Speaker 1: Oh hey, it's that suitcase that you haven't unpacked yet.
Speaker 1: Ali Ward, this isologies. You're here, I'm here, We're here.
Speaker 1: The bees are here. The bees are everywhere. But in
Speaker 1: the US, eighteen states have declared that their state insect
Speaker 1: is Epis malifera, the honeybee. Here's the thing that's not
Speaker 1: native to this continent. It's a European honeybee. It was
Speaker 1: important for wax and honey and pollination. Every honeybee you
Speaker 1: see in the US is feral. What you may not
Speaker 1: know about are the native bees, the ones that have
Speaker 1: been here for eons, yet none of them are state insects.
Speaker 1: So today we'll meet them, and within an hour you're
Speaker 1: going to become the kind of person who's obsessed with
Speaker 1: indigenous bee species. So this episode started in my backyard
Speaker 1: over a year ago when we decided to pair up
Speaker 1: with my old friend David, who runs a native plant
Speaker 1: nonprofit in LA. Fast forward eighteen months and we have
Speaker 1: this thriving, buzzing hill of plants and David mentioned a
Speaker 1: native bee expert he knew, and I begged her to
Speaker 1: hang out with me. Before I knew it, she and
Speaker 1: her camera were here making memes. What kind was that one.
Speaker 2: It was a Holicus tripertitis. It's a little sweaty, sweaty
Speaker 2: you know. Oh wait, she's back. She's over here. Sure, here,
Speaker 2: she's flying away. Okay, now she's on the stem, you know,
Speaker 2: may mean that's a good.
Speaker 1: Place to So thisology is indigenous. Melatology comes from the
Speaker 1: Greek word for bee. So if you know anyone named Melissa,
Speaker 1: their name means b and you may remember that. We
Speaker 1: did a Melatology episode in twenty eighteen that was wonderfully
Speaker 1: informative and charming. It touched on some native bee species.
Speaker 1: It also covered a lot of APIs malifera and backyard beekeeping.
Speaker 1: So we are returning to the topic of bees, but
Speaker 1: this time with a more focused lens, with a photographer,
Speaker 1: an educator, or conservationist. She has been a ted X speaker,
Speaker 1: she's a twenty twenty three National Geographic Explorer Grant recipient.
Speaker 1: She's an author and an advocate it for these native
Speaker 1: creatures and their habitats. She also just launched a deck
Speaker 1: of flashcards all about native bees and in some of
Speaker 1: the audio, I decided to use some outtakes from this
Speaker 1: interview because I got a super sneak peek at the deck,
Speaker 1: which is for sale now and we'll be shipping later
Speaker 1: this month, so we'll sit down with her. But first,
Speaker 1: a quick thanks to everyone supporting the show at Patreon
Speaker 1: dot com, slash ologies and submitted questions for telling a
Speaker 1: friend and for rating and for wearing ologies merch Promologiesmarch
Speaker 1: dot com. Also, you know, I read all your reviews,
Speaker 1: including this fresh one from an unpronounceable string of consonants.
Speaker 1: I think it looks as though it was typed with
Speaker 1: the smear of an elbow, but they said, thanks to
Speaker 1: this podcast, I was able to respond to my therapist
Speaker 1: telling me don't drink out of a fire hose with
Speaker 1: a full explanation of dolphin reproduction. I love that so much,
Speaker 1: they say, as do. I. Okay, go grab a sun hat,
Speaker 1: fill up your water bottle. Let's stare into the bushes
Speaker 1: to meet some native bees and learn about their tunnels, turrets,
Speaker 1: fuzzy butts, second sho amorphism, taxonomic fisticuffs, bee hotels, the
Speaker 1: mustard blight, monocultures, the Tiniest lives talk, and how to
Speaker 1: appreciate and photograph all of the marvels you have been
Speaker 1: overlooking with Native melotologist Crystal Hickman.
Speaker 3: My name is Crystal Hickman and my pronouns are she her.
Speaker 4: Let's get into it now.
Speaker 1: Were you excited about photography, the outdoors?
Speaker 3: Bees?
Speaker 1: Bugs? What was the door that opened for you all
Speaker 1: of that?
Speaker 4: Sweet.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's weird to say this, but I feel like
Speaker 3: I came kind of like pre programmed because like everything
Speaker 3: I was really into as like a toddler, I'm doing
Speaker 3: now as an adult.
Speaker 1: That's dope, that's amazing.
Speaker 5: Yea.
Speaker 3: So I was obsessed with my mom's camera. We had
Speaker 3: rose bushes on the side of our house and I
Speaker 3: used to stare at like the lady bugs and the
Speaker 3: honey bees in there for hours. And I remember one
Speaker 3: time there was a snake in our yard and I
Speaker 3: was so excited to see it. I really love insects, photography,
Speaker 3: like all of it, and it just kind of came together,
Speaker 3: I think, like as an adult, though, I kind of
Speaker 3: got away from it because like it wasn't a career.
Speaker 3: So I went to college for like something I wasn't
Speaker 3: even interested in, and then I started working these office
Speaker 3: jobs and I just kind of like left with like
Speaker 3: no backup, Like I had a little money in the bank.
Speaker 3: But I was like, I'm gonna do every single thing
Speaker 3: that I'm interested in and I'm just going to see
Speaker 3: where it goes.
Speaker 1: Oh that's great.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: What was that day like when you decided, fuck this job,
Speaker 1: I'm leaving.
Speaker 3: I mean it was very slow going. I was like
Speaker 3: I felt like for a little while, I was getting dumber. Yeah,
Speaker 3: like I just thought, Yeah, I was just sitting I
Speaker 3: was like, literally, I I remember I was looking at
Speaker 3: my schedule and I could predict what I was going
Speaker 3: to be doing every single day for the rest of
Speaker 3: the year. And I was just like on autopilot and
Speaker 3: I was like, I am so sick of this.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And the first thing I did, though, was like art,
Speaker 3: because I'm also really into art. Wait, she draws too,
Speaker 3: So I actually picked up a pin while I was
Speaker 3: sitting at the desk and I just drew. I think
Speaker 3: it was a dog mm hmm. And then I was like, oh,
Speaker 3: let me just keep drawing. And then I kept drawing,
Speaker 3: and then it was like a month of me just
Speaker 3: drawing every single day from the show Skins that I
Speaker 3: was obsessed with.
Speaker 1: So this was a darkly comedic British TV series about
Speaker 1: teens and college students, and it came out in two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven, and it is heavily steeped in what's
Speaker 1: known as the indie sleeze culture, an era of DJs
Speaker 1: and side swetbangs and chunky jewelry. There was carbonated caffeinated
Speaker 1: malt liquor options, and this show featured some well written
Speaker 1: subplots about mental health and disordered eating and frustrated sexuality
Speaker 1: in a time before everyone had face filters on their
Speaker 1: social media. So Skins was created by Brian Ellesley and
Speaker 1: Jamie Britton, and Crystal As a fan of the show
Speaker 1: started drawing portraits of the series' actors, starting with a
Speaker 1: character who usually wore a fedora, which I'm sorry that
Speaker 1: was just that was groundbreaking for the era. The guy
Speaker 1: at the store said, I'm the only guy he's ever
Speaker 1: seen pull it off.
Speaker 3: And then after I finished drawing, I put in a
Speaker 3: video and put it on YouTube, and then I found
Speaker 3: the creator online and I sam the video, and then
Speaker 3: within a month of me starting to draw, he hired
Speaker 3: me to work on the show. No, yeah, what right,
Speaker 3: And I was like, oh hey, So for quite a
Speaker 3: while I was just doing a lot of art like
Speaker 3: it kind of took off. Wow.
Speaker 1: Really, well what a shoot your shot moment? Right? How
Speaker 1: glad are you that you just went for it?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was so random and I was like, oh,
Speaker 3: someone wants to pay me for that. It's my favorite show. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I came here originally for acting, so I wrote and
Speaker 3: directed my own short film and then I was just
Speaker 3: following every single path. So I did the same thing
Speaker 3: with the bees, and it kind of linked to the
Speaker 3: artwork because I wanted to get a camera where I
Speaker 3: can take original photos for my artwork, but then also
Speaker 3: photograph bees because I've been drawing everything like based on
Speaker 3: other people's photos when I was like, I want to
Speaker 3: take my own photos.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's a great point. So Chrismal picked up photography
Speaker 1: by taking source photos for her ink drawings.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think so much we don't think about that, is
Speaker 1: how much we use photo references. But yeah, having your
Speaker 1: own must feel like it. It's really really yours.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and like I started creating like really strong messages
Speaker 3: at the time. I just met this girl. We did
Speaker 3: a talk together and she was one of the founding
Speaker 3: members of Black Lives Matter. Oh wow, her name is Shammeel.
Speaker 4: So she had a fro.
Speaker 3: And I saw a picture of her like at a
Speaker 3: Black Lives Matter protest, and I told her she looked
Speaker 3: like Angela Davis. And then she's like, hey, I actually
Speaker 3: know her. Do you want to meet her? Yeah? And
Speaker 3: then like I think it was maybe less than two
Speaker 3: weeks later, I met her the Stars a line, right.
Speaker 4: It was very random.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So basically we recreated that image of like Angela
Speaker 3: Davis with her like fist up. So she came to
Speaker 3: my apartment. I put like a whole backdrop up so
Speaker 3: she was in ballpoint pen and then I used black
Speaker 3: spray paint for the Black Lives Matter logo slash like name,
Speaker 3: Oh my god. And then I did a custom frame
Speaker 3: where I put I think forty four people who had
Speaker 3: basically lost their lives in like activism. I've been working
Speaker 3: on one forever. It's a chicken. My friend brought her
Speaker 3: chicken over to my place. Oh lucky, and I got
Speaker 3: one shot of the chicken looking directly into the camera.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, And that's the one I'm using.
Speaker 1: Oh what's the chicken's name?
Speaker 3: Honey? Thank you.
Speaker 1: I needed to know when someone has a pet chicken,
Speaker 1: you need to know what they named. It yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And that piece features a live chicken standing on a
Speaker 1: dinner plate as a commentary about eating meat and also
Speaker 1: if you want to know more about chickens, we recently
Speaker 1: did an entire Chickenology episode. It was a two parter. Also,
Speaker 1: after we recorded this, I pulled up the twenty eighteen
Speaker 1: time lapse video of Crystal hands with nothing but a
Speaker 1: blank sheet of paper and a ballpoint pen, rendering a
Speaker 1: photorealistic and stunning portrait of the Black Panther character T'Challa,
Speaker 1: which was shared tens of thousands of times on social media,
Speaker 1: including by the late Chadwick Boseman, who added, Crystal Hickman,
Speaker 1: your pen work is incredible. Thank you. I watched this video,
Speaker 1: this time laps video of her making this art, and
Speaker 1: it was so stunningly gorgeous. I started crying, which was
Speaker 1: very embarrassing because I just met her, but it was
Speaker 1: absolutely gorgeous. So she was already finding success and acclaim
Speaker 1: in the art world. But she started picking up more
Speaker 1: and more skills, and you will learn that that is
Speaker 1: kind of what she does. She is one of those
Speaker 1: people that's just good at everything. You got this camera,
Speaker 1: so you were making art and you thought, I want
Speaker 1: a camera that maybe I can shoot people and bugs
Speaker 1: and nature. How much googling did you do? Oh my
Speaker 1: god to find a camera?
Speaker 4: So much?
Speaker 3: So much because I was doing b photography with my
Speaker 3: cell phone for two years. Like I was saying, I
Speaker 3: pick a lot of hobbies, and like I tried to
Speaker 3: go through with all of them. I wasn't sure I
Speaker 3: was going to stick with this one. So I wanted
Speaker 3: to know I was going to stick with it first.
Speaker 3: So after I knew that I was, I did so
Speaker 3: much googling, and I was trying to decide between Nikon
Speaker 3: Cannon and Sony and then I ended up picking a
Speaker 3: Nikon D five hundred, okay, which is a crop sensor lens.
Speaker 3: And this was before like mirrorless was like really big.
Speaker 3: And I just youtubed the crap out of this camera
Speaker 3: because I was like, oh, this is a great camera
Speaker 3: for making small things look large. You don't have to
Speaker 3: crop as much. And I absolutely love this camera. And
Speaker 3: it was a camera that I knew I was gonna
Speaker 3: have to grow with. I didn't want something I would outgrow, yeah,
Speaker 3: because it was it was pretty expensive too. It was
Speaker 3: like the most expensive piece of equipment i'd bought.
Speaker 1: When you had two years of cell phone b pictures down,
Speaker 1: were you using like oleo clips or what types of
Speaker 1: lenses or nothing?
Speaker 4: Really?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, like my old photos, like people thought I
Speaker 3: actually had a.
