,600 --> 01:14:20,600
they will just tear out huge chunks
of your sighting. I love thinking

980
01:14:20,640 --> 01:14:23,960
about this. I don't know,
maybe I'm an asshole, but I just

981
01:14:24,079 --> 01:14:29,720
like thinking about these little critters slowly
destroying someone's kind. It's kind of cute,

982
01:14:29,760 --> 01:14:32,239
though it is, it's not a
and the scheme of things is not

983
01:14:32,279 --> 01:14:35,720
a big problem. Split rail fences, they love split rail fences. Most

984
01:14:35,760 --> 01:14:40,760
people have no idea they're even nesting
in there. They don't defend their nests.

985
01:14:40,800 --> 01:14:43,600
So you could stick your finger up
there and they're not going to like

986
01:14:43,760 --> 01:14:48,680
sting you. And the females of
the Virginia carpenter bee here have one of

987
01:14:48,680 --> 01:14:54,079
the most innocuous stings, like a
lot. So I catch tons of bees,

988
01:14:54,119 --> 01:14:58,199
including lots of carpenter bees, and
I've been maybe stung a couple of

989
01:14:58,239 --> 01:15:01,359
times. But basically it's like,
did I get stung by that carpenter bee

990
01:15:01,439 --> 01:15:06,039
or not? And so and people
see the male which have a white face,

991
01:15:06,960 --> 01:15:14,279
No male bee has at it's that
mellow. Then well, that's crazy

992
01:15:15,840 --> 01:15:18,880
you had mentioned. Let's see,
what are some other things I wrote some

993
01:15:18,920 --> 01:15:23,279
shit down because there's a bunch of
stuff in at that. What is it

994
01:15:23,399 --> 01:15:29,079
that cricket? My hearing is bad, so I think it is. I

995
01:15:29,079 --> 01:15:30,159
don't know what else it could be. It doesn't seem like it's any can

996
01:15:30,319 --> 01:15:35,399
I do have crickets in the electrical
device. But but anyway, the thing

997
01:15:35,439 --> 01:15:39,600
you mentioned too was that you know, a good way to put this for

998
01:15:39,640 --> 01:15:43,479
people is it's kind of pleasant.
I like that obviously, is you know

999
01:15:44,319 --> 01:15:46,119
why it's important to care about this
stuff, I mean, especially being pollinators.

1000
01:15:46,119 --> 01:15:50,239
You've got all these honey bees aren't
doing everything. Obviously, You've got

1001
01:15:50,279 --> 01:15:55,479
specialists and you know why someone who's
maybe a hunter might care about this is

1002
01:15:55,520 --> 01:16:00,520
that the the say birds like the
game birds they're hunting, are eating seeds.

1003
01:16:00,880 --> 01:16:04,279
Those seeds wouldn't exist unless, yeah, these native pollinators were out there

1004
01:16:04,800 --> 01:16:09,479
hitting it. Like ragweed is not
pollinated by pollinator, but it is a

1005
01:16:09,479 --> 01:16:14,840
great seed for birds. But many
many helios. The still fim is the

1006
01:16:14,840 --> 01:16:19,199
heliat. Yeah. So a couple
of interesting things. So game birds in

1007
01:16:19,239 --> 01:16:23,840
the East, a lot of that
would traditionally have been Bob white, but

1008
01:16:23,920 --> 01:16:30,920
Bob White have disappeared. So used
to historical accounts of the Philadelphia market being

1009
01:16:31,000 --> 01:16:34,520
full of Bob Boy quail for sale. You know, in the old days

1010
01:16:34,640 --> 01:16:40,880
you've sold whatever you shot markets and
now there are no Bob Boy quail in

1011
01:16:41,199 --> 01:16:44,640
Pennsylvania. I've only seen one before
and that was in Illinois. I don't

1012
01:16:44,640 --> 01:16:45,720
know if it was released. What's
the deal with those? Why don't they

1013
01:16:45,840 --> 01:16:55,560
wide except for interestingly like Oklahoma and
Texas where the cedar and mesquite have invaded

1014
01:16:55,600 --> 01:17:00,359
prairies and that's like super quail habitat. Now they've all disappeared. A couple

1015
01:17:00,399 --> 01:17:05,640
things. One we are, you
know, a culture of neat and tidy.

1016
01:17:06,239 --> 01:17:10,600
So this is a general problem like
if we can mow it, we

1017
01:17:10,640 --> 01:17:14,760
will. If you're a good farmer, you clean out your ditches, you

1018
01:17:14,800 --> 01:17:17,840
mow your ditches several times, you
mow between the field edge and the woods,

1019
01:17:18,199 --> 01:17:23,880
and you mow the frontage and what
comes in cool seasoned grasses and what's

1020
01:17:23,960 --> 01:17:29,960
in that field not weeds and bugs
nothing. So that all in the past

1021
01:17:30,239 --> 01:17:35,399
was super Bobway quail habitat because you
had lots of weeds. You had you

1022
01:17:35,439 --> 01:17:41,399
know, you'd in and clean your
your road sides and ditches set once a

1023
01:17:41,479 --> 01:17:45,199
year because you had to do with
a scythe and so it was a beautiful

1024
01:17:45,399 --> 01:17:47,560
place for Bob Way. But now
you got to rake and clean those forests

1025
01:17:47,560 --> 01:17:50,079
because you don't want to be in
all filthy dirty, you know, you

1026
01:17:50,159 --> 01:17:57,239
got to go in there. And
I've seen I've seen somebody go fucking neurotic,

1027
01:17:57,479 --> 01:18:01,359
just like insanely everything just that's that's
why I realized this is this is

1028
01:18:01,399 --> 01:18:05,199
borderline mental illness. And some of
these like suburban landscaping. I mean,

1029
01:18:05,239 --> 01:18:09,079
I've seen guys and it's normally I
guess women do it to it. It's

1030
01:18:09,119 --> 01:18:14,840
normally men really going fucking insane,
like completely ecologically illiterate. Everything's got to

1031
01:18:14,880 --> 01:18:17,079
be it's got to look like a
video game house, like something you design

1032
01:18:17,479 --> 01:18:24,319
in SIMS. Got to look like
those house design books that you both.

1033
01:18:24,479 --> 01:18:30,680
Yeah, and there's like a Columner
h conifer at the corners and low in

1034
01:18:30,720 --> 01:18:34,079
the middle, and everything else is
lawn. It's such an OCD thing.

1035
01:18:34,199 --> 01:18:38,199
I was talking this one of the
couples, who's a house. We killed

1036
01:18:38,199 --> 01:18:41,720
the lawn. They they've only lived
there six years. But there's this beautiful

1037
01:18:41,720 --> 01:18:44,600
old don redwood there. You know, not native, but it's not invasive.

1038
01:18:44,600 --> 01:18:45,680
It was native three or four million
years ago. I think it's when

1039
01:18:45,680 --> 01:18:50,399
it went extinct in North America.
But but beautiful, just a beautiful fucking

1040
01:18:50,479 --> 01:18:55,000
tree and huge and just weeping and
such a god. It was one of

1041
01:18:55,039 --> 01:18:58,439
the trees that got me in the
botany like fifteen years ago. And there

1042
01:18:58,479 --> 01:19:00,560
I was telling them, I'm like, you guys are so lucky to have

1043
01:19:00,640 --> 01:19:03,079
this fucking thing here because it's such
a and they're great climbing trees, like

1044
01:19:03,159 --> 01:19:08,640
kids love climbing out of there.
This thing's got a root system that's like

1045
01:19:08,640 --> 01:19:13,039
you can see it's holding this slope
together. It's like sixteen feet wide and

1046
01:19:13,039 --> 01:19:15,199
they're like, yeah, a neighbor
wanted to cut it down because it was

1047
01:19:15,279 --> 01:19:20,119
dropping seeds on his Jesus christ man. I'm like, yeah, well he's

1048
01:19:20,159 --> 01:19:23,279
a nice guy. He just didn't
get it yet. He's like you know,

1049
01:19:23,760 --> 01:19:26,039
I'm saying, but you could take
that to a you know, you

1050
01:19:26,039 --> 01:19:29,039
can really go OCD with that,
to the point where it's like, man,

1051
01:19:29,119 --> 01:19:32,399
well around here, you know,
there's limited amounts of places to build

1052
01:19:32,479 --> 01:19:35,920
homes, and pretty if you're a
well to do person, you just buy

1053
01:19:35,920 --> 01:19:40,479
a woodlot and then you clear.
You're like, oh that's great, I'm

1054
01:19:40,520 --> 01:19:43,960
in the woods. But then they
put in houses like I need some lawn.

