The Habitat Crisis #2 - Dr. Andony Melathopoulos (300)

300 - The Habitat Crisis #2 - Dr. Andony Melathopoulos

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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 Betterbee and all of our sponsors, whose 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 300 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.beekeepingtoday.com. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the show. Becky, this is the second this month of the Minnesota Honey Producers' sponsored habitat series.

Becky: Yes. It's very exciting. The honey producers are pretty passionate about good habitat for bees. We know that nectar is critical for honey production and to help with survival, and we also understand that pollen and all those amino acids and micronutrients it brings is also critical to bee health. The honey producers are very excited to sponsor basically a month of podcasts to really promote and support honey bee health via habitat.

Jeff: Yes. Honey bee habitat month. Woo-hoo.

Becky: I love it.

Jeff: We appreciate the Minnesota Honey Producers for sponsoring this series this month. Today's guest is Andony Melathopoulos from Oregon State University. He's been on the show before, and he has his own podcast. We'll talk to him about that as well.

Becky: Andony is all things honey bee health, and one of his passions is trying to figure out how we can increase nectar and pollen in the landscape. I cannot wait to get an update on what he is doing, and really, information that should support listeners, not just in North America, but this should give some help to beekeepers across the world.

Jeff: It's going to be fun and look forward to having him on. He's been on the show before. Speaking of Beekeeping Today podcast shows, did you know this episode is number 300 of Beekeeping Today podcast episodes?

Becky: Wow. That's a big number.

Jeff: 300 episodes. I can't believe that we're there, but we're there.

Becky: Jeff, that's a big chunk of your life that you've spent putting together information to support beekeepers. I love that it landed in the middle of this habitat series because I think the podcast-- Before I became a co-host, I remember coming to you and saying, "Oh, we really want to get the word out on this. Do you think we could talk to you about this?" You and Kim were always so generous about helping spread the word about good beekeeping programs and opportunities. Congratulations, and what an honor it is for me to be a part of it now.

Jeff: Yes. Thank you. I'm glad you are a part of it. I can remember when we did our 100th, and it was like, "Wow, we made it to 100, and people are still listening." We made it to 200 and now 300. I really appreciate the listeners out there, our sponsors, and it's a joy to be able to bring this news, information, and entertainment [chuckles] about beekeeping to our listeners. Thank you, everybody, for getting us to number 300.

Becky: Hey, if we recorded three a week, we could get to 400 really fast. [laughs]

Jeff: Okay. Next up is Andony Melathopoulos. We look forward to talking to him about habitats and how they affect honey bees.

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Jeff: While you're at the Strong Microbials site, make sure you click on and subscribe to The Hive, the regular newsletter full of interesting beekeeping facts and product updates. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Sitting across the virtual Beekeeping Today podcast table and right down I-5 for me is Dr. Andony Melathopoulos, sitting at Oregon State University. Andony, welcome back to the show.

Dr. Andony Melathopoulos: It's so great to be here. The 300th episode.

Jeff: Oh, you heard, huh? You heard?

[laughter]

Andony: Amazing.

Becky: Welcome.

Andony: You guys rock.

[laughter]

Jeff: Having you on is exciting too because you always bring a wealth of information and experience. For our listeners who've not heard from you or your podcast, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got started in the work you're doing, and then we'll get on to the subject of habitat.

Andony: Yes, sure. I'm a student of Dr. Mark Winston back in the '90s. I've been in apiculture for a while. I worked in British Columbia. I worked for Agriculture Canada for a long time with their apiculture research program in Beaverlodge, Alberta, where the honey crops, we're going to be talking about nectar today, the honey crops are legend. From there, I went out east to Eastern Canada, worked in lowbush blueberry with Chris Cutler and Steve Javorek, lowbush blueberry pollination.

Shelley Hoover was my next stop, Lethbridge, Alberta, where all the hybrid canola seed production happens. Then from there, I got this dream job down in Oregon State University back in 2016, which was not apiculture. It was a strange new program. It was pollinator health. We already have a world-class apiculture research and extension program under Dr. Ramesh Sagili at OSU. This program was different. It was focused more on the relations between pollinators, both managed ones, we have four in the Pacific Northwest, but also the wild bees of the state and people like pesticide applicators, but also people who are trying to put habitat into their landscape. Those all fall under the bailiwick of this program.

