Instant Genius - Samantha Alger: What can we do to save the bees?

Episode Date: January 23, 2020

We all appreciate the buzz of the humble bee in the garden, however, not a summer goes past without hearing news that our bee population is under threat, with the finger usually pointing at habitat loss or chemicals containing neonicotinoids. But in reality, there are a whole host of reasons why our vital bee population is in decline. And given they provide pollination services for every one in three bites of the food we eat, their survival is critical to our very way of life. In this episode of the Science Focus Podcast, University of Vermont environmental scientist and pollination specialist Samantha Alger talks about her work uncovering the secret life of bees, what is causing the decline in bee numbers, and what we can do so save them. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Mark Lynas: Could leaving nature to its own devices be the key to meeting the UK’s climate goals? Andrew Hunter Murray and Dan Schreiber: Is there really no such thing as a fish? Brad Lister: Are we facing an insect apocalypse? Nick Lyon: Filming a Dynasty Neil Gemmell: The genetic hunt for the Loch Ness Monster Steve Brusatte: The truth about dinosaurs Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing.

Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. In California, staying compliant means watching the state laws and the city rules at the same time. And no wonder it feels overwhelming. Meal breaks, rest breaks, wage rules, constant updates, it's a lot.

And that's why Southern California businesses rely on Guardian HR. They're local in L.A. and they understand this community and they help you stay compliant to avoid costly missteps. You get accurate payroll software and a real HR expert who keeps you ahead of issues. Get your Southern California business protected at GuardianHR.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio, and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality.

British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic, specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analog warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. We need to have a change in our mentality of what we think is beautiful and that we need to think of that we're, even if we have a messy lawn, like we're supporting wild bee. and that's a beautiful thing. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast

from the BBC Science Focus magazine team with the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello, I'm Alexander McNamara and I love bees. Not enough to call myself a budding apiurist, but I appreciate them buzzing around in my garden. However, not as summer goes past

without hearing news that our bee population is under threat with the finger usually pointing at habitat loss or chemicals containing neonicotenoids. But in reality, there are a whole host of reasons why our vital bee population is in decline. And given they provide pollination services for every one in three bites of the food we eat, their survival is critical to our way of life. Our editorial assistant, Amy Barrett, spoke to University of Vermont's environmental scientist and pollination specialist Samantha Alga about her work on covering the secret life of bees, what is causing the decline in bee numbers and what we can do to save them.

So I'm Samantha Alger. I'm a research affiliate at the University of Vermont in the Plant and Soil Science Department. And I'm also a environmental scientist and pollinator specialist at a engineering consulting firm called VHB and in Vermont. And what does your latest research show? So our most recent publication, we tested something that was broadly suggested by researchers and by that, but it hadn't yet been tested. And it was that diseases or specifically viruses are spilling over from managed honeybees into wild bumblebee populations. And we found compelling evidence that this is occurring that bumblebees were way more. likely to be infected with viruses when they were collected near honeybee apiaries.

And we also found evidence that this could be, that this transmission of viruses could be occurring through the shared use of flowers. And we found a very high proportion of flowers near honeybee apiaries, about 19% harbored these RNA viruses. Whereas all the flowers we collected in sites where there wasn't a honeybee apiary nearby, they were all negative for the viruses. So again, kind of supporting that hypothesis that apiaries, honeybee apiaries could be hotspots for the transmission of these viruses between managed bees and wild bees.

And these honeybee apiaries, how many of them are there in the U.S.? And how big is beekeeping? So the number of apiaries themselves is a hard number to get. get at, but I can say that there's about 2.6 million commercial colonies, and that doesn't take into account all of the hobbyist beekeepers. The reason why it's a difficult number is that not all states have apiary inspection programs and even the states that do. They don't all collect data on the number of hives and the number of apiaries in the state, but we do have some pretty good numbers for commercial beekeepers. And so it's, you know, 2.6 million.

