[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find Now Temperate zones and tropic climbs and run through currents and thriving seas.
Winds blowing through breathing trees and strong ozone, safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
Hello, K SQUID listeners. It's every other Sunday again and you're listening to Sustainability Now, a bi weekly case Good radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. If you venture out into parks, farms and gardens with various flowering species, you're almost sure to see European honeybees flying about.
They're not native, but when we think of bees, those are the ones that usually come to mind.
But California has more than 1600 indigenous bee species, many of which are threatened with extinction by development and with competition from honeybees.
Moreover, many of those species are hardly documented at all. My guest today is Crystal Hickman, a National Geographic explorer, conservation photographer and native bee expert who. Who uses her photography to raise awareness about the decline of native bee species and their complex ecosystems. Her new book, the ABCs of California Native Bees, has just been published. It's a compendium of text and beautiful and fascinating photos of native bees in their habitats across the state.
Let me read you a blurb about the book.
In her debut book of natural history, Hickman offers an intimate look at the daily habits of rare and overlooked native bees in California.
Those cloaked in green or black or red, that live alone in the ground or sleep inside flowers, that invade nests and pillage resources like infinitesimal conquerors. Or that, unlike more generalist honeybees, are devoted exclusively to the pollen of a single type of flower.
Crystal Hickman, welcome to Sustainability Now.
[00:02:20] Speaker A: Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.
[00:02:23] Speaker B: You know, I wanted to just start by saying that the photos in your book are stunning, especially for those who know nothing about California bees or who have not thought about them.
So my question to start with is how did you get into conservation photography?
And what is a National Geographic explorer? I mean, is there a relationship between the two?
[00:02:45] Speaker A: Yeah, so I got in just sort of on accident. This was supposed to be a hobby that I was doing for fun on the weekends in between my 9 to 5 job.
So initially I just started out taking photos of honeybees and I started photographing them specifically because I saw on social media there was this quote that's attributed to Albert Einstein. It said if the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left. So I Was like, oh, wow, I see honeybees everywhere. Let me go out and try and photograph them and spread the word and save them. So I went out and actually was photographing them for quite a while. And then just inevitably, I photographed a native bee and wasn't able to identify it. And there was a group of melatologists, which are actually bee experts, who identified the bee. And they also fact checked me on quite a few things. They told me that that quote wasn't actually real. Einstein never said it, it's just an Internet invention, but kind of completely.
We worked my entire mindset. So I started going out to look for native bees. And then I would say the shift really happened for me. One time I was out in the Mojave. I do astrophotography as well. So I was coming back very early in the morning and there was this buckwheat that I'd never seen on the side of the road before. It was Ariagonum inflatum. And I found a bee there that was about 3 to 4 millimeters long.
And it turned out I photographed a bee that had never been photographed alive before.
And I also, in one of those photographs, documented a new behavior.
So I realized I can make contributions to science and not harm the creature I was looking at at all. So, yeah, I basically just started there and it kind of gradually took off. And I got involved with more and more people when I started photographing more rare and endangered things, especially in the desert. And eventually I came in contact with National Geographic because I'd been working on this book that just came out recently, and they thankfully decided to help fund the completion of it. And they thought, like, what I was doing was just really amazing. And they're a really wonderful organization.
[00:05:07] Speaker B: Going back to that first native bee that you photographed. How did you find out that it hadn't been photographed before?
[00:05:14] Speaker A: So it was actually a pretty easy bee to identify. One thing about it is it has a specialist relationship, as in, it's a pollen specialist, meaning it only collects pollen from a certain flower.
And one of the things about certain bees that do have those relationships, you can actually identify them by the flower that they have a relationship with, as well as obviously looking at key features and location and time of year as well. But yeah, it was actually a fairly easy bee to identify. The male specifically had this facial feature. It's called a clipius, but it looked like a duck bill just sticking out from its face. And that was the new behavior I discovered, because no one knew what that facial feature was used for. And then I photographed the male using it.
But, yeah, one thing I actually started with that bee, and I still do today, is when I ID a bee, I like to idea them myself through identification keys, but I'll also reach out to the person who's an expert with that particular genus, in this case Perdita. And they've been very helpful and responsive. So he confirmed that I had ID'd the bee, and then he was also the one who told me that no one knew what that facial feature was for.
So that was kind of a cool discovery.
[00:06:30] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Well, tell us about California native bees in general. You know, what do they do? Where do they live? How many are there?
Why don't we see them?
[00:06:41] Speaker A: You know, the thing is, we. We do see them everywhere. But I feel like a lot of times people think of bees, they think of just honeybees or sometimes bumblebees. But California, as far as bee diversity, we're one of the most biodiverse regions in the world.
My friend Olivia Messinger Carroll actually counted native bees, I think about two years ago, and she got up to 1643 species that are identified through my work with the book that I know of three unidentified ones that I photographed. So there's definitely more than that as well. But we have 8% of the bee species in the world, and we have more species here than in countries like Argentina, Argentina, or France. And we're almost on par with the entire continent of Australia.
So there's a lot of bees here. It's just, personally, I think a lot of times people are, like, don't realize what a bee actually looks like. And a lot of them are a lot smaller than people would assume as well. And their behavior is so different. People are just looking for hives.