Oh, and the one last thing is we have this huge, huge wild bee survey, probably the biggest in the nation, where we have volunteers. We have a master beekeeping program here, but we also in Oregon have a master melittology program, where volunteers learn how to pin, curate specimens. They have over 200,000 records for the state of Oregon, making it the richest contemporary data set on wild bees.

Jeff: You have a master beekeeper, which is your typical master beekeeper program.

Andony: Wait, wait. One of the best master beekeeping programs. Sorry.

Becky: [laughs] Uh-oh. Uh-oh.

[laughter]

Jeff: Did I say typical? Oh, I'm sorry.

[laughter]

Jeff: I meant the best, a leading, benchmark-setting master beekeeping program.

Becky: I'm sensing some competition here.

[laughter]

Jeff: The point being that you have the-- now you're going to have to say that word again--

Andony: Melittologist.

Jeff: I kept wanting to say Melathopoulos, and I knew that was wrong. That's all about native bees?

Andony: It's about wild bees. People, they go out, and they collect honey bees out in the wild. I was up in strange places, but they are-- there's all sorts of other species that aren't native that are wild in Oregon, tons of them, but they're collecting and getting an inventory, but also figuring out the plants that each of those bees go to. Each time they collect a bee, they've got a plant record, and so it's this huge data set of bees and plants. It's really cool.

Jeff: Is that publicly available? Can someone sit there, and it's coming soon? I sense a future episode here.

[laughter]

Becky: I love it. Andony, do you have beekeepers who are part of both programs?

Andony: Yes, and I love that part of it. We have a number of beekeepers, some brilliant people; Steve Gomes, Linda Zall, Amber Reese, people who are really dedicated, know their apiculture, and also work with wild bees. I think that's essential. As I mentioned on a previous episode here, there's a strange pitting of the two. I think, of course, people who are in apiculture are predisposed. They already know the anatomy, they already know the biology. They are the essential components of any kind of statewide approach to wild bees.

Jeff: We invited you here to talk about the habitat and the honey bee and the native bee and sometimes how those two cross and interact and how they're so closely tied to the habitat. Can you sum that up really quick and give us the lead-breaking story before we get into the nitty-gritty details? How closely tied are they?

Andony: Before we started recording, Becky and I were talking about Minnesota honey yields, how historically they've declined. Beekeepers do not get the yields that they used to. I was in Alberta recently. This is a province with 120-pound averages and having some years where things are slimming out. There is this problem of land use, the way that land has been converted over historically to new uses. There used to be a lot of legumes on the landscape.

When it comes to honey bee honey yields, brassicas and legumes, clovers, alfalfa, that was the bedrock of our record honey yields. We're seeing a lot of that leave the landscape as other protein sources for livestock have taken hold. We've seen, since the '90s, an explosion of new crops. A lot of those crops need pollination, but they're not great-yielding crops. We've seen a lot of changes historically.

In addition to this, the federal government has a program where they would set aside land from the 1990s. That program has seen a retraction of funding, especially in places like North Dakota, the pothole country where the nation's honey supply really depends on, we've seen lots of those fields that used to be in those programs taken out.

We're seeing a real problem across the board in terms of getting that pasture back into the landscape. It is a related question to the wild bees, but I think there, as I've mentioned in previous episodes, it's a separate issue, especially in the west, where our wild bee diversity are in places that are not suitable for apiculture largely. They are in the high desert in places where you wouldn't take your bees anyways. Those places need attention. Those plant communities are facing grazing, all sorts of other pressures and we need to identify them and keep them intact.

Of course, there's obviously wild bees in places where there's apiculture, but I really think that if we were going to really spend dollars wisely, we need to focus on those problems separately because they're not the same problem.

Jeff: They often get conflated or they often get mixed up. The last couple of years I've been surprised to see the honey bee is not native, so you got to protect the native bees. Folks, stop. The problem is the habitat. If you support the habitat, all insects thrive.

Andony: It's true, but I think we need to be more deliberate. Clint Otto did a really nice study in the Midwest a bunch of years ago, where he simulated bee-plant interactions and he looked at different seed mixes. He said, "You can get a really great solution to honey bee pasture for a fraction of the cost that it would cost to really do get the full host of wild bee species because they don't all go to the same plants.

