Pollinator decline has been a hot topic in the media for the last two decades, but have some important pollinators been left out of the “save the bees” conversation? Listen to explore the tensions and misconceptions surrounding honeybee and native bee health.
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This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.
Music credits:
“Two for Two” from Milk by Lockimara, https://lockimara.bandcamp.com/track/two-for-two
“Allie Mine” by Blue Dot Sessions, https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Blue_Dot_Sessions/sugartree/allie-mine-1
“Hardsider” by Blue Dot Sessions, https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Blue_Dot_Sessions/sugartree/hardsider-1
“Khfett” by Blue Dot Sessions, https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Blue_Dot_Sessions/lufaquest/khfett
Photo credit:
ThreeMilesPerHour, https://www.photosforclass.com/download/pb_4054169
Transcript
Damara Featherstone 0:00
In the early 2000s, scientists and beekeepers started to discover some worrying trends.
News clip 1 0:07
It’s considered one of the biggest environmental threats of our time.
News Clip 2 0:11
Colony Collapse Disorder.
News Clip 3 0:11
Bees are being threatened to extinction.
News Clip 4 0:11
Colonies have disappeared by an alarming 35%.
News Clip 5 0:11
Due to expanding agriculture and development…
News Clip 6 0:11
But are these important honeybees serving a key purpose? Or are they actually disrupting the ecosystem and the native bees?
Damara Featherstone 0:27
Now over a decade later, what is happening to the bees, bees are incredibly important to nature and food production. Amazingly enough, you have pollinators such as bees to thank for one in three bites of the food you eat because of their agricultural and ecological roles. Concerns about bee health are valid, but there’s lots of buzz surrounding honeybee health and native bee health. Within bee communities. Sometimes native bees and honeybees are pitted against each other. So how should the conversation around bees move forward? Today we are speaking with researchers and professionals in the field from both the honeybee and native bee perspective to find out what is happening to the bees and how we can move forward. To start the conversation. Let’s get our hands into a honeybee hive and join Rhonda Thygesen at some of her research hives at UBC.
Rhonda Thygesen 1:17
So, this is technically on top of the bookstore.
Damara Featherstone 1:19
Oh crazy!
Damara Featherstone 1:21
That’s right, there are several research hives on the roof of the UBC bookstore.
The first thing I noticed was all the dead bees in the hive. What are Rondo’s thoughts on this?
Rhonda Thygesen 1:36
Certain things that are just getting them right like the varroa mite has been a big thing. You tend to have wasps around too, that are pretty good at taking out hives, so it just depends.
Damara Featherstone 1:57
Overall, Rhonda’s colonies were looking healthy after a long, wet winter. Now let’s head inside and find out more about Rhonda’s perspective on this topic.
Rhonda Thygesen 2:08
My name is Rhonda Thygesen. I’m in my second year, my master’s in the foster lab. And my research is on blueberry pollination, and I’m looking at pesticide and pathogen effects on honeybee health.
Damara Featherstone 2:20
What do you think are the main stressors honeybees are facing currently?
Rhonda Thygesen 2:24
I think my opinion on all the stressors is you have to think about it kind of from the mindset of a hive. And what they’re really facing. What’s happening is there’s a bunch of stuff going on in the world. There’s pollution, and there’s climate change, and there’s pesticides everywhere. These honeybees are going out and interacting with the end native pollinators are also facing those same stressors. My experience with working with a lot of diseases is some of them are visual, like some pathogens are very visual. But then other stressors are asymptomatic. So even pesticides are asymptomatic or some hidden viruses as well. So, it’s really hard to know exactly what’s going on within a hive.
Damara Featherstone 3:02
So, what is your opinion on the tensions and misunderstandings surrounding honeybees and native bees?
Rhonda Thygesen 3:07
Honeybees are a domesticated species; they’ve always been domesticated their agriculture. And I think certainly their numbers are increasing everywhere around Canada. I think that there’s a poor understanding influenced by like the media on the fact that honeybees are the ones that we need to be taking care of. So that’s just a public misunderstanding. And I think there’s a lot of reconciliation to do there. We can remember the save the bees campaign that was largely misrepresented in favor of honeybees.
Damara Featherstone 3:37
Now let’s get a native bee perspective on the issue.
Jennifer Lipka 3:41
So my name is Jennifer Lipka, and I work at the Plant Insect Ecology and Evolution lab here on UBC campus. My master’s thesis work is on bumble bees. And what I was looking at is bumble bee foraging choice.
Damara Featherstone 3:55
What is Jennifer’s opinion on the tensions between honeybees and native bees?
Jennifer Lipka 3:59
I think that part of that kind of tension is from the fact that honeybees have this amazing PR, when people think save the bees, they think save honeybees. And there’s this kind of underdog, which is maybe the native bees, and the people advocating for them who are like, but what about us, you’re not remembering about us, these honeybees over here, they’re actually, you know, they’re doing poorly, they’re having problems in terms of Colony Collapse Disorder, etc. But we’re having problems too. So, it’s possible that if there was more recognition for native bees and the conservation that they require that there would be less tension between honeybees and native bees.
Damara Featherstone 4:45
So, what are the stressors facing native bees?
Jennifer Lipka 4:48
Land use change, pesticides, parasites, and pathogens. These are like the standard answers, but I had been doing a little bit more research on climate change recently. Why that’s kind of more important for bumblebees is that they’re generally a cooler loving bee. And how will the warming planet affect them? Bumblebees are not moving more north. They’re just losing their southern range because it’s getting too hot.
Damara Featherstone 5:14
Beyond the stressors, do honeybees impact native bee health?
Jennifer Lipka 5:18
It has been found in research that honeybees and their populations do affect native bees in negative ways. And that is something that’s found in the literature. It’s not something we can make go away. It’s just a fact of life.
