Ep. 207 Bee Conservation: Honeybees, Native Bees, and Their Roles | #GoodGrowing

Welcome to the Good Growing podcast. I am Chris Enroth, horticulture educator with the University of Illinois Extension coming at you from Mac Omb, Illinois, and we have got a great show for you today, honey bees and native bees. Are these the same thing? What's going on with the honey bees these days? We will find out today later with our special guest, but you know I'm not doing this by myself.

I'm joined as always every single week by horticulture educator Ken Johnson in Jacksonville. Hey,

Ken. Hello, Chris. You enjoyed the cold spell we've been having? Just how your plants survive?

I will say all of the plants are looking just fine except our saucer magnolia went from beautiful pinkish white flowers to everything on the exterior this morning turned brown after the frost evaporated away, but everything on the interior is still nice and pretty on the inside. So we did get hit by frost, did lose some flowers, Everything's doing fine though. It's supposed to do this in the spring. Right, Ken? How are things going in Jacksonville?

Do you lose anything?

I don't I haven't noticed anything yet. I don't think we have anything that's really I guess some of the magnolias a lot of those are losing petals already though because they've been blooming for a while and we've had lots of wind. So that took care of a lot of them too. Have and as far as our yard, everything is because everything is blooming and supposed to be blooming now and isn't isn't really affected by what's going on.

Yes. It is Ken's yard. Only the hardiest shall survive. So it's Pretty much.

You need lots of care. You're not gonna make it.

Yeah. Oh my. Well, Ken, today is is your show today. We've I have bored you and doled you with plant stuff, but now we're getting back to what you love insects. We're gonna be talking about bees, honeybees, native bees, kind of the the conflict or the the debate going on between the two, but also the issues surrounding kind of bringing together but dividing them as well.

So we we do have our special guest with us today, Shirlakshmi Shuresh, horticulture educator in Effingham. Shirlakshmi, welcome to the show.

Hello. Thank you for having me.

Well, we are happy to have you. So today we are discussing bees, like honeybee versus native bee, but should I be using versus here? Like, I guess, set the stage for us. Is this honeybees versus native bees these days?

So that's a really good question. I definitely hear different opinions from different folks about honey bees and native bees if the people speaking are researchers, if they're farmers, if they're beekeepers, if they're conservationists. Everyone has a opinion about this, who's in the conservation or farming game, and many of them I have found tend to talk past each other or, they tend to have, disagreements with each other when they're not actually having the same conversation. There's definitely differences between honeybees and native bees, but I would say pretty fundamentally, they are kind of inhabiting different parts of our ecosystem and that becomes a lot of the issue with people trying to pit them against each other. They both have a place in our environment, in our ecosystems, and in our agriculture.

Those places are by and large separate. There are some overlap, but they each do their own jobs pretty darn well.

I guess also we need to get a little background about you as well. So what is your experience in in dealing with bees?

Yes. So I started way back in 02/2015. I was looking for a summer job, as one does in undergrad, and I was hired on to identify plants for a honeybee research lab. That was Doctor. Reed Johnson's lab at the Ohio State University and it turns out I liked being there and doing that sort of research so much that I stayed there for a number of years and we fast forward ten years later and I am still talking about bees and plants, so I have done bee research pretty actively for about seven years, took a little break, moved to Japan for a bit, but once I came back, I was back on my bee business.

So I have done research predominantly in honeybee foraging. I would say that I'm a waggle dance analysis expert. In my thesis work and in my undergraduate work, would joke that I'm the FBI because I would put cameras on these observation hives, which rather than the stereotypical kind of little square box that you would think of or even that skep hive that's the kind of like dome shaped hive that you see on a lot of vintage stuff, observation hives are kind of they kinda look like a display case. They're glass on each side. I will say, no.

It is not great for the bees. However, it's really great for us to spy on them, which is what I did for a long time. I just, you know, just overheard and decoded all that they were saying and listened into all of their conversations to figure out where they were going. And so a lot of my background is as an ecologist trying to figure out where honeybees are going in their landscape and with that background, I also of course encountered a lot of native bees. My interest in native bees definitely complements the work that I've done on honeybees because a lot of the resources that they use, native bees and honey bees both, those resources might exist side by side.

Sometimes there's overlap and sometimes there isn't, and that also gives me information too. My interest and background is definitely as a pollinator ecologist. I'm really interested in how bees, plants, and people interact, and I put in people because a lot of my passion and research has been driven by the fact that I love being able to help people. I love being able to talk to and help beekeepers or members of the public understand what's going on with the nature and the environment around them. So I feel pretty lucky to be in a position where instead of holding my friends and family hostage to talk about bees, there are people that actually come to this podcast and do that.

