Bee Regenerative with Sarah Red-Laird (298)

298 - Bee Regenerative with Sarah Red-Laird

Rodger Dewhurst: Hi there. It's Rodger Dewhurst calling from the UK down in Cornwall, the furthest most side west bit sticking out into the Atlantic, next stop Nova Scotia. Anyway, you'd like to hear a little message from some of my girls. Here they are chortling for you.

[bees buzzing]

I think they're saying, welcome to Beekeeping Today's podcast.

[music]

Jeff Ott: Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast presented by Betterbee, your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment. I'm Jeff Ott.

Becky Masterman: I'm Becky Masterman.

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Jeff: Hey, a quick shout out to all of our sponsors who support allows us to bring you this podcast each week without resorting to a fee-based subscription. We don't want that and we know you don't either. Be sure to check out all of our content on the website. There you can read up on all of our guests, read our blog on the various aspects and observations about beekeeping, search for, download, and listen to over 250 past episodes, read episode transcripts, leave comments and feedback on each episode, and check on podcast specials from our sponsors. You can find it all at www.beekeepingtodaypodcast.com. Thank you, Rodger Dewhurst from that great chortling opening from Cornwall UK. Roger, I've never heard that from my bees. Is that a UK bee thing, you think, Becky?

Becky: I wonder, was it an accent maybe that we detected in those bees?

Jeff: I don't know. Have you heard bees chortle?

Becky: The only thing that I've seen is that there is something different that I've seen when the bees are maybe requeening or a mating flight is going on. Whenever I see it and hear it, I close up that colony right away because I think I shouldn't be in there, but never to that detail that he shared with us. I don't know if it's the same thing.

Jeff: I have to agree with Roger. The more I listen to it, I think they are saying, welcome to Beekeeping TodayPodcast. Got to say.

Becky: [laughs] Of course. That too. With an accent, but cool.

Jeff: With an accent. I love it. Thank you, Roger. Becky, it's the end of September, September 30th. How are your bees doing? You've been out in the bees every time I've reached out to you. You're, "I'll get back to you in a minute. I'm in the bees."

Becky: I'm in the bees, I know. It's intense as far as making sure that-- We have such a short window to do any supplemental feeding. I'm trying to wrap all of that up and make sure that everybody's of weight. I'm feeling really good, knock on wood, I won't do it because it's a podcast. I won't make extra noise. Knock on wood, I'm feeling good about the weight. Then of course, I'm very pro-my treatment. It's been an intense fall for me. What about you?

Jeff: I complained to you or no, I whined to you, to be honest. I whined to you after, or I use the formic acid about losing queens. To the best of my knowledge, I've only lost two queens out of 13 applications. I feel like that was okay. They did take a hit, they stopped in production for several days. I wasn't ready for that. I did lose two queens. The one I think is a good chance that it was the queen was on her way out before I applied the treatment because that was the colony that was full of drones.

Becky: That's a good indication that--

Jeff: It was full of just tiny, itty bitty big-eyed drones. It was horrible. That's the one I sent you the picture of the scale, the hive is on the scale. They lost a pound and a half an hour.

Becky: Oh my gosh.

Jeff: They were being robbed out. It was really amazing to see that on the scale.

Becky: I think that's such a good lesson for newer beekeepers who haven't maybe experienced the robbing. I'm just paranoid of robbing from mid-August where I really don't need to be, all the way up until temperatures are too cold for them to fly. It's just all you have to do is see that once. Can you share that picture because it's so dramatic.

Jeff: I'll share it in the show notes. I don't think I shared the second one with you because I was looking at the rest of the-- As I've told you, I have scales on, I think about six colonies. It's really funny, you see the one where it drops down precipitously in 12 hours and right across the yard. There's one that goes up-

Becky: Oh, no.

Jeff: -just the same amount.

Becky: Are you serious?

Jeff: It's just one colony. Just one colony. Yes, it is amazing.

Becky: It makes sense because they're literally recruiting to that. They're doing probably what a round dance thing just over there. It's really close. Come on.

Jeff: You can walk there if you want.

Becky: [laughs] You could walk there.

[laughter]

Oh, that is so fascinating. I'm so not tech savvy in the bee yard, but I love learning about what you're seeing and doing, because what great tools if people employ them. You could just learn so much.

Jeff: Intellectually, one hive robs from the other, it brings it to whole different light to sit there and just there's bees. One, just go down dramatically and the other one rise up dramatically and you say, "Either someone's pulling supers off my colony." Pulling frames. It's amazing. I'll put those pictures in the show notes.

Becky: Good for your bees for just having the initiative to feed themselves. Then good for you for treating every colony in your apiary because you don't have to worry about any mite spread.

Jeff: Coming up next month, we have our series that you and the Minnesota Honey Producers Association pulled together. It's a month about the habitat crisis and the honeybees and native pollinators or pollinators in general. It's going to be a fantastic series.

Becky: I am so excited about this podcast being able to focus on the crisis and pull together a theme for an entire month. Really looking forward to having listeners go through that series. I'm interested in hearing the feedback as far as what they think of listening to the four different episodes and putting it all together and figuring out what's next. What a finale. Really all four episodes are on different themes around the habitat crisis. It's interesting to see how they fit so well together and build on each other to share a really big message.

Jeff: Coincidentally, today's guest is someone who's been on the show before, Sarah Red-Laird. She'll be on the show talking to us about the Bee Girl Initiative and their Bee Regenerative Program that they have going. She is fun to talk to. She's doing a lot of great work out there, all in the habitat.

Becky: She has always been an advocate for honeybees. The direction she's taken is really exciting to see her shift her career a little bit and make such a big difference for our honeybees. I'm really excited to be able to do a deep dive with her and learn more.

