Transcriber: Jeff Broadbent Reviewer: Nada Qanbar
(Applause)
So when I tell people I study bees, they usually want to tell me one of two things;
either about the last time the got stung and how much it hurt,
or they'll tell me about their distant relative that's a beekeeper
and how much they like his honey.
So this kind of shows the superficial understanding most people have about bees:
they sting and they make honey.
But recently, there's been some encouraging changes.
Now when people talk to me about bees,
besides talking about stinging and honey
they want to ask how the bees are doing.
Or they'll tell me about an article they read that said bees are disappearing
or their populations are declining.
So from a conservation standpoint, this is nice
because it shows that people are beginning to care more about bees.
They're beginning to understand that bees are more than stinging and honey
and that they play important roles in our lives.
The problem is we can't really help save the bees -
there's a growing movement to save the bees -
but we can't do this unless we know what the bees are
and know what their needs are. So what do people know about bees?
Well, most people assume there's a handful of bee species in the U.S.:
honey bees, maybe some bumblebees.
In fact most of the research on bees and on populations declining
is done on these bees, honey bees and bumblebees.
But, in fact, there's more bees out there.
There's actually 4,000 different species of bees in the U.S.
So most people are dramatically underestimating bee diversity here.
It makes it hard to protect bees if we don't realize how many there are.
Also, even scientists don't really know how these bees are doing.
Because most of the research is done on honey bees and bumblebees,
we mostly don't know much about these other bees.
It goes further than that.
It's not just that people underestimate bee diversity,
in a lot of instances people don't know which bugs in their yards are bees.
For example, when I show people this picture,
and ask them to tell me which ones are bees -
and I'm sure you're all looking at it thinking, "Which one's are bees?" -
If you're like most people,
most people know that a fly, a grasshopper, and a butterfly are not bees.
And that's good.
Also, most people know that a honey bee, a bumblebee, and a sweat bee are bees.
The problem is, there's these three bees in the middle here.
They're all bees, but people don't recognize them as bees.
They're pretty common in our backyards,
but people often think they're something else.
So there's misunderstanding about
how many bees there are, about what bugs are bees,
and these misunderstandings lead to misguided efforts to save bees.
For example, I saw this poster on the internet,
"Save the bees, save humanity."
It's a great idea, the problem is that's not a bee.
(Laughter)
That's a yellow jacket wasp.
(Laughter)
Or you could buy a t-shirt to help save the bees. It's only $25, right?
The problem with this t-shirt? That's not a bee either.
That's a cicada.
(Laughter)
So let's look at one more.
This is a meme from Facebook, "I die, you die."
So the idea here is that bees pollinate most of our food,
and so if there's no one to pollinate our food, then we die.
The problem is, that's not a bee, that's a fly.
And so that fly is not pollinating the majority of our foods.
But it's not only that people mistake other insects for bees
like in these examples.
In a lot of cases, when people want to make efforts to help bees,
they focus on the bee that they're most familiar with, which is the honey bee.
In fact, there's been a lot of news stories and magazine articles
focusing and teaching people how to save bees,
but they focus almost exclusively on honey bees and on the needs of honey bees.
This has led a lot of people to become backyard beekeepers
in efforts to help save bees.
In fact, cities around the country have changed regulations
so people can keep beehives in their backyards.
For example, Morgan Freeman recently bought 40 beehives,
and he put them on his ranch in Mississippi,
and he says he planted fields of lavender and clover to help save the bees.
Now, this is a valiant effort.
And other people have done this too.
For example, Flea. He's the bass player from the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
He was in Rolling Stone Magazine this year,
and they talked about how Flea is saving the bees.
But what Morgan Freeman and Flea might not realize - and countless other beekeepers -
is that honey bees are only one of thousands of species,
and they're really different biologically than most other bees.
For example, you probably know that honey bees live in big hives,
there's tens of thousands of workers, there's a queen, you know they make honey,
you've probably heard they can sting you once before they die.
Well, those are all true facts for honey bees,
but they're not true for the other bees that live here,
for the native bees in North America.
You might not know that honey bees aren't native to North America.
They're from Europe.
So what are these native bees like?
What do those other thousands of bee species do?