This time of year we're a wash with composites. There's cone coneflowers and coreopsis and golden rod and sunflowers. There's a whole bunch of wild bees that won't exist without those sunflowers. Of course, honey bees will go to them, but in some ways, out of desperation. There's nothing really left at this time of year. It's too dry, it's too hot. The mint family is long behind us and a lot of the legumes are also not around anymore.

I do think that when it comes to wild bees, you need to know the plant community, the bee community, and you have to be very deliberate. There's not a one-size-fits-all solution. For honey bees, there is a one-size-fits-all solution. You need more legumes in the landscape, period, really, and brassicas. There's two groups that you need to get in the landscape, and they're super cheap. Growers know how to grow them and get them in the ground. That's a very simple problem.

If we try to do both at the same time, we squander resources. We end up putting very expensive wild bee habitat in the Central Valley, where there's not really a wild bee community of note, of uniqueness, where we should be doing brassica, like Project Apis M. Seeds for Bees program, where, "What do we got? What's the problem? Here it is. Let's put our resources and our muscle into this problem and do it well," which they do, do well. I think that's the problem. One of the problems we face is figuring out what the problem is and spending our money specifically on it.

Becky: I just have to ask, that was so straightforward. Would you have had the same answer five years ago?

Andony: No.

Becky: You are just saying, "It's simple. Here's the solution, let's just do it," which is lovely because that came from research, experience, and being there trying to solve the problem.

Andony: Well said, Becky. Yes. Exactly. I've been in enough trucks, and I've seen enough wild bee communities, and I've seen enough honey bee colonies, and I've seen enough colonies that people want to do something for them and it doesn't work out. I've just seen the way in which resources haven't been allocated optimally, in some cases, just really badly. We could really, "Let's figure out what we want to do, and then let's dedicate resources towards it."

Jeff: Let's take this quick break and we'll be right back and hear more from Andony Melathopoulos.

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Becky: Welcome back, everybody. Andony, it's almost like you solved our problem and we don't need to talk anymore, but I bet there's more information in your head, [laughs] as far as specific user groups that you have worked with and your experiences and what your conclusions are for different kinds of landscapes.

Andony: Thanks, Becky. Well, that's generous of you, but I do think it's easy to frame it up, but the road hits the rubber when you get out into the world. Again, I would put a shout-out to Project Apis M. I think they had a real clear strategy in California of what they wanted to do. They knew beekeepers were having trouble. It was the nation's beekeeping supply virtually going to California.

It was, "We have to transition a grower group that is used to having bare ground underneath their trees for nut collection. We're going to convince them to put a cover crop underneath the trees." That seems like a simple problem, but you automatically run into thousands of producers with their practices. As beekeepers, we have ways that we keep our bees, and they come about because of experience and bad years, all those things. There's reasons why people do things. Suddenly somebody comes in and says, "What you need to do is this."

What I think they did remarkably is that they figured out the strategy, they made the seed free, they had the technical support on the ground, they went to the meetings. It took years to get to where we are with the Seeds for Bees program. I think that is missing. It sounds like the problem is solved, but what is missing is these very focused programs that have a goal in mind and that don't waffle, but keep the course and get the thing working on the ground because the user groups have all sorts of problems.

Commodity prices took a spike and now they're coming back down again. They've got mortgages to pay. You walk up to a grower that doesn't pay $200 a colony for a rental. Go to blueberries for example, and say, "The pollinator habitat." It's a hard sell. How are we going to get habitat into those places where they are worried about, let's say I have to do a pest management spray. Now, I've put pollinator habitat and I can't treat my aphids because I've made this commitment to putting this thing in. How am I going to do that? How am I going to do my pest management and help pollinators at the same time?

Those things have to be worked out, but you have to also hear that problem articulated and find the cracks where pollinator habitat can be inserted. I think right now there's two big problems. The one was California almonds and the other one was the Great Plains. Getting up in your area in Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, those areas, getting honey bee pasture into those areas is critical. That's maybe more of a federal issue in the federal programs.