Jeff: That's great. I see her out in the Beekeeping Today Podcast green room. We'll get to Sarah real quick, but first we have an audio postcard from Dr. Dewey Caron on his continuing series on communication. We have that coming up and we'll be right back after Dewey and word from our sponsors.

Dr. Dewey Caron: Hello. This is Dr. Dewey Caron. I'm talking to you today from Portland, Oregon. Welcome back. This will be another of the audio postcards on communication for Beekeeping Today Podcast. I do the communication on three levels. The first will be bee scientist to says beekeepers. You probably know that a bee egg is one-1000th the size of the eventual adult bee. Maybe you don't, but that's roughly what it size is. It may not surprise you that all eggs that queen lays in beeswax cells are not the same size. Younger queens, not surprisingly, lay more robust eggs than older age queens.2-year-old queens lay eggs that weigh only about a third less.

Further difference is the mortality rate of eggs that increases as the queen age, as the eggs that they lay. It increases from 3.5% mortality to as much as 10% by the time the queen is a 3-year-old queen. Studies by Olav Rueppell, Dave Tarpy et al, have shown that different queen stocks consistently lay eggs of different sizes. This is, we think, in response to both genetic than environmental factors. An additional interesting difference these ongoing studies have revealed is that queens heading smaller colonies tend to lay larger eggs. 15% larger, in fact, than queens in the larger, more populous colonies. The larger eggs seem to have more metabolites. Those are the chemicals used in energy production and growth. Queens apparently have the ability of determining their colony size as they will then reduce the egg size, as their colony grows in population size. Despite being larger in size initially, the good news is that emerged adult workers are essentially the same size regardless of egg size. The nurse-age bees are capable of making up the difference for a smaller egg size apparently.

One earlier study on egg size has caught the attention of others. Hao Wei and colleagues in China, Jiangxi Agriculture University in Nanchang, found that confined queens laid eggs in larger cells set up for queen rearing. Their eggs were larger, suggesting queens can adjust egg size when beekeepers modify the conditions. It will be interesting to see if this finding holds with further research.

I direct listeners to the regular monthly column of Jay Evans, lead scientist of the USDA Bee Lab in Beltsville, Maryland, recently recognized as AAAS, which is the American Association for the Advancement of Science as a fellow in recognition of his scientific contributions and leadership. Jay was a guest in early August on Beekeeping Today Podcast. Jay summarized the topic egg sizing in his Found in Translation, a regular column in Bee Culture magazine. The references to the Hao Wei and the Rueppell/Tarpy publications are also supplied.

Communication, bee scientists to bees. Second level I've been doing with communication is the beekeeper to the bee. I have stated before effective communication is a two-way street. When we open the beehive, the bees should be telling us something, and when we do our management we are telling our bees something. We wind down our bee year, beekeepers are removing supers to harvest. Hopefully, by the time you are listening to this Beekeeping Today Podcast, you have finished or are finishing the bulk of your harvest. Hope this has been a good year for your bees and harvest by now is something you are glad to be over and done with.

We now have fall beekeeping tasks to complete. One task is to determine the level of Varroa mites and taking corrective action if the number is too high. Your beekeeping preference will help you define what too high a number might be in your situation. Tools for Varroa management from Honey Bee Health Coalition suggest anything over 2% to 3% in full-size colonies as a mite level number presents a heightened level of risk. The greater the percentage, the higher the risk. That is our bees communicating with us.

One thing we want to communicate to our bees is they need adequate fall stores to survive winter. How might we do that? We can feed our bees a heavy syrup, for example. Feeding from the top helps convey the message if on our examinations of weight and how many frames have capped honey in the top box is considered too few per winter. Of course, this will vary where you keep bees in terms of how much is enough.

Bee communication in our management is seldom one-and-done, nor we have only one alternative in trying to accomplish our tasks. Another way to encourage bees to increase their honey stores in the top box is we can put queens below queen excluders in the lowest box to allow only the colony to backfill cells from which adult bees emerge there in the top box.

This is a good strategy if you live in an area with a fall flow. Not all areas have such resources this time of year, so combining with heavy syrup feeding will help send your message to bees. Don't forget to remove that excluder before winter. If you have wet supers from extracting, you can put them on weaker units, above the inner cover for controlled robbing. As the bees clean the honey, they move it down below, well, sometimes. Sometimes they're listening to us. If they persist, then gather it and put in cells of the supers, then an option is to store those supers. It will be a great incentive.

Your means to communicating with your bees when those supers are added the next season. Store in a freezer if you have enough space or in loose stacks protected for mobbing or remove, slash the cappings and allow robbing of the frames again. Tell the bees to fill up the top box for better chance to successfully overwinter. Communication. Finally, communication bee to bee. We know bees need to orient to the location of their hive. Orientation flights of naive new foragers is a pattern that involves short flights that eventually widen out to encompass a greater area.

Bees are memorizing landmarks. Many newly aged forage bees will join in these orientation flights. There is safety in numbers. Also, it seems they know other orienting bees perhaps copying their behavior. What happens when the colony is moved, say to a better overwintering location, or in a case of our commercial beekeepers, to a new pollination or honey production site? Do the bees need to go through the whole process of reorientation to the new site? Turns out, yes, but no, they have a shortcut.

Using harmonic radar technology, the patterns and flight perimeters of initial flights when colonies were moved to a new location were compared with the initial exploratory orientation flights of young honeybees and to the forging flights of those experienced foragers. The flight patterns of orienting bees clearly differs from those of foraging flights. Just as with initial orientation, reorientation flights can be classified into short and long-term flights.