1055
01:19:44,079 --> 01:19:46,800
Why is it grass growing under these
trees? And then they try all

1056
01:19:46,880 --> 01:19:50,000
kinds of things. They take out, tear out all the shrubs, they

1057
01:19:50,039 --> 01:19:53,920
run things over, the trees start
dying because you come pack the roots,

1058
01:19:54,359 --> 01:19:57,439
and then they're like they get it, like, oh there's not enough light,

1059
01:19:57,640 --> 01:20:01,000
so I'm going to cut down these
trees, and then nothing else comes

1060
01:20:01,039 --> 01:20:06,399
back because the cycle is broken.
You just have residual, you know,

1061
01:20:06,960 --> 01:20:13,000
landmark trees that were there to begin
with, and you'll never get a forest

1062
01:20:13,079 --> 01:20:17,359
back because they basically have said no, we're not going to let you reproduce.

1063
01:20:18,199 --> 01:20:24,239
Yeah, I just ruined. But
it's slowly the whole system. I

1064
01:20:24,279 --> 01:20:27,880
hope we reach a point in time
where as a society we just have more

1065
01:20:27,880 --> 01:20:30,880
of this innate respect for living things
because they're cool, not because even like

1066
01:20:31,000 --> 01:20:34,960
practicality. I mean, the practicality
is there once you start looking, but

1067
01:20:35,359 --> 01:20:39,159
maybe not at first, but just
that you know that we reach a point

1068
01:20:39,159 --> 01:20:40,800
where we're like, no, I
don't want to do that, or what

1069
01:20:41,039 --> 01:20:43,720
might what effects might they have if
we do? Like we we're moving in

1070
01:20:43,760 --> 01:20:49,119
that direction, and you can have
a yard that is integrated back into the

1071
01:20:49,159 --> 01:20:56,680
surrounding system and becomes important habitat.
But you know, right now the culturally

1072
01:20:56,720 --> 01:21:00,880
acceptable thing is to have a mode
area, and if you don't, you

1073
01:21:01,000 --> 01:21:04,840
better have a mode strip at minimum, so it looks like whatever you did

1074
01:21:05,000 --> 01:21:10,840
was done on purpose, or you're
going to be turned in and into the

1075
01:21:10,920 --> 01:21:15,680
homeowners association or the county often has
ordinances. I think what needs to change

1076
01:21:15,680 --> 01:21:17,079
too is that it's it's I mean, if you have these guards, we

1077
01:21:17,119 --> 01:21:21,119
need to change so that something growing
there doesn't look like the land isn't maintained.

1078
01:21:21,119 --> 01:21:25,279
Like there's a way like I can
clearly see your spot is overgrown like

1079
01:21:25,319 --> 01:21:28,279
hell, but it's very intentional.
There's paths through it. It's all cool

1080
01:21:28,279 --> 01:21:30,199
plans. I don't live on the
on the front of the road. If

1081
01:21:30,239 --> 01:21:36,680
I did, I would mow the
heck out of my where my sidewalk is.

1082
01:21:38,319 --> 01:21:44,479
Driver, you're a weed whacker to
create intentional places. So it's so

1083
01:21:44,520 --> 01:21:46,720
people get the message I did that
on purpose. And I'm keeping up the

1084
01:21:46,800 --> 01:21:53,760
cultural handshake my having these strips of
lawn and I'm at the edges with my

1085
01:21:53,760 --> 01:21:57,079
neighbors. You know, I'm gonna
we'd whack out a path along the fence

1086
01:21:57,119 --> 01:22:00,920
line. And then there where's and
study and I can't remember where what it

1087
01:22:01,000 --> 01:22:06,119
was done, but they showed that
basically, then the interstitial space, these

1088
01:22:06,199 --> 01:22:11,439
spots that are surrounded by your little
mini edges, you're giving a pass on

1089
01:22:11,479 --> 01:22:14,199
that. Like, I don't know
what you did or doing there. It

1090
01:22:14,239 --> 01:22:16,439
could be just let go, but
yeah, you did it on purpose or

1091
01:22:16,640 --> 01:22:19,640
instead of I mean, I kind
of hate lawn just on principle, but

1092
01:22:20,119 --> 01:22:23,279
like what I would do, especially
because where I live it's a little dryer,

1093
01:22:23,319 --> 01:22:26,800
just put wood chips down, like
wood chips are important as hell.

1094
01:22:26,800 --> 01:22:29,520
There's such a great resource, like
you got tons of chips, you use

1095
01:22:29,640 --> 01:22:31,920
chip drop, dot com my favorite
thing, reach out to arborus whatever.

1096
01:22:31,960 --> 01:22:34,359
But I would just that's what I
would do. Put paths, make it

1097
01:22:34,359 --> 01:22:38,720
look intentional. Put the little signs
of the fucking city leaves you allow your

1098
01:22:38,760 --> 01:22:42,319
pollinator garden whatever I did one of
those, I put a little sign out.

1099
01:22:42,359 --> 01:22:46,000
I don't you know, my in
my ideal pollinator sign would be like

1100
01:22:46,000 --> 01:22:48,760
a middle finger coming out of a
bed of flowers, being like kill your

1101
01:22:48,800 --> 01:22:51,000
lawn. You know. But of
course that's not going to run through well

1102
01:22:51,079 --> 01:22:55,039
with the square community, and those
are the people that I want to leave

1103
01:22:55,079 --> 01:23:00,520
me alone. So but yeah,
there's so much to intentional or just intentional,

1104
01:23:00,600 --> 01:23:05,119
Like this is regular beds around the
house, like the foundation of house.

1105
01:23:05,439 --> 01:23:10,479
It has to have foundation beds.
It can't be like you have wild

1106
01:23:10,560 --> 01:23:15,000
ass grass and forbes and everything growing
right up to the edge of the house.

1107
01:23:15,159 --> 01:23:18,279
Well that's wrong. Well I would
I through the edge of the house.

1108
01:23:18,439 --> 01:23:23,479
Ye're wrong. Well, I just
think from like a fire perspective to

1109
01:23:23,640 --> 01:23:25,800
where I live, it drives out. I want to keep a little bit

1110
01:23:25,840 --> 01:23:28,600
of a buffer, you know.
I don't want two biggest stuff. But

1111
01:23:29,279 --> 01:23:31,199
if if there was. If there
wasn't fire, that's what I would do,

1112
01:23:31,239 --> 01:23:33,920
though, I would get my fucking
hedge clippers. Smoke's coming through the

1113
01:23:33,920 --> 01:23:36,520
air, it's coming. I just
cut a fire line around my house,

1114
01:23:36,600 --> 01:23:42,760
right well. I often burn sections
here and in the spring, and then

1115
01:23:43,920 --> 01:23:45,439
one year it was getting late.
It was like April, like I really

1116
01:23:45,479 --> 01:23:48,479
need to burn this place. And
I used to do one section at a

1117
01:23:48,479 --> 01:23:50,720
time and kind of watch it.
I thought, I'm going to light everything

1118
01:23:50,760 --> 01:23:56,640
on fire, and so I did
that and at that point I just started

1119
01:23:57,640 --> 01:24:01,800
putting in chips. And I had
chips all around this house. And then

1120
01:24:01,920 --> 01:24:06,279
I'm sorry, the other side of
the other house beers in me. Next

1121
01:24:06,319 --> 01:24:10,840
thing, I know, you know, but so you started the house was

1122
01:24:10,880 --> 01:24:15,920
on fire, and what do you
do? Gone from the place that I

1123
01:24:15,920 --> 01:24:19,439
wanted to burn in it? Use
the chips to like walk under the house

1124
01:24:20,279 --> 01:24:25,760
and catch it on fire. Wow, and uh, you know, I

1125
01:24:26,199 --> 01:24:31,159
I get. I made it out
with a snowshovel and it was rough because

1126
01:24:31,199 --> 01:24:35,600
it was like styrofoam under there.
Extinguishers. I do have a ton of

1127
01:24:35,640 --> 01:24:42,119
extinguishers, but at that point it
was like, first I would have a

1128
01:24:42,159 --> 01:24:45,560
snowshovel, is really great for stop, don't go there and at these low

1129
01:24:45,640 --> 01:24:49,279
level fires. So that actually did
it, and then had to go back

1130
01:24:49,319 --> 01:24:56,600
with you know, a spray to
get the little baby fires. After living

1131
01:24:56,640 --> 01:24:59,680
out west for twenty years, I
mean, I really I realized you really

1132
01:24:59,720 --> 01:25:01,119
can't. Well here, it's different
because it's so much more humid. You

1133
01:25:01,119 --> 01:25:04,319
know, you look at the satellite
map of the US, it's much fires

1134
01:25:04,439 --> 01:25:09,119
in the summer, right, all
the lightning strike. But but Natives Native,

1135
01:25:09,159 --> 01:25:11,880
oh, you will have natural fires
in the center. You don't.