colonies, I think, in the U.S. currently. And how much do we know about bee populations, so not just the honeybees, but other bee populations across the states? So we know very little about most of the bee species in North America, but we have the best data for the bumblebees, the big fuzzy charismatic species that are showing range contractions in the UK, as you've probably heard, as well as the U.S. And we know the most about these bees because they were liked by early naturalists, and so they collected a lot of specimens, and we have a lot of historic data, and we can compare the collections, the current collections with the historic data, and we're seeing that

there's been declines of a number of bumblebee species in North America. and we've recently listed our first federally listed species, Bombus of Finnis, it's the rusty patch bumblebee here in the U.S. And that's a species that was really, really common only a few decades ago, and now they're quite difficult to find and they're endangered. And then here in Vermont, where I live, we've had three species in 2015 that were listed as either state threatened or state endangered. And so we see on a state-by-state basis, we see species,

decrease, species populations decreasing. But we also see there's a number of species that are becoming more and more common. And so really what the trends are showing is that we're seeing less of a more of the really common ones, but less of the rarer ones. And so a lot less diversity. In Vermont, we've seen a loss of about, I think, 26,000. percent of historical diversity in this state. Wow. What kind of threats are facing bees across the states? So oftentimes in media we hear that, oh, it's this chemical, it's a roundup, or it's

neo-nicotinoids or it's disease or it's this one thing that I think that everyone, the public really wants to be able to point their finger to a single smoking gun, but it's a multitude and It's a combination of threats, and that includes habitat loss. So with land use change, we see vast areas that are getting converted to corn, for example, which offer nothing for bees, or, you know, or parking lots or, you know, areas that were once really good areas forage are changing. So bees are losing habitat and they're foraging and their nesting and their nesting and foraging resources. We also know that bees are affected by disease. Of course, there's a ton of different pests and pathogens that both managed and wild bees are affected by.

But I think that the most concerning issue with that is the introduction spread of novel or exotic pathogens to naive hosts. And we saw that with the spread of the varroa mite in honeybees. We see small hive beetles that came from Africa and honeybees. And then, of course, Nozima Bombay, which we think has been spread from the commercial, from the spread of commercial bumblebee colonies that were sold. And we know that Nozima Bombay was probably, it could be one of the reasons why we've seen a decline of bumblebee species. And so definitely pest and pathogens is another threat. And then also pesticides and herbicides.

herbicides, there needs to be a lot more research done there, but of course you're killing, if you're using herbicides to kill the wildflowers or what we think of as weeds, that's, you know, affecting their forage, but also pesticides that we put on our agricultural crops to keep herbicides, or I'm sorry, herbivores from eating our food are, of course, can also affect bees. And so it's the multitude of these three things. So habitat loss, the chemicals that we use out in our environment and our on our agriculture and disease in pests. And those non-natives or pests and pathogens that you were talking about, are those the RNA viruses that you looked at in your latest research?

So there's always, so RNA viruses have been around for a long time and they've been studied for a long time in honeybees, but only more recently we're detecting them in native bees and in bumblebees. But it's not really clear if these viruses have been, circulating throughout the pollinator community at large for a long time. It's possible that that's occurring. However, my research is finding that it looks like that honeybees could be a good source for these viruses to wild bees.

And so the viruses have been around in honeybees for a long time, but they really only became a big problem in honeybees with the introduction of the Varroa mite to North America and elsewhere, and that might came from Asia. And those mites transmit viruses, the same viruses that have been around, but because the mites transmit the virus directly to the hemolymph or the blood of the bee, then the viruses are able to propagate quickly and cause symptoms in the honeybees. Whereas previously, honeybees might eat a virus, and it would go through its digestive. track and it might not actually be able to get out into the bees, you know, system at large

and cause issues. And so it's really the introduction of the varroa mite that have made viruses so dangerous to honeybees. And we also wonder whether that introduction of varroa mites that have made viruses more dangerous to honeybees could then have increased the probability of spillover from honeybees to wild bees. And so while we don't think of these RNA viruses necessarily being all exotic or introduced, there are a number. So if we look harder, we find more viruses. And so new viruses, new combinations of viruses will show up.