Similarly, the short-range reorientation flights were performed under unfavorable weather conditions, meaning the bees adapt their flight patterns under changing weather conditions in a similar way. They're telling each other it's not a good day to go out and fly, so they hold off on those orientation and seems also reorientation. However, reorientating bees explored a larger terrain than bees performing their first, their initial exploratory orientation flight. A single reorientation flight was found to be sufficient to learn a new location of the hive. How can we alert the bees to a move?

Change the orientation, the hive entrance, from its previous orientation by at least 15 degrees. Our bees then know and their shorter reorientation flights will help them reset that landscape image they must learn so they become more efficient foragers. As always, I have some references to checkout for further details. I trust your bees are strong with low mite numbers and your fall communications with your bees promote successful overwintering. Until next time, good beeing.

[music]

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Jeff: Hey, everybody, welcome back. Sitting across a great big virtual Beekeeping Today Podcast table, sitting in right down I-5, I believe, in Ashland, Oregon is Sarah Red-Laird. Sarah, welcome back to the BeekeepingToday Podcast.

Sarah Red-Laird: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Becky: Sarah, it's a pleasure to see you. It's been such a long time.

Sarah: Oh, wonderful to see you. Yes, I know. I feel like we saw each other there every few months at conferences and visits to Minneapolis and all the things, and here we are finally reconnecting.

[laughter]

Becky: Exactly. I will bring up, it's on a sad note because when you accepted our invitation, you very fondly remembered the last time you were with Kim on the podcast.

Sarah: Yes, it hit me a little bit. Grief is like that. It comes and goes, and comes in waves. I got quite teary when I received the invite just because the last time I was on the podcast, Kim was the cohost. That was, I think, the last time I saw Kim. Again, pre-pandemic, I saw Kim all the time. He and I have been buddies since the very beginning of the inception of my organization, and maybe even before that, when I was a student at UM in Jerry Bromenshenk's lab, I think, is when I first came across Kim.

It was funny because he was one of my, I wouldn't say critics, but he always was like, "What? Who are you? What are you doing? Why are you here?"

[laughs]

Then, eventually, I feel like I really won him over, and we became friends. He became one of my biggest advocates, which is such a compliment that someone who, at first, had no idea who I was, and what I was doing in the beekeeping world, and why I was there, and then, by the end seemed to really champion my work and understand my work, not only the kids' things but our habitat work as well.

I did a lot of reflecting on that. I have a memorial post that I never feel is good enough that I have yet to post. It's something to that nature of, like, what a compliment to someone who's so respected and revered and known in the beekeeping world to finally charm him into being on my side or understanding that I've been around for long enough that I'm not going anywhere as well just bee friends.

Jeff: Yes, Kim is definitely missed. For our listeners who have just joined us, and weren’t listening back in August of 2022 when the last time you were on, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and your background with bees and why you do what you do?

Sarah: I am the founder and co-director of an organization that is now known as Bee Regenerative. For a long time, the organization was known as the Bee Girl Organization. That was my nickname and something that a little organization to do beekeeping classes and kids' education that I started back in around 2010, thinking that it was going to be just something that I did for about a year until I graduated from college at the University of Montana, Missoula, with a resource conservation degree.

It was in the middle of the recession, and there were no jobs. Colony Collapse Disorder was still really buzzing in people's ears, if you will. Everybody was very curious about honeybees, and everybody wanted to keep bees in their backyard. It was just a skill set that I had that I was going to do for a couple of years, a year, until I got a "real job" in conservation. Here I am 14, 15 years later.

Instead of being hyperfocused on beekeeping education and kids' things, which is what we did for a long time because that's what really the education market wanted. What I've wanted to do since the very beginning was work in habitat and work on agricultural landscapes. Instead of getting a job doing that, I've been able to create my own job doing that and hire other people along the way as well. Doing what I always thought I would be doing, just in a roundabout way, through beekeeping.

Jeff: A very creative way. I like it. I want to say for our listeners, that wasn't you lapping water.

Sarah: I have a cowboy Corgi, named Midy in the van with me. I'm currently in my camper van, where I live for a whole lot of the year, which is where I work out of during field season. She's a Blue Heeler-Corgi cross, which is the perfect van-life size. It's a little warm in here, so she was drinking some water.

Jeff: I just want to make sure people weren't scratching their heads, trying to figure out, "How's she drinking at the same time she's talking? That's pretty good."

Sarah: You probably hear her drinking water and scratching on the door and jumping up and down behind me.

Becky: Sarah, is she a good bee dog?

Sarah: No, she is allergic to bees. I found out the hard way.

Becky: Oh my God.

Sarah: She actually has a legit bee allergy. I've had to Benadryl her twice. My last dog, Sophie, who Becky, you probably met, was a yellow lab, and the bees didn't really care about her because she was beige. She didn't bother them, and they didn't bother her. She didn't have an allergy at all. The only time she ever really got stung more than once was when I was in the almonds with Zach Browning.

She went into the back of his truck, and there were a million bees back there. She got really stung up but she was fine. This poor girl, I took her into the bee yard with me, and she was just hanging out in my bee truck, and she got one sting on her butt, I think, and her whole face swelled up. She doesn't get to do beekeeping chores with me. She doesn't get to go to the apiary.

Becky: Yes, that's a classic sign of an allergic reaction, get stung in one place and swell in a remote location.

Jeff: On the opposite end?

Becky: The opposite end.

Sarah: On the opposite end, yes.

Becky: Poor thing.