And I'm sure, like, you know, my family is just alright. One day that I don't have to deal with them. So thanks for babysitting me, guys. Appreciate it.

I I do have a question. You mentioned waggle dance. I think I I I I did it, but for our listeners, viewers, what's a bee doing waggling around?

So honey bees and very specifically honey bees, this one species does this waggle dance, is actually a whole language. It's, as far as I know, the only insect language that we humans know how to understand. So what it is is that the honeybee, as do all insects, have three parts of their body, the head, the thorax, and the abdomen. The thorax is kind of like our chest, the abdomen is kind of like our belly lower region. So when the honeybee is in the hive, let's say she goes out and finds the best flower she's ever eaten in her life.

Not only is there one, there's hundreds. She has to go back and tell her sisters. Right? Like, she'd just be a horrible honeybee otherwise. Honeybees are a lot nicer to their siblings than most humans are, I think, probably.

Maybe not all of them, but many of them. In any case, she comes back and because bees don't have vocal cords, they can't talk. They have a language where they do this waggle dance. So they have their abdomen that they shake from side to side. They waggle.

So when the honeybee does the waggle dance, she's doing this kind of figure eight motion. She waggles her abdomen, so that lower part of her body for a certain amount of time, and for however long she actually does that, this is going to be in number of seconds, that'll actually correspond to how far away the foraging resource her food is that she's advertising from the hive. So then she'll make that turn in that figure eight, and the angle that she turns is actually the direction that a sister of hers needs to leave the entrance of the hive to fly to get to the food, and she'll continue doing that figure eight. And if she keeps doing that over and over and over again, I tell people it's kind of like she's yelling. She's like, this is the best food ever.

You guys gotta get some of this. I've seen these really determined bees like they will not shut up and they will keep doing the same dance for, a minute, two minutes. Usually, these bees are not really gonna dance for longer than a minute. If there's, like, you know, like, hey. You know, there's a flower down the street.

Okay. I guess. Check it out. I if you want. She'll do that waggle dance maybe once or twice, but when it's a really valuable resource, and this is valuable in the brain of a honeybee.

We can talk about nutrition and what honeybee is like a little later, but in the little bee brain, whatever she thinks is the coolest food stuff of the week, she might yell about. And as you get more foragers, so these are honeybees that leave the hive to get resources to bring back, the more foragers that leave and go to resources, they might start coming back and doing that dance too. So a lot of times when I was doing this analysis and I would be watching videos of bees dancing, I might see five different bees dancing for the same resource. They're all going to the same place because they're like, man, a Costco just opened up down the street. Like, you have got to try the Costco pizza.

Caveat, Illinois Extension does not endorse the products of Costco or Costco pizza. This is a personal opinion of Sri Laxmi's Reyes pretending to be a honeybee.

But now I wanna go to this Costco.

Right. Right. And in the honeybee world, this might be a soybean field. It might be a clover field. There are certain things that they are attracted to that are just very large resources.

The nutrition that is there may or may not be great, but you sure can buy things in bulk.

Yeah. Yes. Well, that's fascinating. The waggle dance. I love it.

Alright. So so bee populations, I guess, in general, have been in the news quite a bit. And and specifically this year, honeybees have really been in the news the last month or two. You wanna talk about a little bit about the, I guess, the most recent honeybee declines we're seeing potentially?

So we are hearing from project APSM, which coordinates a bunch of honeybee research and other folks that are monitoring beehives, researchers, beekeepers, etcetera. They send out a survey every year, usually in the winter asking beekeepers, hey. Are you losing your hives? What are you seeing in varroa mites? What are you seeing in diseases?

Which is a really great way for researchers and beekeepers plus the public to really understand how honeybees are doing. And in this past year, the loss rate of hives was seventy two percent. For context, in the ten years or so since I've been doing bee research, that's the highest annual loss rate that I have heard in almost ten years. For the past ten years, we've been hovering around 50% annual losses, which to be clear is also very high in the days of yore, so I'm talking probably 80s and earlier. In any case, when we were not doing as much honeybee research, we'd only really hear about maybe 30% losses.