Speaker 1: Care I mean you did. It was just part of
Speaker 1: a phone, right, yeah, actually.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah. I think like honestly, cell phones, especially when
Speaker 3: you're like learning how to use a camera, you can
Speaker 3: take better pictures with your cell phone. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And for more on macro photography, I will link our
Speaker 1: whole episode on it. It's called Epieology and it's with
Speaker 1: Joseph Saunders. That'll be in the show notes Just a
Speaker 1: Life of Bug Portraits awaits You did you find that,
Speaker 1: Oh you really liked taking the pictures, having the source
Speaker 1: material and then also getting that practice of like getting
Speaker 1: out and looking for them too.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I really enjoy the process of just going out
Speaker 3: into nature. I think that's like one of the main
Speaker 3: reasons why I keep doing this, going out to places
Speaker 3: where there's no cell phone reception. It's just kind of
Speaker 3: you and whatever you're doing. And I also feel like
Speaker 3: a lot of times in nature just nothing revolves around people,
Speaker 3: which is really nice, so you can't really be like
Speaker 3: selfish in nature and it's just I don't know, it's
Speaker 3: kind of like therapy or like meditation.
Speaker 1: I bet the idea of getting out of your head
Speaker 1: and getting off of your phone is so hard to
Speaker 1: do literally unless there's like no service or you've dropped
Speaker 1: your phone down a well I mean, yeah, which is expensive.
Speaker 4: Oh you've done that? No oh I think.
Speaker 1: So it was funny when people come back from like
Speaker 1: camping or something and they're like, yeah, it's great, I
Speaker 1: had no service.
Speaker 3: It's amazing too, because like, the longest trip I've ever
Speaker 3: been on was a ten day trip. I was in
Speaker 3: the Trinity Alps. It's like two years ago now, and
Speaker 3: it was just so interesting coming back because all of
Speaker 3: this media that I could assume before, like really regularly,
Speaker 3: I didn't realize how negative it was. It's really refreshing.
Speaker 3: That's why I try to go out somewhere every single day.
Speaker 3: And I'm so happy, and I also like everyone around me. Also.
Speaker 3: I don't know if I'm just attracting people that were
Speaker 3: happy or like what exactly, but everyone's super positive.
Speaker 1: It feels like when you know that you're doing something
Speaker 1: you really like. It's that enthusiasm is really infectious. People
Speaker 1: want to get on your team because it's clearly that
Speaker 1: you like what you're doing, you know, which is great.
Speaker 1: And then you never know, the bees might be talking
Speaker 1: to each other about you and just a general they
Speaker 1: could be you know, general buzz above town.
Speaker 3: That buzz about that's the worst thing.
Speaker 1: Now, you liked lady bugs as well on growing up
Speaker 1: and other type of bugs. What was it about bees.
Speaker 3: That really just gotcha? I wish I had like a
Speaker 3: really definite answer. I would just say that I liked
Speaker 3: all insects, all bugs. But the thing that got me
Speaker 3: specifically into looking at bees was this. Uh there's this
Speaker 3: quote that's attributed to Einstein. I saw it on Facebook.
Speaker 3: It says if the bee disappeared off the surface of
Speaker 3: the globe, then man would only have four years of
Speaker 3: life left. It was like, no more bees, no more man,
Speaker 3: no more pollination. So it turns out the quotess not real.
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna say that, doesn't it.
Speaker 3: It's yeah, And it's like it's funny because like now
Speaker 3: when I actually think about it, like that doesn't make
Speaker 3: any sense. But yeah, also Einstein never said it either.
Speaker 3: Someone just put like Einstein's name on it and then
Speaker 3: like the nineties. Oh good, So that got me into
Speaker 3: I was like, I want to save the bees because
Speaker 3: I was like, I love insects, I love nature. So
Speaker 3: I was like, I'll get involved with this because you know,
Speaker 3: it was an idea I wanted to follow through with.
Speaker 3: So I followed through with it. And then I was
Speaker 3: doing that for quite a long time, and then I
Speaker 3: accidentally took a photo of a native bee accidentally accidentally
Speaker 3: I was looking for honeybees.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's funny too, is I photographed a native bee on mustard?
Speaker 3: So it's like super super invasive, uh huh, which is
Speaker 3: just I think it's really funny.
Speaker 1: Especially the history of why mustard is so prevalent in California.
Speaker 1: From what I understand, like missionaries would just kind of
Speaker 1: throw it behind them on their path.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: West Coast missionaries, led in the seventeen hundreds up what's
Speaker 1: now the California Coast by a Catholic priest named Junaparaserra,
Speaker 1: tossed out invasive mustard seeds as they went along this
Speaker 1: El Camino Real, or the Royal Road that connected all
Speaker 1: the missions, creating what was described as a ribbon of
Speaker 1: gold in their wake and botanists have even broken apart
Speaker 1: the adobe bricks of the missions, and as time marched on,
Speaker 1: they were able to see more and more mustard seeds
Speaker 1: within these mu bricks, and they could trace the spread
Speaker 1: of them. But what is the issue with mustard flowers,
Speaker 1: you ask, Well, it's choked out indigenous plants and thus animals.
Speaker 1: And just like he left a wake of highly invasive weeds.
Speaker 1: Juniparasera also believed that indigenous people could be modified to
Speaker 1: suit religious aesthetics, and according to one book, Into the
Speaker 1: West the Story of its People, indigenous populations were punished
Speaker 1: for the sake of salvation. The missionary said. Juniparas Era
Speaker 1: also said at one point that so long as they
Speaker 1: were converted beforehand, their death could be seen as a joy.
Speaker 1: So California nature lovers, when they see these sunny yellow
Speaker 1: fields of wildflowers, many don't know that a lot of
Speaker 1: it is mustard and it's anything but native. And the
Speaker 1: El Camino Real Route in California is still commemorated with
Speaker 1: these rustic roadside bells along the highway shoulders. But recognizing
Speaker 1: the face of Junipasera might be harder because many statues
Speaker 1: of him have been beheaded in recent years, so thanks
Speaker 1: for the genocide and all the mustard, dude.
Speaker 3: I was actually at a farm last week and they
Speaker 3: were using mustard as a cover crop. No, it was
Speaker 3: just fields and fields of mustard. I was like, Oh
Speaker 3: my gosh, yeah, so I mean, And it's funny because
Speaker 3: until you learn that it's invasive, you just think.
Speaker 1: Oh, wild flowers and they're so yellow. Isn't this nice?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 1: I love a native plant so much that in the
Speaker 1: past year, Jared and I have enlisted the help of
Speaker 1: one David Newsom of a nonprofit called Wild Yards Project,
Speaker 1: who has made our dry backyard full of invasive weeds
Speaker 1: into this thriving pollinator garden and a critter habitat. And
Speaker 1: because of him, I see the hillsides of la so differently.
Speaker 1: I really appreciate native, untouched or reintroduced native species. And
Speaker 1: also before this I had never cringed at a flower,
Speaker 1: and now I do. One of the funniest conversation to
Speaker 1: have is just asking like, what do you think about,
Speaker 1: and then just name any invasive plant and then just
Speaker 1: sit back. It's like those rants are so good to hear,
Speaker 1: They're so impassioned.
Speaker 4: Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: And when it comes to native bees versus the European
Speaker 1: honeybe that we're accustomed to. Most people don't know that
Speaker 1: honey bees in at least in the US, are feral, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I call them just like flat out invasive at
Speaker 3: this point. Yeah, it's really frustrating too, because like people
Speaker 3: mix up facts between honey bees and native bees. And
Speaker 3: also you see all these things about save the bees,
Speaker 3: and then there's a honeybee at World b Day. I
Speaker 3: was at a fair. I had a booth, and like
Speaker 3: you had all of these people so happy about supporting
Speaker 3: the honey bees, and I realized after a while, like
Speaker 3: it probably wasn't the best place to throw out facts
Speaker 3: about native bees. It's just interesting that science has become
Speaker 3: so debatable when there's like really solid facts about what's happening,
Speaker 3: and people still want to debate you.
Speaker 1: So, these save the bees campaigns you might see in America,
Speaker 1: well they're usually focused on honeybees, which are completely introduced
Speaker 1: species in America that are still used obviously as farming livestock.
Speaker 1: So each ive has around thirty thousand workers who farmers
Speaker 1: take to different orchards and fields for pollination services. So
Speaker 1: a save the honeybees campaign in the US is kind
Speaker 1: of like a big, well funded push to breed more
Speaker 1: feral cats and granted backyard bee keepers do rescue feral swarms,
Speaker 1: which is kind of like I guess homing stray kittens,
Speaker 1: which is fine by some people, not fined by others.
Speaker 1: But the biggest issue facing bees isn't the loss of
Speaker 1: livestock bees, but really monocultures and habitat loss for all
Speaker 1: kinds of creatures, including native bees.
Speaker 3: Like a positive thing I've seen, at least in California
Speaker 3: is there's a lot of farms that are actually starting
Speaker 3: to farm alongside native ecosystems.
Speaker 1: Really, yeah, since.
Speaker 3: When I started seeing it within the last five years. Wow,
Speaker 3: I don't know if I should see the farm stain,
Speaker 3: but I saw so many native plants. Specifically, I was
Speaker 3: looking at this tomato field and I actually took a
Speaker 3: lot of photos of their Yeah, native bees. They also
Speaker 3: have a lot of birds, They have a lot of butterflies.
Speaker 3: So it doesn't just encourage native bees, but it's like
Speaker 3: anything that's in that ecosystem. So instead of relying on
Speaker 3: this one invasive pollinator, you have like a whole ecosystem
Speaker 3: of creatures that will pollinate your plants for you, and
Speaker 3: they'll do a better job.
Speaker 1: Without the need to truck them around. While Crystal is
Speaker 1: originally from Omaha, Nebraska, she is beyond fluent in local
Speaker 1: native species. We're in California now, and you are also
Speaker 1: making a very cool product for native bees of the
Speaker 1: Western United States. Yes, which we will touch on in
Speaker 1: a bit, putting a pin in that because it's very exciting.
Speaker 1: But when it comes to different habitats, how many native
Speaker 1: bees are out there? Like thousands of species?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so in the entire world there's a little over
Speaker 3: twenty thousand, oh my god. Yeah, in the US there's
Speaker 3: a little over four thousand. Okay, and last year someone
Speaker 3: actually counted in California sixteen hundred and forty three as
Speaker 3: of last year in California. So we have more bees
Speaker 3: in California than in some countries nuts.
Speaker 1: I mean, we have so many different climates too.
Speaker 3: I'd say specifically, I'll just stick with California is that
Speaker 3: we have a Mediterranean climate, and Mediterranean climates are really
Speaker 3: unique just because we get winter rain, we're next to
Speaker 3: large bodies of cold water. We normally have like mountains
Speaker 3: and like a desert. But Mediterranean climates take up only
Speaker 3: about two percent of Earth's land, but they also have
Speaker 3: about twenty percent of Earth's biodiversity. Wow, so we're in
Speaker 3: a crazy, just biodiverse hot spot here. And I think
Speaker 3: that's one reason why I absolutely love documenting not just
Speaker 3: bees but nature here what's happening to their ecosystems, because
Speaker 3: land loss is just a huge factor in decline of bees.
Speaker 3: So I started taking like landscape photos of areas I've
Speaker 3: been visiting because I realized, even just after going for
Speaker 3: like five years, there's so much development happening. There's people
Speaker 3: living close by and even within like if there's neighborhoods
Speaker 3: within a mile, there's people are starting to do fied abatement,
Speaker 3: and it's destroying areas that I've been visiting or I've
Speaker 3: been looking at old records and I want to visit
Speaker 3: them again, But there's like a university building there now.
Speaker 1: Crystal says that she once spent two years trying to
Speaker 1: get a photo of a particular bee on its niche
Speaker 1: favorite flower, and then she went back a week or
Speaker 1: two later, only to find that the whole area had
Speaker 1: been bulldozed. Why why though, And when you say fire abatement.
Speaker 1: What exactly does that mean.
Speaker 3: They're like, oh, there's plants here, these can catch on fire.
Speaker 3: So they go at least two inches into the ground,
Speaker 3: cut down all the plants in their roots so they
Speaker 3: don't go back. They did it all over the Santa
Speaker 3: Monic Mountains, and they're supposed to just do it like
Speaker 3: a mile from houses, but this area was like more
Speaker 3: than a mile. But yeah, it's completely destroyed. There's so
Speaker 3: many creatures that not a lot of people are looking at,
Speaker 3: and they're disappearing, and they don't really negatively or positive
Speaker 3: impact people. But I think just the fact that they're
Speaker 3: here is good enough reason to protect them and preserve
Speaker 3: them and just value them as something that's important, because
Speaker 3: I feel like a lot of times people value nature
Speaker 3: as it revolves around people.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, exactly what can it do for us? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And what about these native bees? I know of orchard
Speaker 1: bees and mason bees. There's sweat bees. Can you take
Speaker 1: me through some of the different types of native bees?
Speaker 1: And like, if let's say you know nothing about native bees.
Speaker 3: Oh, so the smallest one smallest known bee actually in
Speaker 3: North America. It's called a perdida minima. Okay, and The
Speaker 3: very first time I saw it was actually on a
Speaker 3: neighborhood sidewalk in Apple Valley.
Speaker 1: So that is a desert town about one hundred miles
Speaker 1: east of la which is right on the edge of
Speaker 1: the Mohave Desert and the snow capped San Bernardino Mountains.
