[00:00:26] Speaker A: Hello, K squid listeners. It's every other Sunday again. I'm Ronnie Lipschitz here in the studio with Brooke Wright. And you're listening to sustainability now, a bi weekly K squid radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. Bees are in danger around the world. What can we do? What do bees do, and what can bees tell us about human society? Our guest today is Doctor Eve Bratman, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Bratman is author of governing the Sustainable Development Politics in the Amazon, and she's currently writing a book entitled a Journey into the politics of saving bees and the Ethics of a Sustainable Future, which uses bees as a prism for seeing broader social and ecological phenomena and is premised upon revealing the ways that human society fumblingly strives to protect and preserve their roles in our lives. Eve, welcome to sustainability now.
[00:01:33] Speaker B: Thanks.
[00:01:33] Speaker C: It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:36] Speaker A: So you have a lot of expertise about bees, and we'll get into that later and other things. But let's start with your recent focus on bees, which includes several publications. You recently co authored an article about urban beekeeping. Could you talk a little bit about that?
[00:01:51] Speaker C: I'm happy to. First, I want to acknowledge my co author, Doug Sponsler, who is an entomologist and urban ecologist. So he and I collaborated, having worked together in Philadelphia with some urban beekeepers. Doug coming at it from the side of wanting to know more about what the bees were feeding off of in the urban landscape, and me having an interest in what the meanings were of urban beekeeping to people living in the city and to the beekeepers themselves.
So when we talk about urban beekeeping, it can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Right? For Doug, obviously, it was all about pollination services and for myself and for others coming at beekeeping from a more socio political lens.
Urban beekeeping means hands on environmental engagements in places such as cities where we wouldn't normally expect to find people interacting with nature in quite intimate and active ways. So what we do in this article is we try to unpack those different meanings of urban beekeeping, and we draw on urban ecological theory to construct basically three different archetypes of what urban beekeeping can look like. We talk about it as beekeeping in, of, and for the city. So with beekeeping in the city, basically it's kind of add bees to an urban environment and stir people keeping bees just basically for private reasons. Beekeeping of the city is about beekeeping that's conscious about the urban context, sometimes involving the semi professionalization of beekeepers, selling local honey, for example, or local lip balms, as well as creating local expert communities that are sharing knowledge with each other.
And the last category that we articulate is called beekeeping for the city, which is about a shift in mindset where beekeeping is ultimately directed toward civic purposes beyond just the boundaries of the beekeeping community, and really aiming toward a greater awareness raising and environmental engagement of those beyond the narrowly defined beekeeping community. So in this article we're trying to provoke a conversation, both with policy makers and with people practicing beekeeping in the forms of beekeeping associations and societies, to try to encourage a conversation that really engages people in being self reflective about their beekeeping practices and that allows for policymakers to be in conversation with beekeepers about how socioecological benefits could actually be maximized.
[00:04:36] Speaker A: How do you find people react to urban bees?
[00:04:41] Speaker C: It's a huge range for the most part. There's a lot of enthusiasm. Everybody wants to do something seemingly to save the bees, and honeybees are a natural entry point for that.
I'll talk more, I hope, in this interview about some of the problems with keeping honeybees, but at a minimum, people are excited to try to do something and to be able to learn about the bees and see honeybee hives in action. There is, of course, always the inevitable set of critiques that bees lead to more stings, and people with bee sting allergies are more vulnerable. And beekeepers inescapably face a number of calls about wasps as if they are swarms of honeybees, when in fact they're just wasps doing their own thing.
So there's a lot of work that beekeepers are always doing to educate the public and talk about bees with broader communities.
[00:05:40] Speaker A: Do you go to schools with your bees? I mean, do you take them long, do anything like that? Or do you bring the students to the bees?
[00:05:47] Speaker C: I have done a mix of both, but I originally actually began as a beekeeper with beehives on the roof of the school where I was teaching. So the bees both came to the students and the students came to the bees.
[00:06:03] Speaker A: Backyard beekeeping in cities has exploded in popularity. I know that when I first heard about this, I was really sort of puzzled, but is that enough to really make a dent in the problems that bees face?