But 90% of all the bee species are solitary. So they could live in, like, a hole in a stem. They could live in a little hole in the ground or a crevice somewhere.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I mean, I guess we have real prejudices with the honeybee, but I was going to say that my impression from your book is that most of these are very small, are quite small. I know that when I've seen them buzzing around, you know, they're always fairly minute. And so when I say we don't see them. Right. We're not purely paying attention to see them. Is that. I mean, is that true for all of us? Except for bumblebees? Are most of them that small? And how. Why.
[00:08:25] Speaker A: So they range in size. It's a pretty huge size difference. So the Smallest bees in the world. There's one in California. It's the smallest known bee in North America. The males are 1.8 millimeters, so about the size of a letter on a quarter.
There's a couple in Australia that live, I'd say about maybe 20 meters up a eucalyptus tree that are about the same size. But then there's also a bee called Megachile Pluto. In Indonesia, I think it is. That one's 2 inches long.
So the size difference is just massive.
I would say overall, though, typically they are about the same size as honeybees or smaller. Like the larger ones we'd see would be carpenter bees, bumblebees as well. And then there's a lot in the middle, like leaf cutter bees, longhorn bees as well. But they can get really, really small. And a lot of times people just think they're gnats.
[00:09:18] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I can see why you're right. Right. That some. Some of these species are not well known. And I'm just wondering, you know, how many have been photographed and documented? You mentioned 16, 40. But have they been photographed or observed? How are they documented?
[00:09:36] Speaker A: So typically they were documented through pan trapping.
So basically with a melatologist or a bee expert entomologist as well, maybe they would put out a pan with some liquid in it and it would attract pretty much anything flying by. They'd fly into it, they'd perish, and they were studied back in a lab under a microscope. So most of these species are studied not alive, which is why there isn't a lot of behavioral information for a lot of them.
But because of cell phones, I think it's really changing the way science is done because there's a lot more people like me, community scientists, going out there and photographing them.
Myself, I photographed a little over 300 species in California, which I think is a pretty high number. I'm sure there's other people who've maybe photographed more on Inaturalist. I've definitely seen people who photographed in the hundreds as well. But at the same time, I would estimate that maybe we haven't even photographed half of them. But there are people who've, obviously, if you go to a lab, the people who've seen quite a few, but they're not alive.
[00:10:42] Speaker B: They've trapped them but haven't tried to go out into the. Into the field to look for them. What role do they play in California's ecology and ecosystems? You know, again, broadly, I mean, we know what honeybees do. I'm not sure what bumblebees do. Maybe you can say something about that. Bumblebees are native, right?
[00:11:01] Speaker A: Yeah, bumblebees are native. Yeah, definitely.
So bees can serve as indicator insects as the health of an ecosystem. So their change in populations, their increase decline can indicate the health of an ecosystem.
Also their presence can indicate the flowers that are there and also vice versa. And one of the things about bumblebees specifically that they're known for, this is actually something that happens in all six families of bees that are in the United States. But they can buzz, pollinate. So there's certain flowers that basically have a certain frequency that they have to vibrate at and they'll release pollen. So you'll actually see these bumblebees. It's funny too, because this is a really cool behavioral study people can make in their own backyard. At the beginning of the year, if you have like a nightshade flower, for example, like tomato, bumblebees will go to them and they'll start vibrating. But if you go throughout the entire season, you'll start to see the bumblebees get better at it. So it's like they're developing a skill, but they'll figure out like they're perfect pitch to release pollen. But yeah, there's other flowers that could only be pollinated by bees, actually fitting inside the petals of the flower. There's some flowers that are preferentially pollinated by male bees. A lot of times people don't think of male bees as pollinators as well. So pollination is a really important factor as well. And all these flowers, these bees basically evolved to fit the, the features of these flowers. So they pollinated well.
[00:12:36] Speaker B: So the bees are going to collect pollen?
[00:12:38] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:12:39] Speaker B: Why are they collecting pollen?
[00:12:41] Speaker A: So only female bees collect pollen and the pollen is taken back to their eggs or the developing larva. Baby bees or developing bees eat pollen. Adult bees drink nectar.
[00:12:55] Speaker B: Adult bees. Excuse me, say that again.
[00:12:57] Speaker A: Adult bees drink nectar.
[00:12:59] Speaker B: They drink nectar. Where does the nectar come from?
[00:13:01] Speaker A: It comes from the flower.
[00:13:03] Speaker B: Okay, so. So they're going in basically to, to feed and is. Or do they collect the pollen deliberately? I'm. I'm just a little confused about that.
[00:13:12] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. So the female bees purposely collect pollen. They're even like physically designed to collect pollen. So some of them will have kind of. If you look at it really closely, it looks like branched hair could be on their back legs or it could be on the underside of their abdomen. So while they're walking around the flower drinking nectar for, they'll purposely pack pollen on Those hairs and take it back to their nest or their hive, wherever they're raising their young bees.
So that's why when there's a specialist relationship, it's called a pollen specialist relationship, because those developing bees need pollen from very specific plant.
And then a lot of pollination actually is accidental. So these bees are just a lot of them very fluffy.
So when they're just walking around, they're transporting pollen grains between flowers, so it helps to pollinate the flower.