1136
01:25:11,960 --> 01:25:15,880
You don't because it's too wet,
right, there might be small ones a

1137
01:25:15,960 --> 01:25:20,239
year here you can't propagate out.
So you look at the history of the

1138
01:25:20,279 --> 01:25:28,279
region and once uh, you know, indigenous uh Native Americans uh moved in

1139
01:25:28,560 --> 01:25:31,800
many thousand years ago debates as to
win, they burn the hell out of

1140
01:25:31,840 --> 01:25:36,720
everything. And that's really primarily why
we have a lot of open country species,

1141
01:25:38,159 --> 01:25:43,279
because we had a lot of open
country and if the Indians weren't around,

1142
01:25:43,600 --> 01:25:46,359
then there would be it would be
almost all forests, right because deciduous

1143
01:25:46,399 --> 01:25:48,560
for that was the thing that struck
me here too. And I'm glad you

1144
01:25:48,560 --> 01:25:50,800
brought that up because I remember we
talked about that at the b leb.

1145
01:25:50,880 --> 01:25:56,840
But the deciduous force is the dominant
ecotype here or the dominant you know eco

1146
01:25:57,319 --> 01:26:00,800
system. It's the prairie stuff.
I mean, that's why. And you

1147
01:26:00,840 --> 01:26:04,199
know Europeans got to Illinois they wrote
so extensively about the prairie because they'd never

1148
01:26:04,199 --> 01:26:06,800
seen it before. They were like, what, but even in Illinois that

1149
01:26:06,960 --> 01:26:14,520
was mostly a cultural prairie, like
it required burning, burning, and so

1150
01:26:14,880 --> 01:26:19,199
Native Americans and here too, you
burn because as you don't have like chainsaws,

1151
01:26:19,720 --> 01:26:23,920
so you cleared out the understory.
I can gather nuts that I've often

1152
01:26:24,039 --> 01:26:27,359
thought, how would I cut my
hair if I was living seven hundred years

1153
01:26:27,359 --> 01:26:30,279
ago? I don't have any blades
or clippers, not to mention electricity.

1154
01:26:30,520 --> 01:26:32,880
Maybe I'm just gonna set my head
on fire or something. You know,

1155
01:26:34,039 --> 01:26:40,880
No just long hair. Yeah,
well you gotta, but but for you

1156
01:26:40,920 --> 01:26:43,520
got to shave. You don't want
like a you know, a face full

1157
01:26:43,520 --> 01:26:45,920
of pubes, like a beard or
something. And you you think that,

1158
01:26:46,039 --> 01:26:49,399
but I don't want to. I
don't want you gotta you're clean shaving,

1159
01:26:49,439 --> 01:26:51,560
man. I get this. I
can't do what I got to get,

1160
01:26:51,600 --> 01:26:56,119
like a little five o'clock shadow,
because my skin gets irritated, you know.

1161
01:26:56,199 --> 01:26:58,760
So, but but either way,
only shave very few days, so

1162
01:26:58,840 --> 01:27:03,279
yeah, I shaved freaking yeah.
But but so that was yeah, so

1163
01:27:03,319 --> 01:27:06,119
that was all that intentional burning.
But also that I mean, it's so

1164
01:27:06,159 --> 01:27:12,279
great because it gets rid of the
fucking ticks and and chiggers, and depending

1165
01:27:12,279 --> 01:27:15,960
on what time of year you're burning, you know, the ticks, maybe

1166
01:27:15,960 --> 01:27:19,960
it does, but I think ticks
are a function of high deer populations exactly.

1167
01:27:20,000 --> 01:27:23,439
And that's the other thing, right, because it's mostly the deer,

1168
01:27:23,520 --> 01:27:28,560
so there really probably wasn't I don't
know that they had a big tick problem

1169
01:27:28,680 --> 01:27:30,119
also, and there were predators here
too to keep the deal. So the

1170
01:27:30,119 --> 01:27:35,439
deer populations have exponentially grown in the
last few hundred years because of the eradication

1171
01:27:35,520 --> 01:27:40,720
of predators and as just a lot
of people away from hunting browse line and

1172
01:27:40,800 --> 01:27:45,680
many forces because no one's hunting the
deer. That's insane. And not to

1173
01:27:45,720 --> 01:27:47,079
mention, they end up on the
road. Then they get hit and you

1174
01:27:47,079 --> 01:27:53,239
know kill or dogs eat them eat
the deer. Yeah, so just you

1175
01:27:53,279 --> 01:27:59,039
know, a pack of your basically
residential dogs get together or feral dogs,

1176
01:27:59,279 --> 01:28:01,640
right, and they rent the vehicle. So it's the clean next thing,

1177
01:28:01,680 --> 01:28:04,479
you know, they're going out.
We need more dogs killing deer in my

1178
01:28:04,560 --> 01:28:08,720
opinion, because they're bad out here. There's a lot of Yeah it's still

1179
01:28:08,760 --> 01:28:12,079
but they only get the weak and
the sick, which are you know,

1180
01:28:12,279 --> 01:28:15,119
you have deer that are starving to
death as a big form of mortality.

1181
01:28:15,479 --> 01:28:19,880
Right, So there's lots of reasons
to look at, you know, hunting

1182
01:28:20,000 --> 01:28:24,439
and other kinds of deer control things. But it's also tricky. I mean,

1183
01:28:24,920 --> 01:28:27,319
but the tick thing is really bad
out here though, huh. I

1184
01:28:27,319 --> 01:28:30,079
mean there's a lot of lot of
ticks, but you know, yeah,

1185
01:28:30,359 --> 01:28:33,279
it can think of worse things,
right, well, to be anti tick,

1186
01:28:34,159 --> 01:28:38,119
but what's up? Are you anti
tick a little bit? Well?

1187
01:28:38,159 --> 01:28:40,600
I just think they got to be
controlled, you know. That's where I

1188
01:28:40,640 --> 01:28:43,680
get. It's like red necks and
wolves. You know, I'm not I'm

1189
01:28:43,720 --> 01:28:45,039
not an anti wolf. They just
got to big control. That's how I

1190
01:28:45,039 --> 01:28:48,199
feel about the ticks. I'm like, I'm not anti ticks. You control

1191
01:28:48,199 --> 01:28:54,000
them with burning, you control them
with you know, we were in Brazil,

1192
01:28:54,039 --> 01:28:58,279
we were taking ivermactin because they get
a really bad bacteria down there that

1193
01:28:58,359 --> 01:29:00,159
the ticks spread, and so was
like it was just yeah, you could

1194
01:29:00,159 --> 01:29:02,439
buy I remains. I was like, ah, fuck, I call it

1195
01:29:02,520 --> 01:29:05,039
like two on me. I'm like, just gonna fucking dose myself. They'll

1196
01:29:05,119 --> 01:29:12,399
drop off. But uh, probably
also works. Is not that bad?

1197
01:29:12,520 --> 01:29:15,079
Come on? Yeah it was whatever? No, do you put it in?

1198
01:29:15,279 --> 01:29:20,560
Well, it's just like another one
of those things I wanted to until

1199
01:29:20,600 --> 01:29:24,319
you find out it is bad.
Right then you're like, why why have

1200
01:29:24,359 --> 01:29:27,239
I been doing lines of this stuff? Why have I been doing lines of

1201
01:29:27,279 --> 01:29:30,000
the cibermectin? You know? But
uh, but no that it takes off.

1202
01:29:30,119 --> 01:29:34,840
Yeah. The siggers though too.
The chiggers are yeah, they're bad

1203
01:29:34,840 --> 01:29:38,039
in some of the four. Okay, well, so there was a couple

1204
01:29:38,079 --> 01:29:40,640
more things we got. We got
what are we looking at, like twenty

1205
01:29:40,680 --> 01:29:43,920
minutes? I'm not going to keep
you longer than that. Actually, let

1206
01:29:43,960 --> 01:29:46,159
me use the bathroom real quick,
take a leagain. Okay, I'm back.

1207
01:29:46,159 --> 01:29:48,680
Man. Your yard is so nice. I can't get over every time

1208
01:29:48,720 --> 01:29:51,920
I step out, and because I
drank like three liters of green tea and

1209
01:29:51,960 --> 01:29:55,960
a coffee that I have pissed like
two or three times. Sometime I step

1210
01:29:56,000 --> 01:29:58,199
out, I'm like, God,
it's so nice that you could hear it.

1211
01:29:58,600 --> 01:30:00,399
There's like five different species of insects
I can hear, you know.

1212
01:30:00,560 --> 01:30:04,239
It's like it's just there's like birds, way I want to live. Why

1213
01:30:04,279 --> 01:30:06,960
are more I just it always strikes
me it's like more people. Why are

1214
01:30:08,000 --> 01:30:10,279
more people not doing this? They
just don't know, like it's such a

1215
01:30:10,319 --> 01:30:13,800
fulfilling Well, it's a it's a
it's a risk, right, it's a

1216
01:30:13,840 --> 01:30:18,560
cultural risk. It's completely acceptable to
have a lawn, right, and anything

1217
01:30:18,600 --> 01:30:25,319
outside of that is you know,
people are ask questions. There's also effort.