[00:06:21] Speaker C: The short answer, Ronnie, is no, but there's a lot of complex reasons as to why. So the first thing to clarify is that honeybees are actually not endangered. But the situation for all the rest of the 4000 plus native bees in North America and the over 20,000 wild bees around the world is considerably more at risk. So in scholarly journals, people who are studying landscapes and ecosystem diversity are talking literally about the insect apocalypse. So that's not an exaggeration to talk about an actual crisis facing the world of pollinators and the world of invertebrates. And invertebrates are very understudied relative to birds and to mammals. So we've only actually cataloged about 0.8% of the diversity of invertebrates that's that are out there. And the studies that we do have about the changes in the rates of their losses all lead to the equivalent of a sort of all hands on deck fire or a five alarm fire.
There's an alert that it's due to a range of factors. Habitat loss, pesticides, nutritional deficiencies, climate change, altering the phenology of when plants are blossoming, which then has add on effects for pollinators, such that the situation is quite dire for most of the native bees in the world. Beekeepers, honey beekeepers are doing a lot to help ensure that our food system stays intact. Because honeybees are generalist pollinators, they can be trucked around the country to do a lot of the pollination work.
What the loss of all of these additional native pollinators means is potentially ecosystemic cascade effects, where the health of ecosystems suffers and also where farmers experience a loss in productivity, because wild pollinators play a fundamental role in complementing the work of honeybees in a lot of different crops. So this can mean financial losses as well as losses in terms of our food supply.
[00:08:50] Speaker A: I mean, I would imagine that these other species don't do very well in cities.
[00:08:56] Speaker C: You'd be surprised too, that actually, okay, surprise us. Yeah.
Well, for example, in my own front yard in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, I established a native bee hotel, quote unquote hotel, right. Simply drilling a bunch of holes into old scrap wood. And I set this up in my front yard and I had the joy of watching different visitors coming and going. And by my count there were at least five different types of species that were taking up residence just in these simple wooden blocks. And many of the native bees have very fleeting lives. So at one point in late May, I saw just a ton of miner bees drilling little pencil sized holes in the exposed ground in my front yard. And there were about, I don't know, maybe a thousand bees with all these little tiny holes in the dirt. And I start, you know, looking at them and of course, getting onto my, my list and calling my, my bug scientist friends and asking them if they can help me identify the bees. So ultimately I identified them as Dunning's minor bees. And they have a life cycle that's all of five weeks long. So it was quite intense, but only for a short amount of time.
And so long as a lawn has, or a yard space that is ideally not, a lawn has enough habitat available for those bees in terms of things that they can pollinate and plant places that they can make habitat in, such as maybe a little loose soil, then native bees can take up habitat in those spaces as well and thrive quite successfully. Urban areas actually have oftentimes a lot more diversity of plant life than in many of the suburban and rural areas where you've got a mono crop of agriculture around and not a lot of plant diversity.
[00:11:04] Speaker A: And I was going to ask about whether in that case, native species are better for sustaining those bees than the kind of lawns and flowers that we tend to plant that are not native.
Or are these other bee species fairly indiscriminate about where they go foraging?
[00:11:28] Speaker C: It really depends on the bee, but honeybees are about as perfect of a generalist species as one can find. And many of the native bees are much more discriminatory in what they choose to feed off of and pollinate. So in some cases, there will be only one or two plants that a native bee needs in order to survive, and which it has co evolved with, for example, the Mojave desert poppy bee.
So this is, it's a bee that's not on the endangered species list, but it's critically suffering from habitat losses and it's a candidate for being listed. And there's only two types of poppy flowers that it can pollinate and it's just been completely squeezed into less than 2% of its native habitat range, given the pressures of urbanization and also atv's and other threats.
[00:12:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I just, I wanted to ask you. So you're describing definitely habitat loss would be playing a big role in these mass extinctions of these native bees. But you also mentioned about climate change a little bit. And I just, I was just on a walk and I don't know how familiar you are with Santa Cruz, but we have, you know, it's one of the places that monarchs come to and a lot of people plant milkweed and try to be part of this solution for them. And I was walking and there was a caterpillar, a monarch caterpillar underfoot, and I got him onto a piece of milkweed. And then I saw a dead butterfly, dead monarch, minutes later. And I was just thinking, wow, it's the end of November, and there's all these caterpillar monarchs, there's flying monarchs, there's like all this activity, and it was 78 degrees here yesterday, which is really not seasonal. So I'm just curious. It just was like, I was thinking maybe a parallel situation. To what degree are the sort of solutions that people are trying to come up with to support these insects? Are they based on an old reality? Or, you know, to what degree do we have to adjust how we're trying to support them based on the fact that the climate is changing?