[00:14:05] Speaker B: So that's what the males do, basically. They go and feed and they just pick up the pollen by happenstance or by design.
[00:14:11] Speaker A: Yeah. And the females do that as well too.
[00:14:14] Speaker B: Where do you find most native bees? Where do they live?
[00:14:17] Speaker A: I personally feel the best place to find them is around native plants.
Well, so if. Yeah, yeah. So if you have native plants in your yard, there's a good chance you'll find them there.
But yeah, they're all out in nature. In California, specifically, the highest biodiversity of native bees is in Riverside county and San Diego County.
[00:14:39] Speaker B: And is that. Is that out in the desert or is where. Where. In which parts of the county? Counties.
[00:14:44] Speaker A: Yeah, so definitely the desert. A lot of it is areas where there are people as well. But it's just the. The diversity of the ecosystem because it's. There's a lot of chaparral, Mediterranean habitat, which is biodiverse hotspots, but, yeah, desert as well.
[00:15:01] Speaker B: Okay. And our natives be native bees, social, you know, again, honeybees and. And. And hives and all of that. Right. It's where we think about bees in that way.
Mentioned you mentioned that, that they. Some of them are not.
[00:15:16] Speaker A: Yeah. So there's quite a few levels of sociality, but most of them, I'll say, are solitary. 90% of all native bee species are solitary.
So the most social are called eusocial. And those are ones that live in a hive and have a queen. So those would be like honeybees, bumblebees, or stingless bees. And there's also ones that are primitively eusocial as well. And those are like a lot of sweat bees, like lassia, glossums or some halictid species.
And then there's communal, which is kind of in between solitary and social and eusocial, where they basically live in an apartment complex, kind of, but it's in the ground, so they have one entrance, and then when you go into their burrow, it splits up. So they have their own individual apartment. They just share a front door.
There's also solitary bees that look like they're social because they're in groups that's called an aggregation but it's like a neighborhood.
So they live next door to each other, but they have their own little house and that's for protection. And there's also obviously solitary that create their own individual burrow. One burrow per bee, a female laser eggs, collects pollen, provisions it and then the last one is parasitic bees. So there's social parasites and there's also kleptoparasites and these have females that don't actually collect any pollen for their young. They'll sneak into the burrow of a host bee, they'll lay an egg, their egg will hatch and it'll either kill or consume the host bees larva and then it'll eat all the pollen. Basically acts as population control. And then there's some bumblebees that are social parasites where they'll go into the hive of a host bumblebee, they'll kick out the queen, maybe kill her and then make all of her workers do her bidding. Basically raise all of her future sons and queen overthrowing females.
And they're not as much population control.
[00:17:16] Speaker B: You're listening to Sustainability Now. I'm your host Ronnie Lipschutz. My guest today is Crystal Hickman, a conservation photographer and native bee expert who goes out into the world and takes photos of California's 1600 native bee species. And we're just talking about be sociality and I guess, I guess one of the questions that arises from that is and maybe you know, this has to do with co evolutionary development is why do some bees, are some bees parasites on others?
Maybe you don't know. I, I'm just curious about, you know, what are the benefits of that? Just less work.
[00:17:56] Speaker A: I mean it definitely is a lot less work for the, the ones that are the parasites but it's also, I kind of think of it as like a savannah. Like there's the lions and then there's the gazelles and they basically just work as population control.
So people think of bees as like really great insects, which they are, and they're amazing pollinators. But if there's too many of them then there might not be enough resources for possibly other creatures or even those individual bees themselves. So like kind of with the gazelle lion metaphor, which is not 100% one to one but pretty close, I would say if there's too many gazelles, maybe there's not enough food for them to feed on so they can potentially die out. So they have lions there to help control the population.
But yeah, it's not just other bees that are parasites of them. It's also wasps and flies. And then obviously they have predation from birds and other creatures as well, ants.
[00:18:54] Speaker B: What do solitary bees do for reproduction?
[00:18:57] Speaker A: Basically, the males. The males are really funny. They don't do anything except for mate. That's their entire job. They basically.
They emerge as adults first and they just constantly fly around looking for females.
And then the females, when they emerge, they either are bombarded by males or they just try to avoid them, or they're kind of like, you know what? These males are bothering me so much. They just. They're constantly mating with them, but their whole life cycle is just collecting pollen, drinking nectar, putting the pollen in balls back in their burrow or their cavity nest, and they section them off. And they don't actually really participate in the raising of the young. The solitary ones, at least once they've laid all of their eggs, their season is over, they close up their burrows and then they pass away, and their offspring just develop on their own.
[00:19:50] Speaker B: How long do they live?
[00:19:52] Speaker A: Completely depends on the bee.
There's a certain bee that Perdita interrupta, which is in the book, it's the ib they're only out for about as an adult for a month.
There's some carpenter bees that can live as adults for two years.
As far as I'm aware. The longest living ones are honeybee queens, which I think live like around five.
[00:20:13] Speaker B: Six years, so not all that. That long. And do. Do these native bees go out and colonize new areas?
[00:20:24] Speaker A: Some of them can.
So I guess by colonized you just mean, like, look for new areas.
[00:20:29] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Do they. Do they expand? I mean, I realize this depends on the habitat. Right. And the. And the plants. Right. But I'm just. I'm just sort of wondering about, you know, I mean, honeybees start new hives, right?