Speaker 1: Is home to some very specific and elusive critters, such
Speaker 1: as Perdida minima, which is a tiny amber colored native
Speaker 1: fairy bee whose name means lost one on an Apple
Speaker 1: Valley sidewalk. Yeah, and this bee is very small. It's
Speaker 1: about two millimeters is slightly under that. It's about the
Speaker 1: size of a letter on a quarter. Oh my god.
Speaker 3: The largest bee I think is in Indonesia. It's a
Speaker 3: mega kaili, which is the resin bee. That one's about
Speaker 3: two and a half inches. Whoa, yeah, so it's pretty big.
Speaker 3: So yeah, they range from those sizes known sizes. But yeah, colors,
Speaker 3: they come in blues, greens, purples, black orange, just like
Speaker 3: a full rainbow red colors. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Bumble bees are in there as well. Bumble bees are
Speaker 1: in there as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So where we are in southern California, there's about
Speaker 3: like five or six different species. They actually have pretty
Speaker 3: big size ranges as well. I think they go up
Speaker 3: to about twenty millimeters. I think I'm not really good
Speaker 3: converting to inches.
Speaker 4: No, No, Americans.
Speaker 1: Are twenty millimeters is about three quarters of an inch.
Speaker 3: I gotcha. I absolutely love bumblebee. I think bumble bees
Speaker 3: are a great native bee to start with, just because
Speaker 3: they're so large, so they're also kind of harder to ignore. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I feel like that's a great gateway bee.
Speaker 1: Why bumblebees is so cute and stripey. I found a
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen study called defining the Color Pattern phototype in
Speaker 1: bumble Bees a new model for EVO DEVO and I
Speaker 1: had to look it up because evo devo means evolutionary
Speaker 1: developmental biology in cool science talk. And this paper said
Speaker 1: that black bands are the most commonly occurring on bumble
Speaker 1: bees because when paired with other colors, especially yellow, you
Speaker 1: get a sassy, bold contrast that scares the bee cheebers
Speaker 1: out of predators. It's too cute, it's too stylish, it's intimidating.
Speaker 1: This is a this is a not smart question. But
Speaker 1: do native bees tend to have stingers or is that
Speaker 1: mostly just a colony defense for honeybees?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: So all female bees have stingers. Okay, even bees called
Speaker 3: stingless bees. They actually have stingers too, but that's stuff
Speaker 3: that's fucked up. Yeah, so they're called stingless because I
Speaker 3: think it's really hard for them to people. So that's
Speaker 3: kind of like, you know, nature centric around people. But yeah,
Speaker 3: all female beats have stingers, and bumblebees too. They actually
Speaker 3: come in more colors they do. Yeah, so you'll see
Speaker 3: even in southern California, the endangered one here bombas CROTCHYI.
Speaker 3: If you look at the back of their abdomen, they
Speaker 3: have an orange stripe and then some of them have
Speaker 3: white on them as well. And I think there was
Speaker 3: a variant found in it was probably Arizona that was
Speaker 3: all black, which is really cool.
Speaker 1: And there are carpenter bees.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I love carpenter bees too. They're giant, yeah, giant, and
Speaker 1: the ladies tend to be black, the males tend to
Speaker 1: be like a golden color.
Speaker 3: One species is golden okay. Yeah, so that's the valley
Speaker 3: carpenter bee, and that's actually my favorite carpenter bee.
Speaker 1: Yes, learn enough about native bees and you too can
Speaker 1: have a favorite carpenter bee. The genus is Xylo copa
Speaker 1: xylo like xylophone and copa like cabana. And there are
Speaker 1: five hundred species of carpenter bees in thirty one subject
Speaker 1: and I found that out from a pest control website,
Speaker 1: which did not amuse me.
Speaker 3: I think the males are just so funny mm hmm.
Speaker 3: So they like stake out a spot and they're like,
Speaker 3: this is my spot. I'm gonna wait for any like
Speaker 3: females to show up, drive off any males, and if
Speaker 3: you stare at them too, they try and like kind
Speaker 3: of follow you around and act really like big and tough,
Speaker 3: but they don't have any stingers so they can't do anything.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I think they're so cute. And uh yeah,
Speaker 3: that's actually the biggest bee on the West coast. Oh
Speaker 3: my gosh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean they're so hard to miss.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, Australians can post about their native Emigilla bombiformis aka
Speaker 1: the golden haired mortar bee or teddy bear bee, but
Speaker 1: these similarly golden and adorable male valley carpenter bees are
Speaker 1: also called teddy bear bees due to high rates of
Speaker 1: squishy fuzziness and excruciating acts of adorability. And days after
Speaker 1: this interview, I took my dog Goblin for a walk,
Speaker 1: and I stopped in front of a neighbor's native mallow
Speaker 1: in their yard and found myself just enraptured and shocked
Speaker 1: to see a male Valley carpenter bee sleeping in a blossom,
Speaker 1: his whole big hairy butt hanging out. And as I
Speaker 1: loked at Crystal's flash cards later, she showed me more
Speaker 1: sleeping bees in flowers, rather sleeping bees plural in flower singular.
Speaker 1: Look at how beautiful these are. Oh my gosh. And
Speaker 1: now this one was hanging with a friend.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so sometimes they sleep together, So these guys are sleeping.
Speaker 1: These are so awesome. Also in the deck a gorgeous
Speaker 1: shot of a stripey little mason bee, the male of
Speaker 1: which has, as Crystal calls them, tiny popeye arms, which
Speaker 1: they use to gently pull the antennae of their lover,
Speaker 1: covering her eyes as they do the nasty You can
Speaker 1: call them megalichile fidelis or a horn faced leaf cutter bee.
Speaker 3: Oh, this is the one I was thinking of when
Speaker 3: you were talking about colors, because this is the only
Speaker 3: mega kylie with yellow on the abdomen, so you can
Speaker 3: actually id it from species two species the color. Wow,
Speaker 3: I just.
Speaker 1: Kept shuffling through this beautiful deck. This veritable who's who
Speaker 1: in indigenous melletology long horn bees. Look at this agile
Speaker 1: longhorn bee. Yeah, they call it. They can very long
Speaker 1: horn for a reason. Is that still but it's still
Speaker 1: the same number of segments, right.
Speaker 3: So this one has thirteen, the other one has. The
Speaker 3: females have twelve. But yeah, just just longer ones longer. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1: Mini fairy bee.
Speaker 3: So that's the smallest known bee in North America. So
Speaker 3: this is the one that would be on like Sumac
Speaker 3: or toy on. So that's the male. Okay, this is
Speaker 3: the female. And the males like follow behind them and
Speaker 3: like flap their wings and try and get their attention,
Speaker 3: and they're wait, they're really different colors then, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: they're really different colors. There's a size difference, so it's
Speaker 3: four and a half to five millimeters.
Speaker 1: I would have thought at first glance that it was a wasp,
Speaker 1: a U form of mini fairy bee.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the male or you goodb Yeah. And these
Speaker 3: are really temperature specific too, so if you go at
Speaker 3: different temperatures, you'll see the male or the female or both.
Speaker 1: So they really come out when it's hot.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they harass the females. So it's like really
Speaker 3: nice when you just see the females out taking their time.
Speaker 1: Do you have you ever been stung by.
Speaker 4: Name to be?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 1: No, yeah, I never have you there when it comes
Speaker 1: to native bees in terms of people going up to
Speaker 1: them and photographing them, you had one on your finger
Speaker 1: earlier today.
Speaker 5: Ye.
Speaker 1: Do you ever have to like bust any flim flam
Speaker 1: or try to talk any friends down about like, don't
Speaker 1: worry just because it's a bee, You're probably not in
Speaker 1: a lot of danger. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, like I feel like the first thing
Speaker 3: everyone asks about bees is am I going to get stung?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, of course.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And then like the sleeping male bees they can't stand you.
Speaker 1: Oh that's right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they don't bite either.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's good to know. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I mean I feel like if you're out on
Speaker 3: like kind of a cool dreary day or early morning,
Speaker 3: late evening and you can put your finger out like
Speaker 3: a lot of times they will just climb on. There's
Speaker 3: really nothing to worry about.
Speaker 1: You told me earlier that if you see a native
Speaker 1: bee sleeping in a flower, it's probably a guy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just taking a nap. Yeah, taking a load off. I
Speaker 1: think it's very surprising to think of bees taking a
Speaker 1: load off and taking a nap and sleeping in a
Speaker 1: flower because so often we think of bees having colonies
Speaker 1: or hives or nests. So when it comes to native bees,
Speaker 1: where are they, like, where are they sleeping? Where they're
Speaker 1: hanging out? Who dip roommates, what's going on?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So you know, it's funny because I feel like
Speaker 3: that's like very honey bees centric again, yeah, because people
Speaker 3: are like, oh, they're in a colony. Oh, there's a queen.
Speaker 3: Most bees, about ninety percent of them are solitary, so
Speaker 3: they live by themselves, and about seventy five percent of
Speaker 3: them are ground nesting, so that's the females. They just
Speaker 3: create a burrow or they live in a cavity in
Speaker 3: the ground. But yeah, male bees a lot of them,
Speaker 3: and you'll find them sleeping in flowers that open and
Speaker 3: close with the sun.
Speaker 1: I think it's so cute to think of like female
Speaker 1: bees like digging a burrow and living under there and
Speaker 1: dudes just being like I'm just gonna crashy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if you have like a sunflower, you'll find like
Speaker 3: a lot of melisotis, the longhorn bees. They're like males
Speaker 3: hanging out sleeping together there.
Speaker 1: Oh that's so cute.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's funny too because like during the day they're
Speaker 3: all competing with each other for like female attention, but
Speaker 3: then at night they all just huddle together.
Speaker 6: Cuddle, puddle with my boys.
Speaker 1: They're a frat house.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they are in a frat house.
Speaker 1: What are there life cycles?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 1: How long do they live? With some that I see
Speaker 1: here this spring, come back next spring or is it
Speaker 1: for them? So it depends on the bee. Okay, carpenter
Speaker 1: bees of native bees, as far as I'm aware, are
Speaker 1: the longest living ones, so I know the females some
Speaker 1: of them can live like a year or two. Oh okay.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of bees that will spend like a
Speaker 3: month above ground as an adult and the other eleven
Speaker 3: months they're underground developing. And then there's some bees that
Speaker 3: can have two different generations in a year. There's some
Speaker 3: bees that you'll only see as an adult for like
Speaker 3: a month.
Speaker 1: And do you have any idea why some bees are
Speaker 1: called mason bees or the carpenter bees or sweat bees.
Speaker 1: What are some of the stories behind their names.
Speaker 3: So mason bees because they construct things, carpenter bees because
Speaker 3: they basically act like carpenters with wood. Sweat bees will
Speaker 3: land on people, I'm sure other animals as well, and
Speaker 3: they'll actually lick up the sweat and salt perspiration from people.
Speaker 3: So yeah, they're kind of named after what they do.
Speaker 2: My gosh, I.
Speaker 1: Didn't realize that sweat bees were were ever licking me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but chances are we've been licked by sweat bees.
Speaker 3: Yeah, chances are. Wow, lick it up, baby, lick it up.
Speaker 1: Crystal also told me that some ground dwelling native bees
Speaker 1: like East Coast minor bees, a gay chimney bees and
Speaker 1: sand dwelling digger bees, and the West Coast globe mallow
Speaker 1: bee or Diadesia diminuta, make little tunnels at the entrances
Speaker 1: of their burrows, and I needed to know why, and
Speaker 1: according to the US Forest Service, it's a big dang
Speaker 1: dang mystery. So the Forest Service reports that Diadesia bees
Speaker 1: surround their nest entrance with a turret or a chimney,
Speaker 1: of which has long been debated. They write, do turrets
Speaker 1: one help keep rain or soil out of the nest,
Speaker 1: two help females recognize their nest when they return from foraging,
Speaker 1: or three discourage enemies investigation of this mystery continues. They
Speaker 1: say thank you us for service for lending the appropriate
Speaker 1: amount of uri gossip vibes in that science communication. You
Speaker 1: get it. I love it. What about when it comes
Speaker 1: to ground nesting. If so many native bees are ground nesting,
Speaker 1: what's going on with like garden chemicals and roundup and
Speaker 1: all this stuff, Like, how are they doing with that?
Speaker 3: So chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, that's a really big factor with
Speaker 3: bees and urban areas, the climate and the species. And
Speaker 3: what's really interesting too is a lot of times the
Speaker 3: way these chemical companies advertise to stop harming bees, it's
Speaker 3: only directed at honeybees. So they'll say to spray in
Speaker 3: the evening because they're like, oh, well, the bees aren't out,
Speaker 3: but the bees are in the ground and you're spraying
Speaker 3: on the ground. So it is a really great way
Speaker 3: to kill native bees. Yeah, So if you want to
Speaker 3: create a native habitat in your yard, one of the
Speaker 3: really positive things is you don't really need pesticides or
Speaker 3: herbicides if you have a need of habitat it'll be
Speaker 3: like a healthy, biodiverse ecosystem, or it'll be self sustaining,
Speaker 3: which also means you're gonna have a lot of those
Speaker 3: things that you consider pests in your ard, like aphids,
Speaker 3: like thrips, millibugs, things like that. But then you're also
Speaker 3: gonna have creatures that will naturally control the population. So yeah,
Speaker 3: it helps sustain bees as well by just planning native.