[00:13:38] Speaker C: Great question, Brooke. And the answer is that it's complicated. I think in large part, native plants are certainly a part of the answer because of so much of the habitat loss situation. And there's still an outstanding question about to what extent all species, plant and invertebrate alike, will be suffering in the face of an ever hotter climate around the world. In some places obviously drier, and in other places wetter than what those plants have been adapted to.
And I think it's also an important thing to note that.
So we may have to also look toward other plant species as potential complements to offer a greater variety of nutrition, when possible, to the species that might be able to be saved.
So, in the big picture, this evolutionary gamble that we're taking with climate change is basically that, you know, for the most part, we're going to be. We're going to be losing the roulette game time and again. And to the extent that we can plant a bit more to help at least some species have greater resilience in the face of those changing blossoming periods and to provide more habitat than the better off will be.
[00:15:19] Speaker A: Let's take a break right here. You're listening to KSQD 90.7 FM and ksquid.org streaming on the Internet. Hello, everyone. You're listening to sustainability now on KSQD FM. I'm Ronnie Lipschitz in the studio with Brooke Wright. And our guest today is Doctor Eve Bratman, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And she's writing a book about bees. And so we're talking today about bees.
[00:15:48] Speaker C: There's a writer named Emma Maris who has written a book called Rambunctious Garden. It's called Planting in a post wild World, is the subtitle. And I love some of her ideas about allowing nature to come back in to our spaces. And I think my additional sort of complement to that concept is that beyond just planting, what we need to also be doing is noticing more, and noticing more with a sense of curiosity and tolerance for the flying things around us as an integral part of what it means to be living in this new post wild world.
And bringing bees back into that picture is an important way to begin, I think, developing a sensibility about the world around us that is from a position of perhaps friendship and curiosity and a will toward peacemaking, rather than the will toward waging war on nature, which, of course, back in 1963, Rachel Carson talked about in terms of writing about pesticides and the problems of DDT. And, you know, that idea of how humans have been waging a war on nature and trying to tame it and trying to organize it is all about the modern project, and is somewhat antithetical to the idea of allowing for some wild spaces and allowing for the logics of the natural world to take their course in perhaps unplanned and untamable ways. And so when we think about what it means to end the war on nature, I think the first step is that we won't ever get to a peace treaty. But what we need is a different mindset, a different positionality. And I call that ecological rapprochement, which I draw from international relations. The concept of rapprochement is the thawing of antagonistic or hostile relations, and was useful through diplomacy in the Cold War. And I think can also be useful when we start thinking about human relationships with the more than human world.
[00:18:11] Speaker B: That is super interesting, and I'm curious, how would that apply to the agricultural system? So locally, here we have a lot of farmland, and I'm sure that that plays a significant role in the habitat loss and extinctions we're talking about. So if we were to sort of. It almost sounds like you're talking about, like, a rewilding of some spaces. If we were to apply that in the food system, what are some, I don't know, some features of what that would look like?
[00:18:42] Speaker C: Well, it's interesting that the food system, you know, comes up so much as the height of, you know, our modern ability to have industrialized agriculture and to control every dimension of it. And yet, even in big corporations like General Mills, there's a push for regenerative agriculture, which is very intentionally trying to cultivate healthy soils, and thinking more deeply about integration of a diversity of species into the growing matrix. And so I think this is starting to happen already. Through trends like regenerative agriculture, other farming techniques are simply allowing more hedgerows to grow such that some of the border habitat around a given farm has more diversity. So even if you're not a card carrying organic permaculture biodynamic regenerative farmer, I think there are ways that agriculture can begin rethinking some of the fundamental logics of maximizing profit on every square inch up to the exact boundary of the field. And once farmers start thinking a little bit more creatively about weaning themselves off of the dependency on buckets of fertilizer and buckets of pesticides, and instead managing land in ways that allow for a little bit more diversity and essentially giving your farmworkers a break. Farm workers in the human sense as well as in the insect pollinator sense, the benefits will be glaringly apparent to all, and already are being talked about in scientific research and studies on agricultural productivity.
[00:20:46] Speaker B: Does that give you a feeling of optimism? Because that's for the bees, if even these giant players are looking at this, even not as card carrying biodynamic believers.