10 to 30% is the baseline that we would like to see. So when we go from 10 to 30% of hives lost to 50% to suddenly 72%, that's not good. You don't want to be a farmer or a business person where you are losing 70% of all of your product every year that you have to replace and regrow. Like, that's just not good and that's not a great business model. So, obviously, people are concerned about this.

To quantify that 72% loss again, in economic impacts, beekeepers are conservatively conservatively estimated to have lost about $225,000,000 in having to replace their bees, and that's not including any labor, feed, or treatments. It's just their bees are dead. In terms of us here in The US losing out on these pollination services, the economic impact of this loss is expected, estimated to be about $635,000,000. I don't know about you, Chris or Ken, but, $635,000,000 is not pocket change to me. I I would love if it were pocket change, but it sure is not.

This sounds like bad news. The question that we get often is that, you know, the idea that we're using honeybees to help us pollinate our crops and, you know, know, folks that know more about this know that we we truck them around the country to crop to to pollinate valuable horticultural crops that are used in all manner of of cooking, recipes, grocery, all of that stuff. So the question that we often get is if honeybees disappear or if their populations decline to some certain point, whatever that point is, is our food system going to collapse, and does this mean that we should all start keeping honeybees to help honeybees stay with a higher population?

So good question. Good questions, really, because I would say you just asked two different questions. So I do get a lot of people asking, should I keep honeybees to help the population, and, will our food systems be in trouble? And I think that second question kind of starts to get at the idea of why people talk about honeybees and native bees in different ways and that is because honeybees are domesticated livestock. So I say that in saying that honeybees are classified the same way as you would classify a cow, a sheep, a goat, any of these things that we keep as livestock.

Honeybees, European honeybees are livestock as well. They're an agricultural problem. It's an agricultural issue. I don't know if you two have been to the grocery store recently, and thought about picking up a dozen eggs because I definitely went to the grocery aisle, saw the pack of eggs, and I was like, you know what? I don't really need eggs that much.

That's pretty expensive. Probably heard of avian flu going around. That's not something that I will talk about since that is while chickens do fly, they are not really bees, so my experience there is pretty limited, but I'd say that to mention that honeybees are livestock too, so when we've got these issues going on that's affecting their survival and their health, yes, we might see some repercussions in our food systems, but we're talking about livestock here again. Domestication refers to a very distinct coevolutionary mutualistic relationship between a domesticator and the domesticate. So between humans and honeybees.

Humans have been keeping honeybees. We have written records of humans keeping honeybees for three thousand years, but it's estimated that humans have been managing, keeping, domesticating honeybees for over nine thousand years. So these, again, like people don't always think of the honeybee as a livestock livestock animal, but they definitely are. There is some evidence that their genetics, their behavior, it's different than that of the wild honeybees that you might see.

I think people have a hard time wrapping their heads around just bees being animals, period, much less.

That that is very, very true. Yeah. I think I once asked someone about if they saw any animals and I said, I just saw five animals outside and they're like, what? What do you mean? And I start listening.

I'm like, yeah. I saw a ladybug. I saw a sweat bee. I saw this, and they're like, those aren't animals. And I look at them and I'm like, what are they?

Plants? And I could just see that they just had like a like an identity crisis happening before me. But, yeah, they are absolutely animals. Honeybees are not wild animals though. They are our friends on farms.

We keep them to do things that we want them to do. A lot of people don't realize these European honeybees or Western honeybees are called such because they are originally from the European area. They have been in The Americas, North America, South America for less than four hundred years, which is not really enough time for them to evolve and really be enmeshed in the local ecosystems. It's very much just they are a livestock animal that we brought over. I say we, but European colonizers brought over to pollinate a lot of the vegetables, the produce that they eat.

Because if you think about it, a lot of the vegetables that we eat here in The US are not native to The US. Do you two have any favorite vegetables you wanna name off for me? Or fruit. You can name fruit too.

Can't go wrong with an apple in my house.

Apples. Apples are native to Central Asia. They are heavily, pollinated by honeybees, also by native bees, but they are not native to North America. So there's one thing immediately. I eat apples almost every other day, not from North America.

Ken, you got something?

Trying to get stuff that has to be pollinated. We'll be difficult. I'm going with pumpkins and squash.

Pumpkins. So pumpkins and squash, Penn has decided to be difficult on purpose. They are native to North America. However, comma, pumpkins and squash are actually best pollinated by our native squash bees. You really need our native squash bees, so xenoglossa pruenosa to set fruit in your cucumbers, in your pumpkins, your zucchini, in your whatever kind of squash.