1218
01:30:25,680 --> 01:30:29,039
Right, it looks like a jungle
out there, but I'm crafting that

1219
01:30:29,239 --> 01:30:31,439
every year and doing different things.
I want to see a jungle, but

1220
01:30:31,479 --> 01:30:33,600
I want to see a certain kind
of jungle, and I don't want it

1221
01:30:33,640 --> 01:30:42,079
taken over by invasives, pulling out
some of the more thuggier natives and trying

1222
01:30:42,119 --> 01:30:45,239
new things. And yeah, I'm
there every day. For me, it

1223
01:30:45,319 --> 01:30:47,359
is like and I hate, I
don't I hate to compare this to like

1224
01:30:47,439 --> 01:30:50,000
a video game, and especially when
I don't really know shit, I don't

1225
01:30:50,000 --> 01:30:55,039
really play video games. But it's
like a you know, one of those

1226
01:30:55,079 --> 01:30:58,800
games like the you know, sim
Earth or whatever you build your own.

1227
01:30:59,000 --> 01:31:00,800
It's kind of like it's like a
real life version of that. Instead of

1228
01:31:00,800 --> 01:31:05,399
starting at a fucking screen, you're
out there building these these systems and watching

1229
01:31:05,640 --> 01:31:10,800
what visits them and watching how these
things grow and development. It's so cool.

1230
01:31:10,840 --> 01:31:13,520
And I want to look out the
window and see that too, and

1231
01:31:13,560 --> 01:31:16,319
I want to not see any plastic
It's like science and art. And it's

1232
01:31:16,439 --> 01:31:20,880
very mentally stimulating too. I mean, you're constantly learning doing that stuff.

1233
01:31:21,720 --> 01:31:25,479
Okay, let's talk about this.
I want you to get your opinion on

1234
01:31:25,800 --> 01:31:30,239
I'll show you this, that b
species Antho farula that was pollinating the payote

1235
01:31:31,479 --> 01:31:35,520
in South Texas. I've got a
couple pollinators on payote, I mean the

1236
01:31:35,520 --> 01:31:40,159
pink flowers. You can see the
payote flowers. But this Antho farula,

1237
01:31:42,000 --> 01:31:45,680
any idea what see? It's like
huddled over there. It's probably a specialist.

1238
01:31:45,760 --> 01:31:51,640
So Antifarula is a be There's a
couple, maybe three species in the

1239
01:31:51,680 --> 01:31:56,600
east. It's very very rare here, so I don't know as much about

1240
01:31:56,600 --> 01:32:00,720
what's going on in the west.
But my impression from the eastern species is

1241
01:32:00,760 --> 01:32:05,159
that they specialize on things and cacti
have a whole series of bees that are

1242
01:32:05,199 --> 01:32:11,840
specialists, and so and that does
look like anthop arulas, So I'm not

1243
01:32:11,880 --> 01:32:16,359
going to question the id. But
other than that, I can't tell you

1244
01:32:16,399 --> 01:32:20,399
a whole lot because it's a completely
different system. If I were there,

1245
01:32:20,399 --> 01:32:25,119
I'd send all my bees off to
a Western colleague and say here, yeah,

1246
01:32:25,159 --> 01:32:29,119
okay, what about this guy ash
Mediella also pollinating a peote flower.

1247
01:32:30,039 --> 01:32:33,880
Yeah, so ash Mediella super common
out west. Again, only a few

1248
01:32:33,920 --> 01:32:38,439
species out east, I know very
little. I don't know if any of

1249
01:32:38,479 --> 01:32:44,439
them are cacti specialists. But if
you look up Jared Fowler's Western specialist Beeka

1250
01:32:44,760 --> 01:32:47,600
website, he would list so.
But what are these so tell me about

1251
01:32:47,600 --> 01:32:49,439
their life cycle though, like what
do they do? Where do they go

1252
01:32:49,479 --> 01:32:51,960
in the winter? Where do they
nest? What are they? There is

1253
01:32:53,000 --> 01:32:57,840
a little different so and thof Arula
nests in the ground, and as do

1254
01:32:58,279 --> 01:33:00,520
if you were just to do itally, almost tall bees. The bulk of

1255
01:33:00,520 --> 01:33:04,560
the bees are nesting in the ground, and they're solitary, and the average

1256
01:33:04,600 --> 01:33:10,560
person is walking across or next to
their nest many many times during the summer.

1257
01:33:10,720 --> 01:33:15,039
They don't defend them right one be
why would it attack anybody? Because

1258
01:33:15,760 --> 01:33:23,720
it's useless. So that but ash
mediella. A lot of them nest in

1259
01:33:23,880 --> 01:33:27,560
holes in stems or holes in pieces
of wood, you know. Again,

1260
01:33:27,600 --> 01:33:30,399
so this is why the habitat is
important, because you need that's what they're

1261
01:33:30,520 --> 01:33:34,239
they're living in the shrubs basically in
the quote unquote brush. Yeah, so

1262
01:33:34,960 --> 01:33:39,920
you know it could be so most
of the time they can't. For example,

1263
01:33:40,199 --> 01:33:45,439
ashmdiella would not be able to break
through the stem wall of even a

1264
01:33:45,439 --> 01:33:48,600
perennial, you know, like let's
say Helianthus or something like that that might

1265
01:33:48,640 --> 01:33:54,039
have or us crass that might have
big enough. Those are very small bees

1266
01:33:54,640 --> 01:33:58,760
to break in and you know,
have their nest where they would want to

1267
01:33:58,760 --> 01:34:01,119
be, which is inside there.
So there either has to be some kind

1268
01:34:01,159 --> 01:34:05,239
of damage by a moor or it
has to be locked off by a deer

1269
01:34:05,359 --> 01:34:14,239
or grazor or a brushog and so
some mechanical means. So yeah, it

1270
01:34:14,319 --> 01:34:17,039
is all it gets all complicated up. So they're going for a living tissue

1271
01:34:17,079 --> 01:34:20,520
or dead tissue that they need to
Well, nothing is going to be living

1272
01:34:20,560 --> 01:34:27,800
tissue, right because the plant is
going to look at an invasion into living

1273
01:34:27,840 --> 01:34:31,880
tissue as a problem and it's going
to start producing resins and other chemicals not

1274
01:34:31,920 --> 01:34:39,439
good. But it can be that
it's looking for a hollow stem like hibiscus,

1275
01:34:39,600 --> 01:34:43,039
or it could be that it's looking
for a pithy stem like rubis,

1276
01:34:43,560 --> 01:34:47,319
and depends on the species. So
there's these things called small carpenter bees and

1277
01:34:47,399 --> 01:34:55,399
they they want a piff and they
re use the pistol course is very soft

1278
01:34:55,439 --> 01:34:58,399
and malleable so that even they can
handle it. They have to. There

1279
01:34:58,439 --> 01:35:01,039
has to be a break. So
like, for example, a lot of

1280
01:35:01,039 --> 01:35:08,279
people have blackberries and raspberries in their
gardens. Instead of taking last year's canes,

1281
01:35:08,319 --> 01:35:12,199
which you get rid of all the
way down or the two years ago,

1282
01:35:12,279 --> 01:35:14,600
I guess it would be canes all
the way to the ground, you

1283
01:35:14,640 --> 01:35:18,319
want to clip them about a foot
up and leave those dead stumps there because

1284
01:35:18,439 --> 01:35:25,239
they're Seratina and several other species are
going to nest in that, so leave

1285
01:35:25,279 --> 01:35:27,800
a little bit of stem up,
leave like a foot of stem up.

1286
01:35:28,039 --> 01:35:31,920
Yeah, it's really common. You
can basically go through and crack them open,

1287
01:35:31,960 --> 01:35:33,840
and a lot of times in the
middle of the winter like, oh

1288
01:35:33,960 --> 01:35:38,560
there's a little bee nest in there. That's cool. Well, And so

1289
01:35:38,720 --> 01:35:42,800
those are little things where sunflower stalks, for instance, similar thing going on

1290
01:35:42,880 --> 01:35:46,159
there. Well, so what for
gardeners and people who are manipulating their environment,

1291
01:35:46,399 --> 01:35:51,680
I say, you know, you
don't worry about cutting down your plants,

1292
01:35:53,199 --> 01:35:56,319
that particularly your perennials each year because
a lot of times it's like they're

1293
01:35:56,319 --> 01:36:00,960
getting some messages like, oh,
plants, some of these bees are nesting

1294
01:36:01,039 --> 01:36:05,319
in my plant stems. But the
reality is they're nesting in your plants,

1295
01:36:05,439 --> 01:36:11,560
but almost always in the cut plant
stems or browsed or broken or whatever.