Sarah: When I do native bee surveys, and she just wants to always be doing what I'm doing, I'll have my transect all set up and all flagged and measured and perfect, and looking at specific flowers and counting bees, and then she'll just lay down in the middle of it, or she'll literally curl up inside my net. She likes to dig inside my net, in the inside of my net. On bee days, she stays in the van, and I got air conditioning in the van just for that.

Jeff: You mentioned that you started out as the Bee Girl Organization and recently changed the organization's name to Bee Regenerative. Can you explain that?

Sarah: Bee Girl and the Bee Girl Organization still exist. We're just a co-brand now, because Bee Girl really was a personal brand. Bee Girl is me. Everybody in the beekeeping world knows me as Bee Girl. I'm in southern Oregon right now, more people know me by Bee Girl than by my actual name. Most people don’t even know what my name is. They definitely don’t know my last name. Bee Girl is always going to exist. Bee Girl Honey is still the brand name of our honey.

It's more of a personal brand, and it's just me. It was really hard for people to conceptualize all the other people that are here at the organization working. Then also, Bee Girl is just an enigma. It's a little confusing, like, "What do you do?" When we were doing honey or beekeeping-specific things, that made a bit more sense but now we've branched out so much more into what I was alluding to is habitat work and habitat work specifically in the regenerative space.

It just made sense to do a co-brand that would be more the umbrella of the habitat work that we’re doing, which is primarily working on ranches and vineyards and doing research and education around getting better bee habitat in these places. We're also identifying places that are managed in really unique and cool ways, specifically for ecological resilience. I'm there to figure out, are the bee communities thriving there, both the honeybee and the native bee communities. Are they thriving together? Is there something specifically in the management style of the vineyard manager or the rancher that can be replicated? If so, how do we do it? If not, what are the barriers? That’s the overarching of what we do.

On the team right now is me, I’m really the field and education person. I have a co-director, Janelle. She takes care of operations, and she is also working on fundraising and development here in southern Oregon. She’s based out of southern Oregon, where our HQ is. Skyler Burrows is our taxonomist, he’s down in Logan, Utah. Then Autumn Smart, Dr. Smart at UNLV, she is helping me out with data analysis and visualization.

We have a really rad team here of all sorts of folks that are helping out, and a board of directors, and volunteers all over the place too that help us out. It’s just not fair to be called Bee Girl because there are so many other folks. Oh, and Tara Laidlaw, who is our education content development. We’re still working on curriculum, and kids’ things, and nature journaling, that's really connected back to more of the habitat work that we're doing and the honeybee and native bee work that were are doing. She helps out quite a bit with coming up with designing curriculum, and designing lesson plans, and all sorts of things. There are quite a few of us at this point. Yes, Bee Regenerative just felt like a more clearer brand for what we're currently working on.

Jeff: Can you explain what regenerative agriculture is?

Sarah: Yes. Many people have different ideas as to what regenerative agriculture is. Is there specific principles? Can it be labeled? Can it be certified? I like that it’s a little frustrating for people because, to me, it’s maybe not so much a set of principles but it's a mindset and it's a paradigm shift in farming. For me, the mindset is you're using agriculture to regenerate the landscape. Instead of degenerating it, instead of extracting water and nutrients from the soil and leaving behind pesticide residue, you're instead using agriculture to really build the health of the ecosystem. You're regenerating the ecosystem by growing food and leaving it better than you found it, I feel as well.

Jeff: I know in the past there has been talk about minimizing the amount of, and I'm not sure of the proper term, but breaking the soil or turning it over.

Sarah: Yes, minimizing tillage. Yes. The guiding principles are bringing diversity back, whether-- Diversity is on all levels. Does that mean that's diversity in your crop, specifically? There's a farmer, Gabe Brown, in North Dakota that does grow corn as a commodity, but then he also has about 13 different species of flowers growing inside his corn as well to feed the bees and to build the soil. He doesn't have just corn as a mono-crop. He is growing diversity along with his corn.

You're bringing diversity back to the soil, so you're building the microbiome of the soil and you're building the life underneath the soil. Then you're also welcoming insect diversity. You want to have those really good beneficial bugs like bees and lacewings and soldier beetles and the more the merrier in agriculture and regenerative agriculture, you want a diversity of insects there, so those good bugs can keep the "bad bugs" in check. Then also birds and coyotes. Just the more life on the landscape, the better.

Minimizing tillage is part of building your soil health and building your microbiome health down in the soil. Reducing or minimalizing tillage, reducing or minimizing inputs. The idea is to use the least amount of chemical inputs as possible, and try really hard to stay away from Roundup and different chemicals that kill things or build things. The idea is that you're building it with natural diversity and building it with livestock integration, which is another one of the principles.

Bringing livestock back onto the landscape to cycle the nutrients out on the landscape with their slobber and their pea and their poo. I feel that honeybees can be qualified under that as well. I'm sure a lot of beekeepers have seen the area where they keep bees regenerate. I've had research projects out on natural areas. The native bees are in higher density around the hives than they are meters or miles away from the hives. I think that there's something to that.

I think that those flowers could be more nutrient-dense from having all of the nutrient density that the bees bring back to the landscape. Also, the increased pollination means more flowers. I think that honeybees can definitely qualify as livestock integration onto the regenerative landscape, for sure. I'm sure I'm missing a principle or two, but those are the basics.

Jeff: I'm glad you mentioned livestock because both of us have talked often about honeybees being livestock. Not only in terms of animals that we're maintaining and taking care of, you're also extending that use of that term to the environment and the benefit to the environment in the regenerative agriculture use of livestock. That's cool.