Damara Featherstone 5:32
What are some examples of this?
Jennifer Lipka 5:34
The floral resources in urban spaces doesn’t even provide enough resources for all the honey beehives. If there isn’t enough floral resources in the city for honeybees. That means there obviously isn’t enough for bumblebees either.
Damara Featherstone 5:48
In recent years, urban beekeeping has increased in popularity. This has caused increased competition for floral resources. Since honeybees can fly greater distances. This has been shown to negatively affect wild bee populations as most wild bees are solitary and have a shorter range around their nesting sites. A study in Paris found that wild pollinator visitation rates were negatively correlated to honeybee colony density in the vicinity. Now let’s talk to Julia Common, the co-founder and former chief beekeeper of hives for humanity, Julia is now working as an independent beekeeping consultant and providing greenhouse and field pollination as well as selling nucs and honey. Julia has over 40 years of beekeeping experience.
Julia Common 6:31
Yeah, four decades, it’s like a scary long time.
Damara Featherstone 6:34
Julia is a beekeeper, but she is also actively involved in honeybee research and the native bee community. So, Julia, why are you involved with native bee work as well?
Julia Common 6:43
Well, I joined the native bee society. I’m also taking a pollinator stewardship course. Because I think it’s important to understand the bigger picture beyond the bees, the honeybees. When in hives humanity very early on, we always were planting gardens. And I know that Sarah has really developed with gardening side there so that they’re very aware of forage and habitat for the wild bees.
Damara Featherstone 7:10
So, what do you think is the path forward for reconciling native bee and honeybee health?
Julia Common 7:15
I think that we tend to lump that topic into one topic. And I think it really needs to separate out into what’s going on in the country, honeybees, native bees, or wild bees, what’s going on in kind of semi-rural areas and what’s going on in the city? And I think it’s three different systems going on there.
Damara Featherstone 7:37
So, what are the ways forward in the urban context
Julia Common 7:40
In the city, I think we need to find ways to measure the capacity of a city to support bees, wild bees, pollinators in general, and to support us, so I think we need a proper way to measure and monitor. And I think it’s also recognizing that I think there is a shift in the urban beekeeping, you know, the numbers have doubled in 10 years, it’s tripled in 10 years. At the same time these cities are losing their green spaces, it could be that we do have to limit the number of bees in the city.
Damara Featherstone 8:09
And how do you think the rural or farmland area can progress forward in terms of native bee health?
Julia Common 8:15
How do you convince that farmer to take out the swath and put in habitat? You convince him by showing him he will make more money.
Damara Featherstone 8:25
Whoa, whoa, whoa, what does Julia mean the farmer will make more money? Can native bees be used for crop pollination as well?
Jennifer Lipka 8:32
There are a lot of native bees that are agriculturally important if not more important than honeybees. So, bumblebees are agriculturally important because they are able to provide us with pollination services. And they do this through this really cool effect that they have which is called Buzz pollination, where they vibrate at a very high frequency that helps to dislodge pollen. It is this ability that they have this buzz pollination that makes them better and more efficient pollinators of particular crops that we have some crops that we grow here in BC like blueberries.
Damara Featherstone 9:04
Bumblebees are arguably the most important pollinators because of this buzz pollination technique. In fact, they are moving 10 times more pollen from bloom to bloom, then the next highest pollinator, which is the honeybee.
Jennifer Lipka 9:16
Honeybees are just easy because we manage them ourselves. We control where they go where they are, and we can feed them and multiply them we have a lot of control. We do not have as much control, if not hardly any control over native bee species, but we can utilize them for their pollination services. And we can do that through a variety of different agricultural methods like intercropping we can do improving hedgerows
Damara Featherstone 9:46
So, how do we move forward?
Jennifer Lipka 9:48
Honeybees are here to stay and we’re not going to do anything about that they’re part of our food system. There are domesticated, agricultural animal just like a cow or a pig and so we’re not going to get rid of them managing honeybees is different from conserving native bees. We’re very lucky that they haven’t naturalized in the environment, that they do still require humans and that is good, because then we can watch them and put them in places where we want them to be that maybe they won’t be in as much conflict with native bees.
Julia Common 10:20
We are re-evaluating so many of the things we do in life in general. And why would beekeeping be any different? I’ve always said, keeping bees is not going to save the bees, it might save you. So there’s no doubt in my mind that keeping bees is therapeutic. However, I also think staying in touch with anything in nature is therapeutic. I think as a beekeeper if you are a beekeeper in the city, or you’re going to be an urban beekeeper, you really have to make sure that your bees are kept in a fashion that is responsible.
Damara Featherstone 10:51
So, we have learned that reconciling honeybee and native bee health is a highly complex issue. But what is clear is that honeybees nor native bees can shoulder the entire load of pollination alone. There’s more research that must be done in both fields. But there are some tangible ways forward the urban landscape is a tough environment for native bees. With the influx in recent years of urban beekeeping, we must consider how this affects other pollinators within the city and consider regulations through finding out the capacity of the landscape and capping the number of beehives in the city. Also, we need to consider greening our cities in a different way. Instead of lawns of neatly cut grass. We should be planting native plants to decrease the burden on native pollinators in this fragmented environment. If you were looking for individual actions plant lots of flowers with a variety of flowering periods, colors, and size. Also, be messy. Many native bees nest and rotting wood, stems, or compost piles so don’t be neat in your gardens.
A huge thank you to Rhonda Thygesen, Jennifer Lipka, and Julia Common for taking time out of their busy schedules to chat with me about their insights on this topic. This podcast would not have been possible without them. Music in this episode includes “two for two” by the band Lockimara, as well as music by Blue Dot sessions.