[00:20:59] Speaker C: Overall, I am very. I'm very hopeful. I think I'm always a little hesitant to talk about optimism. I kind of feel like optimism in the age of climate change is a little bit like putting one's head in the sand, but hopeful in the sense that there's work to be done and it can be done and is meaningful and might actually make a substantive change in how our world looks, I'm certainly hopeful. And I think this is fundamentally a hopeful story that I'm telling about the importance of pollinators and people trying to do something in a variety of different ways, to think differently, to listen differently to the world around them.
And paradoxically, I think also that the lesson here is not that we humans are going to be saving pollinators, but that the bees and pollinators more generally, are actually here to help save us, if only we step back a bit and start to listen to them.
[00:22:08] Speaker A: Well, let's talk a little bit about your book. Okay. I was WONdering WHETHer pollination is a play on words of some sort, or it's just a title that you pick because it. So many books have nation in the title.
[00:22:23] Speaker C: I do love puns, and beekeepers irresistibly gravitate to puns. So in a sense, pollination is, of course, you know, a pun on pollination.
And it is also, you have to kind of say it, you know, POLLEN nation with a pause.
And the title is also meant to get us thinking about the national context of these decisions, as well as the international dimensions of a global predicament. And I start off the book actually telling a story of the mayor of a city in Costa Rica who talks with a hummingbird. The hummingbird visits this mayor. His name is Mayor Edgar. Edgar Mora Altamirano. And this hummingbird, who the mayor has called Frankie, visits his patio almost every day. And one of the first things that Frankie the hummingbird said to the mayor was that he should sell his garage and tear down. Sorry, sell his car and tear down his garage. And the mayor's like, what? And, you know, hummingbirds don't stick around long, right? You have to sort of be patient. And so, over time, they develop this.
This relationship, and the mayor understands that Frankie is a presence in the city that is trying to convey on a policy, to convey messages that can really, actually deeply inform policy.
So this mayor takes the story of this conversation from Frankie, does actually sell off his car and tear down his garage and creates more habitat, and then begin structuring urban policy in Curydebat, the city that's just outside of San Jose, toward giving pollinators citizenship and thinking about the urban design of the city through the experience of the native bee and through the experience of a raindrop as it percolates through the soil and through the experience of an earthworm as it moves through the soil and so on and so forth. Right. But what they're doing is really reorienting their sensibilities and their metrics around the natural environment in ways that challenge our notions of how one is supposed to utilize the city and move through space.
And part of these lessons that the mayor learned was about trying to create more habitat as a way of also destressing the urban environment for the people that live there. And that messaging of, oh, if you just, you know, shut down those engines for, you know, a little bit or make the garden a little bit more peaceful, then nature will come back in and feel a little bit more able to be bountiful and flourish there. The coda of that story is that he didn't get voted out of office. He actually won reelection and then became, for a time, Costa Rica's minister of education. So listening to hummingbirds can actually get you promoted, and I think there's a big lesson there for all of us.
[00:25:46] Speaker A: You're listening to KSQD 90.7 FM and kSquid.org streaming on the Internet.
Hello, KSquid listeners. You're listening to sustainability now. I'm Ronnie Lipschitz here in the studio with Brooke Wright. Our guest today is doctor Eve Bratman from Lancaster University. No sorry, Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I'm sure there's a Lancaster university somewhere, probably in England, and she's writing a book about bees. And we were just talking about a mayor in Costa Rica who has talked to a hummingbird. And you also mentioned something about seeing the environment as a bee or through the eyes of a bee. What was your phrase? And I'm sort of wondering, how do you do that?
[00:26:35] Speaker C: Well, taking a bee's eye view on the world doesn't necessarily mean seeing it in less color. I start with that anecdote, right?
Bees don't see white. They see our white as ultraviolet. And I think that part of using bees as a prism for seeing our larger ecological crises is really thinking about how they are boundary crossers between different sorts of habitats and that they don't see property lines and fence lines in nearly the same ways as we humans tend to. And so when we think about what does it take for a bee to flourish, it's essentially water sources, stable climate, and abundant habitat for nutrition as well as for habitation.
And of course, reducing the number of additional predators would be nice, too, right? A few less bald faced hornets and so on.
But a bees eye view on the world is really meant to explain, explore, and help readers understand what a deeper level of seeing the environment and cooperating with the environment would look like.
Insofar as bees are natural boundary crossers, I think they really help us to understand what happens when we think between systems and when we think in interdisciplinary ways about the challenges that are facing our world. So I try to do that both by helping readers understand what's going on with pesticides, as well as what's going on with almond pollination, as well as what's going on with the international honey trade.