In these areas, like I am or Michigan or parts of California that are outside of almonds, we're dealing with small groups and getting them on board, there's not going to be a short-term payoff. You're going to have to hear what their concerns are, what their restrictions are, and try to fit things in. I could go through examples of different groups and problems that they encounter. [laughs]

Becky: I have at least one question I have to ask because I'm starting to sweat here. You're talking about habitat underneath trees. In Minnesota, our rule of thumb is make sure you are mowing that so there are no flowering plants when pesticides are applied. You can put it there, but make sure it's not flowering during application or-- please solve this for me.

Andony: That's the trick.

Becky: Is that the trick?

Andony: Let's think about a farm. A farm is not the only place where pollinator habitat can go on. You can put it between the rows, and as you point out, Becky, that opens up a whole can of worms. You could put it on the headlands. If you go by any field crops, it's usually right to the roadside. There's a little ditch and then it's crops. There's not a lot of areas there.

There you can look at-- There are some headlands in terms of hedge rows or areas that are marginal. I think the Bees and Butterfly Habitat program has really focused on these marginal lands and pulling them out of production, convincing the grower that this land is not worth actually cultivating, and creating a piece of land on the edge or in the Pacific Northwest, we may have a field with grass, that has a purpose, you have to drive over it, but it is also in the dry Pacific Northwest, that grass is right now brown.

One thing that we've been focusing on trying to figure out is there's all sorts of plants that will grow under grass through the winter. After that last mowing in May will bolt. Chicory is a great example of this, where the plant will just pop up, and it just has to support a tractor driving on it. Otherwise, it has no other purpose. The other place in a farm, is that grassy rows or those areas that are too wet to farm where you can plug in habitat. There is some risk still for some of them if it's too close, if you're spraying a pesticide, that it can drift on there, which creates some problems for the grower, but it's not nearly as bad as having it in between the crop where they just can't do, really restricts their farming practices.

Becky: Right. I've seen that in Iowa and it still makes me nervous. Some of the pollinator strips.

Andony: Yes, it should be.

Becky: Okay. I'm like, "Wait, but--" [laughs]

Andony: The filter strip program is something I've wondered about, though. In Iowa, I did a podcast with the people at Iowa State. That was interesting because they'd survey people in the counties, like, "What's a priority to you?" and water quality was a priority. They want to put these strips in with deep-rooted plants so that anywhere they've got a little bit of a slope, it'll catch the pesticide and prevent it from going into the water course. That might a place where you could put some deep-rooted perennials, and it could be that it is going to have the pesticide residues moving into the plant may be problematic.

I don't know. Those are all the things that need to be worked out, but there you have a lot of support to try and prevent, as most rural communities do not-- You want to make sure that they want farming, but they want their water quality to be high. Figuring out, there might be a little niche where pollinator habitat will go in like that. Maybe that's the second solution. There's another problem that people are trying to solve. Can you slip in some coneflowers there or can you slip in something that would be of benefit?

Of course, those are little pieces. I think coming back to it and thinking about this key problem, honey crops in America and how we're going to get them back, we're not going to get them back with filter strips, we're going to get them back with big plots of land planted to clover somehow.

Becky: I will just say to beekeepers out there, if you don't know what your average yield per colony is for your state now compared to there are easily searchable data 30 years ago, check it out, because if you have not been keeping bees for a long time, you probably don't know what you're maybe missing. Honey production makes just all the change in the world, from struggling to manage bees to managing healthy bees. It's a very different animal. Literally, your bees with tons of nectar and pollen versus your bees that are really struggling to pull in nectar.

I want every beekeeper in America to know that number, to know what it used to be versus what it is now. We might not get to where it was, but let's have a goal. [laughs] You basically said the solution is cheap, and I think that's why Bee and Butterfly Habitat Fund has figured it out, that it's the free seed solution and project Apis M. Seeds for Bees. Is there also information out there that you've been able to share with growers that says not only you're putting in this habitat, so you're supporting your hired pollinators, your managed pollinators, but you also get a boost in pollination by having a more robust native pollinator population living close by. Are those data out there, and do they support these different management techniques?

