Bees Are Big Business, Believe It or Not

big podcast project, a spinoff, if you will. It's called the Business of Bees, and it's a six part mini series looking at well that bees, their importance in the economy, the environmental threats they face, and a whole lot more. You can listen to it by searching the Business of Bees wherever you get your podcasts. I am joined today by the crew that put this whole thing together, Adam Allington and Tiffany Stecker. Hello everyone, Hey David, Hi David.

So let's just talk about the podcast really quickly. What why bees? Why did we choose bees to sort of dig do this really deep dive. Well, As listeners might not know, we three together have all at different points covered the pesticide beat here at Bloomberg Environment first and then Tiffany, and now me and so anyone who's covered pesticides knows that pollinators are particularly impacted by agricultural pesticides,

and so that kind of got us talking. I think about the ways in which our agricultural economy was structured today and how that impacts bees specifically, and how bees have become also this big symbol for these environmental policy problems. So I think that's kind of what got us talking, right, right, I think Adam really wanted to tell this story in a new way through a podcast medium. We've heard so much about this, We've read so many news stories, but

it has really been done in this sort of format. Yeah, you're right. I mean that when I was covering pesticide, I'm sure you guys experienced this as well. That it's just, you know, anytime you talk about bees or you write

about bees, someone's going to be listening. It's it's something that just inherently, you know, gets people's attention because people are either you know, think bees are cute, or they're worried that all the bees are dying or both, you know, or they're remembering back to you know, two thousand and six, two thousand and seven and colony collapse, which was the moment bees really became you know, headline news, and even for people like us who were sort of cover this

stuff all along, I was still kind of wondering, like, his colony collapse still the number one threat for bees today? And if you know, have we solved it, have we fixed colony collapse? Why are we still see these headlines about bees dying in record numbers and why is it still so hard for bee keepers to keep their bees alive? And so I think that was the other sort of guiding light for the podcast, is trying to connect these

dots for the listeners. Do you think that was one of the more surprising things that you learned when doing this is that colony collapse seems like, you know, it was in the news so much back when it was going on, but it's not really that big of an issue anymore. That was that surprised me. Well, I think that's part of the reason we made this a six part series. There's so many different elements to it, and colony collapse was very mysterious when it was first discovered.

We still don't know a whole lot about it, but there's all these other issues surrounding bees, the mites, as Adam mentioned for real mites, pesticides, overall loss of biodiversity and plant life in the US. Another thing that really surprised me, which is something that you touched on a lot in the first episode which was just released, is that the most beekeepers don't really make a lot of

money off of their honey. They make money from selling pollination services where they send out their hives and they you know, have their hives go pollinate these big fields of crops. That was wild to me that honey isn't afterthought for these beekeepers. I know, you wouldn't really know, you wouldn't come to that conclusion just based on you know, maybe going to the grocery store or your local farmers

market or you know, honey's everywhere. It's definitely a product people still consume a lot, in fact, are consuming more and more each year. But the money that the beekeepers, the commercial beekeepers can make through pollination services is so high that they've it's essentially become their their number one business. Beekeepers are. You know, commercial beekeepers will still maybe sell some honey, but a lot of them just keep the honey in the hive to use his feed for the bees.

Because their main job is to go from crop to crop to help pollinate, and they need that honey. You know, if they didn't have the honey, the beekeeper would have to provide some other food source. So it's really changed quite a bit. You guys went to California, Michigan, South Carolina. I went to Maryland. I met the long trek to to Maryland to go interview. Yeah, you're gonna want to

You're gonna want to expense for that trick. Yeah, that's what was the What was your favorite interview that you guys did, uh, you know for this product, this project. We spoke to a lot of interesting people, but I really enjoyed kind of these off the off the cuff conversations with farmers that we had. I had a good conversation with Mike Doherty in California about how to pronounce uh, the nut. That is the reason why bees are so

important pollination. There's two different ways. Apparently there's almond and there's ammen and and well Mike pointed out that you don't say solomon. Well, okay, that's that's a good point, but that's ammin. That's bizarre. Yeah. I mean, as a reporter, I think anytime that I can get out and talk to farmers, I'm particularly happy, you know. I think farmers, especially almond farmers, are you know, and they really want

to you know. They they're part scientists, they're part business you know, entrepreneur, and then they're you know, old school farmers. So they you know, they're trying to do the best job they can to keep bees alive and to also bring in the crop and to use the least amount of chemicals and to produce you know, something that's that's

you know, a really high quality product. And so they're really balancing a lot of different you know inputs into this specific system, and it's it's interesting to pick their brain.