Speaker 1: Just a shout out to Zercesociety at zercees dot org,
Speaker 1: which I have been pronouncing xerxes for five years publicly
Speaker 1: until this week when I met a lovely entomologist who
Speaker 1: works for Zerces named Yara, who David Newshim brought around
Speaker 1: and although I was in my backyard looking at bugs
Speaker 1: with her, I thought maybe I was in heaven. It
Speaker 1: was the best, so Xercees dot org. They have great
Speaker 1: maps and lists. Feed or Pain is a foundation that's
Speaker 1: another great resource for native plant guidance. And you can
Speaker 1: also follow David Newsom's work at Wild Yards Project because
Speaker 1: he's great and he pulls together and amplifies so many experts,
Speaker 1: many of whom have a lot of indigenous knowledge. Just
Speaker 1: in case you're hungry for more biodiversity in your guard. Oh,
Speaker 1: speaking of hunger, what are the bees eating?
Speaker 3: Adult bees consume nectar. Developing bees consume pollen.
Speaker 1: And who's feeding them?
Speaker 3: Typically, okay, it's the female parent bees, okay, But then
Speaker 3: there's also bees that are kleptoparasites. They're like cuckoo bees,
Speaker 3: uh huh. So they'll go into the burrow of their
Speaker 3: host bee, they'll lay an egg in there, their egg
Speaker 3: will hatch, it'll either kill the egg or the larvae
Speaker 3: of the host species and then eat all of the pollen.
Speaker 1: I remember these photos of cuckoo bird chicks hatching and
Speaker 1: just immediately instinctively balancing the host bird's egg on their
Speaker 1: back and like a wrinkled little has to go with
Speaker 1: a beak doing a barbell squat move to just boop
Speaker 1: plunk the host bird's egg out the side of the nest.
Speaker 1: And then these chicks just grow bigger and bigger. They're
Speaker 1: towering over their unsuspecting host parents who are struggling to
Speaker 1: feed them. So do cuckoo bees love that kind of.
Speaker 3: Drama, so there's no real taking care of them. So
Speaker 3: it's basically the host bee or most bees that are
Speaker 3: non cuckoo bees, they'll actually just lay the egg, they'll
Speaker 3: provision some pollen, they'll close up the burrow interest, and
Speaker 3: then they'll leave. And that's normally like after they maybe
Speaker 3: constructed a few burrows, they'll actually pass away. So they're
Speaker 3: basically like taking care of themselves as they're developing.
Speaker 1: So they leave their egg with like a care package,
Speaker 1: like a swag bag whatever, and they're like, when you
Speaker 1: wake up, Mama left some food. Bye. Is it like
Speaker 1: tandem parking?
Speaker 3: Is it stays like tandem parking?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 3: Yeah. And what's interesting too, is so some bees have
Speaker 3: kind of like i'd call it like living. So there's
Speaker 3: this sweat bee called the nagapostuman mele of interest. It's
Speaker 3: a green sweat bee, and multiple females will have a
Speaker 3: burrow with like one entrance, but then they'll have their
Speaker 3: own little apartment in there. Oh so then they'll have
Speaker 3: their own little like section where their babies are developing.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's funny too.
Speaker 3: I found a burrow one time. I was so happy.
Speaker 3: There was one female like guarding the entrance and she
Speaker 3: was using a little clump of dirt and she was
Speaker 3: like repositioning it to like hide the burrow entrance and
Speaker 3: then other females were coming and going and they were
Speaker 3: moving it, but it was completely hidden.
Speaker 1: Wow, how do you find burrows?
Speaker 3: It's completely dumb luck Yeah for me. Yeah. Like sometimes
Speaker 3: I'll just see them go into there and I'm like, oh,
Speaker 3: there's a burrow. Other times I've just seen them land
Speaker 3: and I'm like, oh, my gosh, you're starting to dig,
Speaker 3: and I'll just hang out there. I think it was
Speaker 3: two weeks ago. There is this bee. It was a
Speaker 3: Duphoria and I've never seen a Duforia burrow before, and
Speaker 3: I was so excited.
Speaker 1: Dulforia is a genius, with one hundred and sixty different
Speaker 1: species of these small, short faced gloss see little sweat bees,
Speaker 1: which you might mistake for a fly unless you're Crystal
Speaker 1: Hickman or you have her flash cards.
Speaker 3: She took like seven minutes to dig, and I was
Speaker 3: waiting for her to come out, but I think she
Speaker 3: took a nap.
Speaker 1: Oh, she took like a two hour nap.
Speaker 3: So I was laying at an Air Force base in
Speaker 3: the middle of the road and I was really hoping
Speaker 3: no one would come by, and I was like, what
Speaker 3: is she doing? Or did I miss her? And then
Speaker 3: she finally came out like two hours later.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: But while I was laying there, it was so cool.
Speaker 3: There was a wasp that came by, dug a burrow, left,
Speaker 3: came back with a caterpillar, buried it, and then flew
Speaker 3: off and started making other burrows. And then I started
Speaker 3: seeing these other like ground nesting bees. They're called Caliopsis
Speaker 3: mm hmm. So they hide their burrow entrance. They basically
Speaker 3: make like a kind of a funnel shape and then
Speaker 3: they cover it with gravel in this case gravel or dirt,
Speaker 3: and they basically just dive through the gravel or the dirt,
Speaker 3: so you never see the entrance.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 3: And I started seeing them coming in and out of those,
Speaker 3: and then I got video footage of like one coming out,
Speaker 3: which I was like so happy about. I got photos
Speaker 3: of the daphoria when she was leaving, and I was like,
Speaker 3: thank god, because you took forever.
Speaker 1: Do you ever have to edit your own voice out
Speaker 1: of your videos talking to the bees? Gasping at the bee?
Speaker 3: For sure?
Speaker 1: For sure?
Speaker 3: And like also, I have really bad allergies, so I
Speaker 3: get like the sniffles. So there's some of my videos
Speaker 3: where I'm just like like that over and I'm like, God,
Speaker 3: that's so annoying. But yeah, it's sniffles a lot. We're
Speaker 3: gonna need a box of tissues.
Speaker 1: What types of soil do they tend to prefer? Do
Speaker 1: they tend to prefer drier areas where they can burrow
Speaker 1: and not get flooded. Are there some that want like
Speaker 1: a peady, swampy area.
Speaker 3: It's all different kinds of soil, honestly, So that's that's
Speaker 3: one good way to actually find the bees. So there's
Speaker 3: a bee that I'm looking for, I'm going to find
Speaker 3: it next weekend. It's called the nomia. It prefers alkaline soil.
Speaker 1: Nomia is another type of sweatye and they're kind of
Speaker 1: chunky with fuzzy stripes and this grayish white perlescent coloring.
Speaker 1: They look like if a silver suv had a big
Speaker 1: round face and hair but was tiny. And there's over
Speaker 1: one hundred species of these all over the world and
Speaker 1: they're ground nesting and also they're very good at pollinating
Speaker 1: alfalfa thanks nomea.
Speaker 3: So if you want to find that bee, you go
Speaker 3: to altline soil. There's a microanthopera that just will nest
Speaker 3: in everything, So you just kind of look for the flowers.
Speaker 3: There's ones that nest on the side of hills, there's
Speaker 3: some that nest in like the sand and beaches.
Speaker 5: M h.
Speaker 3: It's they're all over the place.
Speaker 1: And when it comes to the pollen and the nectar,
Speaker 1: do they have a preference for native flowers versus invasive
Speaker 1: flowers or are they like it it's got a little
Speaker 1: bit of water and sugar, I'm down. Do they have
Speaker 1: certain plants that they can really only thrive with.
Speaker 3: I've found most native bees seem to prefer native plants,
Speaker 3: but that doesn't mean they'll exclusively go to them. Okay,
Speaker 3: there's a lot of bees that are generalist pollenase that
Speaker 3: will visit like just about anything. Personally, I think for
Speaker 3: the last two and a half years, I've been looking
Speaker 3: at a lot of specialists. So they'll visit maybe one
Speaker 3: family of plants. Some of them even just like one
Speaker 3: species of a plant. So it can be like very
Speaker 3: very specific. So that's why, like a lot of times,
Speaker 3: if you want to look for a very specific native bee,
Speaker 3: you look for the plant, and I do kind of
Speaker 3: a cheat, like I'll go on I naturalist if like
Speaker 3: I'm like I'm waiting for this plant to bloom, but
Speaker 3: I don't want to drive like three hours into the desert,
Speaker 3: so I'm waiting for someone else on I naturalists to
Speaker 3: find it and like, oh, it's out. So then I
Speaker 3: go there.
Speaker 1: And do you ever have be scientists who are working
Speaker 1: with one specific bee? Like are they ever doing that
Speaker 1: to you? Where they're like, well, you waited till someone
Speaker 1: saw the plant, and then they're waiting until the really
Speaker 1: good native be photographer binds it and then they'll tell
Speaker 1: us what you found.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So I work with a lot of I don't
Speaker 3: know if i'd say work with, but I'm in communication
Speaker 3: with a lot of militologists who will work with just
Speaker 3: like one genus a B or like subgenus because I
Speaker 3: don't do any collecting. I just I idea everything through photos.
Speaker 3: So some of them like the way they do their science,
Speaker 3: which I think is still really beneficial, but they want
Speaker 3: to collect specimens and like some of the bees. There's
Speaker 3: one bee I got last year. I think most labs
Speaker 3: don't have specimens of this, like they'd never seen it
Speaker 3: in person. So she wanted me to actually collect them,
Speaker 3: and I was like, I'm not collecting this because I
Speaker 3: saw three of them. But yeah, I feel like a
Speaker 3: lot of millitologists at universities, you are just really happy
Speaker 3: with photos, really happy with observations, or even like behavioral observations.
Speaker 1: Said, the videos must come in handy for that.
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah, the videos are great. Yeah, I've been doing
Speaker 3: so many more because I have two cameras now, so
Speaker 3: I'll leave one out for video and then I'll go
Speaker 3: around for that one for photography.
Speaker 1: It's funny too, because if you think about the way
Speaker 1: that science has been done for so many hundreds of years.
Speaker 1: We needed the dead specimen and we needed someone with
Speaker 1: a field journal to describe it. But now having obviously
Speaker 1: that it wouldn't have the DNA or something, but just
Speaker 1: with the way that technology is, you can capture so
Speaker 1: much more.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I one hundred percent think we're in a place
Speaker 3: now where we don't need to collect the same way
Speaker 3: we were before. I definitely value, like the all of
Speaker 3: the information that we're getting from millitologists who've spent the
Speaker 3: years of decades out there collecting.
Speaker 1: I feel like the way that you capture insects, you're
Speaker 1: so good at your photography is so amazing, and it's
Speaker 1: such not only a boon to scientist but also to
Speaker 1: people who don't yet realize that they're about to fall
Speaker 1: in love with native bees. And tell me a little
Speaker 1: bit about the deck that you put together.
Speaker 3: Oh, I'm so proud of this. So I've been working
Speaker 3: on it since twenty nineteen so and I'm just finally done.
Speaker 3: But yeah, people were coming up to me with so
Speaker 3: many questions and I was just repeating myself over and
Speaker 3: over again. And I started teaching classes about how to idbes,
Speaker 3: and I was like, you know, I feel like it'd
Speaker 3: be great if someone could just have something in their
Speaker 3: hand where they could like learn list themselves. So there's
Speaker 3: also plant relationships in here as well, so if you
Speaker 3: want to start attracting these bees, you can actually plant
Speaker 3: these plants and this bee might show up and learn
Speaker 3: to identify it yourself.
Speaker 4: There's photos of.
Speaker 3: The males, the females, any variants, the times of year
Speaker 3: that they'll show up. There's also wing vanation because you
Speaker 3: can IDBs to like genus or subgenus just from the
Speaker 3: photos of their wings. There's a taxonomy and just like
Speaker 3: little facts about them in there as.
Speaker 1: Well, and they're in a little box so you can
Speaker 1: keep them in your backpack, you can keep them in
Speaker 1: your car. And I love the idea too, that you
Speaker 1: have something that you can when you're not even outlooking,
Speaker 1: you can just study and share. And I think that's
Speaker 1: such a good idea. Did you have to try to
Speaker 1: limit like, Okay, how many cars am I going to make?
Speaker 4: How big is this deck going to be? Yes?
Speaker 3: Oh my god, that was so hard. That was so
Speaker 3: hard to So I was originally starting out with like, oh,
Speaker 3: let me just do like the forty most common bees.