Well most of North America's native bees are solitary ground-nesting bees.
What does that mean?
Well, they live by themselves - they're solitary - and they nest in the ground.
So a single female bee digs a hole in the ground,
at the bottom of that hole she'll make little rooms
and she'll put pollen and nectar in there.
Then she'll lay an egg in each room, cover up the hole and fly away.
So there's no queen, there's no hive with workers, and there's no honey.
So if we only focus on the needs of honey bees, we'll probably be doing very little
to help these ground-nesting solitary bees.
Now, not all bees nest in the ground.
There's other bees that nest in other places.
For example, this is a leaf cutter bee,
and she prefers to nest in holes in pieces of wood.
Here she's bringing back a piece of a leaf that she'll use to line that hole,
kind of like wallpaper.
Again, she's a solitary bee, so there's no queen and no hive and no honey involved.
So, when I tell people about these native bees, they often say,
"Well that's pretty interesting, but they don't really pollinate, right?"
In fact, native bees do pollinate.
They do the majority of the pollination for most of our wildflowers
and there are lost of studies that show
that they're important pollinators of many of our crops as well.
So why don't people recognize these native bees
when they think about making efforts to save bees?
Well it could be because a lot of native bees don't really look like honey bees.
They don't have that yellow and black striped abdomen
like we see in the cartoons.
These, for example, are all mason bees, a native bee to North America.
Mason bees come in metallic blue or green, sometimes gold and purple.
Mason bees can be really important pollinators of many of our orchard crops.
For example, the pollination that would take a hundred honey bees to accomplish
can be done in many orchard by only two mason bees.
So not only do they pollinate,
in some cases they're much more efficient pollinators.
There are a lot of factors that contribute to this efficiency.
One of these factors could be their dietary preferences.
A lot of native bees are picky eaters.
This, for example, is a squash bee, and squash bees only visit squash flowers.
So because she has a preference for squash flowers,
she's a really effective pollinator of our pumpkins and our zucchinis
and our cucumbers and other members of the squash family.
So again, if we only focus on the needs of honey bees,
and plant fields of lavender and clover, for example,
we might be doing very little for these native bees
that have different preferences. They don't like lavender and clover.
Native bees have other abilities that make them important pollinators.
For example, tomatoes and their relatives or blueberries produce more fruit
when they're buzz pollinated.
Buzz pollination is when a bee lands on a flower
and vibrates it at a certain frequency causing it to release more pollen.
Honey bees don't know how to buzz pollinate.
They just don't have that ability.
But a lot of our native bees do.
So I'm not trying to say that honey bees are necessarily bad.
They play important roles in many of our agricultural systems.
But if we artificially increase honey bee populations too much,
then that can lead to competition between honey bees and native bees
and negatively impact the native bee populations.
So, I applaud people's efforts to save the bees.
I think that this is a good movement to get behind,
but we need to realize that honey bees are only one of thousands of species
and these other bees are also playing important roles in our environment
and in our lives.
So if you want to help bees, where do we go to learn about these native bees?
Well there's a lot of resources that have recently been made available.
For example, a lot of books like The Bee-Friendly Gardner,
or my book The Bees in Your Backyard.
Or there's websites that teach us about native bees like the Xerces Society
or BugGuide.net.
Or there's pollinator workshops that are being put on all around the country.
So if you look into these resources,
they'll teach you that bees need two things:
they need food, as in flowers, and they need nesting sights.
So in our yards, we can make efforts to help bees by planting flowers.
If we plant a variety of different kinds of flowers,
different colors and shapes and sizes,
we can attract a bunch of different kinds of bees,
bees that have different dietary preferences.
And also, in between those flowers,
instead of putting ground cloth or thick layers of mulch,
we can leave bare patches of dirt for the ground-nesting bees to nest in.
Providing habitat for other bees can be as simple as
drilling a bunch of holes in a piece of wood.
Leaf cutter bees and their relatives find these holes
and they make their nests in them.
So, if we as a society want to protect bees,
the first step should be to learn about bees - all of the bees -
including the native bees.
These native bees are playing important roles,
and many of them need our attention too.
We don't want to be left saying, "Save the bees!
Oh wait a second, was that a bee?"
Thank you.
(Applause)