Andony: Yes. There is data from other parts of the country that show that having a habitat in proximity to the crop can supplement pollination. For me, I'm not familiar with all the examples in the Pacific Northwest is less so. For me, the example that I always have in my head is the lowbush blueberry crop and the work that Frank Drummond did out in Maine, where he really convincingly made the case, and also my former supervisor, Steve Javorek in Canada, where they really showed that making a little bit of invest-- especially there where there's a lot of wild bees that are--

Wild blueberry is a wild plant, and so the bee community is really-- there's a whole bunch of Andrena that just pop out of the ground with bloom and they're really keyed into it. I think it's not a one-size-fits-all. Maybe this is the message that I have. We have these ideas, and they don't fit everywhere. I think it is about prioritizing where they do fit. In Oregon, we've got two crops, I would say that really demonstrably have wild bee benefits, and that would be red clover and coastal cranberries. Blueberries are visited by bumblebees and they do a better job, but it blooms at a time when queens are just starting nests, and you don't have those huge populations.

I find in Oregon, the later blooming crops, when the colonies have already established benefit from the bumblebees and the habitat, it's really contextual in some places, maybe even Florida where there is a Habropoda blueberry bee that is in sync with that system. I think that makes a lot of sense, but one needs to be realistic about it. You can't just walk in and say, "You're going to get all these benefits." Many farmers are very good businesswomen and businessmen and they know exactly what return they're getting out of their fertilizer. You go in there and try to sell them this and it gets a word that this is flimsy and a place where invasive weeds are moving in, you're never going to talk to them again. You're done with them.

Becky: I can't wait to see a picture of the blueberry bee, but I want you to share. [chuckles] I think some people are googling Andrena right now. Do you want to talk a little bit about Andrena Bee? [laughs]

Andony: Yes. Some of our earliest ground-nesting bees, it's a really specious group. I venture to say the most species in Oregon is probably in that group. They come out all year, but they really are early-season bees. There's no social bee in that whole group. They're all solitary. They're ground nesting. It's one of the first solitary bees you see in the spring, at least here in Oregon, probably in other parts of the US.

Becky: People will often have them nesting, not in the same nest, but groups of nests alongside their houses here in Minnesota.

Andony: Thanks, Becky. There's a school in Portland where Mace Vaughan from the Xerces Society, his kids went there. They had them all over the playground, so this Andrena miserabilis. It's really common here in the Pacific Northwest. They made the mascot for the school tickle bees. [laughs]

Becky: Oh, that's so smart. That's what we have to do.

Andony: Sable Elementary.

Becky: I love that. [laughs]

Jeff: We'll get a link to that in the show notes and that'll be fun to see. Is there anything the individual can do to help with the habitat issue for honey bees, and native bees, wild bees?

Andony: I remember we had this similar conversation in the last episode I was on and I think people really need to think about things. I think the beekeeping industry has been great at this, but I think they need to double down and be very concerted with what they want. I think spreading a little bit of money here and a little bit of money there, and talking about politics is okay, but we really do need a really strong strategy where our commercial honey bee colonies are going. For just the health of this industry, that's critical.

For wild bees, in contrast, we need to also support them. I think we need to go to bat when we're doing conservation work and we have to get away. Because I think what we had in the Obama years was a straightforward push to legislators, clear what we were doing, and now the message is fracturing into all these pieces. Beekeepers need to get behind where we need to do wild bee conservation and support that too.

As I mentioned on that last episode, people who are wild bee advocates need to do the same. They need to say, "Okay, this place needs honey bee habitat and we need to invest in it. We're going to support you because you've supported us when we wanted a piece of BLM land in Utah with no benefit to honey bees. We have come to bat and said this is a national priority for wild bees." I think that's the one thing you can do, is just go to your bee clubs, go to the state meetings, come up with a strategy.

Even in Oregon, we have the Natural Resource Conservation Service. They set priorities on a region-wide basis. I don't think any beekeepers ever go to those meetings. I don't think they've ever gone to them. There's all sorts of other people at those meetings. They should know which one they want to go to, go to the meeting as a group, say, "This is a priority for us." Otherwise, other priorities, and there's all sorts of priorities that need to be met, will get filled. I think thinking a little bit more strategically about what we need to do.