Honey bees can do a slap dash okay job, but if you want the job done and done well, you better be having some squash bees. Ken, do you have a non difficult answer?

Will do maybe peppers or tomatoes since everybody likes those.

So peppers and tomatoes, we think that they came from, I believe, around South America. So not North America either. We have a lot of our tomatoes pollinated by bumblebees. People will bring in the common eastern bumblebee bombus impatiens into greenhouses for pollination of tomatoes because honeybees cannot pollinate the flowers and that's because if you ever get the chance to look at a flower in the nightshade family, which is a pretty prolific family, nightshades include deadly nightshade, of course, which is the scary one, but includes tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, potatoes. A lot of fan favorites are in the nightshade family, and these flowers, they kind of look like a star with if you've ever seen a daffodil and seen that kind of cup shape on it, imagine if that cup shape were kind of closed into a point, so it's this kind of star shape with this cupped pointy bit and inside are these stamens where the pollen, is.

Honeybees are not really good at getting into, those stamens trying to get that pollen off. However, bumblebees are big and fat and they love to shake their little butts and they do buzz pollination, so they clamp on to tomatoes, these tomato flowers, and they will shake their bodies to do buzz pollination and in that buzz pollination, they'll actually get the pollen to fall off of the tomato flowers and do pollination that way. They're doing this to really gather that pollen to take back to their hive, but of course, if they're visiting a greenhouse where they've got hundreds of tomato plants in a row, they're gonna be pretty efficient pollinators along the way. But again, tomatoes, not something native to North America. So there's a lot of examples like this.

We hear a lot about almonds. Almonds are produced in California. We California is the number one global producer of almonds in the world, and they are pretty much exclusively pollinated by honeybees, but almonds are again not native to North America. So European colonizers brought over honeybees, the European honeybee or the western honeybee to be able to have the foods that they were, comfortable with, that they were used to having. And so us fast forward couple centuries, we're still eating similar things, not all of the same things, but a lot of them, and so we have come to really rely on these livestock animals for the food that we eat in our day to day.

Without honeybees, there are a lot of foods that we wouldn't have in our grocery stores without honeybees. And so they are really crucial to our food systems as livestock.

So with with honeybees being important for our food supply, I think we still have this you kinda have your, you know, your native when it comes to home landscapes, have your native purists, you have your traditional, and then everybody in between as well. And I think there's this conflict between, you know, your your we're strictly native people land, like honeybees and, you know, getting into landscapes causing issues with our native pollinators and stuff. So do do honeybees, I guess, negatively impact native bees?

So research on that is ongoing. It is definitely a very hot topic. A lot of people, a lot of scientists around the world are working on that problem, trying to figure out what the case is for either side. I will say for a short summary, it's looking like honey bees are generally negatively impacting native bees for the same reasons that, if you bring in hundreds of livestock into like if you had, let's say, a national forest, know, Yellowstone, somewhere with open grasslands, that's really nice. If you brought in hundreds of cattle, to just graze that area, you're not going to have a lot of food left for the other things in that area.

When you bring in a lot of honeybees to a protected area, a lot of times they can compete with each other negatively, and really I will say I know that and I very strongly believe honeybees and native bees both have their place. We need honeybees for our food systems and for our agriculture. They can't go away because we would suddenly be losing a lot of the produce in our grocery stores, and that's just not realistic. We need them too. But our native bees are also really important for our food systems and agriculture.

We just don't quantify them as much, but there also are wild animals that are necessary for our native landscapes. So when people pet honeybees and native bees against each other, a lot of time they are talking about competition and pathogens. So when we're talking about honeybees, we really talk about the four p's that are affecting populations of honeybees that we think that these four p's work together to really lead to these drastic declines in honeybees and these four p's are poor forage, pesticides, pests, and pathogens. Poor forage being food. If we look at say Illinois, for example, back in 1840, there were over 22,000,000 acres of prairie in Illinois.

I can tell you that that is not the case in current day. If you think about how much food and how much is grown in Illinois, how much farmland we have, that's not prairie. Those are not flowers that are being pollinated by native insects, so when we talk about competition, when we talk about poor forage, there's just really not enough food, and so you're fighting over the last scraps in the landscape, right, and so honeybees live in these massive gigantic colonies. Almost no other bees live at the size that honeybees do, and so you just get hundreds of these guys coming in and cleaning out the Costco and there's nothing left on the shelves for anyone else, so that's kind of what's happening. It's not necessarily that they would directly, you know, fight each other or attack each other necessarily.