[00:20:44] Speaker A: Oh, for sure, yes. Okay.
[00:20:46] Speaker B: You know, and. And these, particularly the solitary bees, but is the population just basically limited in the ways that you were describing, or do they go out and, you know, when they're born, do they go out and look for new territory or. Or something like that? Should we panic about bees, California native bees spreading?
[00:21:07] Speaker A: Definitely shouldn't panic about it. We should definitely try and give them more areas to spread to.
But one of the things that I'd highlight about a lot of them is not only are they specialists on the plants that they visit, they're also habitat specialists. So you can only find them in certain. Certain species in certain habitats, and there's certain bees that will just nest literally right under the flower that they visit. So they just go straight up to the flower, go back down to their nest, back and forth. But there's also bees that I've seen travel like two blocks away from their initial nests. And one of the main issues with bees and traveling is habitat fragmentation, especially like land loss.
So a lot of times bees are forced to relocate. There's actually a bee that's, I didn't talk about this in the book, but it's the HB Anthophora halleluka. It's a Sorothamus specialist, which is smoke tree, smoke bushes.
I found one in the Kelso Dunes in the Mojave Desert. And that's an area where there's absolutely no sort of trees. This was a bee that had left wherever it was born and maybe through loss of plants, who knows? It was just traveling looking for a new ecosystem. And I actually went online later to look to see where the closest known records of Saurothamus was and it was 7.14 miles away. And this was a bee that was a size of a housefly. So that was an incredibly long journey that I was going on to hopefully find a new habitat.
So I wouldn't worry about them expanding to habitats where they, where we think they shouldn't be. I would just try to support habitats where they are. And also if you have a yard too, instead of having just like a green grass, like European style lawn, maybe put the native plants in there because you're going to attract a lot of generalist pollinators. So not just native bees, but also native pollinators, native animals as well. Other animals. Yeah.
[00:23:10] Speaker B: How do you decide, you know, where to go and, and what to photograph? I mean, I have a question here about how you prepare to go on a photo expedition. And do you decide you're going to go look for particular species or do you just go out, you know, to particular habitats and keep an eye out for them? I mean, what's the, you know, what's your strategy?
[00:23:33] Speaker A: Actually, both of those things.
So when I was working on the book, I needed to have every single letter in the Alphabet because it's an ABC book.
So I would look at old records of bees and I would see historically where they were found.
And that was actually one of the reasons, kind of what we were talking about before, about habitat is I would go to certain places where I started looking at them and Google Maps after a while because like certain times there were like neighborhoods were there when there used to be A field or there was a building there, so they lost habitat. But yeah, basically, basically I show up, I look for the flower. A lot of times I use inaturalist as well because a lot of the places I'm driving to are like four or five hours away.
So I just want to see if the flower's blooming first. And sometimes they're not because halfway through this book, a good portion of it, there's a three year drought, so there were no flowers.
But yeah, certain times I'm just, I go there looking for the bees. And since I'm really familiar with their behavior, especially like male bees, since they don't typically live in burrows or with a hive, they're out sleeping. So I'll look for them first. And then I found like 10 o' clock is like the perfect time for females to start showing up because the, the sun hits them and it really warms up. But other times there was one bee in the book, the MB I found just because I met a friend somewhere and I, it was dusk and I was like, hey, there's a field out here, let me look for bees. And two feet in front of my car there was a bee that no one had seen since the 50s.
So just accidents happen as well because when you're out there looking you just see cool things.
[00:25:15] Speaker B: So I mean, do you just basically, you know, every day you're just looking for places where you might see bees. Is that your.
[00:25:22] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's, that's pretty much it. Just driving out to the middle of nowhere and then just kind of hanging out. And then. Because I, I love bees, but I also love their habitats and you see all these really cool animals that are in their habitats as well. And I, I really appreciate the, those guys as well.
[00:25:39] Speaker B: So what do you do to prepare for an expedition? Photo expedition. How long do you go? How long do you, how much time do you spend there? I know you said four to five hours away.
[00:25:51] Speaker A: Four to five hour drive. Yeah.
[00:25:52] Speaker B: I mean do you do this on a, like a daily basis or an extended basis? You know, what's your, what are your practices?
[00:26:00] Speaker A: So it used to be pretty much every single day driving out there.
And I don't have a schedule. I just leave as maybe like one in the morning, like to get there around four or five, right before sunrise. And then I, this is one thing too I like to do is take photos of the area because I've realized because of habitat loss and climate change, the areas just drastically look different year after year. And then again sometimes like a Neighborhood is where a beautiful ecosystem used to be. So I make sure to photograph things, look for the bees, and then yeah, I just, I pack a lunch and I don't have a timeframe for when I'm leaving.
Sometimes I've like stood by a bush for about 16 hours because I'm like, let me just document every single bee here. And then you'll start to notice as the day shifts, the creatures that show up shift as well. And then actually it was kind of a cool way too because like for about a year I got into Joshua Tree for free because I would show up before the, the park open so there was no one at the gate and then I would be there pretty well past sunset. So everyone had gone home already. So I just never saw anyone working there. So I just got in and out free for a while.
But yeah, I don't have a plan. I just show up and see what's there.