1296
01:36:11,640 --> 01:36:14,680
They need an opening. So just
having a bunch of a big stand of

1297
01:36:15,119 --> 01:36:18,760
Helianthus that has no openings is useless
for them. So the best thing you

1298
01:36:18,800 --> 01:36:21,760
do is just and also your neighbors
like this, right, So you cut

1299
01:36:21,800 --> 01:36:28,119
it down about a foot off the
ground, and you can move the stalks

1300
01:36:28,159 --> 01:36:30,560
away and set them up at the
edge of the woods, so potentially more

1301
01:36:31,119 --> 01:36:34,880
places for bees to enter. So
even if the stalk is disconnected from the

1302
01:36:34,880 --> 01:36:39,840
ground, still those still yeah,
if you can. A fun thing to

1303
01:36:39,920 --> 01:36:44,319
do is to take big grass fregmighties
is a good one, like who cares

1304
01:36:44,319 --> 01:36:49,720
about them? And my canthus argentina
plume grass and those kinds of things,

1305
01:36:50,119 --> 01:36:53,960
and you cut them off, you
know, foot off the ground again,

1306
01:36:54,359 --> 01:36:58,920
and then you bundle them up in
every foot. You cinch them down with

1307
01:36:59,039 --> 01:37:03,159
wire or zip ties, and then
take a handsong and cut in between very

1308
01:37:03,199 --> 01:37:09,520
neat and tiny bundle of all kinds
of holes, different almost so it looks

1309
01:37:09,560 --> 01:37:14,000
like one of those be those bumblebee
nests. You could the wood tube bumble

1310
01:37:14,000 --> 01:37:15,720
bee nests you can buy online or
something like that. Those aren't bumblebeanists.

1311
01:37:15,720 --> 01:37:19,119
Those are mason be nests. Oh, mason bees. But mason bees are

1312
01:37:19,199 --> 01:37:24,119
whole nests in wood. You can
do crazy whatever you want with those.

1313
01:37:24,199 --> 01:37:28,319
Are those legit? Do those things
actually work? Those work? Bumblebee nests

1314
01:37:28,399 --> 01:37:31,520
never work, like one of our
big fails. We're failing all the time.

1315
01:37:31,560 --> 01:37:34,720
So it's not that big of a
deal. Which is I want to

1316
01:37:34,840 --> 01:37:41,880
be able to make a nesting thing. Let's call it that bumblebees will nest

1317
01:37:41,920 --> 01:37:45,399
in so that I can, you
know, study them better and manipulate them.

1318
01:37:45,520 --> 01:37:49,239
It's very difficult to find bumblebee nests. Bumble Bees are incredibly common,

1319
01:37:49,680 --> 01:37:55,600
and we can do molecular things and
see that there are many family groups out

1320
01:37:55,600 --> 01:37:59,680
there per acre, but it's almost
impossible to find their nests. That's one

1321
01:37:59,680 --> 01:38:04,640
of the problems with doing studies of
say Bomba saphanus the endangered species and others,

1322
01:38:04,720 --> 01:38:08,560
is like, we can't find the
nest. Where are they, I

1323
01:38:08,560 --> 01:38:13,560
mean the people, where are they
likely hiding? So they are let's call

1324
01:38:13,600 --> 01:38:23,279
them nook and cranny things. Mostly
humblebees would be colonial, would be the

1325
01:38:24,039 --> 01:38:27,720
an easy way to explain it.
Actually they're not truly colonial, but that's

1326
01:38:27,760 --> 01:38:31,800
definitional. Have a queen once a
year and then she produces workers. End

1327
01:38:31,840 --> 01:38:35,479
of the year, they produce guides, which would be the the next year's

1328
01:38:35,520 --> 01:38:43,000
reproductives. They make the males die
as usual, and then the female queen's

1329
01:38:43,039 --> 01:38:49,079
overwinter starts again. So the nest
though, is often like an old roadent

1330
01:38:49,159 --> 01:38:55,680
burrow, and ah. Sometimes it's
just an underground cavity. They spend a

1331
01:38:55,680 --> 01:39:00,079
lot of time looking for these things. Sometimes it's just a thick clump of

1332
01:39:00,119 --> 01:39:03,920
grass. So some species are more
like that. But they're hiding them,

1333
01:39:04,159 --> 01:39:10,039
duh. And they have a you
know, may have a good number of

1334
01:39:10,039 --> 01:39:13,600
workers, but they don't have like
yellowjacket numbers of workers. A lot of

1335
01:39:13,640 --> 01:39:16,880
times you can find a yellowjacket nest
by just sitting back in the late evening

1336
01:39:16,960 --> 01:39:21,800
and looking for the line of yellow
jackets moving up and moving down. Bumblebees

1337
01:39:23,119 --> 01:39:27,439
no, really hard. Try to
fuse dogs still really hard. Wow,

1338
01:39:27,720 --> 01:39:33,479
And so anyway, wouldn't it be
nice? As would appear to be the

1339
01:39:33,520 --> 01:39:38,159
case because you can go online and
look up bumblebee nest box and they're like,

1340
01:39:38,319 --> 01:39:42,279
here's a bumblebee nest box. Does
not guarantee in the east, it

1341
01:39:42,319 --> 01:39:46,399
does not work. And lots of
bumblebee studies never get pumblished because they put

1342
01:39:46,439 --> 01:39:50,560
out a bunch of what theoretically would
be bumblebe nesting box and they get nothing.

1343
01:39:51,520 --> 01:39:58,199
So anyway, one of my goals
figure out an actual bubblebee nesting box

1344
01:39:58,239 --> 01:40:00,880
that works. But the point is
is you can cut for a lot of

1345
01:40:00,880 --> 01:40:03,920
the native bees. You can just
cut that native invasive grass that's pampas grass.

1346
01:40:04,319 --> 01:40:09,039
A single female is going to look
through all of those and say I

1347
01:40:09,199 --> 01:40:14,079
like this one for whatever reason.
But you have instantly created a whole series

1348
01:40:14,119 --> 01:40:16,000
of choice for them, so you
know how to spend a lot of time

1349
01:40:16,079 --> 01:40:20,119
doing this, and then the same
thing with wood things. So yes,

1350
01:40:20,199 --> 01:40:24,560
you can buy these mason bee nests
and they'll be populated. You don't need

1351
01:40:24,600 --> 01:40:28,199
to buy mason bees. You don't
need to bring them in. You just

1352
01:40:28,279 --> 01:40:30,600
put them up. They'll come.
They're all over the place, and you

1353
01:40:30,720 --> 01:40:38,119
just need drill bits three eighths,
one eighth and five eighths and just you

1354
01:40:38,159 --> 01:40:41,000
know again if you have a really
long drill bit or you can get those

1355
01:40:41,520 --> 01:40:45,920
better, just the you know,
big box store drill bit set. Just

1356
01:40:45,000 --> 01:40:48,800
drill a bunch of holes in a
block and like a long be the neighbor's

1357
01:40:48,840 --> 01:40:53,319
fence, it can be a telephone
hole, it can be your porch,

1358
01:40:53,600 --> 01:40:57,600
all which I've you know done.
Yeah, very effective. Okay, one

1359
01:40:57,640 --> 01:41:00,079
more, we got this one.
Let's see do we looked at it?

1360
01:41:00,199 --> 01:41:05,239
No, we didn't look at Macrotera
yet. The specialist that is macro Terra

1361
01:41:05,399 --> 01:41:13,479
is at least some members are again
not my not my area of coverage.

1362
01:41:14,039 --> 01:41:16,880
If you look up again, I
urge you to look at Jared Fowler's site.

1363
01:41:17,399 --> 01:41:20,960
How many species I'm looking at?
There's like six species, three of

1364
01:41:21,000 --> 01:41:27,279
which have no photos for their tax
on page. Wow, that's cool.

1365
01:41:27,560 --> 01:41:32,920
They are cacked. There's probably a
lot more. If I'm mac macro Terra,

1366
01:41:33,039 --> 01:41:38,039
I don't know. If I naturalists
does not include a species if there's

1367
01:41:38,079 --> 01:41:41,279
never been a sighting, Oh my
god, here's sure that's your go to.

1368
01:41:42,239 --> 01:41:46,479
There is a place John Asher maintains
a site that catalogs all the species

1369
01:41:46,520 --> 01:41:50,000
of bees in the world and you
can look it up by country, so

1370
01:41:50,319 --> 01:41:55,319
you could easily, you know,
find the number of macrotera in the world.

1371
01:41:55,439 --> 01:41:59,920
Here's a macroterrilla and it's only been
observed Yeah, right in South Texas.

1372
01:42:00,039 --> 01:42:01,119
Lean, Well, that's cool.
I don't know much about that group.

1373
01:42:01,159 --> 01:42:03,840
That's fucking cool. Man. Well, South Texas, you know you

1374
01:42:03,880 --> 01:42:10,680
have that tom al epan thornscrubub and
you have that whole ecosystem just kisses into

1375
01:42:12,439 --> 01:42:16,159
Texas or the North America right there, and from a b point of view,

1376
01:42:16,239 --> 01:42:20,600
it's very understudied. There's a guy
who I wanted to talk to you

1377
01:42:20,760 --> 01:42:26,199
named Jack Neff. He's up in
the Austin area and he's sort of the

1378
01:42:26,279 --> 01:42:29,000
Texas b guru. How do you
spell his name? I'm gonna look this

1379
01:42:29,039 --> 01:42:34,199
guy up. It's any Ff and
his first name I think would be John,

1380
01:42:34,560 --> 01:42:38,600
not Jack, and I can get
you his email, Okay, yeah,

1381
01:42:38,640 --> 01:42:42,680
please, that'd be great. Anyway, he doesn't. He says,

1382
01:42:42,800 --> 01:42:46,359
that's the area that we know the
least about because almost none of the bee

1383
01:42:46,359 --> 01:42:50,319
heads aren't located there. They don't
go there. Oh it's in the cut

1384
01:42:50,479 --> 01:42:55,960
It is, like, yeah,
it's I'm living in a cutty area man.