We'll find deadlier versions of viruses. And there are certainly viruses that are elsewhere in the world that aren't yet here in North America. and, you know, restrictions and bans on honeybee transportation and trade and purchasing has, one of the reasons for that is to kind of keep some of these other viruses that aren't here from coming across our borders. And so the virulamite, you mentioned it came from Asia, how did that come to be so prevalent in the honeybee populations in the U.S.? That's a great question.

and I think the topic of a lot of research, but we don't really know how, where exactly it started and how it spread so quickly, except that it's just a really, a really, really good parasite of honeybees. So it started off in the Asiatic honeybee, which is a different species. And they don't cause the same, to the same extent,

of damage that they caused to our honeybee apis malephyra here in the U.S. and elsewhere. They just are very, their life cycle is very well-timed with our, with the species. And we just, we, I don't think we were prepared for it when it came. And so since then, over the past, I guess it was, you'll have to fact check this, but I think it was introduced in the late 80s, early 90s. And so since then, we've come up with a slew of, different chemical treatments, conventional, organic. There's different cultural practices that beekeepers employed to kind of keep

virul mites at bay. And so those methods have been developed over time and are, you know, in some ways they're working, but we're never going to eradicate the varol mite. They're here, and it's just a matter of managing. But there is another mite, the Tripoli Labs mite, that's in Asia. and it's right now there's scientists that are studying it and see it's showing that that that might also looks to be spreading and there's an issue I mean there's a concern because the trilopalalalapes might could actually outcompete the varroa mite should it actually come here and so I think

with what we've learned with the spread and the issues that varroa mite has caught that the virul mite has caused, we're taking what we learned and hopefully in doing and taking precautions now. And there's researchers studying tropolololapse in its environment and trying to formulate and figure out mite management strategies already before it gets here. So hopefully we're in a much better place than where we were decades ago when the varroa mite came. And one other thing that we're doing to try to keep the tropololololite away is the

in the U.S. here, we have the National Honeybee Survey. It's funded by the Farm Bill. It's a USDA APIS program. That's APHIS. That's Animal Plant Health Inspection Service. And that program serves to, number one is to just to try to detect early the presence of these exotic pests before they become a problem. And so there's most states are involved and I help run the one in Vermont and we go out and sample honeybee colonies across 24 apiaries in the state every year. And those samples are tested and examined for tropolololapse. And so this is, you know, this is one of the precautions that we're that we're doing now to, um, to try to, you know, take the things that we learn from Verroa and, um, and learn from it and benefit from it. And so I wonder, why doesn't the USA have any, you know,

native honeybees. Oh, that's a great question. I guess it would be related to evolution and that they just, they didn't evolve here. But I don't know the answer to that. But they, you know, they were brought here by colonists in the, I guess to Virginia in the, in the 1600s for honey, really, not for pollination services. And it's funny because most people here in the States don't know that honeybees aren't native to our country, to North America. Everyone thinks that they're native and that they're part of the conservation efforts, which has been interesting because here they're really just they're an agricultural livestock animal. You know, that's really how they're treated because they're not going to do that well out in nature, especially now with varroa mites.

We do have some naturalized colonies, but not like they're used to be. And so, you know, they need to be managed by beekeepers for them to stay healthy in most cases. And it's interesting to talk to the general public and to tell them that, no, honeybees are not. When bee colonies are dying, it's certainly an issue for the economy and for agriculture, but it's not really an issue from a conservation perspective because they're not native. And people seem to get surprised and I think also a little hurt by that fact. Yeah, I can understand why. And so if, you know, say in America, the majority of the population decided one day to stop eating honey,

that would mean that the honeybees eventually would not be managed and they'd disappear from the US. Is that right? Well, I think it would have to take a complete overhaul of agriculture because although honey is just one thing that that honeybees provide for us, but number one, I think the number one way which beekeepers make money from honeybees is through pollination contracts. And so, you know, this is, I think we talked about it a little bit before, but, you know, about half of the 2.6 million commercial colonies that we talked about in the states. are contracted for crop pollination. And so, you know, we'd have to decide that we weren't going to use honeybees to pollinate our food crops anymore. And then, you know, also we're not going to eat honey. And all people who are interested in beekeeping are going to stop beekeeping.