I often wonder, I'm probably going to be skewered for this if this is going to be the one YouTube clip that's going to be on there. I once gave a seminar here at OSU and I talked about bee habitat, and I had my colleague who's in the nursery breeding area say, "Let me get this straight. You want us to subsidize your industry with habitat, whereas I'm in the nursery trade, nobody's giving us anything?" I said, "There is a point to that, and maybe we need to develop some very high-yielding nectar plants."

I often think about this, where you have a grower who is growing a hay field and you want them to go past the point where they're going to lose nitrogen in that hay, you're going to pay them something so that they withhold, and they're going to get less value on that hay, but you're going to get that nectar. We may need to come up with strategies to really get pieces of land that we are going to invest in and get the yields out of them.

George Hansen, a beekeeper here in Oregon, plants a lot of bee habitat. He's investing in his own habitat. He's thinking about how to make those investments. He has tilia trees, for example. He just knows you get more bang for your buck over time, needs less care. We may need to spend some of our own money and get areas of land, good chunks that are going to just spit out nectar and pollen in gobs. We've to thing, "We have 5 acres, how am I going to get the most out of these 5 acres?"

To that end, let me just make one quick plug. Again, Project Apis M., thank goodness for them, we did have a grant with them where we tested, I can't remember, 70 forage plants for nectar and pollen production in the Pacific Northwest region. I think that kind of working out-- Donate to Project Apis M., and then that kind of work where we can figure out what those key plants are and if we are going to actually put some of our own dimes down, what are we going to focus on so that we get the most out of it? I think that's also important.

Becky: I just want to say a couple of things to that point. Okay, I'm going to brag about Minnesota, so hang on. Hang on, everybody.

Andony: Yes, Minnesota, you should brag about it. You guys have amazing programs.

Becky: I'm going to include a couple of other states, but last year, 2023, we had a tri-state convention in Minnesota North and South Dakota, and we had a habitat auction, a live auction, where beekeepers paid $65 for a pound of white Dutch clover. We just had, not the going rate, but-

Jeff: What is the going rate?

Becky: $5?

Andony: Wholesale or?

Becky: $10, depending on where you buy it. Anyway, at the end of the night, the generosity of a lot of commercial beekeepers, a lot of beekeeping industry participants, we had $66,000 that we raised, that we donated to the Bee and Butterfly Habitat Fund for projects in our tri-state area, and they're giving out free seed to the landowners. I think we raised about $2,500 for Project Apis M. It happened again this year, where George Hanson has donated the encaustic paintings, which are just amazing, and this year, Pat Heitkam donated a couple of bundles of queens.

The people who are on these boards for these projects are donating their work, their bees, their efforts, and trying to help us raise money for them. I'm not promising a George Hansen painting for everybody, but there are opportunities for beekeeping groups when you get together to potentially raise funds for some of these organizations that are then helping with the free seed to growers or landowners that can make a difference.

Andony: Just to punctuate that point, Pat also donates queens at our auction, and so does George. It's the same names, and they're very generous. I think that level of stewardship of the industry and supporting it and being present, if you want, another thing you can do is really congratulate and thank those people who really step up every time. They're the same people. I think they're-

Becky: John Miller. Yes. [laughs] They are.

Andony: They're critical. Without them, we would be in trouble. We do have maybe two dozen people across the nation who are really doing extraordinary work. If you don't have the time or the bandwidth, I don't know how these people do it, but you should congratulate them.

Becky: They're setting such a good example. I think it's one of the reasons why this industry needs to come together, beekeepers of all levels. I think there's criticism going both directions, but the commercial beekeepers that I have relationships with, oh my gosh, they are obsessed with trying to improve bee health and to protect our bees and to protect the industry. If only we could get everybody on board working in that same direction, we could do a lot of good.

Jeff: I want to ask a question that's going to take us back to the very beginning. Sitting here thinking and listening, and this is all sounds really good, we haven't explicitly stated what has happened to bee habitat. Is it shopping malls and shopping centers? Is it housing or is it big ag? Where has it gone?

Andony: We've seen a homogenization, at least in the Midwest, in terms of crops. We've seen, starting in about the mid-'90s, a trend upwards with corn and soybean, which has displaced what might have been a hay field. What the people in Minnesota may have seen years ago is they would have a big sweet clover field, or they'd have hay fields, or they'd have-- All of that has fallen away. That's one dimension in agriculture. There's those field crops which have not the benefits that the field crops in the past may have had.