So there's a lot of different levels there to be explored.
[00:28:42] Speaker A: You're right that bees can be a prism for seeing broader social and ecological phenomeNa. I think you may have already said that. And so I'm Wondering, how do you make that connect? You talked about rapprochement, but that, of course, is a human concept, I suppose, diplomatic concept, right? What do the bees tell you?
[00:29:05] Speaker C: You know, I have interviewed a lot of people who listen to bees very deeply, right? Who meditate in front of hives, who told the story of the mayor, who listens to his hummingbird friend.
And I myself am a beekeeper, and I'm listening all the time for the messages from the hive. Like, are the bees upset? Am I moving too fast? Should I not have used quite as much smoke when I was working with the bees and so on. But on a much deeper level.
[00:29:42] Speaker B: The.
[00:29:42] Speaker C: Ways in which bees have helped me to see the world differently are all about recognizing in a more close way, what's blossoming. Excuse me?
What's blossoming? What is my neighbor doing on their lawn that might also affect my hives?
What is the city doing as far as policies are concerned regarding protection of pollinators, creation of habitat, whether that's through tree plantings or lawn ordinances that mandate mowing.
And all of that becomes wrapped up in thinking in a more interdisciplinary and holistic way about the conditions of the world around us, beyond the hive. What are the bees picking up as they pollinate in the rest of the area around us? What can be done even as simply as putting in a native bee hotel or planting some native plants that might draw something new into one's garden that you haven't seen before. And so I think these are helpful in that way for giving us a singular point of focus, but through which we can see a lot of other issues beginning to play out.
[00:31:05] Speaker A: Can you expand on what those other issues might be?
[00:31:09] Speaker C: Sure. My book talks a bit about sacred approaches to beekeeping and to thinking about human natural relationship. I also look at.
I mentioned the honey business. Honey is a commodity that has a lot of fraud in it, and some of the biggest trade busts in us history have happened over essentially honey laundering or trans shipment of honey and falsified labels of country of origin happening in the US honey market. So I look at that and have interviewed people involved in trying to verify where our food is coming from and where our honey is coming from in particular.
They also, of course, help us think through agricultural questions. So one of my chapters deals with almond pollination and modern agriculture, and other chapters deal in smaller scale urban beekeeping and what an individual might do within the context of a very different of social and ecological reality to do the work of protecting bees.
I'm also really interested in a deep way, not just in honeybees, but in the laws and regulations surrounding pesticides and the management of agriculture.
I'm doing some writing and thinking about a comparison of the US and the European Union when it comes to neonicotinoid pesticides, which is the world's most widely used class of pesticides, and which the EU effectively has banned in the past few years, and which the US has most discernedly not banned or even slowed down in using in recent years.
And I think there's some really interesting things to be said as well about the role of invasive species and pests as they interface with our changing ecological realities. There's also a chapter that talks about invasives, and invasive plants, of course, are a component of that, but so are invasive pests that are affecting honeybee species.
[00:33:34] Speaker A: I was sort of thinking that you were looking at the bee colonies and hives as some kind of social model for human beings, and this is what I was trying to draw out, and it doesn't sound like that's quite right.
Humans have anthropomorphized bees throughout recorded history and read all kinds of behaviors, meanings, and lessons from their behaviors. Right. And I was thinking of Bernard Mandeville's fable of the bees, which I haven't read, but which I see has, you know, was put sort of forth as a model of human society.
And so I was sort of trying to draw you out whether you see anything there.
[00:34:22] Speaker C: I'm glad you asked, because it is so tempting to want to draw lessons of bounteous cooperation leading to harmonious coexistence when we look at a honeybee hive.
But I think it's really critically important to resist that temptation to read too much into them. After all, honeybee society is a monarchy, and the queen must inevitably die.
And there's a lot of gender imbalance in a honey beehive. All the male bees are killed off at the end of a season, and we wouldn't want to just kind of selectively pick and choose the lessons that we take from bees. And so I think there's a real limit to which it's useful to draw metaphor in a direct way from beehives into our own lives. And instead, I'd rather really focus the or anchor the discussion in, you know, what, in the question of what we can learn from bees by trying to relate to them rather than trying to impose our own narratives of what we want, you know, seeing what we want to see onto them.
[00:35:43] Speaker A: Well, you know, I mean, of course, the Mandeville's fable, right, emerged at a particular point in english history. I think it was english history as capitalism was emerging. I mean, it's kind of curious, right? Because I was thinking of bees as a kind of class ridden communist society.