My my favorite interview was one that I did not do, but actually when you did with Philip Ramsey, who's entomologist at the University of Maryland's right, that's correct, Yeah, And just he described how these mites attack bees and the actual like mechanics of it, and it was so vivid and so gruesome that it's just like I saw that in my mind and I don't think I will ever

unsee it, and it is just he was an amazing character. Yeah, these Verroa mites they're called Veroa destructor, and what they do to bees is they attached to the bees abdomen and they you know, they slowly suck out the bees liver basically, and you know, try to imagine, you know, if you had, you know, a parasitic might the size of your you know, your hand on your stomach, and it was sucking out your liver, you'd probably be less

than a healthy as well. So yeah, there's a lot of wrapping things up since because now I'm what, I don't get to ramble on for thirty five minutes about No, No, that was fascinating. I just gonna need to go lose my lunch over pretty soon. The big question that I wanted to ask you guys kind of was that you guys worked on we all worked on this project for close to six months. We really lived and breathed bees

during that time. Knowing what we know now, do you think that bees are more or less under threat, more or less endangered than they were before we started this project? Why don't we start with you, Tiffany, Well, it really depends. I mean, bee is used very broadly, but we have the honey bee. As we talked a lot about and we also have tons of different wild bees of native pollinators, those I think are really under threat. The thing about

honeybees is that they really are like livestock. Beekeepers can reproduce them. If they're getting low, they can make more, they can raise more. That's not really the same for native pollinators that are really dependent on wildlife. I have wild plants, biodiversity and also very affected by pesticides and these other chemicals. That's a great point, and we have a whole episode coming up devoted to that that not all bees are like, not all bees or honey bees.

The wild bees are very overlooked and very threatened. Adam, what about you, Yeah, I mean what Tiffany said, But like you know, in you know, twenty seventeen was a kind of a watershed moment for a bee conservation when the rusty patch bumblebee was added to the endangered species list, you know, the first bee to be added to the list. And you know, not to discount the the problems faced by bee keepers and the fact that honeybees are dying is a problem, but you know, the environment we keep

these honey bees in is a man made environment. And so even if we were to say lose seventy five percent of all the honey bees, that would be a tragedy. But we could just simply, we could bounce back from that. Whereas if you lose you know, ninety five percent of the rusty patched bumble bees, which is was the case with them with that species, you know, you can't just put those species back out into the environment. They're gone.

They're gone, right, and so and we're learning so much about how these native pollinators interact with not just crops, but you know, wildflowers, shrubs, you know, they're very important connections in these ecosystems that you know, we don't really know what will happen if they go away. And then I guess I would say, since you know, I have to answer this question too, I don't really know. And I think that's my favorite part about the podcast is

that this is such a complex topic. There's no simple answer, and I think, you know, I think we got at the complexity and we got we got at the the nuance of this that some bees are threatened, some bees aren't. The threats are complex. It's not any one thing. It's not just chemicals, and you know that's uh, you know, that's what I think I took away from the podcast. I kind of walk away from it also feeling like we could do another six episodes too, just on bees,

Like there is really so much. There's such a fascinating species and their connections with so many different you know, agriculture and then in cities, and then you know, I think we could just keep going, but unfortunately we gotta kind of wrap it up at six. I guess that was Adam Allington, an, Tiffany Stecker and myself talking about our new podcast, Business of Bees. Thank you guys for joining us. Sure, thank you, David. You can find Business

of Bees wherever fine podcasts are found. For more information on pollinators of all types, visit our website News dot Bloomberg, Environment dot com. That's news dot Bloomberg, Environment dot com, and if you want to chat with us on social media, use the hashtag parts per b. That hashtag, once again is parts per b. Today's episode of Parts Pavilion was produced by myself along with Maurissa Horne and Jessica Coombs. Nicholas Anzelota is the audio engineer. The music for this

episode is a message by Jazarre. It was used under a creative comments license. Thank you for listening. Hey, I'm Adam Allenton. I'm the host of a new show from Bloomberg Environment called The Business of Bees. Here's what you need to know about it. We travel around the country talking to people at every corner of the honeybee ecosystem. This is the largest managed pollination event on Earth. In fact, commercial beekeeping is more important to farming than ever before.

But bees are also under threat from pesticides and invasive pests and mysterious diseases. It's sort of like Christmas when you go to the hive in December and you open the lid, you just hope somebody's home. If you're interested in bees, two, I think you might like the show. Look for us wherever you get your podcasts.