And then I'm sure that there would be a number of colonies that might exist out in the wild and, you know, in tree cavities or maybe in people's houses for a time. but if some test like Tropolololapus might get introduced and people aren't able to manage the colonies in the wild, they might blink out if there aren't resistant genetics out there in the wild. But yeah, and so in terms of like the overhaul of our agricultural, what that would mean is the way we grow our food in these huge monocultures. I mean, this is like acres and acres and acres of the same crop as far as you can see. It's just not, we don't, those areas don't support wild bees. There's not places for the wild bees to nest. And although when crops bloom, they offer, you know, a lot of nectar and a lot of pollen, but it's in a short period of time, you know, maybe a couple weeks for almonds.

It might be three weeks. But then after they bloom, if there's nothing else around, for them to eat, it's not going to support a robust wild bee community in that area. And so farmers can't take advantage of the free pollination services that wild bees provide because it just isn't the habitat for them. And so to say we're not going to utilize honeybees for crop pollination would mean we're going to have to completely change the way that we grow our food to support wild bees so that way farmers can still get the pollination services to the crops that they need to produce the food to support our growing population.

So can you tell us a bit more about how beekeepers and farmers work together? How do honeybees come into that pollination? Yeah, so beekeepers, you know, they'll manage, you know, sometimes thousands of honeybees, the big commercial beekeepers. and they have brokers involved and truck drivers involved, and they, through a process of brokering, and they sign on contracts with these growers. So, for instance, we'll talk about almond growers, for instance, and they will contract a number of colonies to the almond growers

for the period of almond bloom. and I think it's around $100 or $200 a colony somewhere around there that they'll get for bringing their bees to the almond fields. And so they'll, you know, truck drivers will put hundreds of or thousands of bee colonies on trucks and bring them out during that one period of time and of almond bloom. And for almonds, it's, I think it's each acre of almond requires an average of two honeybee colonies. So it's a lot, a lot of colonies in an area. And so people who are, so for the almonds, for example, almonds require about 1.5 million honeybee colonies during that month-long bloom. So when I say there's 2.6 million commercial colonies, about half of those are used for crop pollination. and all of them, pretty much all of them, spend time, those three weeks pollinating almonds.

But then for beekeepers who are really on the road all the time with their bees, they'll travel, they'll go up to Maine for blueberries, they'll go down south or watermelons or cantaloupe or, you know, squash. And so they'll spend most of the year on the road just trucking their bees around from one crop to the next to the next. Wow. And do we have to use honeybees for that? Could we keep apiaries, of other species, the pollinators? Yeah, so the honeybees are really the most efficient bee for doing this in such. I mean, when you talk about how many bees you need and how big of these fields are, you can't house and transport native bees in that kind of quantity.

Like a bumblebee colony might be a couple. hundred individuals and they don't overwinter as a colony. So there's an issue where you'd have to be starting out every single year. You have to start out with a new colony each year. And most of our wild bees are solitary species. And so, I mean, they are done. Like we have alfalfa leaf cutter bees that are really good at pollinating alfalfa for seed. We've got blue orchard mason bees, which are really good for pollinating some crops. So it's done, but it's usually done in a much smaller scale. But if you need a huge number of insect bodies for a very short period of time,

it's honeybees that are getting utilized. But for some crops like tomatoes, for example, and greenhouse crops, bumblebees are the primary pollinator that farmers will use. inside greenhouse crops because they do pretty well. And it doesn't, but there are, so you can buy commercial bumblebee colonies, but that's a whole other issue. As soon as you start producing insects or anything at a commercial scale, there's always an issue where you have high densities.

There might be high densities of the insect where they could easily spread and transmit disease. and then if you then take them and put them out in the wild, there's an opportunity there where you're just spreading disease from these commercial colonies into the wild. And so anytime you try to take an animal and then try to domesticate it with marmot, there's all these issues that come along with it. And I wonder going back to that spillover

that you mentioned that you found in your research, could you just explain how that happens so how managed honeybees could have this virus and how that could then spill over onto the wild. bees around. Sure. So we don't really know if what like what the mode of of transmission might be. So you think about during the flu season and people are sneezing on their hands and then touching doorknobes, for example. So, you know, we don't know whether it's through salivary secretions or through feces. And so, but those are the two most probable methods or modes that these viruses

might be getting transmitted because when bees forge on flowers, think of a flower is like a is like a dirty doorknob during flu season, right? It's just a, in the disease ecology world, we call it a foamite. It's sort of an inanimate object that might harbor a pathogen. And so you think of a honeybee lands on a flower. And what they're doing on that flower is walking around on it. They're getting pollen on their bodies. They're sticking their tongues in the flowers and in drinking up the nectar. And then once they get pollen on their bodies, they're sort of, they're coating it in salivary secretions.