You know, I did. I forgot about the monarchy part.
But again, you know, or something that HG wells might have written about, you know, in the time machine, something like that.
You talk about these and international relations, right? You've written about that. So maybe we can go back to the concept of rock Pochemont, and maybe you can expand a little bit on that. And whether there are other features of international relations with which you make connections.
[00:36:37] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely.
One of the pieces of research that I've done and which I'll talk about in my book manuscript, is about the resurgence of stingless beekeeping in the yucatan peninsula in Mexico and among the mayan communities in the Yucatan.
Stingless bees, this particular species, called melipona bici, was long considered to be sacred. There's even a Melipona God depicted in mayan architecture, coming down from the heavens and being a sort of translator of the spiritual world back to the grounded world of the present. And Melipona bees were at the brink of extinction.
Back in 2005, scientists were studying their population and realizing that if the current rates of decline of the population continued, there would be none of these bees left at all. And the practice had became reinvigorated and experienced resurgence, thanks to conservationists really doing an effective job of marrying modern scientific practice with indigenous ways of knowing and relating to each other.
So bee researchers essentially partnered with local people who essentially functioned as agricultural extension agents and who repopularized a practice that had long been considered too old fashioned and like, oh, that's something that my grandparents did. You know, why would I want to do that? And essentially, they created all these really dynamic cooperatives of young people and students, partnering with the. With their grandparents generation, doing classes in mayan language, and exposing people to the exciting ways in which this particular bee had long been a part of their history and was important not just for the honey and not just because it's a really cool beef, but also really playing a vital role in the protection of their culture.
And I think there's some really deep lessons there for international relations scholars, as we think about translating scientific and sort of expert community knowledge into people's everyday lives and making those knowledge systems adapted and contextualized and relevant for people's realities on the ground.
[00:39:16] Speaker A: I mean, in a way, regenerative agriculture tries to do exactly that, right, to bring back the closed cycle as much as possible, but potentially, it's more costly and maybe less efficient. I don't know exactly which generates resistance here, but the fact that it was extension agents that sort of revived this particular practice. Were these local extension agents, were they.
[00:39:49] Speaker C: I mean, yeah, they were all locals.
They were all essentially, you know, young people who already had community ties and who were working outside of the sand and sun resort context of urban cancun, but really going back into the small towns and villages and pueblos. And in many cases, they're adopting a sort of plurality of approaches where there's the old fashioned. They're called hobones, they're log hives. And those are side by side with square or rectangular melipona beehives. And where people are, I saw cases of honeybee keepers who also had their little stingless bee, meliponario, side by side with or, you know, sort of nearby, and where they're keeping the stingless bees, in part for the incredible value of the stingless bee honey, but also creating little boxes for hives of solitary orchid bees and also picking up wild hives of bees to, you know, to host and protect when they go for walks in the nearby forest. And all of that was indicative to me of something that is taking place side by side, sometimes with the capitalist systems of honey production that we see taking place there, and also having a totally different operating logic, one in which valuing the diversity of many different bee species in this case exists kind of for its own sake and for a cultural connection, and also just where people were just clearly passionate and exuberant about the different species that they were hosting and the wondrousness of the way that all these different types of bees manage their internal lives.
[00:41:55] Speaker A: This is KSQD 90.7 fm and ksquid.org streaming on the Internet.
Good afternoon, you're listening to sustainability now. I'm Ronnie Lipschitz with Brooke Wright here in the K Squid studio. Actually, we're not in the K Squid studio this week, and our guest today is Doctor Eve Bratman, who works with and writes about all kinds of bees. And we've just been talking about bees, the restoration of old beekeeping practices in the Yucatan.
Do you see anything like that emerging in the global north? Then.
[00:42:35] Speaker C: There are some really interesting things taking place in North America and Canada.
Do you need to pause?
[00:42:43] Speaker A: No, no. Go on, go on.
[00:42:44] Speaker C: Okay.
With people basically looking to native bees, like blue orchard bees for use in pollination, as well as for at home, you know, playing host to bees with the rise of native bee hotels. There are a number of different Facebook groups that I'm a part of and, you know, Instagram people that I follow around native beekeeping, and it's not even really beekeeping, right, but native bee watching and photography and hosting as much as possible to create more habitat for those native bees.