It can often be there's only one slice of cake left in the bakery aisle and only one bee is going to get it right in this analogy, and so they're competing over the same things. In terms of pesticides, you know, things that are going to kill honeybees are going to kill the native bees. That's because most of the bees we have here in The US are in the family Apidae. Honeybees also are in the family apidae, so it serves to reason the things that would kill honeybees would also kill things that are very closely related within the same family, and so pesticides are also a problem because when you have insecticides that are killing honeybees, we don't have a lot of research on what native bee declines are looking like because there hasn't been a lot of background research. You don't have a baseline.

It's really hard to figure out what changes are if you don't have that quote unquote normal to look at. But we do understand that these things that are generally killing honeybees are generally going to kill these other bees too because they have similar modes of action. When we think about pests, there's a lot that can go along with that. We think about Varroa mites in honeybee as being a major pest in The US, but there's also other mites that are coming along now. We are starting to see the spread of Tropezoleil lapse mites, which is not great.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news and say, hey. Watch out for this new honeybee pest. But there is one coming, so there's that. So one of the pests that can infect honeybees that we see some spillover into native bees, especially our bumblebees is Nocema. So specifically, Nocema ceranae is a microsporidian, so that means it's a small single celled parasite that we know now to be kind of related to fungi or mushrooms as people will often think of them.

There's a lot more to fungi than the world of mushrooms, but you can think of it as a similar kind of single celled little parasite there. And then we think about that fourth p of pathogens, so that's disease. There is a lot of research ongoing about honeybee disease because of course they're very, very valuable livestock. There isn't again as much research on pathogens affecting native bees, but we can generally say that having a disease is bad. I don't think that's a controversial take, and so even though we don't have a lot of baseline knowledge, we don't know a lot of, say life history, populations, how certain native bees live, and how they kind of interact or their behavior, we can generally assume that having a disease is bad and kind of getting the evidence to prove the fact that having various diseases is bad is still ongoing, and I'm being purposefully a little vague because this is how science works.

Right? We are learning new things every day. We're learning new things and having new advances and making all these really cool new tools, so it's possible we might learn something and I would love to retract one of these pieces being a problem or one of these issues I'm talking about, but I'm doing my best to share with what we know now, and so what we know now is honey bees and native bees don't have a lot of food, the food that they have to share, there's a lot more honeybees at the table than there are native bees, and so it's just going to be hard to elbow those honeybees out of the way when there's hundreds of them compared to just a couple of native bees in the area. Pesticides are hurting them both because they are made to kind of hurt similar groups of insects. Pasts that can spill over are also again not good.

We might not know a background of native bees as well as we do honey bees, but as I mentioned with pathogens, we can generally say that having a disease, having a pest is bad. It's not great to have something hitchhiking on you or something that is making you sick Even if we don't know what your normal or healthy looks like, we can generally say that it's not great to be sick or have these pests and also be dealing with pesticides and poor forage. When we talk about honeybee losses and we talk about native bees too, these four peas interacting, so again, poor forage, pesticides, pests, and pathogens, we are trying to figure out as researchers how these things interact to reduce bee populations and really affect them, which it kind of makes sense because if you think about it, imagine someone's poisoning you, the food that you're eating has poison in it, That's not great, so you're not doing great. Imagine that food that has poison in it. You also don't have much of it, so you're kind of also starving, and then someone hits you with a new disease.

So you're starving, the food that you have is not good for you and is poisoning you, and suddenly you're sick. That's what a lot of our honeybees are facing and that's what a lot of our native bees are facing. Whether one of these things has more impact than the other is kind of up to debate, but in general, if you ask me to pick what is the biggest issue, what is the worst pee, I'd say poor forage because I know when I'm sick, I want a nice hot cup of tea, some nice I am drinking fluids out the wazoo, and I'm making sure that I'm eating something that's nutritious for me. If you are not getting that good nutrition, you're not going to be able to fight off poison or any disease or sickness that you have, so having good food is really the baseline of that pyramid of needs, right? Don't got good food, you're not having a good day.

And bees are really not having a good day for a long time now because they just don't have the options that they had over the thousands of millions of years that they were here originally, especially when we're thinking about those native bees.

So thinking about good food, and this is a specific question I got last year. A landowner got a proposition from a beekeeper. This landowner had high quality prairie, and the beekeeper wanted to rent some of this prairie. And they came to me. They wanna know, well, is there any issues that could arise from having a a honeybee colony or multiple colonies, hives in my prairie.