1385
01:42:56,239 --> 01:43:01,119
Ironically, though, my colleague just
went down to see the eclipse down

1386
01:43:01,159 --> 01:43:06,000
there, and you know, he
went because his wife wanted to go and

1387
01:43:06,279 --> 01:43:10,800
he wanted to go be collecting,
and so he and he's a carpenter bee

1388
01:43:10,800 --> 01:43:15,640
specialist, and he found three carpenter
be species down there and very excited.

1389
01:43:15,880 --> 01:43:23,600
Oh ship cool at rare ones or
what. No. And although although one

1390
01:43:23,800 --> 01:43:29,399
is basically a Mexican species that just
gets up there with every it's not in

1391
01:43:29,479 --> 01:43:32,319
very many collections, but none of
them are like new for the state.

1392
01:43:32,840 --> 01:43:35,479
But he was psyched to go back
to that area. And I haven't been

1393
01:43:35,520 --> 01:43:39,399
in that area for years. So
we ever come down there, you ever

1394
01:43:39,439 --> 01:43:43,239
come down, hit me up.
There's a bunch of good like near the

1395
01:43:43,279 --> 01:43:48,840
McCallan area, like Hidalgo, and
there's a lot of habit that destruction going

1396
01:43:48,840 --> 01:43:53,239
on, but there's still some really
cool little patches. Yeah, o god,

1397
01:43:53,279 --> 01:43:56,000
what's the I mean? Now,
it's just tracked houses. They're sprouting,

1398
01:43:56,079 --> 01:43:59,800
they're growing, they're farming tracked houses
like no one's but that makes me

1399
01:44:00,159 --> 01:44:02,319
insane too, But they make me
feel nuts because it's like they have no

1400
01:44:02,439 --> 01:44:06,600
idea, like the developers have any
idea what's coming. Like it's we had

1401
01:44:06,680 --> 01:44:10,960
three weeks of one hundred and five
degree temperatures in June. First year we've

1402
01:44:11,000 --> 01:44:14,880
had a sustained he heat wave like
that in June, like you would I

1403
01:44:14,920 --> 01:44:16,720
looked at temp records that would be
like like one oh five for a day,

1404
01:44:17,279 --> 01:44:20,399
right, two days and nineteen ninety
eight something like that, But this

1405
01:44:20,560 --> 01:44:25,399
was three weeks of just insanely hot, like somehow you can't go outside,

1406
01:44:25,439 --> 01:44:29,800
like you are basically relegated. Your
car becomes like a spaceship, like you're

1407
01:44:29,800 --> 01:44:31,239
stuck in like a rover on Mars, like a Mars rover, you know,

1408
01:44:31,399 --> 01:44:35,159
just like you can't exist without the
AC most people can't. And we

1409
01:44:35,359 --> 01:44:41,720
were there in the eighties and we
were doing bird surveys of the then just

1410
01:44:41,760 --> 01:44:46,399
beginning to put together lower Rio Grande
Valley National Wildlife Rereser Complex in this thorn

1411
01:44:46,439 --> 01:44:49,720
scrub, and so we would be
up at four thirty in the morning because

1412
01:44:49,720 --> 01:44:56,239
that's bird time, and it would
be still eighty and because the goal was

1413
01:44:56,279 --> 01:44:59,960
there, we would by nine when
you know, things are pretty much done,

1414
01:45:00,039 --> 01:45:03,560
and I would be sweaty, but
not like up here sweaty, which

1415
01:45:03,600 --> 01:45:09,079
is also human. I would be
head to toe everything would be wet.

1416
01:45:09,239 --> 01:45:13,279
Well, yeah, that's what it's
like. I mean, it's incredibly harsh

1417
01:45:13,640 --> 01:45:16,319
environment in that way, but very
cool birds. Yeah. Living down there,

1418
01:45:16,319 --> 01:45:19,000
I've become accustomed to that. Like
I was in Chicago during one of

1419
01:45:19,000 --> 01:45:21,960
their quote unquote heat waves. It
got to like ninety five during the day,

1420
01:45:23,000 --> 01:45:25,000
and I was like, you know
what I'd give to have a fucking

1421
01:45:25,079 --> 01:45:29,159
ninety five a high of ninety five
degree day where I live, Like this

1422
01:45:29,239 --> 01:45:31,199
is nothing like you just adapt,
you know, you get a good hat

1423
01:45:31,520 --> 01:45:36,159
where sunscreen at least on your face
and your neck, and then just sweat

1424
01:45:36,199 --> 01:45:41,319
and just roll with it. Baggy
shirt, you know. Yeah, but

1425
01:45:41,720 --> 01:45:44,279
you know a lot of that habitat
though. You can't wear shorts. It's

1426
01:45:44,319 --> 01:45:46,279
just it'll slice you up. Yeah. Yeah, no, definitely. Yeah.

1427
01:45:46,319 --> 01:45:49,359
Brown Jay's Green Jay's all this.
All these cool fucking birds you don

1428
01:45:49,399 --> 01:45:53,680
get anywhere else. Oh God,
I love those. I love those little

1429
01:45:53,680 --> 01:45:56,720
bastards, man, They're so cool. The chucha lockers are layers. Okay,

1430
01:45:56,720 --> 01:45:58,399
well, I'll let you go in
a minute. But I want to

1431
01:45:58,399 --> 01:46:00,680
ask some of your photos aren't credible, uh huh. And we'll get to

1432
01:46:00,680 --> 01:46:04,159
where people can look them up later. But how do you how do you

1433
01:46:04,239 --> 01:46:08,640
take these? What do you do? Yeah? So they're all dead and

1434
01:46:08,720 --> 01:46:13,640
what they are is stacked photos.
So we have a little system in the

1435
01:46:13,720 --> 01:46:18,880
lab. Basically we're using a you
know, not top of the line camera

1436
01:46:18,880 --> 01:46:25,640
anymore. Canon Mark two five D
was what we started with. We got

1437
01:46:25,640 --> 01:46:30,479
to a three and then we haven't
advanced since their big sensor screen. And

1438
01:46:30,680 --> 01:46:39,840
we have a sled that is from
Synogys. I think it's Synogyus that I

1439
01:46:39,880 --> 01:46:44,199
can have a little microprocessor and I
can say start here and here and then

1440
01:46:44,239 --> 01:46:46,920
take a picture every so many mic
focus. What's a sled? What do

1441
01:46:46,920 --> 01:46:49,520
you mean? What is that?
Yeah? So the camera sits on a

1442
01:46:49,600 --> 01:46:55,319
sled with a little screw that can
be very precisely moved, because what you're

1443
01:46:55,359 --> 01:47:00,560
doing is you're taking a whole series. We've taken over two hundred pictures of

1444
01:47:00,640 --> 01:47:06,119
one bee at very high magnification.
So high magnification with the kinds of lenses

1445
01:47:06,159 --> 01:47:10,520
that we're using has almost no depth
of field, so very little like one

1446
01:47:10,520 --> 01:47:13,399
intental s right. Yeah, my
friend Allen does that with mushrooms. He

1447
01:47:13,479 --> 01:47:15,119
focused stacks, but the camera does
it for him. They don't use it.

1448
01:47:15,960 --> 01:47:20,920
Yes, but this is maybe old
school now, but my understanding is

1449
01:47:20,920 --> 01:47:27,840
that to do this kind of focus
stacking where you're taking many, like one

1450
01:47:27,920 --> 01:47:31,159
hundred shots, you need to have
a stable environment. And then we have

1451
01:47:31,239 --> 01:47:39,840
a beer cooler with all kinds of
places for the flash to bounce around in,

1452
01:47:39,920 --> 01:47:45,199
and we have little we call them
bridges with velum paper to soften the

1453
01:47:45,239 --> 01:47:47,680
flash. And it's a little it's
basically a little, tiny, little studio

1454
01:47:47,960 --> 01:47:51,319
to diffuse the light. Yeah,
you've used like a little chamber. Basically,

1455
01:47:51,439 --> 01:47:57,760
they're like wedding photographers. Yeah,
and black, and there's a black

1456
01:47:57,840 --> 01:48:03,239
velvet curtain. So are our difference
has from others, although people are doing

1457
01:48:03,279 --> 01:48:08,119
it now, is that it's a
solid black background. We push the background

1458
01:48:08,119 --> 01:48:13,680
to absolute zero zero zero on the
scale so that you can expand and contract

1459
01:48:13,800 --> 01:48:18,960
the boundaries as much as you like. And then visually you don't look at

1460
01:48:19,000 --> 01:48:24,479
anything but the b because no,
you don't inspect the black. If you

1461
01:48:24,520 --> 01:48:29,359
have a light background on anything,
your eye always goes to the lightest part

1462
01:48:29,359 --> 01:48:31,119
of the picture. So if you
have a bright white background. It's kind

1463
01:48:31,119 --> 01:48:33,680
of looking all over the place.
Then it gets to looking at the thing.