Sarah: I went to Cowgirl Camp a few years ago and learned-- It was a savory hub adjacent. Cowgirl Camp, it was at a ranch that was a savory hub, but now they're folding in some of their own principles as well. The week was all about learning about holistic management. Allan Savory, the Savory Institute's holistic management trademarks. It was all about livestock and using livestock beneficially. Honeybees fit in like a glove to every single principle that we learned about except for castration.

[laughter]

Everything else was 1000% applicable to honeybees and beekeeping and honeybee management and proper landscape management, and talking to your neighbors and getting along with your community and being a beneficial human in the community as well. Yes, it fits right in there. I encourage any sideliner beekeeper or commercial beekeeper to take a holistic management class. You'll be absolutely wowed by how much honeybees can be utilized just like sheep or cattle and holistic management.

Jeff: You may not have castration, but there's definitely the drone kill-off every fall, so...

Sarah: There's that, yes. There's drone semen harvesting, which is not-

Becky: That's true.

Sarah: -the same thing, but kind of the same thing. You have to-- It's kind of the same thing, just less rubber bands.

[laughter]

Jeff: Smaller rubber bands.

[laughter]

Sarah: Yes. Way smaller rubber bands. Way smaller metal tools.

Jeff: On that note, let's take a quick break, and hear from our sponsors. We'll be right back.

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Becky: Welcome back everybody. Sarah, I feel like you are a professor in a regenerative ag class. I absolutely love listening to this side of you. It's so exciting to see the transformation of your organization to embrace this really big project. I'm wondering if, when you talk to beekeepers now at conferences and beekeepers who've known you for a long time, and then you start talking about all of the work you're doing, do they just stare at you for a second and have to do a shift in their head because they're used to hearing about your Kids and Bees program?

Sarah: Yes, for sure. Then it's funny too because I mostly exist in the regenerative ag space now. That's where I'm taking a lot of those courses, going to a lot of those conferences, just spending time out. I'm in a transition period right now between the ranching world and the wine grape-growing world. I've just spent five months living in the van on ranches, literally in a herd of bison for a good chunk of my summer in South Dakota. I'm about to transition into the world of wine.

I'm really, really in it, living with the ranchers, living with their livestock. There was also honeybee hives out at the bison ranch and I got to go sample. Finally, this is a total tangent, but it was so delightful to feel like I finally got to go back and do something that I knew what I was doing. Because I feel like I don't know anything about ranching, I don't know anything about soil, I don't know anything about regenerative agriculture, but I know a whole lot about honeybees. I know I got into 12 hives with no smoke and no gloves and got zero stings. I was like, "This is the thing I know how to do." It was just so great to be back in that world. I miss the beekeeping world. I miss going down to the almonds .

[laughter]

It was so delightful to go to ABF this year and reconnect with everybody. It felt like the first real conference since the pandemic. It really did have that vibe for sure. Yes, I just assume that everybody knows about soil microbes and knows about soil health, and thinks about regenerative agriculture. Because that's just the world that I'm now living in. When I do go back to a bee conference or speak at a bee conference or attend a bee conference or go back into the beekeeping world or connect with a commercial beekeeper at a farmer's market, it does take a bit. Because I just start speaking in the speaker and they're like, "Wait, what?"

Becky: Wait just a second.

Sarah: You're not doing good like-- I sent the honeybee samples to go get tested for viruses. That was the first question out of the guy, the lab's mouth was like, "Oh, how's your Kids program going?" I'm literally living on a bison ranch. I'm sending you samples from the middle of 'nowhere' , South Dakota, I'm not doing a kids program, but later that week, I actually did have a meeting with the Pine Ridge Reservation about doing a kids program. I'll always do kids stuff and I'll always figure out a way to fold it in, but it's just not my primary thing anymore, so yes, there is a bit of confusion because I did that for 10 years. I headed up the ABF program for 10 years, and I took it around the world. I got a Facebook memory yesterday that I was in Yorkshire, in Huddersfield eight years ago doing a kids program there. It was so delightful and such a good memory and I was like, "Oh wow, it's really solidly my life for so long."

Becky: What you're doing now is not easy, native bee surveys, that transects, all of that, that is hard, hard work. Do you feel like the education you got at Montana, did that prepare you for this?

Sarah: All of my coursework was more policy work and more ecology, biology work, and then my only bee experience was beekeeping and working in the bee lab. Definitely developing a scientist mindset, for sure. I learned that at UM. As far as the native bee thing, I'm pretty much self-taught. I've just been really, really lucky to have some great mentors who-- Robin Thorpe, before he passed, I spent a lot of time with him, which was absolutely wonderful. When I was doing my first native bee survey project in 2016, Sam Droege.

Becky: Oh, wow. These are big names.

Sarah: He was so responsive. He spent a lot of time on the phone. He helped me set up my study. I emailed him a million questions. He was so responsive and so lovely and so wonderful. Then also the Oregon Bee Project started, and so I was able to connect with Lincoln Best, a taxonomist for OSUNO, and he helped out a ton. It's more like one-on-one mentorship. Then we also hired Sarah Gardner for a couple of years to help set up all of our-- she was our scientific advisor as well as our taxonomist, so she helped set up a lot of our studies to make sure that they were publishable, replicable, rigorous, all of the things.

Now working with Skyler Burrows, he's a taxonomist for the USDA, but then he moonlights doing small projects like this. He's so helpful and responsive and answers a lot of questions. I'm just lucky enough to have some real rock stars in the native bee world helping me out with these projects.

Becky: You gave a presentation of this work for the American Association of Professional Apiculturists. That's a top audience.