It sounds like it might not be the best idea. I don't know. She'll actually what? I I kind of just when I said to them, what's your goal? Do you want a native only situation?

Then you probably don't want honeybees. If it's okay, then, and I sent them, resources, but I don't what could did could there be any problems here?

Right. And so that, I think, gets back to the like, is the landowner's goal conservation or is it supporting local agriculture? Those are both respectable goals to have, either one of them. I don't think one is necessarily more important than the other, but if your goal is conservation, then you don't necessarily need to have livestock in that area because if instead of a beekeeper, let's say the landowner was approached by a dairy farmer like, hey, can I get my cattle to graze your prairie? If that landowner would be like, heck no, you're going to just kill all my prairie, probably doesn't want honeybees there either then because also the fact of the matter is a lot of the thesis work that I did, I was finding pretty much over and over again, honeybees are eating things that we think of as weeds.

A lot of Queen Anne's lace, so that stachys corota, it's a wild carrot, non native introduced from Europe, white clover, Trifolium repens, also introduced from Europe, And there's a couple of other things that honeybees are eating, but I can tell you that the vast majority of the things these honeybees are feeding on are things that are evolutionarily familiar to them. Things that they have evolved with over thousands, over millions of years in their European habitats that we know or think of as weeds here are what honeybees are eating. That said, there's research coming out. I did my master's with Doctor. Adam Dolezal at the University of Illinois and some of the work that he has done with his colleagues has also included that we're seeing that prairie can lead to good nutrition for these honeybees in the late season and the late fall season where they're kind of dealing with lack of food, poisoning diseases, pests kind of, they kind of ramp up as we get closer to that winter season and he was finding that the nutrition from native prairie plants can actually be very good and help honeybees survive or do a little better at least than honeybees that didn't get access to that pollen.

That said, kind of their last last choice. Honeybees are kind of going to whatever they can. I always say honeybees are really like humans in a way that they're lazy. They'll go to like whatever is closest to them. Done a lot of work on honeybees forging on soybean for instance, and that's because when you have a soybean field next door that is in full bloom, soybean, soybean nectar doesn't have a lot of nutrition, but it's a lot of energy.

It's a lot of carbohydrates. And so it's kind of like having a Costco of potato chips next door. So you can go next door and get a week supply of potato chips to feed you and you just have to walk next door or you can drive, or you can fly, you know, two miles down and get this high this high nutrition, really nice organic prairie feed and no. You know, most people are just gonna go to the grocery store next door that's super easy and has, you know, a lot of stuff in bulk, and they're just gonna grab that and go. They're not gonna waste their time going all the way across town to get food that's better, and some people will and will supplement their diets, of course, because I'm using a metaphor here of honeybees.

In general, they're going to take that easy route, and so they're just trying to see what is most available in terms of number. You often get a lot of white clover, you often get a lot of dandelion, you often get a lot of soybean, that's what they're going to be eating. Even to the fact if the landowner wanted to support honeybees and local agriculture, I don't know that that would be the place where the honeybees would be feeding. Anyways, it's certainly possible that they go there, but in my research, given options, given the choice between different agricultural and different ecosystems, honeybees tend to go for what we think of as weeds, and I just pulled up some of my thesis work and over two years of quantifying what honeybees were bringing back to their hive, 51% of all the pollen that I identified was introduced to The US non native. So half of everything that a honeybee was eating, bringing back to the hive for the hives that I was monitoring wasn't even native to North America.

Natives were only 40% of what the honeybees were bringing back to the hive, and the last 9% were cultivated. And by cultivated, I mean things like soybean, we're growing on purpose. And what I found was really interesting, so of the half of the stuff that 51% introduced pollen that the honeybees were bringing back, a full third had some sort of invasive control status to them. 30% of that 51 were listed as invasive and 4% in total were listed as noxious weeds with laws in Illinois about legal control. The point here I'm trying to make is that honeybees, yes, will absolutely go to Prairie.

They get benefits from Prairie. It's really good nutrition, but it's not really their first choice. Right? It's kind of to them, their home cooked food or mom's cooking are things like clover and dandelions. It's not going to be our nice goldenrods or our cone flowers necessarily.

They'll eat it, but that's kind of like, ah, yes. I want to get Italian or Korean today, stretching out that food metaphor I have.