1464
01:48:33,760 --> 01:48:36,880
Oh yeah, black backgrounds grace especially
for I do the same with with

1465
01:48:38,000 --> 01:48:41,439
macro photos of plants. But what
what lens are you guys using? We

1466
01:48:41,600 --> 01:48:48,279
use the now unfortunately out of production
Canon MPE sixty five millimeter one to five

1467
01:48:48,560 --> 01:48:53,079
X is it? Sixty five milimeter? That's it? And if you're able

1468
01:48:53,119 --> 01:48:56,520
to get this well again we have
to stack everything. No, but I

1469
01:48:56,560 --> 01:49:00,600
mean just to get that up closed, like, how do you Because after

1470
01:49:00,600 --> 01:49:03,039
a certain point you get the lens
so close to the subject it just won't

1471
01:49:03,039 --> 01:49:10,079
focus anymore. Well you can,
yeah, so you can, and it's

1472
01:49:10,159 --> 01:49:14,039
not that bad because the next step
we do. We have twenty X and

1473
01:49:14,159 --> 01:49:20,279
ten and ten X systems where we've
modified. There's a great website called extrememacro

1474
01:49:20,479 --> 01:49:24,720
dot com I believe it's a UK
place shows how to do this. You

1475
01:49:24,800 --> 01:49:31,399
take an old fixed whatever, non
zoom lens. We use two hun are

1476
01:49:31,439 --> 01:49:35,840
millimeter and then you modify it and
you stick a microscope lens on top of

1477
01:49:35,840 --> 01:49:42,159
that of certain certain kinds. And
so we have ten X and twenty five

1478
01:49:42,399 --> 01:49:47,239
X. Our twenty X microscope lenses
that really really close and can do super

1479
01:49:47,279 --> 01:49:50,600
tiny I'd love to get money shots
and anthers like that. It's just like

1480
01:49:50,800 --> 01:49:56,439
so they're so fun. And also
seeds are like incredible, like cacus seeds.

1481
01:49:56,720 --> 01:50:00,000
Oh yeah, yeah, all the
little divots and everything. Culture.

1482
01:50:00,199 --> 01:50:03,399
If you go to our site and
you learn how to use flickers search tools,

1483
01:50:03,399 --> 01:50:08,600
it's pretty easy. You can find. We have a catalog of well

1484
01:50:08,640 --> 01:50:14,000
over five thousand shots and now we're
retooling. We've just literally yesterday got in

1485
01:50:14,119 --> 01:50:21,159
a a mirrorless camera now, the
r R five. It's out of EOS

1486
01:50:21,319 --> 01:50:27,399
R five Canon that's out of production, but you know, meets our specs

1487
01:50:27,479 --> 01:50:30,000
and also our cost. God that's
cool. So this isn't just a macro

1488
01:50:30,119 --> 01:50:35,840
lens. It's like a magnification lens
that you're using too. Uh so,

1489
01:50:36,279 --> 01:50:40,520
yes, we have both. So
a lot of our day to day is

1490
01:50:40,520 --> 01:50:45,520
this one to five X because I
can change the magnification to frame the shot

1491
01:50:45,840 --> 01:50:47,840
as much as I want, so
that's super convenient. But I can only

1492
01:50:47,920 --> 01:50:51,199
go up to five X if I
want to go more. I have these

1493
01:50:51,239 --> 01:50:56,079
fixed ones, which you know have
their own issues, but do get me

1494
01:50:56,119 --> 01:51:00,239
the magnification. Those are literally just
a few millimeters on the subject because of

1495
01:51:00,279 --> 01:51:04,000
what you just talked about, which
is that your working distance is minute.

1496
01:51:04,399 --> 01:51:09,399
Yeah, but that's okay. You
know, we rejigger everything and we pour

1497
01:51:09,479 --> 01:51:14,039
in a lot of light and it's
all on stands. And even if the

1498
01:51:14,079 --> 01:51:16,000
aperture is super small, I mean
you guys using a big aperture, right,

1499
01:51:16,039 --> 01:51:18,680
since you're focused stacking, you don't
need to use it. Yeah,

1500
01:51:18,880 --> 01:51:24,199
we don't want to. If you
have a small a really small one or

1501
01:51:24,279 --> 01:51:30,000
really big one, you get into
some weird really when you're focused stacking and

1502
01:51:30,359 --> 01:51:35,800
you're looking at all this detail,
it you run into some aberrations refraction or

1503
01:51:35,840 --> 01:51:40,239
something of something. Yeah, I
don't know. Yeah, yeah. My

1504
01:51:40,319 --> 01:51:44,319
setup is just like a Nikon,
just a Nikon, like a beginner DSL

1505
01:51:44,560 --> 01:51:47,479
because it's got the pop up flash. Use a macro lens diffuser for super

1506
01:51:47,920 --> 01:51:53,880
you know, low contrast light and
no shadows, and then just like F

1507
01:51:53,920 --> 01:51:59,000
twenty two or smaller like F twenty
nine ideal, but then you lose a

1508
01:51:59,039 --> 01:52:02,119
little bit of lucidity. Yeah you
know, yeah, so we don't we

1509
01:52:02,439 --> 01:52:06,640
Our rule is F nine to F
three point five. Yeah, yeah.

1510
01:52:06,760 --> 01:52:10,680
Extremes and the focused thacking is really
that's really where it's at. Man,

1511
01:52:10,720 --> 01:52:15,119
you get some incredible photos there.
There's a so our system is really derived

1512
01:52:15,159 --> 01:52:21,039
from actually the army, and that
system now exists in modified form by a

1513
01:52:21,760 --> 01:52:27,880
group called Macro Solutions, I think, and they they have it setups where

1514
01:52:27,880 --> 01:52:30,680
you can bring them out into the
field, which we never do on tripods,

1515
01:52:31,039 --> 01:52:36,760
and so the whole the whole sled
is right there in the field.

1516
01:52:38,680 --> 01:52:41,479
And then you know your more problem
is like you can't have a lot of

1517
01:52:41,520 --> 01:52:45,319
wind or something that blows around,
but you can do some more interesting things,

1518
01:52:45,479 --> 01:52:47,279
right, Yeah, well work,
So that's what I want to ask

1519
01:52:47,279 --> 01:52:49,880
you now too, is what's the
website working? People check out your work?

1520
01:52:50,439 --> 01:52:56,399
Yeah, so we have our our
social media handle, including the Flicker

1521
01:52:56,720 --> 01:53:01,319
website where you can download the originals. Is well at least the so we

1522
01:53:01,399 --> 01:53:04,560
do a lot of post processing.
I can send those if people want,

1523
01:53:04,600 --> 01:53:10,960
but they're monster but the finals which
will blow up to whatever you want,

1524
01:53:11,000 --> 01:53:14,039
and we ask you not to even
contact us. We just want you to

1525
01:53:14,079 --> 01:53:18,520
take them. Is because we're just
going to say yes always. And weirdly,

1526
01:53:18,560 --> 01:53:23,720
they just show up in all kinds
of weird commercial places like in Walmart.

1527
01:53:24,279 --> 01:53:29,960
We're like that's our picture. That's
our picture because they're being resold a

1528
01:53:29,960 --> 01:53:34,680
million times. Oh but anyway,
the Flicker site is in our social media

1529
01:53:34,720 --> 01:53:45,239
is USGS, US Geological Survey b
I m L and the Inventory Monitoring Lab,

1530
01:53:45,560 --> 01:53:47,920
which we actually don't use that naming
or we're stuck with the acronym.