Sarah: It was amazing. It was such a cool experience. It was so hard to get. I presented on our bison project, and I am right now, just really in a data-gathering phase over at The Bison Ranch. Really excited to start getting enough data where I feel confident to share and educate from everything that we're learning out there. This was year two, and I hope that it's like a 20-year project because there's so much to learn out there, and I'm not a grad student and I don't have my own lab at a university, so I'm not on a timeline. I don't have to publish.

We're out there for four different reasons. One is to gather enough data to be able to share management strategies or collaborate on management strategies with the ranchers and the ranch managers. Number two is to really understand these bee communities out in South Dakota. There may be bees out there that are yet to be discovered, to keep an eye on their communities, keep an eye on their communities as far as how climate change is affecting them, which I can say it definitely is out there, and if there's any mitigation strategies climate-wise that we can do to help these bees out. Also because there's so many honeybee hives out there, we're looking at the interaction between honeybees and native bees. Lastly is to educate the consumers on bison and bison burger and how amazing bison are.

Becky: I didn't see that coming.

Sarah: How amazing bison are for the ecosystem and for bees. I think that buying direct from these companies that are regeneratively managing bison are a key to honeybee health and native bee survival. Right now, it's anecdotal because it's just what I'm seeing. We're gathering some pretty solid data to show that. Educating the people about how amazing bison are, how even if they're not being raised for meat, I think that they belong absolutely everywhere.

I'm wowed by this animal. I want to see them in any place that they can possibly be, tribal lands, state parks, federal lands, ranches. I'd love to see more people ranching bison. Also, there's a part of it that is consumer and public and rancher education about these animals and how cool they are and how beneficial they are for bees. That's what I'm doing out there.

I got to present on some very preliminary research at the conference earlier this year in New Orleans, and it was very intimidating. Out of the dozens of people that presented, I was one of the only people there that wasn't either working on a PhD or a master's or had my own lab. What I lacked in data visualization, I made up for in beautiful pictures of bison.

Becky: Nice job.

Sarah: It was really very different from any other presentations that were given that session, that day, that week. I always judge my success on a presentation by the questions afterwards. It just shows how engaged people were and it also shows how much they understood what I was talking about if they can ask really deep questions. I ran over and we still had one minute for questions and everybody just stood there with their mouths agape and nobody had any questions, and I was like, "I bailed."

Then afterwards during the reception, which I think was that night-- oh, no, it was just after that session at the lunch break maybe, there was a line of like 10 people wanting a TED talk. That was really, really, really, really wonderful, and a lot of folks were very excited about that. One of our collaborators on this project is Vanessa Corby-Harris down at the Tucson bee lab, and we're looking at nutrient density and flowers on this landscape particularly together.

It was really funny, your regenerative ag question, because I sent her a bunch of soil data the other day and she's like, "Wow, I don't know what any of this means, but I'm really excited to learn." It's like, "Well, we'll learn together." It is very complex but also very exciting. We're excited to see if we can correlate and pull together some of the soil health data with the nutrient density data. She was one of the folks that was there, that was really excited to see the talk because it was really cool for her. She's got flowers that I'm shipping from this landscape and she got to see a bunch of pictures and really get a good inside look at what we're up to.

I'll be presenting the same presentation but with another year of data under my belt at the Entomological Society of America this November. Very honored to be a truly grassroots research and education organization that is getting accepted to present at these conferences. It gives me just so much hope and excitement around people's enthusiasm for regenerative agriculture and for bison grazing, and bees and bison and the curiosity around that relationship.

Becky: It's very different as far as a presentation than if people go to a regular beekeeping conference. It's a short presentation. The room is filled with scientists, and what happens is that people who are really, really smart will listen to a talk and then share information with you, have conversations, and then you get to say, "Oh, I can go in this direction," or they might offer support as far as data analysis, or something like that.

It's really intense compared to a beekeeping convention. It's so important that you're a part of it because you're going to help shape some of the directions of other people's research, because you had an attentive audience of people who are looking to support bee health and habitat. That's exciting.

Sarah: Along with consumer education, I should add another point that's a completely different point, which is sharing our findings with the scientific community, which is different than educating consumers. That is another part of this project and all the projects that we do, we hope to share our findings with the scientific community.

I don't know if that looks like publishing in the journal nature, but I do know that looks like continuing to remain connected with the scientific bee community and make presentations and share our findings, and exactly to collaborate and to share and to get advice and to give advice if we ever feel that we're to the level to be able to do that. We were approached by a couple of different professors afterwards that were like, "We have a PhD program sitting here waiting for somebody to do large ungulate research on bee habitat if you want it." I was like, "I'm good, but let's continue to talk and I'll be like a pseudo PhD student for you. I'll go out and do all the fieldwork, and we can still talk and share and be excited and nerd out together."

Becky: They do usually have pretty good healthcare insurance, just so you know.

Jeff: Regarding the bison project that you have on your website and you were just referring to, has there been anything in that work that you've been doing watching the buffalo play this last season? Is there anything from that study and work that you've done that's surprised you that you say, "Wow, I didn't really think that would be that way"?

Sarah: The one thing that I had an inkling last year is I noticed that there were areas-- I wasn't really confident enough last year to get too close to the bison. They're huge, and this is a giant herd. Last year, there was 2,400 bison in this herd. It's one of the largest bison herds in the whole entire world, and I was there during the rut. It's a really intense time. The males are fighting and bellowing and wallowing all over the place, and it's just a really, really, really intense time to be around the bison. It was like if they were in the road when I was driving by, I would stop and take some pictures and some videos and listen to the bellows for a while.

I really gave them a lot of space, but I was there this year a little bit later. I was actually there pretty much post-rut when they had divided into their family groups and were just much more mellow. The energy was more mellow. I was a lot more confident to just stay in the paddock that they were in and let them come and go around the van as they felt comfortable. That gave me the absolutely amazing opportunity to actually watch their grazing habits.

