Translator: Rhonda Jacobs Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
I'm a designer by trade,
so, to help my creativity, I decided to take a walk in the woods,
and actually ended up thinking of all the things that I hate instead:
(Laughter)
parking lots, humidity, people who put ketchup on their eggs.
You know who you are.
(Laughter)
But really, my biggest pet peeve is someone messing with my food,
which is why bees and I are pretty good friends.
They ensure that I can have guac on my burrito
or a beer during the football game.
But their numbers continue to decline
so I wanted to see if we could come up with a solution to bee decline ourselves,
and turns out, we can.
On May 19th of 2015, the White House released their Pollinator Action Plan.
It was presented as this grand document
that's supposed to help bees and other pollinators.
About 20 organizations for over a year worked on it,
and I was a part of one of them.
So, what exactly has happened since the release of that document?
Let's take a look.
Exactly one year later, in May of 2016,
commercial bee keepers reported losses at about 45 percent.
Not only is that number completely unsustainable,
but the previous year, 41 per cent.
It's actually gone up since the release of the document.
In August of 2016, millions of bees were found dead in a South Carolina county
due to spraying insecticide to try and control Zika.
Just about a month ago, in September of 2016,
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
actually added some of the yellow-faced bees native to Hawaii
to the Endangered Species list,
seven years after they were proposed for the status originally.
No conservation habitat designated, just words on a page at this point.
There are many things causing bee decline,
and to be honest,
the media causes a lot of false truths surrounding these issues,
but really, there's three main things that are killing the bees.
Number one is overuse of chemicals;
two, is diseases, mites, and other pathogens;
and also, the lack of year-round diverse habitat.
And the thing is, no matter what chemicals that we're talking about,
and no matter what diseases they may encounter,
without good, nutritional food year-round, these bees can't survive.
None of us could.
You see, we can't do this pollination by hand.
That's not what we mean when we say we want job creation.
(Laughter)
So, what do these bees do to help produce our food?
Well, very broadly and very simply,
they go to visit a flower to feed on their pollen or nectar source,
and when they pass by the pollen, some of it gets on their body,
and when they fly to the next flower,
some of it drops off and fertilizes the flower,
thus producing fruit.
There are honey bees, and these are kind of the poster child for pollination.
They live in hives with thousands of other bees.
But then, there are native bees.
These guys come in all shapes, colors, sizes, and textures,
just like the plants that they pollinate.
We've been told stories as if honey bees are the only bee out there,
but really, they're only one
out of over 4,000 species in the U.S. alone.
There's three main reasons why I think focusing on native bees,
especially for urban areas, is vital.
The first reason is by far, safety.
Honey bees will sting to protect their colony;
they are social, they live in a hive.
But native bees, 95 per cent of them do not sting.
They are solitary, and they live in the ground or in wood.
So native bees, they pollinate at about a 91 per cent efficiency rate,
and honey bees only do so at about a 72 per cent efficiency rate.
It's been said that just about 200 native bees
can do the same level of pollination
as a hive containing over 10,000 worker bees in some instances.
And now, the final reason is cost.
Honey bee hive rentals are up to $300 a week in some areas.
California's almond crop alone
spent $294 million in pollination services in one year.
And according to a USDA report,
if we use native bees to supplement for some pollination efforts,
we can save up to $327 million.
That's like sending 11,000 people to a four-year college for free,
or giving kids over 200 million free school lunches.
Now don't get me wrong, we definitely need honey bees for, well, honey.
(Laughter)
And also for pollination efforts for crops that may bloom
up to two weeks earlier in the year than native bees become active,
including almonds.
But at the end of the day, all bees matter,
and these efforts, they'll help both native bees and honey bees
without encouraging the formation of hives in public areas.
So, here's our problem:
Currently, bees live in an area for as long as there are flowers in bloom
for a handful of weeks out of the year,
and then they need to be able to fly to their next habitat spot.
But some of these bees can only fly about three blocks
before they need more food, and can die trying to get there.
We've focused on building these very large habitat spots
but forgotten about the little ones in between,
which is almost like building a city without roads.
But luckily, urban areas are in a very unique position
to offer almost stepping-stone habitats
to help these bees move across the urban and rural landscapes.
Because the biggest problem isn't, "If we build it, will they come?"
It's, "If we build it, can they leave?"
So what can we do right now to help these bees?