[00:27:20] Speaker B: Do you go on, I mean, multi day trips like to Northern California or, or do you stick pretty much.
And what do you do then?
[00:27:29] Speaker A: Yeah, so I. My first multi day trip was a backpacking trip in the Trinity Alps, which I really learned after that trip not to overpack because that was a very intense trip.
But yeah, it was basically 10ish days in two different meadows just looking for whatever bees were present. I was looking for Bombus franklini, which is one of California's endangered, possibly extinct bumblebees.
But yeah, I go to the Trinity Alps or the Siskiyou Mountains area once a year to look for Bombus franklini and other cool bees and then also camp in the Algodones dunes. Camp at Kelso Dunes as well.
But yeah, I really enjoy backpacking.
[00:28:16] Speaker B: Did you find that bee?
[00:28:18] Speaker A: No, no. So it hasn't been seen since August 2006.
Yeah, it's one of my things too, is my goals is to find all four of California's endangered bumblebees. And I've got two of them, so hopefully gonna get suckly eye next, which is another cuckoo bumblebee.
[00:28:40] Speaker B: So the, the photos in the book are, I think, I mean, are really exquisite and detailed. How do you go about doing that? I mean, you know, a lot of them are real close ups and without alarming the bees.
[00:28:54] Speaker A: Yeah. So I think one thing that really helps is just kind of sitting there and watching their behavior. So just like people, they have habits.
[00:29:01] Speaker B: Mm.
[00:29:02] Speaker A: With the male bees, I was kind of talking about them perching before. Sometimes they have a favorite perch, which is like a flower or a stem. So when you know where it is, you just park yourself in front of that perch and then they'll come back to you and you could just photograph them there.
And also they get used to you after a while. They do fly away at first, but then when you're just sitting there for hours, they're like, oh, this is someone who's not trying to harm me. So then they just start ignoring you.
But then also with female bees too, when you see them collecting pollen, you'll see like, let's say they're on like a stock flower, like a lupine or a penstemon. They'll start a lot of times at the lower flowers and they'll just circle around each flower going higher and higher until they run out of flowers. So you can just pick a flower that you think looks photogenic and take a photo of a bee coming in or out of there.
Also, a lot of them, they have three light sensing eyes at the top of their head. So I'll actually like, sometimes just wave my hand over the, the bees to create a shadow. And the ones that don't fly away, like, okay, you're the ones I'm going to photograph. But it's, it's mostly just sitting there, getting to know their behavior. And then after a while it gets so much easier to photograph them because you can kind of predict what they're going to do based on what they've done in the past.
[00:30:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
You have some photos of bees sleeping.
[00:30:21] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:30:22] Speaker B: And, and you know, how does, how do you do that? I mean, how do you, how do you see them? And, or is this in the morning, early morning, you know, when, when do bees sleep?
[00:30:34] Speaker A: Yeah, so it depends on the bee species, but most of the ones that you see out sleeping are males because they don't have a hive or a nest to return to typically.
So, yeah, dusk, dawn, sometimes in the middle of the night, I normally look by the flowers that the females collect pollen from because since the male's only job really is to mate, they're going to hang out by the flowers where the females show up.
So sometimes they'll sleep in the flowers, sometimes they'll sleep on grasses or plant material next to them. And what's really cool is once you find them the first time, they keep returning to the same plants, flower, stem, whatever, night after night. So you can just keep going back there.
And what's also really interesting too is it's not just during their season, you could see their descendants the next year will also go to those exact same plants or that exact same area.
So it's a really good way to just see generations year after year, huh?
[00:31:33] Speaker B: You're listening to Sustainability Now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is Crystal Hickman, who is a conservation photographer who specializes in California native bees and has just published, in fact, just a couple of weeks ago. Right. The ABCs of California native Bees by Heyday Press, I think, in Berkeley, which is a wonderful, a wonderful press.
Now, I, I, I'm, I'm imagine you take lots and lots and lots of photos.
[00:32:03] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:32:04] Speaker B: And, and not many of them see the light of day, so to speak.
So two questions. Two questions are how do you decide? How did you decide which ones go into the book and what do you do with the rest of the photos?
[00:32:18] Speaker A: I have a lot of photos that are just sitting in Google Drive right now, and no one will ever see them. But I, I decide pretty much based on how I think the audience will, Reviewers will react to them, and also just past experience photographing things and putting them out there.
So sometimes I'll have like 10 photos in a row of a bee, basically in the exact same position, but I'm waiting for their antennae to not point directly at my camera because I've realized when that happens, people think the bee only has one antennae. So I'm just waiting for them to just move their little antennae.
But, yeah, I look for photos that basically are portraits of the bee. So a lot of times they have their head tilted a certain way that sort of is curious. Or they seem to be looking at the camera, or one of their behaviors is pointed at the camera. But also, I really want to go for esthetically pleasing photos as well that fit the, the story that I'm trying to tell about them.
[00:33:21] Speaker B: For every photo that you publish, how many have you taken? You know, just, I've always wondered with photographers, right, that there must be hundreds or if not thousands, right. For every famous, for every one of Dorothea Lange's famous photographs, there must have been hundreds, right?
[00:33:40] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah.
[00:33:42] Speaker B: So, you know, how many do you usually.