Speaker 3: And then also I realized what people were observing wasn't
Speaker 3: necessarily the most common. They were just the largest. Oh
Speaker 3: that makes sense. Yeah, So initially the forty most common,
Speaker 3: twenty of them were bumble bees, and I was like,
Speaker 3: that's a lot of bumble bees. Yeah. So I actually
Speaker 3: I started using a bunch of different references, talking to
Speaker 3: a lot of different like millitologists, and just that's where
Speaker 3: I kind of came to the conclusion like, oh, it's
Speaker 3: not that there's actually this many bumblebees, it's that people
Speaker 3: are seeing them because they're so much larger. So I
Speaker 3: ended up going through a bunch of different records and
Speaker 3: I just started looking at different genera that people would
Speaker 3: commonly observe in their gardens and the desert on mountain
Speaker 3: ranges planes. Yeah, it was really hard to pick the
Speaker 3: forty two and I stopped at forty two because forty
Speaker 3: two b species equal to hundred cards, and I was like,
Speaker 3: I'm done there.
Speaker 1: Uh huh.
Speaker 3: So I called this one Volume one. I'm thinking about
Speaker 3: doing a rare B one just for California.
Speaker 1: You started working on the project in twenty nineteen. When
Speaker 1: did you launch it on Kickstarter? It was March.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: First, I think it was really successful and it was
Speaker 3: fully funded. Yeah, like boom the first day. I can't
Speaker 3: remember how, but it hit like I was like, oh,
Speaker 3: this is gonna be funded.
Speaker 4: What an exciting day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And to know that there's an audience of people
Speaker 1: who are like very stoked about this.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, Like I'm getting a lot of messages like
Speaker 3: people are very very excited because I put out a
Speaker 3: thing that I got the final samples for the flash cards.
Speaker 1: And yes, her deck is one hundred lovely green cards
Speaker 1: with super detailed, full color macro photos of the bees
Speaker 1: and facts aplenty. Again, it's called Native Bees of the
Speaker 1: Western United States, Volume One, and you can order yours
Speaker 1: there's a link in the show notes. You can get
Speaker 1: them now and they'll be shipping in the next month
Speaker 1: or so, coming up soon. Also, for every episode, we
Speaker 1: donate to a cause of theologists choosing, and this week
Speaker 1: Crystal asks that it go to No Canyon Hills, which
Speaker 1: is a nonprofit in La attempting to conserve a large
Speaker 1: swath of the Verdugo Mountains, which is Fernandinho Tatavium and
Speaker 1: Gabrielino Tongva Land and an out of state developer wants
Speaker 1: to tear up three hundred acres of oaks and native
Speaker 1: plants and animals to build luxury homes and it's threatening
Speaker 1: local ecology and it's even crucial habitat for LA's threatened
Speaker 1: cougar population, including Latuna puma hashtag tonpuma. If you listen
Speaker 1: to the p twenty two episode, you know that's kind
Speaker 1: of a big deal to have a puma in the area.
Speaker 1: So you can support their fight to stop this development
Speaker 1: at No Canyon Hills dot org. You can also sign
Speaker 1: the petition there. It costs you no dollars to do
Speaker 1: it again. That is No Canyon Hills dot org that
Speaker 1: is linked in the show notes and thanks to sponsors
Speaker 1: of the show for making that donation possible in Crystal's honor. Okay, so,
Speaker 1: if you're a patron of the show via patreon dot
Speaker 1: com sashologies for one hot dollar a month, you can
Speaker 1: submit questions and I may read your beautiful name with
Speaker 1: my filthy mouth, such as this common question asked by
Speaker 1: Rachel Swinson, Kaylie Jones, Kelly Shaver, Nick mcash AZM Great
Speaker 1: Dane Lady and Lindsay and Storm and the aerial mapper
Speaker 1: want to know how can we attract native bees to
Speaker 1: our yards?
Speaker 3: Biggest thing plant native plants, native plants. Yeah, and also
Speaker 3: I really encourage this. I really want to start getting
Speaker 3: into this soon. I encourage people to create native landscaping bridges.
Speaker 3: So it's not actual bridge, it's just encourage your neighbors
Speaker 3: to put like a small area of native plants as well.
Speaker 3: So these not just bees, but native creatures have areas
Speaker 3: to travel between, and it helps increase the biodiversity of
Speaker 3: these creatures as well.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's a great idea. I hadn't thought about that either. Again,
Speaker 1: Wild the Arts Project dot org great resource. You can
Speaker 1: follow David's work on social media and all the people
Speaker 1: he amplifies as well as the US based zercees dot org.
Speaker 1: But what if you are not in the United States,
Speaker 1: such as patrons Stephen Moxley and some bee lovers from Diananda,
Speaker 1: Josie Chase, Renee Dike Storm and fellow Aussi tischer Kout
Speaker 1: wants to know if you have any native plant ideas
Speaker 1: for places like Australia or if people all over the globe.
Speaker 1: Obviously you're not going to be like in Melbourne is
Speaker 1: because there are people listening to this in so many countries. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what's the best way to find out what to plant?
Speaker 3: What I always recommend is going to native gardening stores
Speaker 3: or locations. A lot of them now have websites where
Speaker 3: you can actually put in your zip code and find
Speaker 3: plants that are native to exactly where you are. I'm
Speaker 3: sure that applies in other countries as well. But yeah,
Speaker 3: instead of going to like these large stores, just visit
Speaker 3: your local garden stores and ask them again.
Speaker 1: Zercees dot org covers the US in case that's of interest.
Speaker 1: And this next question was asked by truly hospitable patrons
Speaker 1: Andrea Delvin, Gretchen Schroder Beauty and banks Chenna Congden, Gretchen Schrader,
Speaker 1: Katie King, Beggy the Sassycgrast, scientist Rachel Swinson, Josie Chase,
Speaker 1: and ril vnsand B hotels Are they actually helpful? I
Speaker 1: have a B hotel that was a gift in the art.
Speaker 1: A couple Mason bees went in there, but I don't
Speaker 1: know that I'm even up keeping it well, So feel
Speaker 1: free to go off.
Speaker 6: The floor is yours.
Speaker 3: I'd say they're more helpful to people than they are
Speaker 3: to bees. Okay, I compare it to This isn't a
Speaker 3: one to one comparison, but I would say they're helpful
Speaker 3: to bees if you clean them out regularly. Okay, A
Speaker 3: lot of bee hotels aren't designed to be cleaned, and
Speaker 3: it's kind of like, again, not a wonder go in comparison,
Speaker 3: but it's like if you have a doghouse outside, your
Speaker 3: dog lives in it twenty four to seven and you've
Speaker 3: absolutely never cleaned it out, hm your dog can get sick.
Speaker 3: The same thing can happen with bees. So it's always
Speaker 3: good when you have a B hotel to make sure
Speaker 3: that the openings in it, the columns are the appropriate
Speaker 3: size for the bees in your area. That you can
Speaker 3: take them apart and clean them. There's a lot of
Speaker 3: YouTube videos that actually have instructions on how to clean
Speaker 3: these out and disinfect them.
Speaker 1: Listen, I know you know how to YouTube be hotel instructions,
Speaker 1: but maybe you're operating a forklift, maybe you're feeding a
Speaker 1: baby donkey. Maybe it's not a good time. So I
Speaker 1: looked it up for us, and I watched a video
Speaker 1: with aggressively upbeat stock music, and I harvested some steps. Okay,
Speaker 1: so in mid September, remove these used read or tubes
Speaker 1: from your b hotel. They should be filled with mud
Speaker 1: plugs and tiny sleeping babies and cocoons. Then you take
Speaker 1: your razor blade into the front end of the tube
Speaker 1: and you twist it and that'll split the tube. Usually
Speaker 1: there's like a bamboo read or a straw. So now
Speaker 1: they're split in two and you can see across sections,
Speaker 1: so you can remove and sort the cocoons. You take
Speaker 1: out the pollen and any debris, remove any pests, and
Speaker 1: you can even wash your mason Be cocoons in a
Speaker 1: bowl of warm water for a few minutes. If you like,
Speaker 1: you try them off. You put your cocoons in a
Speaker 1: bee safe, which is like a cardboard box inside a
Speaker 1: metal box with air holes. Keep them safe, let them breathe.
Speaker 1: You want to layer some paper towels in between them,
Speaker 1: and then you place the bee safe in their fridge
Speaker 1: till about February, and then you can put them in
Speaker 1: the attic of your bee house or a drawer if
Speaker 1: it has one. Hopefully that drawer has a hole or
Speaker 1: two for some egress. They're gonna wake up. They're gonna
Speaker 1: emerge when mother nature beckons them with warm weather and
Speaker 1: flowers and horniness.
Speaker 3: Also that it comes with a drawer because female bees
Speaker 3: can actually control whether or not they're laying a male
Speaker 3: or female eggs, so they'll typically lay male eggs closer
Speaker 3: to the entrance of the burrow and females closer back.
Speaker 3: So after you're finished cleaning them out, you don't want
Speaker 3: to put them back in the cavities because you might
Speaker 3: put them in the wrong order. You want to put
Speaker 3: them in a drawer that's in the bee house and
Speaker 3: then they'll just be close or exit when they're supposed
Speaker 3: to do. But yeah, if you have a native, healthy,
Speaker 3: native ecosystem, you don't need a bee house. The bee
Speaker 3: houses that I do recommend if you want to get
Speaker 3: one wee b house on Instagram, it's wee b It's
Speaker 3: designed to be cleaned. It comes with a drawer. I
Speaker 3: think they're great.
Speaker 1: Also, I was like, why are male bees such mama's boys?
Speaker 1: And it turns out that they are laid closest to
Speaker 1: the exit so that they can come out first, and
Speaker 1: then they can sit outside, biding their time for the
Speaker 1: ladies to emerge, kind of like an awkward promptate with
Speaker 1: slimy palms waiting at the bottom of your staircase. Also,
Speaker 1: they may use this time to try to kill each other,
Speaker 1: giving females fewer options, which is romantic to bees. Maybe. Also,
Speaker 1: with all this be hotel talk, I do want to
Speaker 1: read a question from a patron Ariel Vansant, who said,
Speaker 1: I managed to finally attract Mason bees. I've had a
Speaker 1: little house for them for years and I never had
Speaker 1: any takers. This year, I noticed a swarm of them
Speaker 1: by the house and they filled it up. I got
Speaker 1: them two more houses and those are all full too.
Speaker 1: Now what do I do? Do I keep adding houses?
Speaker 1: Do I need to tend to them? Okay, Ariel, first
Speaker 1: thing you should do, according to experts, is throw a
Speaker 1: fucking party because that rules. Also, get the bee hotels
Speaker 1: with the removable straws or the reeds. You want to
Speaker 1: clean it in the fall to make sure that there
Speaker 1: aren't pollen mites or beetle larvae or ear wigs and
Speaker 1: they're snacking on your baby convention. And overall, I say,
Speaker 1: if the bees like it and there's a need for it,
Speaker 1: and you like it, become a real estate baron in
Speaker 1: bee hospitality. And are the things that people worried about
Speaker 1: with honey bees, like mites and colony collapse disorder? Are
Speaker 1: those threats to native populations as well.
Speaker 3: So different mites, but yeah, a b hotel, you can't
Speaker 3: have my infestations there. So colony collapse disorder comes from
Speaker 3: varroa mites. Honey Bees will get like a roamite will
Speaker 3: like basically latch onto a developing honeybee, so that actually
Speaker 3: can spread to bumble bees. So there's some honey bees
Speaker 3: that are carriers, but they're not physically impacted. So basically
Speaker 3: a lot of honey bees are urban areas, so they'll
Speaker 3: actually visit flowers and they'll infect the pollen with the
Speaker 3: deformed wing virus. And it's been found that bumble bees
Speaker 3: will actually visit those same flowers, and since they're collecting pollen,
Speaker 3: it's they're developing larva, they're developing bees that are eating it.
Speaker 3: So we're seeing bumble bees with tiny wings as well.
Speaker 3: And a way to combat that, besides like not having
Speaker 3: honey bees around, is to plant more plant diversity, so
Speaker 3: it's less likely that these bumble bees will develop these
Speaker 3: small wings.
Speaker 1: How in general, do native bee aficionados and appreciators feel
Speaker 1: about be keeping in urban settings, like people with hives
Speaker 1: on top of Brooklyn apartments and stuff. What's the feeling
Speaker 1: on that.
Speaker 3: I'll just say the people that I talk to, it's
Speaker 3: not super positive. I'll also say I feel like there's
Speaker 3: so many honey bees that are getting out into nature.
Speaker 3: I literally spend time in the middle of nowhere in
Speaker 3: the desert, and there's just honey bees everywhere. Sometimes I'd
Speaker 3: step out of my car and I'd just hear this
Speaker 3: hum and I was like, the only flowering trees around
Speaker 3: would just have swarms of honey bees, and you would
Speaker 3: see less native bees when the honey bees showed up.
Speaker 3: I think, like a great example, if you go to
Speaker 3: the Channel Islands, I'll just say, Santa Rosa, because that's
Speaker 3: the one I've visited.
Speaker 1: There's no honey bees. How did that happen? They just
Speaker 1: didn't make another there's.
Speaker 3: No honey bees, but there's like the diversity of native
Speaker 3: bees there is just crazy.
Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah, what a great place to shoot.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, I actually I went there looking for a
Speaker 3: specific species of bee from my book that I'm working on.
Speaker 3: I found it and I was just But also while
Speaker 3: I was there, I was like, oh my gosh, there's
Speaker 3: so many native bees here.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, you're worrying in a book.
