102 – Jacob Pecenka – Watermelons, pests and pollination (in English)

Speaker 1

From the Oregon State University Extension Service, this is pollination, a podcast that tells the stories of researchers, land managers, and concerned citizens making bold strides to improve the health of pollinators. I'm your host. Doctor Adoni Melitopol, his assistant professor in pollinator health in the Department of Horticulture. Pollination and good pest management are two key factors in being able to get high yields of crops. Everybody kind of knows this, but my next guest is one of the few people who I've seen who's actually tested the interaction between pest management decisions, and pollinators. Field Jacob Tachanka is working on his pH. D In the Department of Entomology at Purdue University. His remarkable research project focuses on watermelon production across the state of Indiana and multiple sites. And looking at this interaction between real key pest of watermelons managing this pest with an integrated pest management approach and its subsequent effect on pollination and yield, this is a great episode for just kind of putting all those pieces together. But if you're also interested in pollinating your watermelon some basic. Technology. This is a great episode for you. I am so excited to be sitting across from Jacob Kochenko. Welcome to pollination.

Speaker 2

Yeah, thanks for help. Glad to be here.

Speaker 1

Now you're from Indiana.

Speaker 2

Yes, Purdue University, Purdue University. And when I think about Purdue University, I think about corn and soybeans and corn and more soybeans. Yeah, if you've been lucky enough to be in Indiana, you're drive down the highway. You're probably not wrong there. That's all over the place. It's pretty pervasive. In the given year, there's somewhere between a 5th and the 4th of the land surface of Indiana is dedicated to corn, so it's. There and it represents a pretty big commodity for the state.

Speaker 1

And there's been a lot of work and interest in pollinators, specifically through loss of habitat, but also through the use of seed treatments and their effect on pollinators. But your interest is a little bit different. Tell us like you're looking at some kind of weird crop out there.

Speaker 2

Yeah, yeah. Something a little different. Crop that people wouldn't necessarily attribute to Indiana is watermelon production. It's something we love. You know, it's not summer with. That sweet watermelon, but Indiana, on top of being a top five corn producing state, is routinely a top five watermelon producing state. Yeah, you know, there's those the biggies. South Carolina, Georgia, Florida. That you. We instantly go to. But Indiana is up there and it represents typically around $30 million market just in state.

Speaker 1

I'll be darned.

Speaker 2

Producing those guys, so worry. We get them around.

Speaker 1

So give us a little. Background on growing watermelons and sort of keeping them healthy. So what are some of the things that growers like have to keep in mind when they're growing this grow?

Speaker 2

Yeah, plenty of watermelons. It's definitely a little bit more difficult sometimes. You know, a lot of row crops, it's you throw them out there and you watch them grow. Or watermelons. They pretty much all have. Plastic beds where you got to roll out those mulch beds just to keep them off the soil as they grow to help prevent some. Fungal pathogens and disease, and almost entirely, there's irrigation on them. They, especially early on, they're pretty demanding water wise. In Indiana, it gets quite a bit of moisture, but you never want to risk dry couple of weeks, especially when they're just getting started. So irrigation is is pretty common and. As they grow there. Those vines can. Reach out and depending on. And the operations you had to turn the vines and keep them on the plastic for a certain amount of time and throughout the season as in Indiana, there's a lot of aerial borne pathogens and diseases to keep track of. And so fungicide application is something also growers have to think of more so and so they.

Speaker

Oh wow.

Speaker 2

A lot, lot. Fussier than a lot of Rd. crops, and they need more attention for growers. It's not an easy thing to grow anywhere.

Speaker 1

Really high value crop and you're unlike, you know, these large commodity crops, they're really trying to protect them as they're growing.

Speaker 2

Yep, Yep. It's all about marketability. If you're walking to the grocery store, you see them being a melons, like a lot of fruit and vegetable crops, you're not going to pick the ugly one, the one that misshapen or has damage. And so keeping those guys healthy and happy and the right color, the right size is super important and. And and part of what comes into that is that watermelons require insect pollination. You're not going to get a watermelon if you don't have insects. And the more insects you have visiting, the more pollination you have, the bigger and better looking melons you're going to get.

Speaker 1

I though I I remember from we talked to Mimi Jenkins a bunch of episodes back. Maybe it was a half a year ago, but it's also not honey. Bees are not really great at pollinating.

Speaker 2

No, and and that's. Kind of that was.

Speaker 1

Nobody. If I remember, nobody likes going to watermelons.

Speaker 2

No beekeepers, it's they grumbled, putting their bees out there because it's kind of like just eating birthday cake. If you did that for a whole summer, you would not be looking too hot come August. And that's kind of the same thing the the bees. Beekeepers will rent their bees out to a melon grower. He'll pay the beekeeper, put them out there and for a lot of that. Time period. There's not a lot else out there flowering, so the bees have no choice but to hit that watermelon hard and through sheer numbers they pollinate. They're not the most effective pollinators, but just there's so many of those gals out there doing their thing that. There's enough visits that they do at the end of the day, an effective job of pollinating the melons.