I just Jane Goodalled out and I would get my coffee and my tiny little camp chair and my telephoto camera lens and just wash them for hours. Last year, what I noticed was there's a lot of Maximilian sunflowers that were standing and I was like, I don't know if they just haven't been here yet. I don't know if they came through. The Maximilian sunflowers weren't blooming yet, but these are native wild sunflower that many flowers will grow up a stock.

From our data, last year was hands down the most popular flower on the ranch bee-wise. It attracted almost every single genus of bee that was out there was interested in this flower as well. It's honeybees, and also it's blooming at the very end of summer when almost nothing else is blooming. They are extremely drought resilient, fire resilient. It's just such an amazingly cool flower.

I just noticed that there was a lot of them around and I was like, I wonder if the bison eat these because on other ranches and just being a person that lives in the world in the west where pretty much every spot of federal landscape is also a grazing lease, I'm not used to seeing a lot of flowers out there. I'm used to flowers being just totally decimated by cattle. I got to sit there this year and watch them graze through patches of Maximilian sunflowers and not eat them.

If you can imagine thousands of pounds of animal moving through a field of flowers and eating every single piece of grass between all the flower stock and not touching the flowers, it is amazing, or willows. There is a small willow stand that was just growing. They were probably in between 6 inches and 4 feet high. I'm sure they would be delicious because they were brand-new babies and they did not touch the willow and they did not touch the flowers. They only ate the grass.

I watched them, they licked, they didn't do this all the time, but when they were in the flower field, this is what they did. They would lick every bite before they ate it. They would lick it to make sure that it was the grass, and then they would chomp the grass. Then if they licked a flower stem, which is very rough and spiny, they wouldn't eat it. I was like, "Oh, that is just so amazing."

I was there long enough to notice that once the flower goes to seed, they go back through and they top it, but only the flowers that have gone to seed. There's multiple flowers on a stock, and it starts blooming at the top and then progressively blooms all the way to the bottom over a few weeks. I actually have some. I have a bouquet that I collected of the top flowers in the van. They're dried now, but they would just eat the tops of the plant down to where the dried flowers were and leave all the live flowers, which are still completely covered with bees, which is so amazing. I am really curious to know if this helps with seed dispersal.

I'm also curious to know, are they just waiting till it's more-- because there's protein in the seeds, and so are they waiting for the protein-rich, or is there something that they just co-evolved to be bee-friendly? What is happening? I'm so curious. That's the one thing that really blew my mind this year was watching their grazing habits with flowers.

Then, also, I have a control plot out there. Now, the bison have been kept out of-- I have an 11-acre control plot that has had zero bison in it for three years. It is a disaster. It's a mess. There's no flowers. The wallows are completely grown over. Oh, I also found this year ground-nesting bees, Agapostemon. I think they were Agapostemon texanus, a little green sweat bees, metallic green sweat bees. They were making their nests and the cliff side of some bison wallows. The bison wallows actually create habitat space for bees on the prairie, which was amazing to watch with my own eyeballs.

In my control plot, there's no flowers, there's nothing. There's no flowers. The wallows are completely grown over the lake. There's a little pond lake thing in it, stinks to high heaven because of all the overgrown weeds and whatever else. It's really, really, really, really, really cool to watch the rest of the ranch thrive while this one area that has no bison in it is just going to hell in a handbasket right before my very eyes. It's great to be able to collect the data on that. I have soil data and I have my results back already and it is astounding what I have found out there in three years. The changes in the soil are-

Becky: That's amazing.

Sarah: -significant.

Becky: Sarah, where are the ranchers getting their planting advice from? Are they doing USDA programs?

Sarah: Most of them aren't planting at this point. Most of them are just letting nature be nature, and they're using holistic raising or mob grazing, and that's the idea for our work together would be, I could say, "Oh, hey, I found Bombus occidentalis, the Western bumblebee, which is up for listing as an endangered species on this specific kind of flower. When you do your grazing plan, can you please make sure to not be grazing your cows in this area at this specific time?" That's an example of what we're doing together, but they're not planting anything yet. If it was up to me, every ranch in America would be planting massive amounts of Maximilian sunflowers.

Becky: They're in my front yard, so I took care of mine.

Sarah: Excellent. Well done. There was a project that I've been working on for the last three years. It's a Western SARE project actually called Buzz on the Range. They were trying to do planting on their ranches via feeding the cows. This is a cow project, feeding cows flower seeds in the mineral and having them disperse on the landscape through poo. We haven't been seeing anything yet, but a lot of these flowers are perennials and a lot of them are native. It might take a couple years or some pretty good rains before we see some sprouts, but that was a farmer-led project. One of the ranchers just got the idea that she wanted to do it.

Becky: Oh, I want that to work.

Sarah: Got four or five of her rancher friends to sign up and they got a Western SARE grant and then hired me as a contractor to come out and do the observations and the data collection on it. There is one rancher from that project that they had previously done, I think maybe it was a USDA CRP project to get sainfoin planted, and then the sainfoin has been pushed out by smooth brome at this point. I got a donation of sainfoin seeds from a seed company called AZ Seeds. We're getting a donation of soil amendment from Elm Dirt. We're going to tackle that field together and replant it and try to get some more flowers out there. He'll probably do a no-till seed drill.

Becky: Katie Lee would be mad if I didn't tell everybody what SARE is, Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, and beekeepers can get grants to study their research questions. Farmers can write their own grants also. It's a very, very friendly granting system for sustainable agriculture.