Speaker 3: Yeah what Yeah. Yeah, I'm working on an ABC book
Speaker 3: and it's based on It's like bee, So it's California
Speaker 3: bees and every single letter in the book is a
Speaker 3: different species or subspecies of bee. Yeah. So they're in
Speaker 3: different environments, like there's the pretty to minimum on the sidewalk,
Speaker 3: there's one on the island, there's one on the top
Speaker 3: of a mountain. There's also stories about them, like what's
Speaker 3: happening to them after fires? Competing with honeybees after fire abatement. Yeah,
Speaker 3: there's I think eight bees right now where they're the
Speaker 3: only photos of living representatives of their species.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. Yeah, does that book come out.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm hoping to get all of the photos this year.
Speaker 3: I actually got a grant from nat GEO on that one.
Speaker 1: That's amazing.
Speaker 3: So I'm really excited and it's like really super validating.
Speaker 1: Does that mean that they publish it?
Speaker 3: Hopefully?
Speaker 1: Literary agents of the world reach out to Crystal Heckmann.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at you, wme Uta Cia scoop this lady up.
Speaker 3: That's going to be a great book. Yeah, it's going
Speaker 3: to be a coffee table book.
Speaker 1: Ah.
Speaker 3: I love it. So I was going to self publish it.
Speaker 3: H And I applied for the Explorers grant last year
Speaker 3: and I was like, there's no way because there's so
Speaker 3: many people applying for this. Actually it was the same
Speaker 3: day my Kickstarter was funded, was the day I found
Speaker 3: out I got.
Speaker 4: Be Careful Explorer. And I was like, this is amazing.
Speaker 1: Where you like suddenly believed in astrology, where you're like,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, it's so weird the stars aligned. How
Speaker 1: did you celebrate? What do you even do?
Speaker 3: Well? Like, I called like three of my millitologists friends
Speaker 3: and like just freaked the hell out.
Speaker 4: Uh huh.
Speaker 3: It was really validating, and it's kind of like a
Speaker 3: bucket list thing because I've been I've wanted to be
Speaker 3: a national geographic since I was like six.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's the dream, it's the dream. It is.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine you and omaha by the rose bushes
Speaker 1: knowing like, oh, ps, you're gonna get an electronic message
Speaker 1: that says, yeah, like we love the work you're doing.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I love that you had to really ask yourself,
Speaker 1: like what was missing in your life that you wanted
Speaker 1: to get back to, and that you let yourself go
Speaker 1: do a bunch of things to see what fo Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I think it's like really good to just do
Speaker 3: things that you just might be really bad at just
Speaker 3: because they pop into because I feel like that everyone
Speaker 3: has ideas that pop into their head but they don't
Speaker 3: like follow them through.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But I also feel like it is kind of like
Speaker 3: a privilege to be able to follow things through because
Speaker 3: I was only able to actually do that when I
Speaker 3: started making more money, because I feel like a lot
Speaker 3: of times you can't do your hobbies if you're like
Speaker 3: concentrating on money or like paying all of your bills. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I do feel like very privileged to be able to
Speaker 3: follow through with my hobbies and then actually turn my
Speaker 3: hobbies into a career that's just insane.
Speaker 1: And on top of that that it helps other people
Speaker 1: learn and gets them inspired and also helps the freakin' bees.
Speaker 1: Yeah like when when it is And yes, well, sometimes
Speaker 1: she might get a sun rash from the desert elements
Speaker 1: or lay her body down accidentally upon thousands of biting ants.
Speaker 1: I hope that she always sleeps easy, knowing that she's
Speaker 1: helping save the bees who need her the most. Speaking
Speaker 1: of sleeping easy, on the topic of the hotels, Kent
Speaker 1: driven wants to know. They say, I have drilled holes
Speaker 1: in scrap lumber untreated, and it seems like a lot
Speaker 1: of sizes get used. But when should I redrill or
Speaker 1: discard them?
Speaker 3: What I always recommend is instead of just using like
Speaker 3: the bare holes that you drill, I would only drill
Speaker 3: sizes where if you have like a paper straw that
Speaker 3: could fit into them. Oh so I would always put
Speaker 3: paper straws into them, and then when they're closed up,
Speaker 3: take the paper straws out, unwrap them, clean up the cells,
Speaker 3: and then if you can get a drawer for a
Speaker 3: b hotel, I wouldn't store them inside because it would
Speaker 3: probably throw off when they would be closed. Just put
Speaker 3: straws in there. But yeah, it's kind of hard to
Speaker 3: do with Like some people drill really really tiny holes,
Speaker 3: so i'd maybe just like personally, I would just avoid
Speaker 3: those because it really technically isn't beneficial to the bees.
Speaker 3: It's more so for people. Oh this is another thing too,
Speaker 3: and this is a mix up between like honey bees
Speaker 3: and native bees. People put water out for bees. That's
Speaker 3: for honey bees. Oh yeah, so if you put water
Speaker 3: dishes out, you're going to be attracting more honey bees
Speaker 3: to your yard, not native bees.
Speaker 1: What about fountains and things like that.
Speaker 3: Same, Yeah, so a native bee And that's actually in
Speaker 3: my cards too, and you could go through them. But
Speaker 3: it's like basics for bees, like you don't have to
Speaker 3: do this, you don't have to do this. But yeah,
Speaker 3: native bees get all of their hydration from plants. I
Speaker 3: didn't know that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so yes, I checked into this. And honey bees
Speaker 1: drink water on hot days because they need to take
Speaker 1: it back to the whole colony and they air condition
Speaker 1: the hive by drinking, spitting at the door, and fanning
Speaker 1: it with their wings, acting like a swamp cooler. Native
Speaker 1: bees do not do this. But butterflies sip on water too,
Speaker 1: but typically it's the salt and the minerals that they're after. However,
Speaker 1: having a water feature like a little burbling solar powered
Speaker 1: fountain with some kind of moving water can be attracted
Speaker 1: to all kinds of local wildlife. So you have to
Speaker 1: decide if you want an aquascape that brings all the
Speaker 1: bees to the yard as well as other creatures like
Speaker 1: birds and frogs animals. Yesterday I saw a big ass
Speaker 1: coyote broad daylight in my driveway, lapping from a watering
Speaker 1: can that I used to catch our HVAC condensation, and
Speaker 1: per wildlife conservation protocol, I hazed it by screaming at
Speaker 1: it for its own good, and I felt like a
Speaker 1: real bitch. But keeping them scared of humans saves them
Speaker 1: from cars, so I'm a bitch with a purpose.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: On that note, a lot of folks kJ, macnot Cookie,
Speaker 1: Yak and Yang wanted to know about conservation, and kJ
Speaker 1: said this might be a stupid question, but is the
Speaker 1: decline of native bees related to the decline of butterflies.
Speaker 1: I noticed the growing absence of butterflies ever since the
Speaker 1: bees in my neighborhood disappeared when it comes to habitat.
Speaker 1: Is it just they're both the victims of the same thing.
Speaker 3: I would say it's kind of a complicated question the answer,
Speaker 3: but it's also not a stupid question at all. I
Speaker 3: would say they are connected. Land loss is up until
Speaker 3: I think like two or three years ago, was the
Speaker 3: biggest factor for the decline in bees, but it's also
Speaker 3: a huge factor for a decline and a lot of
Speaker 3: creatures as well. Now it's climate change is actually number one,
Speaker 3: And these are things that are impacting all of nature.
Speaker 3: So I wouldn't be surprised. I don't really work with butterflies,
Speaker 3: but I wouldn't be surprised if the same things weren't
Speaker 3: impacting both of them.
Speaker 1: And we did have questions about that first time. Question
Speaker 1: asker Lada Barabash and Oliver Kellis wanted to know how
Speaker 1: are the native bees affected by the climate crisis and
Speaker 1: is it the extreme weathers? Is it the nesting spaces?
Speaker 1: Is it the food sources? A Lota also said, my
Speaker 1: grandma has Zyla Copa violatia visit her garden every year
Speaker 1: and just wanted to say how pretty it is.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, so that's the Carpenter beet. Which one was it?
Speaker 3: Was it the son arena. I think it's Syla copa
Speaker 3: son arena. I think that might have been the old
Speaker 3: name for that bee.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, Oh that's good to know.
Speaker 3: I think they had a species name change like four years.
Speaker 1: Ago, a rebrand of rebrand. That seems like a big
Speaker 1: deal to rename a species, right.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, it happens a lot. Really is really,
Speaker 3: it happens a lot.
Speaker 1: How come?
Speaker 3: So okay? A lot of reasons, So okay. For example,
Speaker 3: sometimes if it's like higher up in the taxonomic table,
Speaker 3: I guess. Sometimes let's say there's a millitologist working in California,
Speaker 3: and then there's another one working in Nevada, and let's
Speaker 3: say one of them has idd the species this name here,
Speaker 3: but it's the exact same species in another state, but
Speaker 3: it has a different name. But it's because these two
Speaker 3: people weren't working together, so it has two different names.
Speaker 3: Or it could be someone just found a male here
Speaker 3: and a female here and they didn't know that they're
Speaker 3: the same species, so they have different names. Or a
Speaker 3: lot of times now there's like bar coding being done
Speaker 3: with DNA testing, specifically with bumblebees. It's happening a lot
Speaker 3: where they're like, these two species look really similar. They
Speaker 3: could be the same species, or they could not be,
Speaker 3: but there's more genetic testing that needs to be done.
Speaker 3: I actually have that listed here a lot. It's just
Speaker 3: it's all over the place. But yeah, taxonomy is like
Speaker 3: ever evolving and changing, and it's just yeah, I've started
Speaker 3: noticing like the same things happening with plants because of
Speaker 3: their relation to bees. I'm looking at plants a lot
Speaker 3: and I'm like, wow, this is the name keeps changing.
Speaker 3: M Yeah.
Speaker 1: I didn't even know that they could do that. That's
Speaker 1: really fad.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I'm like also trying to figure out, like
Speaker 3: I still don't understand who decides that it officially is changed,
Speaker 3: and then everyone's like okay, yeah.
Speaker 1: Especially if someone's like, oh man, I named that after
Speaker 1: my professor. Oh okay, yeah.
Speaker 3: And I've seen people release papers where they're like, no,
Speaker 3: these are all the same thing now, and then people
Speaker 3: like don't agree with them, and they're like, so it
Speaker 3: doesn't change.
Speaker 1: I guess I don't know what else they do. Did
Speaker 1: arm wrestle have a dance battle?
Speaker 3: I don't know how they don't know I just kind
Speaker 3: of go along with whoever says like, oh it's changed now, okay.
Speaker 1: So typically names will get changed when someone realizes that
Speaker 1: they have some kind of double up situation, or if
Speaker 1: a species gets oopsie daisied and put into a different genus.
Speaker 1: And remember when Leneus proposed the genus species naming model.
Speaker 1: Everyone thought that there were just plants and animals. They
Speaker 1: were like, what's a fun guy. There was not a
Speaker 1: DNA sequencer that you could plug into your electronic laptop
Speaker 1: for genetic idea in the middle of a rainforest. So
Speaker 1: things are still a little wiggly taxonomically. And I am
Speaker 1: so certain that scientists have punched each other like kangaroos
Speaker 1: over this stuff. I can practically taste the blood on
Speaker 1: my teeth thinking about it. And that's gone on for years.
Speaker 1: According to the dusty nineteen eighty eight publication New Insights
Speaker 1: into the Nature of Science by philosophy professor William Bechdel,
Speaker 1: who put the following ponderings to paper, he wrote, it
Speaker 1: is often those most similar to your own but are
Speaker 1: your most serious competitors and against which you struggle most.
Speaker 1: This is exemplified by the fights between scientists over names
Speaker 1: naming an entity is one way to mark your idea
Speaker 1: of that entity. Letting someone else's name be attached to
Speaker 1: this ame entity may signify that you have lost out
Speaker 1: to someone else, which is a good thing to remember
Speaker 1: when you hate someone and you don't know why are
Speaker 1: they too much like you? And are they your competition?
Speaker 1: Or do you just hate yourself? And are these questions
Speaker 1: you want to think of when you're listening to a
Speaker 1: podcast about bees. No, let's move on. Well, some folks,
Speaker 1: the head family, Chase Steinbacher, Felicia Chandler, Maya Rubnarin, Johnny
Speaker 1: Brownds wanted to know if there are any good field
Speaker 1: guides or good sources, And yes there are, and one
Speaker 1: of them is called Native Bees of the Western United States,
Speaker 1: Volume one.
Speaker 3: Yeah, link in the show notes for that. So yeah,
Speaker 3: my flash cards definitely. But I would also say too,
Speaker 3: a lot of times when people start out with native
Speaker 3: bees they try to overready, as in, try to id
Speaker 3: them to species. I would try to figure out the
Speaker 3: families first. So there's six families in the US, try
Speaker 3: to figure out which bee goes into which family, and
Speaker 3: then after you get the family, try and get to
Speaker 3: the genus. Because I see so many people just try
Speaker 3: to id to species and it's like sometimes it's a fly, yeah.
Speaker 4: And it's just it, it happens.