And I think those are some of the most exciting new currents in the world of beekeeping in the global north. There's also some wonderful initiatives like the Xerces Society has a program called Bee City USA where.
Where community is built around protecting pollinators and where it's not just, you know, like minded people getting together to talk about bees, but actually to also plant pollinator habitat and advocate for urban policies that are in support of pollinators. And they're understanding pollinators and bees far more broadly than merely honeybees, but rather in a broader ecological context. So in Santa Fe, for example, there's a recent program run by the Xerces Society and with B city, USA, of planting more habitat at different points, essentially creating biodiversity corridors for native pollinators at locations throughout the city, and where participants in the program essentially get a, you know, a habitat kit of more than 20 plants that they then can put into these spaces that have been targeted as being essential to rebuilding the ecosystem, or at least providing a little bit of contiguous habitat so that native pollinators have more of a chance to survive and thrive. So I think those are some of the more inspirational examples of things that I'm seeing in this context that, you know, get people really excited. I'll also give a shout out to a recent film that came out on PBS. It's called my garden of a thousand bees, and I'll send you the link. But it's made by a british wildlife filmmaker who, during the pandemic, the sort of premise is that he couldn't go out to travel. And so instead, he turns his cameras to his own backyard and starts documenting the native bees and their lives there in his own backyard. And it's beautifully done, incredibly filmed, and makes this case, I think, quite compellingly about the fascinating worlds of native bees that are taking place, literally in our own backyards and right underneath our feet, oftentimes without a certain cognizance of it. And I think stories like that, and this is, in a british guise, backyard, I forget the city, but I think it's messaging like that that's coming across in the global north that's also giving greater momentum and consciousness awareness raising to these issues.
[00:46:25] Speaker B: Are there, of all the. You've described some really great examples of some things that, dare I say, give you a little bit of optimism, perhaps without putting your head in the sand, but are there in terms of, okay, so we're in this area, like I said, where there's some ag, it's also urban, or in this Monterey Bay region, are there, like, maybe two or three top policies or approaches that you feel like if we had, you know, we were able to bend the ear of local electeds like this would be the thing that we should try to get going if we want to really have an impact on the native bees?
[00:47:04] Speaker C: Great question. And without knowing too much about your local context and state preemption laws, I'm hesitant to offer some of the more ambitious policy options, like, you know, trying to institute a pesticide ban, for example, which some parts of the country have done, but are often hindered by state preemption laws that prohibit that sort of local actions.
[00:47:31] Speaker B: And do you mean like.
Sorry, just on that. Do you mean like, specifically those types of pesticides you were talking about earlier?
[00:47:38] Speaker C: Or is it neonicotinoid pesticides? Yeah, no, neonicotinoid pesticides especially, are the target of many of those policy asks. And the group beyond pesticides, and certainly the Xerces society, are tremendous resources for thinking in strategic ways about, about policy asks. And another thing that I would generally recommend is to take a deep dive into the city's zoning ordinances and look to see if there is a recommendation on the books that essentially mandates that lawns be planted or that they can be no taller than, say, six inches, because it's sometimes ordinances like that that tend to subtly incentivize people being really uncreative with how they use their lawns. And what we need is, of course, a sort of different aesthetic appreciation for how we can imagine the new ideal of the american front lawn and backyard, for that matter. And in addition, there's.
[00:48:56] Speaker B: Sorry, go ahead.
[00:48:57] Speaker C: Let me just also say, I think there's a lot of important wiggle room when it comes to how we think about our roads. And a lot of headway is being made through federal policies about low mow and replanting along highway corridors. And much of that can also increasingly be done in spaces that are essentially under municipal management, plantings in boulevards and so on that ultimately are just a cost burden on a city if they're having to mow it, and which instead could easily become more meadow like in their habitat.
[00:49:38] Speaker B: Yeah, I was just thinking that our tendencies towards drought here and the love of the monarch have already helped change that aesthetic appreciation you're talking about. But those are, those are really helpful examples. Thank you.
[00:49:52] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:49:53] Speaker A: Well, Eve, I'm afraid we're out of time. It's been a fascinating discussion, and if people want to learn more about Eve's work, you can go and look up her website.
So thank you very much.
[00:50:07] Speaker C: My website is evebratman.com. That's ev ebratman.com. Thank you for hosting me, Brooke and Ronnie.
[00:50:17] Speaker D: As a reminder, shows from the five to 06:00 p.m. Sunday slot are rebroadcast the following Tuesday mornings from six to seven.
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