How many photos are behind the one that you published?
[00:33:50] Speaker A: That's. I, I wish I could tell you the number.
I'll just tell you. I know on some trips I've taken over 8,000 photos, and then I'll come back with maybe like 10 or 20 photos that I'm like, these are the ones that I'm definitely going to publish.
And yeah, it's not necessarily because the other ones are bad or anything. It's just because maybe some of the other photos are for identification purposes, and not a lot of people would like to stare at those. But, yeah, it's a really small number. I think I have about 10 terabytes of photos in Google Drive right now.
[00:34:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I have no idea how many that is, but I know that's a lot.
[00:34:29] Speaker A: That's quite a few. Yeah.
[00:34:30] Speaker B: Quite a. Quite a lot. Yeah. You know, again, I'm just kind of rambling here, but. But we see photos. Well, you see Ansel Adams photos, right? And we think, oh, you know, he got that one shot, right. And that's the one that everybody knows and nobody ever thinks about.
Right. What, What? He didn't. He didn't show and. Oh, yeah, it's interesting.
[00:34:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
How did you go about sitting there? Yeah.
[00:34:58] Speaker B: How did you go about. You know, so you. You put together this book, you assemble this book.
How did you decide what to include, you know, which bees to include? I know it's abc, but when I looked at the. The names, they. They weren't always.
I mean, the letter was there somewhere in the name, but what. What, you know, how did you decide on that?
[00:35:20] Speaker A: Yeah, so it was the Alphabet is by the species name, so not the genus.
Yeah. So initially I was going to only do not repeat any genera. And which, because I was like, oh, this will be, like, kind of cool to show, like, so much B diversity. But then their stories started overlapping so much, where I was like, oh, wow, these are just so fascinating. And you probably. I don't know if you could tell from the book, but my favorite bee genera are Anthophora and Perdita, and those just so happen to be the only ones that repeated. But then I also decided to talk about taxonomy a little bit as well. So the one of the bees is a sub genus. It's the G.B. glitus Hylanus Godalius. So I wanted to talk about sub genera and how you can ID bees to species or subspecies actually by location, because that one's on Santa Cruz Island. But then there was another bee. It was a Melecta separata that was actually identified by the species. And that was going to be my ESPY in the book. But then I realized this one's a parasite of another bee and you can actually ID this bee all the way down to subspecies by its host bee without collecting them. So I thought it was really important to include the subspecies there, which wasn't originally planned because I was like, well, leaving that out leaves out, I think, really important information about the bee. So I ended up including more subspecies than I planned. But yeah, typically it's just, it goes by the species of the bee.
[00:36:58] Speaker B: Well, now I'm going to ask you a really broad question. I want you to tell us, give us three narratives about the three most interesting bee species you photographed and they don't have to appear in the book.
All right?
[00:37:13] Speaker A: Oh, okay.
[00:37:13] Speaker B: So. So I'm, I'm giving you, you know, broad latitude with this. Just so since. Since we don't have visuals on the radio.
[00:37:21] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:37:22] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:37:24] Speaker A: Yeah, okay. So I guess just period.
There was a very cool one that I photographed in July this year in Hawaii. So I'm working on my second book. Instead of just California, it's Bees of the World. So I'm traveling all over.
[00:37:37] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:37:38] Speaker A: And this be so Hawaii. I was in the big, I was on the big island. And it's just everything there that's non native because it's so habitat restricted is called. Is considered invasive.
And I think by the time I'd left, I think I'd photographed about 40 different things, animals, plants, whatever. And only two of them actually. Sorry, no, like maybe two to four were native.
And one of the bees I found which was a, one of the endemic bees, there's only one genus of endemic bee, it's a Hylaeus or a mast bee, I found in an active volcanic crater.
And the. Basically because it was a volcano, it was restricted access. So it was only the native plants and the native bee that were there.
So I was walking in the crater and found one of the bees and it was like, I was just like, wow, this is really cool. And then two days later it erupted and it was shooting lava like 1200ft into the air. And I got really beautiful photos of that with the plant that this bee has relationship with in the foreground. And I just thought was really cool because like, who would think of looking for a. A native be in an active volcano?
[00:38:51] Speaker B: So how did you, how did. If it's restricted, how did you get into the crater?
[00:38:55] Speaker A: Oh, it's. So it's restricted access basically. I mean it's harder for non native creatures or plants to get in there.
[00:39:04] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:39:06] Speaker A: Yeah, it is definitely restricted when the, the volcano is erupting as well. But yeah, and then I guess another story, one that's in the book. I think the ivy is one that people could identify with a lot because it takes place in a backyard. It's Perdita interrupta. So this is the California poppy fairy bee and it has a specialist relationship with California poppies. And what's really Cool about the plant is they only produce pollen, so no nectar. So when any pollinator that drinks nectar has a relationship with poppies, they also have to visit other flowers for the nectar.
But, yeah, the males spend their whole entire adult life just waiting on the flower petals for a female to show up. And then they mate there, and then they just keep hanging out. But this was really amazing because it was a backyard that they had converted from before they moved in there. There were like cars or trash, things like that. They created a chaparral ecosystem. And initially I highlighted that backyard because not only did they have this bee that was rare, but they also found one of the endangered bumblebees in California there, Bombus crochiae. And I would bring that yard up initially because I was like, what happens if this family moves? And then they put in a green grass lawn? Where are these bees gonna go?