So I guess, though, that being said, and and you've kind of hinted at this to some extent. So, you know, if we've got honeybees foraging in a in a prairie, is there a chance that maybe they over time could change the kind of look at that that prairie? If they're kinda they're preferring to have these non native plants that they're feeding on, you know, those are getting pollinated and those are producing seed. Do do we have the chance of that maybe shifting that plant community over time?

That's a great question. And research is ongoing. I know that's like my favorite thing to say this this whole session is research is ongoing. We just don't know.

It depends. But

Of course, there's a we just don't know. The but here is that I have seen a few studies done within the past five years showing that when honeybees are visiting native plants, they are not effective pollinators of native plants. Honeybees are generalists, which means they will eat whatever is easiest for them, whatever they can get in bulk. They're not picky eaters. Native bees, we contrast them, are often picky eaters because their offspring, the larvae, are obligate feeders so that means if they don't eat a certain thing, they will die, so a lot of these guys, these native bees are going to be visiting particular things and over the course of thousands of years or over the course of millions of years, we got pretty dang good at their jobs of getting pollen and nectar out of certain things.

We come back to Xenoglossa prunosa or that squash bee, they are really, really good at getting pollen and nectar out of pumpkin plants. Honeybees cannot hold a candle to how efficient they are. The honeybees kind of like, you know, a new grad intern that you just hired off the street, whereas the the squash bee is like, you know, it's like Ken or Chris here who's been on the job for a while, and they they know what they're doing. They're not me. Or at least when it comes to bees, the tables turn when it comes to pollinators perhaps, but honeybees are just not up to snuff.

They they do something, but they don't do jobs well. So I've seen a couple of studies in the past couple of years showing that when honeybees do visit native plants, the native plants actually see reduced seed set and the physiology or the reproduction of the plants are negatively affected by honeybees as compared to the native bees that have traditionally, evolutionarily been pollinating these plants. So yes, we're also seeing that honeybees are not great for the native plants either, But again, I I know that this whole topic is near and dear to a lot of people's hearts. It's near and dear to my own heart, having been a professional beekeeper. I I forgot to mention in my introduction, I was for a year the lab manager for the Ohio State University's bee lab up in Worcester.

So I was in charge of 45 hives doing and leading research experiments, also in charge of making sure these colonies were doing well, over the year. And so I have a soft spot for honey bees, sure, but I also have a spot soft spot for native bees knowing that they're the wild animals in our ecosystems that are doing a lot of the work that are just not really credited for it. They're the behind the scenes kind of doers that make things happen. I've seen native bees on raspberries, on strawberries, on pretty much anything I would see a honeybee on, see native bees on too. And I know some of these native bees, especially if they've evolved together, they're gonna do a lot better job than the honeybee that's the new bee that is doing its best but doesn't really have the experience to do the best job of pollination.

I guess a another if we we get started in our journey of learning about bees, I mean, how many bees are we talking about here? We've we've divided them into two groups, a honeybee and a native bee. How you know, is there like five of these or 10? Like, how many are we talking about here?

So I'm gonna totally turn this question on you. Mhmm. How many bees do you think there are? I'm not asking Ken because I think he knows. So, Chris, you're under the spotlight.

I want you to tell me how many bees you think there are in the entire world. We'll start there. World. In the entire world. How many species of bees are there on planet Earth?

Okay. I've done I've done oh gosh. I've done a few pollinator classes. I've said the North American number, but the world number, 15,000 species.

Not bad. The answer is 20,000. Are 20,000 different kinds of bees in the world. How many bees are there in Illinois, Chris?

No. I thought you're gonna ask North America.

I have to make this hard for you. Where where's the fun in making it easy? I don't wanna ask you anything you can you can do.

I'll go with 500.

Oh, right on the money. You are correct. Ding ding ding. Have 500 different species of bees in Illinois of which the honeybee is only a single kind of bee. We have four ninety nine different species of bees that have completely different life histories and biologies than the honeybee.

Of course when I talk about native bees and honeybees, I'm doing a lot of generalization here because honeybees are a single species and four ninety nine other native bees belong to not only different species, but different genera and different families. So there's a lot of variation here.

I I love the I love the carpenter bees, though, because there's the small carpenter bees, this teeny tiny little thing, and then there's just the carpenter bee, the, like, this massive thing flying around. And probably I I would say my favorite, if I had to pick a favorite, is probably the carpenter bee, the large carpenter bee. I love the males that I can

just Oh, yes.

Push I just take my finger. I was like, go away. Leave me alone. And then the kids are like, what are you doing? I'm like, nah.