We've also seen, as I mentioned earlier, there has been an explosion of new crops that they may produce nectar and pollen, but they need pollination. You come out of a blueberry field, of course, blueberries produce nectar, but not four colonies an acre. There is that problem too, where we're increasingly dependent on crop pollination since the '90s, and this has exploded.

I do think urbanization is another issue. Thank God for Oregon's agricultural land use policy set back in the 1970s, far-reaching legislation that has retained a lot of areas. Sorry, I love Idaho. Idaho is a beautiful state and great place and great people, but you can see the difference in land use there, where the Treasure Valley beautiful agricultural land is getting converted into condos, and that is because of land use policy.

The part of it is that as well where we have not thought a lot about what our resources are as a state or as a nation and prioritized this is what this should be for, I think that's also changed since the '90s specifically. I think that's been a big change. A lot of those policies that might have been in place have been eroded.

Becky: I think I can hear a beekeeper screaming, and it's all of those turf grass lawns we keep maintaining. [chuckles] We do a lot of that too. People, [chuckles] they get really big yards and they don't want any dandelions or clover or any flowering plants, and they just want these perfect grass lawns.

Andony: The bigger problem is, if I can just say, we have encroachment into agricultural areas of people who buy up an acreage, and then I have a commercial beekeeper across the road and there's bees in my swimming pool, and they go to the county and they say, "We have to restrict this activity." We're seeing that too, where beekeepers are struggling to find good places to put their colonies.

They can get a semi in and out of, and those places are increasingly being closed down to our beekeepers. There's all sorts of-- That has ramifications that goes in multiple directions, where I think it's just squeezing beekeepers into places that might not have the best habitat. It's the only place available to them. There's a lot of not enough places and beekeepers crowding places that are good because there's nowhere else to go. That's happening and that is a real problem.

Jeff: Well, I don't want to end the podcast on a down note. I apologize for taking us back to [crosstalk] the regional problem.

Becky: Thanks a lot, Jeff. We were in such a good roll. [laughs]

Jeff: Geez. Can I re-edit this? There are smart people and dedicated people working on finding solutions for this, and Andony, you're one of those folks that are trying to understand the problem and come up with solutions that's beneficial to everybody. I appreciate the efforts that you and your team and the people that you work with are doing.

Andony: Thanks, and I do have a lot of hope, and I do think it's where Becky put it. We've come out of the pandemic with our beekeeping clubs, our beekeeping associations. It was a hard time, but I do see them still there and going, and that, I think, we really need to pay attention. You do need to go to your bee club. You do need to support your state association.

This is the way in which we're going to make our way forward, and it is heartening to see the clubs survive the pandemic, come together and have health. To me, that if I see a way forward, it's through that grassroots of beekeepers from urban and county beekeeping clubs, right up to the state association, up to our national organizations. That's the way forward.

Jeff: I was congratulating you on the work that you're doing, but the other thing that you do, you're a great communicator, as we've enjoyed listening to you and talking with you today. You also have your own podcast. Can you tell our listeners about your podcast?

Andony: It's the cheap kind of-- [crosstalk]

Jeff: Oh God, we're-- No, no, no. That's not true at all. Don't queue it up that way.

[laughter]

Andony: No, here it goes. When I started the podcast, I did it with the intention-- I didn't think anybody would listen to it. Maybe you did as well, Jeff, when you started this with Kim, but I thought, nobody's going to listen to it, but at least I'm going to talk to somebody and I'll have a conversation, because you're more likely to talk with somebody, and so I've had all sorts of-- I remember doing one podcast outside the Southern Oregon Beekeepers Association meeting in the cab of the truck as it was getting dark. I did one outside the bathroom, where I cornered a guy at a pesticide talk.

Jeff: That would've been an interesting conversation.

Andony: No, it was a little surprise to see me, [chuckles] but I wanted to-- I guess part of it was I wanted to have listeners introduced to the many conversations that I was having episodically. In some ways, it's a little bit, some episodes are short and some episodes-- I had one with a legislature that was 10 minutes. I had one with a historian that was like two hours. [chuckles] Just a little bit, but thanks so much for the plug PolliNation the Nickel version.