So I was talking about, like native landscaping, bridges, encouraging people who have yards to plant patches of native plants. So it increases bee diversity and creates this sort of pathway for bees to travel along.
But it turned into a completely different story because the house is in Altadena, which is where the fires were earlier this year. And they ended up losing their house in the fire.
And I ended up going there the day after the fire happened. And it was. There's like explosions.
There were flames shooting up from everyone's houses where the gas lines were.
But yeah, then eventually the flowers came back and I was like, you know, let me see if the bees are going to come back.
And the bees came back right on schedule. So I got this photo, it was the last photo of the book where there was a male bee sitting on a poppy, waiting for a female to show up. And then there was the ruins of the house in the background.
But yeah, just. I think that's kind of a. Interesting story that's ongoing because they are going to rebuild. But if you create a habitat that chaparral, which is supposed to survive after fire, it. It does come back.
[00:41:31] Speaker B: So any idea where the bees came from?
[00:41:35] Speaker A: Yeah, so these are ground nesting bees. So they were literally below the fire, below the ashes. They're like Phoenix phoenixes. They rose from the flames and came back.
Yeah, so that was really cool, I guess. Third one.
I feel like these are kind of.
[00:41:52] Speaker B: Long, but that's okay.
[00:41:55] Speaker A: I think probably the yb, which is at the Kelso Dunes, which is a really interesting bee.
So initially this one was misidentified for.
I can't remember when it was first identified. Maybe the 60s could have been earlier.
But my friend Doug Yeniga, who is this basically encyclopedia of B Knowledge, he works at UC Riverside, he was the one who realized in, I think it was the early 2000s ish, that the bee was identified wrong. And it took another decade for someone to confirm that he was correct, that this bee was identified wrong. So I set out to capture the first photos of a living representative of its species. And I went to Kelso Dunes in 2022 and thought I photographed it for about two years and realized when I was actually talking to Doug again, because I had shown him the picture of the bee from the front and he was like, oh, yeah, that's the bee. But showed him a picture of it from behind. It wasn't the bee, but, yeah, it was a drought year, so there weren't a lot of bees present.
So when I ended up going back, which was last year, I had more conversations with them, and it turned out there was, like, kind of a cool thing happening at the dunes. There's typically. People call it, like a niche ecosystem where there's only one animal or one creature that fills this niche of an ecosystem. Like, they are the ones that pollinate this plant. They are the ones that show up midday, drink this nectar, because otherwise there's too much competition. But it turns out at the Kelso Dunes, and it's probably happening elsewhere, but with Perdita specifically, there's multiple species that have almost the exact same phenology. So they show up midday when it's about 100 degrees, they visit the exact same flower, they show up the same time of year, they're out the same, and they almost look identical.
So there's about, I think, six species, possibly there, that look almost exactly the same.
And I just thought it was kind of cool because it just would have. I identified the bee wrong, just like the original person.
And Doug, who the bee was named after, actually, there's a photo of him in the book holding the bee in his lab, too, so you can see how small it is. It's actually the smallest bee in the book, but I just thought it was really cool. And then there's photos that you can see of the drought year where it was just sand and then three years later, like a super bloom because we had so much rain.
But, yeah, I think that's a really cool story.
[00:44:30] Speaker B: You're listening to Sustainability Now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is Crystal Hickman, who's a conservation photographer and a specialist in California native bees and has just published the ABCs of California Native Bees, which is a.
A book full of beautiful photos of bees in their native habitat.
One thing that, you know, you mentioned in Kelso Dunes, I think it was that there were these six bee species that look very much alike.
[00:44:59] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:44:59] Speaker B: I mean, what are the differences? How do you tell that they're different species if they, if they resemble each other so much? What are the, what differentiates them?
[00:45:10] Speaker A: Yeah, so I guess the first year I made the mistake.
There was no signal the first year I was there. So when I went back, I ended up memorizing all of the bees, like, the key features to identify them.
But one thing, too, that was very difficult is I think two of the species, the females, look identical, almost exactly the same.
So I had to photograph males, which thankfully I did.
And I again had the keys memorized. So I was like, I am 99% sure I photographed the right bees, but let me just talk to the bee expert. So Perdita expert is Zach Portman, and we've had a good relationship, actually. He is the one I initially contacted with that Perdita nasuda bee in the desert with the duck face or the Clippius. So kind of had a working relationship with him a while, and he was like, yes, this is definitely what that bee is. So, and so, yeah, he helped confirm, but, yeah, I had to memorize the key.
[00:46:12] Speaker B: But you only took one photos of one of the species or, or no.
[00:46:16] Speaker A: I, I, no, not all of them. That would have been great. I photographed three of them.
[00:46:21] Speaker B: Huh?
[00:46:23] Speaker A: Yeah. And those three are in the book.
[00:46:25] Speaker B: Well, you mentioned that you're starting a new project, Bees of the World, and where are you. And you were in Hawaii in a volcano.
Where else are you going to do photography?
[00:46:39] Speaker A: So I've already photographed a nocturnal bee in Belize.
I photographed another bee in Colombia.