They're coating it in saliva, and they're then sticking it to the sides of their body with this, you know, after they make it all sticky. And so then they'll then travel to the next flower and do the same thing. And some of those pollen grains that they might have put saliva on could fall off their bodies onto that flower. And then also during that process, they oftentimes will defecate and leave behind feces.

if they're traveling or if they're just sitting on the flower, they'll defecate. And so, you know, it's funny. We look out onto our beautiful gardens and we see bees pollinating plants and you're not thinking about all these gross, sort of gross, you know, feces and salivary secretions that could be left behind by bees. But that's how we think this is occurring and that another bee will land on that flower and, you know, they're basically feeding from the same waterhole, right? and picking and then could possibly pick up the viruses through the salivary secretions or feces left behind on the flowers.

And these viruses, they can't affect humans, can they? But can they just affect bee species? Yes, you're right. Yeah, they will not affect humans. And they've been detected in, like I mentioned, native bees, but not just bumble bees, other solitary species of bees. But they've also been detected in flies, like hoverfish. and ants and beetles and butterflies, but there's been very little evidence to show that these viruses are causing symptoms in these other arthropod species. So it's possible that when you,

so when you do the molecular test to test for the virus, you can find virus particles, but that doesn't tell you whether or not the virus is actually active or not. And so, you know, if, let's think of a beetle maybe like a flower beetle on a flower. A honeybee might leave behind some salivary secretions that have a virus on it, and then the beetle will eat some of that pollen. And then if a researcher goes and scoops up that beetle and test it, we'll say, well, we found this virus and this beetle. But when in fact the virus is just an inactive particle on a piece of pollen,

and if we had left that beetle for a little bit longer on the flower, then that beetle might have just defecated and, you know, rid its body of the virus particle and it would have never even caused any, any harm to the beetle. And so that's the issue in this research is it's one thing to show that we've just, so we say we detect viruses in these species, but it's another thing to show that they're actually causing harm and causing symptoms in the species. What's sort of unique in our study is that we, we tested for virus replication in, our bumblebees that we sampled to show whether or not the viruses are actively replicating.

It's this method of where we, I don't know how detailed you want me to get, but we sort of we fish for the negative strand of the virus, which means that the virus is actively replicating because it needs this negative strand to make copies of itself. And so if you find this negative strand, it means that the viruses are replicating. And so we did find, in fact, that these viruses were replicating inside the bumblebee hosts. And we found replication was more likely, I think, just in deformed wing virus, when the honeybees were collected near, I mean, sorry, when the bumblebees were near honeybee apiaries. And there's been a number of studies that have looked at the effects, or really not a number, just a handful of studies that look at the effect of these viruses on other bee species, not really the larger Arthur pod community. I haven't seen much for that.

And they found that deformed wing virus looks like it might cause wing deformities in bumbleycese, in bumblebees as well as honeybees. Israeli Q paralysis virus looks like it also causes mortality, deformed in mortality in bumblebees as well as honeybees. But we really, we know that the viruses can replicate inside the host, which means that they're able to switch hosts, but we know very little about what symptoms they might cause in other bees besides honeybees and other insects.