Becky: Since he's not doing a good job of it, let me do a good job of it. [laughter] I will say, the one thing I love about it is that you never know what subject's going to pop up in the feed. Was it grounding bees? That's what's just came out, and then you also had something on the yellow-legged hornet. Correct?

Andony: That was also in a bar. We recorded that one in a bar. That was awesome.

Jeff: I haven't heard that one. I'm going to have to listen.

Becky: Why can't we record in a bar? Anyway, but you never know what's going to pop up. It reminds me at the beginning of you've got these beekeepers out there who are also crossing over and becoming experts on native bees, but you become a better beekeeper by listening to your podcast because you are learning about not just honey bees, but about all the bees out there, and bigger policy issues, and it's excellent. I strongly encourage people to listen, despite your lack of effective promotion.

[laughter]

Andony: Thanks, Becky.

Jeff: Andony, is there anything that we haven't covered that you would like to make sure our listeners know about, either yourself or the programs you work with?

Andony: No, it's been real pleasure being with you guys today. I always love-- I'm a avid Beekeeping Todaylistener, so thanks for having me. It's always an honor to be on the show.

Jeff: I don't think we have an opening from Oregon State. Sometime you ought to send us in an opening welcoming our listeners to the show. We'll put it up there.

Andony: We hatched a plan of having you guys on the show, so we have to arrange that. I think we need a Beekeeping Today podcast because my listeners are a little bit different. I think there's some beekeepers, but I think there's gardeners and growers. It's a different crowd, and I'd love them to be Beekeeping Todaysubscribers.

[music]

Jeff: We'd be happy to join you. Thanks a lot, Andony. We appreciate you being here today.

Becky: You've really helped our habitat series with all the information you shared, so we are very grateful. Thank you.

Jeff: It's amazing. You think that it's a small problem, then it becomes even a larger problem, then becomes a smaller problem when you frame it up, and then it becomes the answers just-- It's really complex.

Becky: Well, I heard the answer's cheap, so that's exciting. [chuckles]

Jeff: There's a first.

Becky: If you're a honey bee. I know. [chuckles] Let's just celebrate that. Our bees are cheap eaters. It's like, they go to McDonald's, not the Steakhouse, of flowers, of course. I'm still surprised and really happy because I've talked to Andony before, and it used to be more-- I'm not saying it's not complicated, because it is, like you said, but I'm still surprised he as a scientist was able to say, "It's simple. We just have to do it at this point."

Of course, there's work with relationships, but the seed solution and what the solution is, it sounds pretty exciting. I'm going to stop talking in a second, but again, I need beekeepers to hear how much easier it is to manage bees if there's more food for them, and they're able to draw out easier you have to feed them less during dearth periods. They are able to just be healthier, and so less susceptible to diseases if they have good food.

In a lot of areas across the states where I've done a lot of talks across the states, where I will look up their honey production and it's dramatically lower, and their yields are lower as well as total production. I hope that beekeepers hear that, one, there's a solution, and two, most importantly, there's a problem. [chuckles] There's definitely a problem.

Jeff: It seems so easy. A healthy bee is a well-fed bee, and it really just simplifies life for the bee, for the beekeepers, for everyone. I really do want to thank the Minnesota Honey Producers Association for sponsoring this series and bringing us this valuable information for all beekeepers across the country.

[music]

Becky: Ah, on behalf of the Minnesota Honey Producers and as chair of their Habitat Committee co-chair, I would like to say you are welcome and we are just delighted that Beekeeping Today podcast is spreading this great message to beekeepers across the country and the world.

Jeff: Well, 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 or 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 tab along the top of any webpage. We want to thank Better Bee and our regular longtime sponsors, 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 on our website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

[silence]

Jeff: Are you there? [chuckles] If you've been listening to this show, all 300 episodes or just a few, you know sometimes I place a couple of surprises at the end. Well, since this is our 300th episode, I will send the first five respondents to this message a special commemorative 300th episode Beekeeping Today podcast coffee mug. [chuckles] I don't know why it's always a coffee mug or a beer mug, but this time it's a coffee mug. Enjoy, and thank you for listening.

[00:50:11] [END OF AUDIO]