1531
01:53:49,039 --> 01:53:56,520
And yeah, take them and glad
they're glad to have them used in any

1532
01:53:56,560 --> 01:53:59,239
way. You don't again, you
can use them for anything. You can

1533
01:53:59,279 --> 01:54:03,399
sell them. A bunch of people
do could like get an emblazoned on a

1534
01:54:03,520 --> 01:54:09,319
shirt or something at Walgreens is stuck
quilt, don't laugh. In the last

1535
01:54:09,399 --> 01:54:13,439
year, someone said I think these
are your pictures and it was a pair

1536
01:54:13,479 --> 01:54:17,159
of yoga pants that were completed by
That's hilarious. But you're all for it

1537
01:54:17,159 --> 01:54:20,399
because you just want to get this
information out there and have people be able

1538
01:54:20,399 --> 01:54:26,520
to There was another group that tracks
where your pictures end up so that you

1539
01:54:26,560 --> 01:54:31,479
know theory. You sue them and
they're just curious and they're in basically every

1540
01:54:31,479 --> 01:54:38,119
country in the world using them in
some way, probably fifteen generations removed from

1541
01:54:38,239 --> 01:54:41,319
us, so mostly we don't get
acknowledged, but that's okay. Yeah,

1542
01:54:41,439 --> 01:54:46,479
this does beautiful picture of something that
you can resonate with. They're fucking They're

1543
01:54:46,479 --> 01:54:49,279
incredible. They're really cool. I'd
love to get one blown up in like

1544
01:54:49,319 --> 01:54:54,920
a poster or something. You can't. They blow up nicely. They I've

1545
01:54:54,960 --> 01:55:00,720
seen them ten feet tall museums and
things like that. I would Wantastern species

1546
01:55:00,720 --> 01:55:01,720
though, want like, you know, you have a lot of Western species,

1547
01:55:01,760 --> 01:55:05,000
cactus bees or something like that.
Yeah you can. I don't know

1548
01:55:05,000 --> 01:55:10,279
about cactus bees, but per se. But and also if you send us

1549
01:55:10,279 --> 01:55:13,760
a specimen, we'll take a picture. Yeah, what's the what's the best

1550
01:55:13,800 --> 01:55:17,119
way to just capture it and then
freeze it or something? Yeah? Yeah,

1551
01:55:17,319 --> 01:55:21,439
so yeah, that's the best way. You don't want it to be

1552
01:55:23,000 --> 01:55:25,760
uh, how do you dry it
out? So? How do you dry

1553
01:55:25,800 --> 01:55:29,880
it out so it doesn't run.
They as long as you're not in some

1554
01:55:29,960 --> 01:55:33,079
kind of weird humid environment or something, they dry naturally, Okay. And

1555
01:55:33,840 --> 01:55:39,359
so the best way would be to
send it to us in a you know,

1556
01:55:39,399 --> 01:55:42,760
like a jewelry comes in little cotton
fiber box. Yeah, just put

1557
01:55:42,760 --> 01:55:45,399
it in there, put two layers
of cotton on top. They're very delicate

1558
01:55:45,439 --> 01:55:48,960
and they will dry and then things
snap off and shipping address and all that's

1559
01:55:49,159 --> 01:55:53,000
on the website. I don't know
if it is. But you can email.

1560
01:55:53,279 --> 01:55:56,279
Yeah, you can contact me,
okay and spell your name sober one

1561
01:55:56,359 --> 01:55:59,520
knows how to look it up,
or you get a ted typ DEA isn't

1562
01:55:59,600 --> 01:56:05,720
David R E g E okay,
so Sam Sam driggi okay? Cool y,

1563
01:56:06,039 --> 01:56:08,920
Well, thank you so much,
man. I appreciate you doing this.

1564
01:56:09,039 --> 01:56:12,680
Seek Your fucking house is inspirational too. It's so cool. Keeps me

1565
01:56:12,720 --> 01:56:15,319
alive. That stove thing. How
long did that take you to build?

1566
01:56:15,359 --> 01:56:19,720
They tell everyone about the stove just
put it rocket mass heater with the adobe.

1567
01:56:19,760 --> 01:56:24,720
With the adobe and a big like
cool looking barrel. It's a fifty

1568
01:56:24,760 --> 01:56:29,239
five gallon drum. So the rocket
mass heater is a rocket stove. So

1569
01:56:29,319 --> 01:56:31,840
this is way outside the boundaries for
most people. But there's a rocket stove

1570
01:56:32,199 --> 01:56:36,399
and then there's a big chunk of
adobe which includes chunks of concrete and everything

1571
01:56:36,399 --> 01:56:43,800
else that scavenges the heat off of
the stove that normally on a wood stove,

1572
01:56:43,800 --> 01:56:47,000
it goes straight up the chimney that
bench or whatever you want to make

1573
01:56:47,000 --> 01:56:50,199
it into. Right, It's very
crafty because here it's like a four by

1574
01:56:50,319 --> 01:56:55,479
six adobe. A lot of people
run a bench along their wall, and

1575
01:56:55,520 --> 01:56:59,279
then some people make it into their
bed. Other people will just have it.

1576
01:56:59,359 --> 01:57:01,720
Here is a real warm bench,
and that becomes the center of the

1577
01:57:01,720 --> 01:57:06,319
house in the winter. So my
partner has one, and that's where she

1578
01:57:06,520 --> 01:57:10,239
is all along on that thing.
She says, I don't have to go

1579
01:57:10,279 --> 01:57:15,000
to the south anymore because I have
this super warm and it makes it sound

1580
01:57:15,039 --> 01:57:18,760
like a rocket, and it's more
efficient, so it's like eighty percent a

1581
01:57:18,920 --> 01:57:26,680
gentle like a war and yeah,
and you can see the fire. You

1582
01:57:26,680 --> 01:57:28,920
got a hole, but it's just
a hole. It's like a six eight

1583
01:57:30,399 --> 01:57:33,960
dropping You're dropping wood and it could
be anything. Scrap wood, sticks of

1584
01:57:34,000 --> 01:57:40,159
wood down into a hole which is
made of fire brick, not even cemented

1585
01:57:40,159 --> 01:57:45,159
together. It's gluding clay. And
the draft is so strong that it's burning

1586
01:57:45,279 --> 01:57:48,399
only from the bottom. And you
would think it would chimney up, but

1587
01:57:48,479 --> 01:57:55,840
it doesn't unless you really screw up
and under certain circumstances. But yeah,

1588
01:57:56,000 --> 01:58:00,159
so that's what I run all winter. Build this little house too. So

1589
01:58:00,359 --> 01:58:03,560
a friend of ours built this house. I did the one next door.

1590
01:58:03,680 --> 01:58:08,199
He does a much better job than
I any He's like a craftsman. So

1591
01:58:08,239 --> 01:58:14,760
it's all out of straw bales and
different kinds of clay and adobe, and

1592
01:58:15,319 --> 01:58:19,720
yeah, everything is recycled here in
this building. You know, I get

1593
01:58:19,760 --> 01:58:24,600
stories about all these pieces of wood. We have a sawmill that's all silver

1594
01:58:24,640 --> 01:58:28,640
maple from a tree in the backyard. Yeah. What's with this little like

1595
01:58:28,840 --> 01:58:36,159
rounded shelf n So, yeah,
it's just so it's a very three dimensional

1596
01:58:36,159 --> 01:58:39,760
thing, which is one of the
things I like. There's depth to the

1597
01:58:39,800 --> 01:58:43,720
wall. It looks like it looks
like the you know, like Luke Skywalker's

1598
01:58:43,760 --> 01:58:46,239
home in the Star Wars where they
live on what's that. I forget the

1599
01:58:46,319 --> 01:58:48,840
name of the island the planet,
but whatever, you know, I don't

1600
01:58:48,840 --> 01:58:53,239
know. Tattooing. It looks like
the nice house and tattooing. It's it's

1601
01:58:53,520 --> 01:58:58,399
very getting really wonderful vibes here.
Yeah. Yeah, so you can you

1602
01:58:58,439 --> 01:59:01,319
can sculpt it. So you can
if you want three dimensional outside the wall,

1603
01:59:01,399 --> 01:59:04,640
you just make it out of clay. Cool. And then he's really

1604
01:59:04,680 --> 01:59:09,560
good. You can see from the
smoothness and the lack of cracks that he

1605
01:59:09,680 --> 01:59:14,720
really can do the formulas right to
get a non cracking surface out of what's

1606
01:59:14,760 --> 01:59:16,439
b if you've got to hang something
on the wall, how do you You

1607
01:59:16,439 --> 01:59:21,720
can do it different ways, so
you can use you know, standard pegs

1608
01:59:21,760 --> 01:59:28,279
for holes. But you know,
the straw bale people have their their ways.

1609
01:59:28,520 --> 01:59:30,319
I mean the simplest is like those
are just a nail right, just

1610
01:59:30,439 --> 01:59:34,720
nail right in the mud. Like
if you have to hang something really heavy,

1611
01:59:34,800 --> 01:59:39,920
then you're gonna look at something that
goes into the straw bales below right

1612
01:59:40,359 --> 01:59:43,039
and hangs off it. God,
it's it's yeah, it's it's great,

1613
01:59:43,079 --> 01:59:45,239
man. Yeah, it's it's always
cool to go to, you know,

1614
01:59:45,279 --> 01:59:46,319
go to a friend's house and see
like, oh, you got a really

1615
01:59:46,399 --> 01:59:49,199
nice setup. Man, It's always
makes it fun to go over. Yeah.

1616
01:59:49,319 --> 01:59:51,039
No, this is where I want
to live. It's gonna be I'm

1617
01:59:51,079 --> 01:59:54,800
gonna be hanging out. You know. You find me here later this afternoon.

1618
01:59:54,840 --> 01:59:57,439
Oh yeah, you can say it
later as one. I'm heading out

1619
01:59:57,760 --> 01:59:59,279
right. Man. All right,
well, thanks so much for your time.

1620
01:59:59,359 --> 02:00:00,399
So I appreciate you. Bet all
right, that's all I got to

1621
02:00:00,399 --> 02:00:01,640
have. Aggressive They pipe