Is that something you're likely to look at next, or what would you like to focus on next? Yes, so there's a huge gap there. It's a little difficult to study that because you have to, well, you have to purify virus in a lab and then you have to, you know, you have to feed the virus to commercial to colonies that you bring into the lab. And part of the issue when you are doing this work is you don't know whether the bees that you're feeding are already infected or not. And we tried to do a study like this in the past. We tested, um, we tested, um, the, the effects of these viruses on bumblebees. And when we ordered the commercial bumblebee colonies, they already came infected with the viruses that we were studying. And so there's another issue right there is that these commercial bumblebee colonies could be, you know,

so the commercial suppliers are feeding bumblebees in the lab. They're feeding them pollen that was collected from honeybee colonies. Now, with everything you know now about how viruses are on pollen particles, this would be a really good way to infect a bunch of bumblebees. And then if these commercial suppliers are then selling their bumblebee colonies to farmers to pollany different crops, they could be also spreading the viruses that way. So it might not be just from honeybees. It could be from commercial bumblebees that are being fed honeybillowlone or honeybee pollen. So one of the, so that's sort of an issue with doing the studies. But yes, I definitely would like as a next step to to look at the effects of these viruses on bumblebees and other bee species.

Another big step for us is to try to demonstrate the transmission route of honeybee to flower and flower to bumblebee. because the field study we did is very compelling evidence that this is occurring. But just because we find these patterns out in the environment doesn't mean that it's absolutely definitely occurring, right? We have to take this into a controlled setting and demonstrate that honeybees will leave behind viruses when they're foraging and that bumblebees will pick up those viruses and then become infected to really nail down the transmission route. and that's something where we're working on and we've actually done most of the experiments in our writing up the study right now.

And why did you personally start studying bees? So I was, let's see, I was a business major as an undergrad. And then I had an opportunity to study tropical ecology and conservation in this program abroad. and learned that about social insects through a program, through an independent research project on Army ants, and realized that you could be a biologist and you can study insects for a living, which was ludicrous to me who grew up in a household

where you could be a doctor or a lawyer. I didn't know that these things existed. And I knew I was interested in conservation. But I wanted to focus on my efforts on something that was, important for not just for conservation, you know, in like a tree hugger kind of way, but also that's important for humans because that's where really the rubber meets the road and you can make changes if people feel like it's an important initiative. And so with my interest in social insects, I found that, well, these are, you need them for one of every three bites of food that

you eat. That's their, you know, they provide pollination services for so, for most of the the food that we eat. And so the connection there was really strong that, you know, it's good for conservation, for, you know, wild bee conservation, but also, you know, it's important to humans. I think when we think of saving the bees, we often actually think about honey bees. Should we start really focusing our efforts onto other types of bees? I think we should definitely broaden our efforts onto other bees. I think there's a lot of, I think that it'd be nice to just for people to understand that it's two separate issues. However, the fact that the public and conservation initiatives have focused so much on honeybees, they're charismatic. People know what a beekeeper looks like,

and people know how bees are kept on this incredible comb and this hexagonal structure. It's all very charismatic, and people understand it. Whereas if you try to talk to people about a solitary bee that lives underground and they nest in these little tiny holes, it's different. for people to take hold of that and feel like they're connected to it and to try to make changes based on this, like, be that's, you know, a, it could be that they'd never even considered being existing, you know, that might be green or blue. And so I think that in some ways, the conservation efforts for native bees have really benefited by the public's attraction and connection with the honeybee.

But it can get a little bit off a little bit, because if all of the effort is focused on the honeybee, then we're missing the vast majority of species in the world. There's 20,000 species of bees in the world. And, you know, if we're finding that honeybees are causing problems for wild bees through either through the spread of disease or through maybe competition on flowers, that's a difficult thing to show, but people have tried between honeybees and wild bees. Then, you know, then we're sort of, you know, we're missing, we're missing, you know, the effort,

the opportunities to make strides towards helping the wild bees. It's a real shame that, like you say, the solitary bees because they don't seem to offer any benefit to humans that we're not as worried about them. Well, I wouldn't say that they don't offer benefit to humans. They are fantastic pollinators of crops. It's just a matter of making sure that there's the habitat to support them. So in Vermont here, we're pretty rural. Our farming community is structured in such a way that the farms tend to be pretty

small, and we have a lot of wild habitat around between farms. and some research here at UVM by my colleagues found that that blueberry growers produced way more blueberries when they had wild habitat around their farms and that their blueberries were really supported by wild bees. And so they're fantastic pollinators. It's just a matter of being able to support them around our crops to take advantage of that free pollination service. And so that's, you know, again, public education is it's not that they're not doing. anything for us they are. It's just that I think what my point was earlier was that people don't