Jeff: Oh, very good. I can't believe how quickly this time has flown. Is there anything that we haven't asked you about that you want to bring to the attention of our listeners?

Sarah: Oh my gosh. Well, we just pretty much talked a lot about the Bison Project, because I'm just so excited about it, and I was just there. I just left, and I was just living with the bison for the last three and a half weeks. One family group of the herd decided that the van was a big bison.

Becky: Oh gosh.

Sarah: They basically accepted us into the herd, and they would just come hang out with us in the morning and at night.

Jeff: That's funny.

Sarah: Then when I would leave to go to a different part of the ranch to go do the thing, they would circle up and just hang out in a circle where the van was and sniff the ground, and it was really cool. Anyways, I digress. How can I not just talk about the bison all the time?

Becky: I have a question if you don't have something. Could you just give us a couple minutes on the artwork that you're doing?

Sarah: That's actually what I was going to say.

Becky: Okay, good.

Sarah: I was going to say go to beeregenerative.org and check out all of the other projects we're doing, because we're doing many other things as well besides just the bison. Probably my next favorite, you're not supposed to choose favorites, but my next favorite thing is the Habitat and Cyanotype project. In an attempt to reach into every community that I possibly can, I've started producing art, and I do cyanotypes, which is a very, very old method of taking photographs with the sunshine using photo-sensitive paper.

I mix my own chemicals. I make my own paper, and then all summer long, I take clippings from all of the ranches and the vineyards that we're working on. I flatten them in a flower press. I've just got stacks of flower presses in the van with me. At the end of the year, I load them off into my art studio in Ashland, Oregon. Then I just spend the winter and the spring creating these. Basically, I take pictures of the flowers from our projects with the sun, and then I make little entomological collections on the pictures with pinned bees from the projects.

Then I put them in a shadow box made of reclaimed barn wood to keep it aggie. Then I build a website for every single one of the pieces, so every piece has a website that is correlated with it that tells the story of the flower, the story of the bees that are in the piece, the story of the rancher or winemaker, and then the story of our collaboration, and why we're working together, and what we're doing together. Then pictures of the flower as well that I snapped before I clipped it, or some of their friends that were nearby.

It's just a really cool way. The pieces themselves are co-opt blue and white. They're pretty striking. The bee thing is really cool. It brings people in. It just gets a whole new sect of the different communities that the art is in to talk about flowers and bees, and regenerative agriculture. People that wouldn't necessarily go to a beekeeping conference, or go to a farming conference, or think about soil. It's been a really, really very fun and successful way to also do fundraising for the organization.

Every piece sold 100% goes back to Bee Regenerative, and we have done many big shows where we've sold almost every single piece in the whole entire exhibit, which is really, really, really cool. This winter, I'm working on doing prints and gift cards, so we can do things that are mailable. You don't have to just be at one of our exhibits in Ashland. You can get them from anywhere, and then it will all support the habitat work. Then as well those webpage are live. As I find out more things about the flowers or the bees that are in that piece, I'll update it and then I'll email the purchaser and say, "Hey, I just added one of Dr. Smart's beautiful visualizations-

Becky: Excellent.

Sarah: -or some piece of data, or some discovery that's been made." They're live, and it continues to be interactive throughout the life of the bees. It's super fun. Not like I don't have enough to do in the off-season, but it definitely gives me a very large project to continue to work on, on the off-season to keep me connected to the landscape, and the bees, and our projects.

Jeff: I encourage our listeners to go out to your website to take a look at the artwork, and all the projects that Bee Regenerative, and The Bee Girl have all been a part of, and encourage you also to go back and listen to our earlier episodes. I failed to mention that you were on originally on the podcast with Dr. Becky: Traynor when she co-hosted the show early on. Thanks for returning to the Beekeeping Today podcast. We really enjoy having you on.

Sarah: Yes, I am absolutely delighted to meet up with the both of you and chat about our work, and thank you for the great questions. I truly, truly love and miss the beekeeping community. There's unfortunately just one of me, so I can only be so many places, but I do. That's another thing I look forward to in the downtime is hopefully getting to make it out to a couple beekeeping conferences and reconnect with my beeople. I've been doing this for so long. You guys really do feel like family, and I'm so glad that even though I've done a transition into more habitat and landscape, that you still consider me one of your own. Thank you for having me on.

Becky: We're not letting you get away. Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah: Thank you.

Jeff: It is fun to have Sarah back on the show. She is really busy.

Becky: She's busy, and it's not just keeping busy, it's accomplishing things. She's getting work done. She's doing it in an innovative way, and I think she's representing the beekeeping world really well out there.

Jeff: The work the folks are all doing in this regenerative space, whether it be Jonathan Lundgren or Sarah, or all the many other folks that are doing work in this area of agriculture are doing such important work, and they're really, forgive the pun, but breaking ground on something that's so important to the health of all pollinators, our honeybees. Quite honestly, and not to get too spacey about it, but to the entire world. This regenerative environment, or agriculture is key.

Becky: Exactly. I think that the reason we have a habitat crisis is because agriculture hasn't been regenerative, so had we just kept on doing it the right way instead of making a really big shift. It would've helped out everybody, I think, including the bees.

Jeff: That's a great segue into this next month's series on the habitat crisis. Folks, I know you'll enjoy listening to it as much as we had, and getting it ready for you.

Becky: Well said.

Jeff: That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to follow us and rate us five stars on Apple Podcast wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you like. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the reviews along the top of any webpage. We want to thank our regular episode sponsors, Betterbee, Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and Northern Bee Books for their generous support.

Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank you, the Beekeeping Today podcast listener, for joining us on this show. Feel free to leave us questions and comments at the leave a comment section under each episode on the website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

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