They explained to him the difference between, like, you know, the males that don't have stingers. I'm not worried about being stung. So, yes. Do actually, do you have a favorite bee? Is this I you never asked.

Okay. Here we go. No.

No. I I definitely have a favorite bee. My favorite family of bees are the megachilids, the leafcutter bees. For folks that have not seen these or the likely cases you've seen them and not known that they were a bee, many of these megachilids, what they do is they cut leaves as is in their common name. They take them back to align their nests in these little leaves and also instead of having their pollen collecting hairs on their legs like most bees do, megachilids actually have their pollen collecting hairs on the underside of their abdomen.

So let me tell you my favorite bee not only sleeps in leaf blankets like a little fairy, it also has a fuzzy butt. What more Mhmm. Could you want? What more could you want in an insect? Perfect.

Fuzzy butts and leaf blankets. Doesn't get much better than that.

It's got, like, a hoodie pocket to put all its pollen in. Like, that's that's sounds so cozy. Yeah. It's kinda what you're thinking of. Right?

What I'm thinking of right here. So

Yeah. There's also it doesn't live here, but there is a leafcutter bee in Turkey that exclusively uses flower petals to line its nests, so there are these absolutely precious photos that you can look up of the Turkish leafcutter bee and there's just this little little tube of flower petals and just this little guy sticking their little head out, being so fuzzy and cute, sleeping in flower petals. I'm like, come on. If you ever believed in fairies, that's what leafcutter bees are. Living leaves and flowers and they're just fuzzy and cute.

I love them. They're also efficient and important native pollinators, of course.

Of course. Ken, do you have a favorite bee?

Think I do. They're they're all good in their own special way.

Oh, Chris, I have something fun to tell you about carpenter bees. So as I mentioned, I lived in Japan for about two years, and so I picked up the language. I had this great opportunity where a beekeeper sponsored me to come out to Japan and speak to local beekeepers two years ago now, but some of the one of the cutest things I learned. So in Japanese, the Japanese carpenter bee is called kumabachi, which is literally bear bee because, you know, like, big and stocky like bears. They just it's very literally kuma is bear and bachi is is bee or wasp.

It's just bear bees, and I just I love that. I think that's so fun.

Love it. Yes. Thank you for sharing that. That was great.

I Sort of petition to change their names.

Yes. But we should start calling them bear bees. I mean, you know, common names are just like that. Right? If we if the three of us decide that we're gonna call them bear bees and, you know Mhmm.

It catches on, we we have something here. We can we can be the change we wanna see in the world.

From now on. Yes. Social language after all.

It could be carpenter bear bee, and it'll just slowly drop the carpenter.

Oh, yes. Excellent. Ken has a plan. Alright, listeners. You know what to do.

Bear bees.

Bear bees.

Well, that was a lot of great information about honeybees and native bees. My mind is is full of information now. I'm going to have to go process this. Well, the Good Growing podcast is a production of University of Illinois Extension, edited this week by me, Chris Enroth. A special thank you to our special guest today, Sherlaxmi.

Thank you so much for being here today. I there's so many fun little, like, tidbit facts that have come out of today. I'm going to be, like, rewatching this thing over and over again and learning something new every time. Thank you.

Chris. Chris, would you say that you're buzzing with excitement?

Oh, I'm oh, beat me to it. Oh, yes. I'm buzzing right out of this chair practically. No. It's this was a lot of great information.

So you shined a wonderful light on also, you know, the story that's happening between honeybees and native bees. Just yes. Thank you very much. This is a wealth of knowledge. Thank you.

Thanks for having me. And, of course, I am always happy to talk to people about bees. You are saving my friends and family from having to hear about them again. So always feel free to reach out. Yeah.

Email or otherwise.

Thank Ken, as always, thank you for hanging out with me. You had a pretty good idea this week, you know, these bees. So now I'm all excited about insects again. Here we go. It's cicadas all over again.

We're just gonna be all bees this year. Thanks again.

Sounds good. And, yes, thank you, Shwakashmi, for a lot of great information. And, Chris, let's do this again next week.

Oh, we shall do this again next week. We'll be chatting about some fun gardening horticultural topic, and so just look forward to that episode next week. Well, listeners, thank you for doing what you do best, and that is listening. Or if you're watching us on YouTube watching. And as always, keep on growing.

Which I don't know about you, Chris or John, but that or Chris or did I say John? Chris and Ken?

He goes by many names. I've been called worse.

Yeah. I don't sorry, Ken.