associate them, they're not, they don't have that childhood sort of curiosity or interest with wild bees because they just, they hadn't been introduced to it at such a young age as they had been to honeybees. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And so what can people do to

help wild bees and what can people at home actually do that would change and stop the decline? Right. So, I think the number, there's two big things, and that would be to do what they can to create pollinator habitat. And so bees like really messy, messy, messy field, you know, or talking about, like, snagued trees that are, that have been, that have died that are still standing and they,

they have holes in them. You know, us humans don't like to look at those and we like to take them down, but that's incredible bee habitat, you know, messy brush piles or, you know, areas where there's, you know, areas where there's there's clumps of grass that bumblebees can nest down into and burrow into. So all these things that we view as they're not aesthetically, they might not be aesthetically pleasing. They're not that beautiful cut grass that might be caught at an angle. You know, we don't, that's basically a desert for bees. So we need to have a change in our mentality of what we think is beautiful and that we need to

think of that we're, even if we have a messy lawn, like we're supporting wild bees and that's a beautiful thing. And so some things that have done, so in Minnesota, they offer now incentives for changing over your lawn to pollinator-friendly lawns, which is pretty great. So this is going to be mowing a lot less, which is, you know, it's better for the environment. It caught costs. You know, you don't have to spend a lot of time on your lawn more anymore if you let your lawn grow and let the wildflowers come up. And the other big thing besides, you know, changing how you look at nature and what we, you know, in our lawns and creating nice habitat and planting flowers for bees. Besides that, the other big thing is to avoid using pesticides and chemicals on our home gardens.

And I think in Vermont here, we just passed a bill that restricts the use or the purchase of neonicotinoids to homeowners. Now, while most of neonicotinoids are being brought in through treated seeds, so through treated corn or treated soybeans, I think it was really, it's been found that its homeowners tend to use, they're not necessarily trained how to use pesticides or how to apply it or when to apply it. And so while it's not really the vast quantity of how these chemicals are being used, it's the most oftentimes the way that they're being misused. and so we're now

Vermont has restricted these embroad or getting them off the shelves of places where like hardware stores where homeowners can purchase them because they're really not necessary. I mean they're being sold so that people can spray their rose gardens and they're just incredibly harmful to pollinators

and to insects in general. So yeah, so cut down on using so many chemicals and then create some nice pollinator habitat and then also supporting organic agriculture and small farms that, you know, are doing their best to grow plants in an ecologically friendly way. And it's funny, I think being in this, you know, in this position of a bee researcher and an advocate for bee conservation,

a lot of people come up to me and say, I'm, oh, I'm thinking about becoming a beekeeper because I wanted to help save the bees. I want to do my part, so I'm going to become a beekeeper. And, you know, based on our discussion this whole time, time, you know, you'd see why that's such a disconnect. It's like, I said this, um, so before, it's like, it's like being interested in, um, wanting to do something for bird conservation and then saying you're going to become a chicken farmer. It's just, you know, it's, it's no, honeybees are not native in their agriculture. It's great. It's great. You want to take on that hobby, but that's, but the issue is if you're not going to do it, it beekeeping is a lot

of work. It's a lot of effort. You have to do a lot of things to keep your bees, um, you know, pathogen-free. And if you're not willing to put in the effort, you're actually could be causing harm to your own bees, to maybe your neighbor's bees. And now we're seeing to the large, the pollinator community at large if your pathogens are spilling over. That was environmental scientist and pollination specialist Samantha Alga on the threat facing our bee population. If this episode left you buzzing for more animal chat, then tune in next week when we talked to paleontologist Ross Barner about the impressive mammals that lived

during the Pleistocene. If you fancy something a little more science-y, we have more than 100 more podcasts for you to take your pick from. So subscribe wherever you listen to your pods and leave a rating or review. That way we can produce more and better podcasts in the future.

Otherwise, grab a copy of the latest BBC Science Focus magazine, which is packed full of features, interviews and other fun facts. This month, we're investigating the surprising science of self-control. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast

from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal,

Name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com.