Travel to Australia once a year to photograph. I'm trying to photograph two different types of bees there. There's one family that only exists in Australia called Stenatur. Today.
I'm hoping to spend a month there next year documenting their whole life cycle. And then also there's a bee. There's actually three bees that are the same size as Perdita minima, possibly smaller. We'll see.
Only one person has ever seen them. His name's Ken Walker, and one of the bees is actually named after him.
And then I'm planning on going to hopefully a few places in Africa next year. I'm looking at Madagascar, South Africa, Kenya and Tanzania. We'll see if I make it to all of Those, but. But that's on the list right now.
[00:47:31] Speaker B: How do you decide?
How are you deciding where to go?
[00:47:35] Speaker A: I'm combining places that I want to visit and places that also have just really unique looking bees. So it's kind of like a vacation, but also a work trip.
[00:47:48] Speaker B: Sort of opportunistic then, right?
[00:47:50] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, definitely.
[00:47:51] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, Crystal, we're starting to approach the end of our time together, and I was just wondering, you know, what would you like to leave people with? How can they. What can they do to support and protect California's native bees?
[00:48:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I would like to just, like, tell everyone that I'm a community scientist. So I don't have a degree in this field that I'm studying. And a lot of times people think of scientists as someone in a white lab coat staring at a microscope for hours a day. And they've gone to college for years to do this, which is definitely one route. But I just like to inspire people to go out with their cameras and take photos because there's amazing things that you can discover in your own yard. For example, the Ib Perdita interrupta in the backyard. As far as I'm aware, no one's ever seen a burrow. So if you have that bee in your yard, maybe just hang out for hours, days, the entire month, and just look for a burrow, take a photo, because you can make an amazing contribution. And I think one thing too is a lot of times with nature, people think like, oh, I have to drive the four or five hours out into the middle of nowhere where there's no cell phone reception. But nature can be in your own backyard, so it doesn't have to be a place you travel to. And habitats can be incredibly small for these creatures. Their entire world could be just one patch of sunflowers, which could be in your yard.
[00:49:22] Speaker B: Okay. Anything else?
[00:49:25] Speaker A: Anything else?
[00:49:26] Speaker B: Oh, I know what I. I'll.
Are there places. Are there any places that people could send their photos to? I know there's inaturalist, but that's great.
[00:49:35] Speaker A: Are there any.
[00:49:36] Speaker B: Are there any, you know, bee repositories, so to speak, that specialize in collecting photos like that? Do you know of anything like that?
[00:49:46] Speaker A: So besides I naturalist, there's BugGuide.org is another great one, which is pretty much a naturalist, but just not an app. So it's like a. Just a website that you would go to as well.
There's a lot of hymenopter groups which are groups for wasps, which are, you know, bees or wasps. So you can post there as well. But, yeah, I feel like Inaturalist is at the moment the place to post about your photos. And that's where a lot of.
I feel like most melitologists are on there, IDing things for people. And it's. It's really fun because you can basically look at any location, almost anywhere in the world and find bees.
[00:50:31] Speaker B: Is. Is there any way to know? So if you want to plant a native garden chaparral, let's say. Right.
[00:50:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:50:37] Speaker B: Is there any way to know what to plant in order to attract particular bee species?
Is there some place one can go to look for, you know, for those kinds of plants and correlations?
[00:50:51] Speaker A: Definitely. So there's a few places I recommend. One is the Audubon Society. They actually have a plant finder by your zip code, so you can actually type in your zip code and will bring up native plants. And honestly, like, pretty much almost any native plant that you plant will attract not just bees, but creatures of the habitat. And you can also go to native plant nurseries. There's theater pain, which I think is a great one. It's here in Sun Valley, California.
You can do plant finders with them and actually purchase the flowers as well.
But plants that I would recommend universally, especially in California, Southern California, are Asteraceaes. So like sunflowers, asters, daisies, plants like that.
Buckwheats. There's so many different species of buckwheats. Those are great poppies. We've talked about that a lot.
Phacelia. I think those are beautiful flowers. And they also attract a lot of pollinators. Mallows are a really fun plant, especially if you have kids, because they open and close with the sun and you'll start to notice male bees will, like, sleep in them, will climb into them right before it sunsets, and the flowers will close around them. And then when the sun rises, the flowers will open up and the bees will fly out.
But, yeah, that's what I'd recommend.
Oh, also grasses. Grasses are important as well.
[00:52:07] Speaker B: Grasses are important. And what about for Northern California? Any. Any recommendations?
[00:52:13] Speaker A: So I see a lot of the same plants as well, but, like, just say the species do change. But I would recommend again, going to Ottawan Society. So it's definitely more localized than what I could offer you. And. Yeah, and get exact species.
[00:52:25] Speaker B: Okay. Well, Crystal Hickman, thank you so much for being my guest on sustainability now.
[00:52:30] Speaker A: Thank you so much.
[00:52:32] Speaker B: If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find
[email protected] and Spotify, YouTube and Pocket Casts among other podcast sites. So thanks for listening and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make case good your community radio station and keep it going.
And so, until next every other Sunday, sustainability now.
[00:53:03] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out.
Temperate zones and tropic climbs through currents and thriving seas.
Winds blowing through breathing trees, strong ozone, safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find.
[00:53:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