The answer? It may have been underneath us this whole time.
By changing the plants within our parking lots
and our existing green spaces,
we can actually save the majority of our native bee species
and help conserve the composition of both our landscapes
and our dinner plates.
So, how does this work exactly?
I took a little area of Houston, Texas, downtown,
mostly because I figure if I can make Houston, Texas pollinator-friendly,
I might be able to do this anywhere.
(Laughter)
The first thing that we've got to do, no matter what city that you're in,
is take a look at your native bee species.
Acquire that list.
I created an easy diagram
that separates these guys into five different analysis categories.
The bigger the bee's body, the farther they can fly before they need more food.
You can see some of the small native bees can only fly about three blocks;
and the big ones, they can fly up to three quarters of a mile
before they need more food.
Here's the area of downtown Houston.
I took about a mile-and-a-half section,
and I figured, what if we just changed the plants within our green spaces?
Would that be enough to help these bees?
In truth, for the extra large ones that can fly pretty far, sure.
I put circles around each of these bees
to show how far they can fly before they need more food.
If they touch or overlap, it's likely that they'll be able to reach it in time.
For these large native bees, it's probably going to be no problem.
But, look what happens
when we go just one body-size category down.
There's already gaps of multiple blocks,
and they may not be able to reach it in time.
But, what if we add parking lots?
We just almost quadrupled the amount of habitat space in this area alone.
And now look...
Those large native bees, they'll have no problem.
Same with the medium,
the small,
and even potentially the extra-small specialists can make it.
This is what a typical parking lot looks like.
And this is what it would look like if it were pollinator habitat.
See, the thing is, most of these parking lots
already have planting regulations attached to them.
We're not saying decrease your parking or change your land use.
We're just saying use better plants.
There's a few take-home messages for anyone trying to create habitat.
The first is you want to make sure that each plant that you use
takes up at least 15 square feet in area.
Bees need to be able to see or smell their next food source
before they get there.
Sometimes with pollution, they can't smell it.
But by planting patches that they can see a lot easier,
we ensure that they can get there.
We also want to make sure that there's multiple blooms year round
because bees don't just need food in July.
But food isn't everything.
We want to make sure that we leave bare ground patches
and pieces of driftwood for these guys to nest in.
Notice how I said bare ground, not mulch.
They actually can't nest in mulch, so be careful where you use it.
And overall, we want to make sure
that we maintain at least a majority flowering plants
to those nesting areas, about 80 per cent to 20 per cent,
because a lot of these bees, they'll just be using this
as a stepping-stone habitat to the next one.
There's additional things that we can do depending on our area.
We can add boulders to the landscape to help maintain heat overnight
so they become active earlier in the day.
Or, we can add fruiting trees to the corners of our parking lots
because they're great pollen and nectar sources
and also, free snacks; no one complains about free snacks.
(Laughter)
This can change everything, but it shouldn't stop at parking lots.
Here's Houston's lightrail downtown corridor as it is right now,
and it's green;
but green is good, it's not great.
And this is it...
as if it were pollinator habitat.
Some of these flowers too, they filter out contaminants in the water
and help it infiltrate quicker.
Your backyard isn't excluded.
That's a great place to put stuff.
Beautiful flowers, a nice little vegetable garden in the corner.
Even balconies under three stories can help contribute greatly to this cause.
Not only is pollinator habitat vital to their survival,
but it's also way prettier to look at.
It's a secret way that we can make our urban areas more attractive.
You might be wondering, okay,
well, how does this compare to Denver, necessarily, and other cities?
Pretty well, actually.
Almost every city
has at least ten per cent of its land use dedicated to surface parking lots alone.
So, even in Denver, in a rapidly growing city,
this can make a great contribution.
Parking lots are an eyesore and a poor use of land in my opinion,
but just because they are doesn't mean that they have to be.
Johann von Goethe said it best when he said,
"Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again."
This is our food and our world,
and I'm pissed.
(Cheer)
You should be too.
(Cheers)
(Applause)
These bees, they're intricately linked to our food and our happiness,
and what affects bees directly affects us.
But we don't have to stand around
and wait for someone else to do something about it.
All we have to do, in the words of Ron Finley,
is plant some shit.
(Laughter)
And I don't know about you,
but I'm not giving up my avocados or blueberries without a fight.
Thank you.
(Cheers) (Applause)