Speaker 3: I mean, I do understand that it is kind of
Speaker 3: difficult when you're first starting out, so I would recommen
Speaker 3: and besides my flash cards, I Naturalist is great. There's
Speaker 3: this book called The Bees in Your Backyard. That's the
Speaker 3: book that I started with and that really helped me
Speaker 3: get to families. There's also Bees of the World by
Speaker 3: Charles Mishner. It has a honeybee on the cover for
Speaker 3: some reason, but it's about like it'll really help you
Speaker 3: with native bees. I think it's advertising.
Speaker 4: Oh that's funny.
Speaker 3: My Naturalist, which is obviously free. There's also bug Guide,
Speaker 3: which is another website. Discoverlife dot org is another great website.
Speaker 3: I would use Discover Life if you're much more familiar
Speaker 3: with species and also like different body parts of bees,
Speaker 3: so it'll help you like id things to species. Well.
Speaker 1: That in Maya's words, also asked by Chase Steinbacher, the
Speaker 1: head Family, Felicia Chandler, Cheney Rounds, and Maya rup Narin. Maya,
Speaker 1: I wanted to know how can be beginners learn to
Speaker 1: tell the different bees apart? But what key features should
Speaker 1: they look for? I think for me, I'm like.
Speaker 3: What color is it's but which is I mean that
Speaker 3: could actually help you with some species. Okay, yeah, I
Speaker 3: would say start off figuring out how to tell males
Speaker 3: and females apart. Okay, So telling bees from wasps and
Speaker 3: the flies is a really good place to start, because
Speaker 3: people keep sending me fly in wasp pictures. If it
Speaker 3: has short antenna eyes that take up pretty much the
Speaker 3: whole head, only two wings, that's a fly. If you
Speaker 3: see longer antenna and four wings, smaller eyes, it could
Speaker 3: be a wasp or a bee. If it's collecting pollen
Speaker 3: on the back legs or underside of the abdomen, that
Speaker 3: is going to be a bee. If you want to
Speaker 3: get more specific, you can look at the veanation of
Speaker 3: the wings, which can be really specific. Also, a lot
Speaker 3: of wasps have a ocular sinus in their eyes. It's
Speaker 3: like a little like a concave sort of niche. Some
Speaker 3: bees have that, but it's not as extreme. Also, a
Speaker 3: lot of times the way bees are sleeping, you can
Speaker 3: distinguish them. Most wasp perch, most sleeping bees clamped by
Speaker 3: their mandibles, but you do see some bees perching as well.
Speaker 3: A lot of times people say, oh, it's the amount
Speaker 3: of hair on the body, but that doesn't really apply.
Speaker 3: There's so many exceptions, so I wouldn't say that one.
Speaker 3: But yeah, yeah, just carrying how they carry pollen. Yeah, actually,
Speaker 3: how they carry pollen can actually help you distinguish between
Speaker 3: families of bees.
Speaker 1: Really, Like some have different saddle baggies. Yeah, yeah, so
Speaker 1: some like honey bees and bumble bees. Also some perdita
Speaker 1: they'll have like balls of pollen on their back legs
Speaker 1: and also if they carry it on the abdomen, that'll
Speaker 1: help you distinguish families. Antennae you can tell based just
Speaker 1: on antennae if you're looking at a male or female bee.
Speaker 1: So males typically have longer antennae. They also have thirteen
Speaker 1: antenna segments. Females have twelve, so if you're able to count.
Speaker 3: That could help. If the bee doesn't have any pollen
Speaker 3: carrying structures, it could be a male, but it could
Speaker 3: also be a kleptoparasitic bee.
Speaker 4: Ooh.
Speaker 3: Also, behaviors are a really good way to tell males
Speaker 3: and females apart. If you see like a bee that's
Speaker 3: never landing. It's just kind of fluttering around a bush
Speaker 3: a lot. That's a male probably looking for a female. Ah,
Speaker 3: or if they're a sleep in a flower, if they're
Speaker 3: a sleep in a flower.
Speaker 1: Yes, why are these bees sleeping so much? I know
Speaker 1: that they're very busy, but I especially during the day,
Speaker 1: Like that's one of those things where I it doesn't
Speaker 1: even occur to me that bees are sleeping or yet
Speaker 1: stick naps like my dog as has been passed out
Speaker 1: for the last you know, twenty minutes. But every creature
Speaker 1: needs to sleep. But do they sleep like an hour here,
Speaker 1: one off, one on, or.
Speaker 3: They could Most bees sleep at night, so just kind
Speaker 3: of like the same hours of people. But they're cold blooded,
Speaker 3: so they need Like it's cloudy or kind of cold,
Speaker 3: you're less likely to see bees out because they need
Speaker 3: the sun to warm themselves up, so they'll be sleeping longer.
Speaker 1: It worked out in our favor though, that it was
Speaker 1: overcast today. Yeah, that really helps because I didn't expect
Speaker 1: to see I thought, oh man, it's overcast, we might
Speaker 1: not see any But little did we know that it
Speaker 1: was just naptown.
Speaker 3: Overcast days are great because it could still be warm.
Speaker 3: But like the sun's not out, so you'll also see
Speaker 3: like we saw some female bees as well, but they
Speaker 3: were slower so they were easy to photograph.
Speaker 1: And this actually brings me to some questions from listeners
Speaker 1: about sleepy bees. Connie Conne Bobunni, Carolyn Myers First Southwest,
Speaker 1: Jesco Storm, and Julia Cape wanted to know well, Carolyn
Speaker 1: Meyer said, speaking of bee butts, because Connie Connie bow Bunny,
Speaker 1: I love that name. I'm such a good name, talked
Speaker 1: about sleeping inside of flowers. But Carolyn Myers wants to know,
Speaker 1: speaking bee butts, do bees really fall asleep in flowers
Speaker 1: with their cute butt sticking out? Is there a reason
Speaker 1: why bee butts are so easy to see? Do they
Speaker 1: sleep with their butts out usually or is that only
Speaker 1: when they've been digging in there for pollen and nectar.
Speaker 3: I think there's this meme of a bumblebee butt sticking
Speaker 3: out of a flower, and I don't know the context
Speaker 3: of that photo, but I think it was a female,
Speaker 3: so I'm pretty sure she was nectaring in the flower
Speaker 3: and not actually sleeping.
Speaker 1: Oh, she was just getting under the hood.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's what she was doing. But it
Speaker 3: looked just her butt was sticking out. Oh my gosh, wait,
Speaker 3: what was the question? Do they do bee butt stick out?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Do they sleep with their butts out? Usually? Or
Speaker 1: probably not?
Speaker 3: I usually don't so normally. I can't remember what the
Speaker 3: center of the flowers called. Is it the stamen?
Speaker 1: I think so, but I'll check it out. Okay, to
Speaker 1: stop yelling at us. The circle of stalks inside a
Speaker 1: flower that are all covered in pollen, those are stamens,
Speaker 1: and the rod in the middle connected to of flowers
Speaker 1: ovary is called a stigma. And I was like stigma,
Speaker 1: that's not the right word. It was in stigma like stigma.
Speaker 1: And both the shame stigma and the flower stigma come
Speaker 1: from the same root word for a pointed stick, because
Speaker 1: sometimes imprisoned people were marked with pointed sticks like brand.
Speaker 1: Also there's the word stigmata, all crumbs from the same thing.
Speaker 1: And no, I didn't know all of this because we
Speaker 1: haven't done a flowers episode yet, which would be anthology?
Speaker 1: Is that right?
Speaker 5: No?
Speaker 1: Anthology is a collection?
Speaker 3: Right? Wait?
Speaker 1: Okay, both anthology, the study of flowers, and collection come
Speaker 1: from the same word meaning to collect. So yes, I
Speaker 1: can do an anthology of anthological facts about the stigma
Speaker 1: of not knowing what a stigma is. That is the
Speaker 1: part we were talking about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so normally bees sleep wrapped around like the center
Speaker 3: of the flower flowers that open and closed. A lot
Speaker 3: of times you'll just see them like tucked in. Sometimes
Speaker 3: you'll see them kind of face up on the flower opens,
Speaker 3: you'll see their face first. But yeah, normally, do I
Speaker 3: see a lot of bee butts when they're sleeping. I
Speaker 3: don't think so. You do get to see a lot
Speaker 3: of bee butts though, right, I see a lot of
Speaker 3: bee butts. Yeah, I get more bee butt photos than
Speaker 3: face photos. Yeah, It's it's funny because like bees have
Speaker 3: a lot of like they have five eyes, so I
Speaker 3: try to hide from their eyes. Like I normally, if
Speaker 3: I'm like sneaking up on a bee, even though I'm
Speaker 3: like super huge, I'll like have like a piece of
Speaker 3: grass or like a stem in between us, so I
Speaker 3: kind of sneak up behind the stem, and it like
Speaker 3: works oddly well.
Speaker 1: So all it takes is that little block.
Speaker 3: That little thing, and I don't know how it works
Speaker 3: so well, but I do it like almost and it
Speaker 3: works so well. And then I just kind of move
Speaker 3: around it, and then they don't fly away as much.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I just I sneak up behind the thinnest things.
Speaker 1: Oh that's so cute. Yeah, Nat Scheffer says every spring,
Speaker 1: mason bees find their way through a wall vent and
Speaker 1: into my preschool daughter's bedroom. These ones never seem to
Speaker 1: live long. We try rescuing them by taking them outside,
Speaker 1: or if it's totally could by getting them fresh flowers
Speaker 1: and water breen them. But any idea? Are they distorted
Speaker 1: seeking shelter? Are they drunk? Have you heard of native
Speaker 1: bees that are that nest inside? Sometimes? Any idea what
Speaker 1: to do?
Speaker 3: I have not heard of bees, native bees nesting inside.
Speaker 3: I would double check to see if they actually are
Speaker 3: mason bees first, okay, so they do nest in cavities.
Speaker 3: I would look for the cavities. I don't know how
Speaker 3: they're getting inside. That's interesting.
Speaker 1: Maybe block up an entrance of some sort. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it sounds like a very specific problem too.
Speaker 3: Yeah it does.
Speaker 1: But we loved it. And yes, mason bees tend to
Speaker 1: be solitary. But if there's a nesting hole that exists
Speaker 1: that's pretty tight, many might build their own little nest
Speaker 1: within it, and not I got some news for you.
Speaker 1: It might not be that every spring they find their
Speaker 1: way in. They're probably there year round, just hibernating through
Speaker 1: the chili winter, drinking eggnog, binging skins, hoping for a
Speaker 1: makeout scene, and then when things warm up outside, they're like,
Speaker 1: what's up, roomy. But typically the females don't sting unless
Speaker 1: absolutely pursed, like because you squeeze them or you added
Speaker 1: them to a two active text thread that they feel
Speaker 1: bad leaving. But for the patrons who asked about bee swarms,
Speaker 1: I'm looking at you, Gabrielle Legenovic and Julia Cape. You're
Speaker 1: probably seeing swarms of European honey bees which break off
Speaker 1: into groups when the older queen gets ousted from the nest.
Speaker 1: They're like, you're dead to us, and she's like, I'm
Speaker 1: fucking out of here, and half of her subjects are
Speaker 1: like we're with her. They leave out of loyalty or
Speaker 1: love or fear whatever, and then that swarm is looking
Speaker 1: for a new castle and to heal their hearts, being
Speaker 1: like we got to find a new place to live. Man,
Speaker 1: this sucks. That's what you're probably seeing. But what if
Speaker 1: you have builder bees, carpenter bees, patrons Sunny Bramsey, Valerie Bertha,
Speaker 1: Michelle Hutsko and Mary of the Grapefruit asked about seeing
Speaker 1: them booping them, ignoring them. Others are not fans of
Speaker 1: the carpenter bee, and for that I offer my condolences
Speaker 1: because I can cannot comprehend you. They're so cute. I
Speaker 1: want to hold tiny hands with them. A lot of people, though,
Speaker 1: don't have an individual problem. Kate Munker, Jen Ashley Conan,
Speaker 1: Julia Bingham wanted to know a little bit about carpenter
Speaker 1: bees and anyway to lure them away from like a
Speaker 1: swing set.
Speaker 3: Or as so carpenter bees, I don't know if I
Speaker 3: would classify them technically as you social. They basically kind
Speaker 3: of have like a family structure inside the colonies that
Speaker 3: they create in wood. What I would maybe recommend doing
Speaker 3: is just providing other resources for them to nested in,
Speaker 3: because they really like wood that's not treated. They love yuka,
Speaker 3: they love fence posts, fallen logs, things like that. But yeah,
Speaker 3: like a lot of times, because they sort of have
Speaker 3: like a community sort of, they'll come back.
Speaker 1: Ah.
Speaker 3: But also they don't do any structural damage. They just
Speaker 3: do unsightly damage.
Speaker 1: Okay, Yeah, so they're not your swing set or your
Speaker 1: decks going to fall apart because of carpenter bees. No, oh,
Speaker 1: well then that's great. Then you just got yourself a
Speaker 1: dual purpose B.
Speaker 3: Hotel, right, basically a self made be hotel.
Speaker 1: I looked it up and okay, people are divided on
Speaker 1: carpenter b destruction.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 1: And carpenter bees do have to chew wood with their faces,
Speaker 1: so naturally they prefer the softer stuff, your pines, your cedar,
Speaker 1: your redwood. But if you have a hardwood like oak,
Speaker 1: they may chew into it if it's decomposing a little
Speaker 1: or untreated. And yeah, we have a whole episode called
Speaker 1: Zilology about lumber. But carpenter bees they have made foot
Speaker 1: long baby tunnels into wood, And according to a Texas
Speaker 1: A and M pamphlet that I just read, succeeding generations
Speaker 1: of carpenter bees can keep inheriting and expanding old tunnels,
Speaker 1: extending them several meters like a neppo baby bee mansion.
Speaker 1: But is that likely? Not that likely? Also, a carpenter
Speaker 1: bee cansting you if she's a lady and if you've
Speaker 1: really maddened her, and unlike a honey bee, her stinger
Speaker 1: isn't barbed, so she can just keep doing it again
Speaker 1: and again, kind of like a bottomless slot machine. And
Speaker 1: it hurts about the same as a bumblebeasting, which hurts
Speaker 1: way less than a bikini wax. So let him live.
Speaker 1: Last question I'll ask from patrons Helen. First time question
Speaker 1: asker wants to know I think I already know what
Speaker 1: they are. Your thoughts on the b movie starring a
Speaker 1: male a male honeybee very d bends.
Speaker 6: In so you see so to spuild on a sidewalk
Speaker 6: and you don't drink It is.
Speaker 4: A little bee.
Speaker 1: He's not bothering anybody.
Speaker 3: Get out of.
Speaker 4: Here, your creep.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's so annoying, you know what. Don't like it's
Speaker 3: not just like ants, like the Bugs Life, like all
Speaker 3: these movies. For some reason, it's always centered around male characters.
Speaker 3: They're always doing something that they never do right. Yeah,
Speaker 3: It's like I feel like, once you get to know
Speaker 3: any subject, whenever a movie comes out about it, you
Speaker 3: just get really frustrated. Oh yeah, but yeah, I was like,
Speaker 3: can you like also maybe like just female centric doesn't
Speaker 3: live in a hive, not a honey bee, maybe somewhat
Speaker 3: accurate to like something they would normally do.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, just like open the wiki page before
Speaker 1: just sell draft.
Speaker 3: Yeah, just just talk to someone else. Oh have you
Speaker 3: seen my garden of a thousand bees?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 3: Oh my god. So this guy during the pandemic was
Speaker 3: a documentary filmmaker and couldn't go anywhere because it was
Speaker 3: obviously a pandemic. He had a native like yard like yours.
Speaker 3: So he's like, let me just make a documentary about
Speaker 3: the native bees in my yard. And it's amazing, absolutely amazing.
Speaker 3: I recommend it to like everybody full tape.
Speaker 6: In the spring of twenty twenty, as the country goes
Speaker 6: into lockdown, outside the garden is coming alive. As a
Speaker 6: wildlife filmmaker, I knew there were revelations here that could
Speaker 6: be just as amazing as anything I'd ever filmed.
Speaker 1: These bees and just go ye, you know, Susannah Green
Speaker 1: first time question Osker also in terms of we always
Speaker 1: like to ask, like, what's the best representation in like
Speaker 1: pop culture, but wants to know how you feel about
Speaker 1: they bring Home a Baby Bumblebee song? Are you familiar
Speaker 1: with it?
Speaker 3: I am very familiar with that song, and I haven't
Speaker 3: thought about it since I think elementary school. I don't
Speaker 3: really have strong opinions about it.
Speaker 1: Okay, it's a cute song. I have one child and
Speaker 1: she is a dog, so I did not remember the song,
Speaker 1: but I looked it up and it goes, I'm bringing
Speaker 1: home a baby bumblebee. Won't my mommy be so proud
Speaker 1: of me? I'm bringing home a baby bumblebee. Oh, it's
Speaker 1: stung me. And then the stances go, I'm squishing up
Speaker 1: my baby bumblebee. I'm licking up my baby bumblebee. I'm
Speaker 1: throwing up my baby bumblebee. I'm wiping up my baby bumblebee.
Speaker 1: I'm ringing out my baby bumblebee. In terms of native
Speaker 1: bee representation, what could be more memorable than a child?
Speaker 1: Why not an innocent smashing a bee with its bare hands,
Speaker 1: eating its guts and barfing them at you. So yeah, Crystal,
Speaker 1: when it comes to the pr of indigenous bees, We're
Speaker 1: all counting on you. We need you.
Speaker 3: I'm working on an animated short about a bee. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 3: And I just hired a character designer. She's halfway done
Speaker 3: with the main character.
Speaker 1: Are you serious?
Speaker 3: And I'm so excited for it. I'm hoping to have
Speaker 3: like the main three character design and then I'm going
Speaker 3: to start pitching it and people because I finished the script,
Speaker 3: it's like super short.
Speaker 1: That's great, Yeah, agents, holler upon her. But life can't
Speaker 1: all be nectar and flowers, right, what sucks about bees?
Speaker 1: There's got to be something that sucks about photographing them.
Speaker 1: I can already tell. It's got to be either allergies
Speaker 1: or so rash or getting stun abdomen from something else.
Speaker 3: Also, okay, so this is for the cards too, Okay,
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh. So like I was taking really beautiful
Speaker 3: I thought beautiful photos of bees, but then I was like,
Speaker 3: you know, I realized not all of these photos are
Speaker 3: great for ID. So like sometimes I need like a
Speaker 3: complete side view of the bee, but I need them
Speaker 3: to turn their head just slightly so I can get
Speaker 3: a good face shot as well. It would be really
Speaker 3: great if bees spoke English, so I could just kind
Speaker 3: of say, like, hey, don't fly away, I just need
Speaker 3: one picture of you. Because I've stood by bushes before,
Speaker 3: like lately, I've been standing by them longer for like
Speaker 3: fifteen hours, and I just need them to like kind
Speaker 3: of pose slightly differently, or just like realize I'm not
Speaker 3: trying to eat them.
Speaker 1: I'm sure people have called you a bee whisperer so much.
Speaker 1: I wish I could whisper to the bees and I like, yeah,
Speaker 1: here to the left head chinned down.
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh, yeah no.
Speaker 3: And then like also too, like sometimes when I do
Speaker 3: get that pose, their antennae is like slightly down so
Speaker 3: it covers up the facial feature that I'm interested in.
Speaker 3: And then like also two I've noticed like when I
Speaker 3: get that perfectly and the antenna is pointed right at
Speaker 3: the camera, people are like, why does it only have
Speaker 3: one antennae? I'm like, oh jeez, but yeah, I wish
Speaker 3: I could communicate with them.
Speaker 1: Better to be a director like America's next top model,
Speaker 1: but for beest whatever the thing you know.
Speaker 3: Do you know that all of America is rooting for you?
Speaker 1: Do you know that if only you could direct, I
Speaker 1: would love that?
Speaker 3: Or if I could speak be like.
Speaker 1: If you ever would be is yeah one of those
Speaker 1: one of those Yeah, what about the best thing?
Speaker 3: The best thing? I think that would be like really
Speaker 3: personal depending on who you're talking to, But I would say,
Speaker 3: for me, the best thing about bees is that they
Speaker 3: got me back into nature, and they got me into
Speaker 3: places where I think I said this before, where nothing
Speaker 3: is human centric, like you really don't matter there, and
Speaker 3: it's just it's kind of nice when things just don't
Speaker 3: revolve around you or any other people that you know.
Speaker 3: It's just you're just kind of sitting there in the
Speaker 3: moment enjoying yourself.
Speaker 1: And we just don't ever do that, don't.
Speaker 3: Yeah, But yeah, that's why I really try and go
Speaker 3: out every single day and just sit somewhere and just
Speaker 3: enjoy quiet.
Speaker 1: Well, it's inspiring me even just to take my iPhone
Speaker 1: and go out there.
Speaker 3: You don't even need attachments for your phones anymore, but yeah,
Speaker 3: just they go out in your yard, you could experience
Speaker 3: the exact same thing. Just lay on the ground.
Speaker 1: And do you get a lot of dms from people
Speaker 1: asking about bees or showing you bees?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. I get a lot of
Speaker 3: photos where people like can you idea this? Or tell
Speaker 3: me more about this? But I really enjoy it.
Speaker 1: I mean, how contagious is she? Y'all? Even after we
Speaker 1: were done with the main interview, we sat and chatted
Speaker 1: for I was just loved hanging out. Do we love her?
Speaker 1: We love her? And Volume one? Congratulations on Volume Volume one. Yes,
Speaker 1: I'm excited. I have four sets coming, do you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I bought four because I'm like, I know I want one,
Speaker 1: But then I also know so many people that I'm
Speaker 1: going to want to give them to. Oh, and especially
Speaker 1: if I have friends who have like just moved to LA.
Speaker 1: When people just move to your city, it's so fun
Speaker 1: to get them a book about local flora or fauna
Speaker 1: to make them more excited. And yeah, I mostly do
Speaker 1: it so that my friends don't hate LA and move away.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I swear, We've got great bugs, We've got
Speaker 1: great everything, so.
Speaker 4: Oh we do, we do.
Speaker 1: I have several copies of the Wild La Book for
Speaker 1: that reason, where, Oh.
Speaker 4: My gosh, I love that book.
Speaker 1: It's a great book. We have an episode about this book,
Speaker 1: and it's called Field Trip How to Change Your Life
Speaker 1: via the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, and it
Speaker 1: includes excerpts read by the authors, including entomology guest Lee
Speaker 1: Lincoln's so Wild La. Excellent book. Get it for everyone
Speaker 1: you know who lives near LA.
Speaker 4: I keep that in my car with me.
Speaker 1: Oh it's so good. I'm on my second batch of
Speaker 1: them because I give them to neighbors or when people
Speaker 1: move to LA's and I feel like your deck will
Speaker 1: be like that.
Speaker 3: I really hope, so really, I put so much thought
Speaker 3: into it, so I really hope everyone really enjoys it
Speaker 3: and learns things from it.
Speaker 1: Well, congratulations, thank you so much for doing this. This
Speaker 1: has been a joy.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, anytime you want to photograph bees, you know we
Speaker 1: got them.
Speaker 4: Yeah you do, come right on over.
Speaker 3: You have a great native yard in your backyard. You
Speaker 3: did a really good job.
Speaker 1: Thanks to David too for that. Anytime you want to
Speaker 1: come by, it's open to I love that.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: So ask enthusiastic experts basic bee questions, and then turn
Speaker 1: off your phone and go stare at a plant. From
Speaker 1: it again. You can find Crystal Hickman at b sip
Speaker 1: on Instagram, and her website and other socials are linked
Speaker 1: in the show notes, alongside a very easy link to
Speaker 1: get a deck of her flash cards and definitely have
Speaker 1: a look at her photography. Tell her you love her work.
Speaker 1: We are atologies on Instagram and Twitter. I'm at ali
Speaker 1: Ward on both. We have kid friendly classroom save episodes
Speaker 1: called Smologies that are available in this feed or for
Speaker 1: free at aliward dot com slash Smologies. Thank you, Zek
Speaker 1: Rodriguez Thomas and Mercedes Maitland for working on those. Emily
Speaker 1: White of the word to remakes our professional transcripts. Aaron
Speaker 1: Talbert admins Theologies podcast Facebook group with assists from Bonnie
Speaker 1: Dutch and Tanne Feltis. Kelly ar Dwyer works on our website.
Speaker 1: Noel Dillworth does our scheduling season Hail does so so much,
Speaker 1: including handles. All of our merch again available at ologiesmerch
Speaker 1: dot com. Mark David Christensen Assistant Edits and Laurel McCall
Speaker 1: assisted on research for this episode. A bit Jarret Sleeper
Speaker 1: of mindcham Media as a friend to the bees and
Speaker 1: to me's and lead editor who we know in love
Speaker 1: is Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn wrote theme
Speaker 1: music and if you stick around to the end of
Speaker 1: the episode, I tell you secret this week. Oh it's
Speaker 1: that I'll be in Philly for the week. If anyone's
Speaker 1: going to the st conference, it's an education conference. I'm
Speaker 1: doing a talk next Tuesday morning. Also this week I
Speaker 1: made a tech talk about being a landlord and having
Speaker 1: to evict a single mother. But it was actually a
Speaker 1: video about a spider that I had to put outside
Speaker 1: who had made a web in our bedroom, and I
Speaker 1: was like, I gotta put her outside. But I think
Speaker 1: some people didn't see the whole thing and actually thought
Speaker 1: that I was a landlord and I was evicting someone,
Speaker 1: which is not true. It was just a video about
Speaker 1: a spider relocation, but I worried about it, and then
Speaker 1: I deleted the video just in case. But anyway, I
Speaker 1: hope the spider is thriving, as are you. Okay, go
Speaker 1: look at bees burbye.
Speaker 5: Pacadermatologymbology or doo zoology, lithology, yeah, zerology, meteorology, pology, apology, seriology, slisology.
Speaker 1: It's a bee, it's a bumblebee. It's furry, it's about
Speaker 1: this big