Speaker 1

I think you were mentioning as well. I'm not, I can't remember if it was like a significant source of Polish, but you do have wild bees. That are coming into the fields.

Speaker 2

Oh yes, there's honey. Bees are not at all the only pond out there. They're the primary one. When we think of managed honey, bees are managed pollinators. But bumblebees are starting to become a popular option that grows, are looking at purchasing grown bumblebees. Putting them out there and it's a temporary burst of pollination. Yeah, doing that key window but there. A plethora of native bees out there, a lot of solitary bees, your electeds and they. If you spend time and get out there really early and when the sun comes up in Indiana melons, they are buzzing with just dozens and dozens of those little shiny green bees zipping all over the place. And so there it is a. Definitely a diverse community that is contributing to this.

Speaker 1

And I know from previous episodes listeners will be aware that you know when the crop is in bloom and when you start to try and protect the crop. At that point it's the highest risk to exposure with pollinators. What are some of the things that happened during bloom that are potentially risky to pollinator health?

Speaker 2

Yep. So during that peak Bloom period, that's when the rows are really watching for their crop, because those flowers are vulnerable. If the flowers get damaged or munched on by something, then they're not going to get there. Melons and so. In Indiana watermelon production, we have things like spider mites and aphids and squash bugs, but striped and spotted cucumber beetles are our focal pests. They're the ones that are on the farmer's mind and.

Speaker 1

Striped cucumber beetle, OK.

Speaker 2

Yes, striped cucumber beetle, which you know we think of them as in our squash and zucchini in our gardens. But Watermelon is a close enough relative that those beetles sure don't mind munching on the leaves. They in Indiana they go through two generations. So early on when the plants are small, they can hit them. Hard. They lay their eggs in the soil and then once those flowers starting to come up, you see another big wave of them. And there's an added stress of those little larvae munching on their roots and. Yeah, so they're kind of hit getting hit from below and above. And it's two sides. And that can really stress the melons out.

Speaker 1

Oh wow. What can growers do about this?

Speaker 2

The most common thing is pyrethroid spray, so if. Go out in. During the day with the aerial or aerial, or I spare their pull behind the tractor, douse the douse the melons with the insecticide. And that's the Prairie thread. It's toxic, but it's also repellent. And so you come back the next day of a field that was just full of insects, both good and bad. And it'll be a ghost town.

Speaker 1

But OK.

Speaker 2

The next day, those those that repellent effect they'd want nothing to do with that field and it even the earliest insects to return it, it can be up to a week before you really start seeing activity resume and. So the grower might be thinking, Yep, I got to get my spray out there. This is when the melons need to be protected. But that's also the key point where you need those pollinators to be out there doing their thing. But if those gals are being repelled, you might not be doing a whole lot of.

Speaker 1

Good. OK. So it sounds like there can be a trade off here.

Speaker 2

Yes it is. I would never say that it's easy to be a farmer. They're every decision. I can only have met just in my research plots. You know, having to make those decisions. It's not my livelihood. It's not to me, bringing the check home, depending on how good of a job I do growing these plants. So they trying to protect them and doing what they think is right and it is hard to manage those pests while trying to keep your beneficials around. And there's so many different places, they're getting advice from and suggestions and trying to find the right resource. I have to imagine is tough for a farmer who just wants to grow melons.

Speaker 1

Well, before we talk about your research, tell us one thing is that there are, you know, integrated pest management, something we don't talk a lot about on the show, it's sort of. You know we we're sort of we talked a little bit about it, but with the straight cucumber beetle, there is a kind of integrated pest management approach. Can you describe what that approach is?

Speaker 2

Yeah. So in integrated pest management, it's kind of it's this principles we've had for a long time. It's just we don't always think about them insects. Sides oftentimes are pretty cheap. They're pretty easy. You don't have to think a whole lot. You go out there, spray it. I can go to bed and not worry about it. But integrated pest management is combining a lot of aspects of going out there, seeing what's in your field, combining some cultural practices like cover crops or tillage. But for watermelons, a lot of it involves. Scouting going out there, looking at your plans, seeing what kind of feeding damage you have, just how many beetles are out there and using really well established thresholds. The what they call economic threshold. That's the point where if you see consistently 5 beetles of our striped cucumber beetles. On a melon plant, that's how you know you are going to start to see an economic loss. Those Beals are contributing to harming those plants enough that you will have lower yield. In your field.

Speaker 1

So you get down on your hands, hands and knees in a couple of areas of the field. You flip the leaf. Over and that's how.

Speaker 2

You do it? Yep. Yep. It's again. That's why it's not so popular.

Speaker

On a.

Speaker 2

Hot day in in July. I can I? Can imagine a lot of. Farmers can look at me funny when I. Suggest. Yeah. Just gotta get down there. And flip over some leaves, but. That's really an effective way because if you know you see the occasional beater here or there, a farmer might be clutching his pearls that he's worried that these bills are out there, but they're not high enough numbers. They're really not going to be doing anything to your bottom line. So.

Speaker 1

Right. And it probably, but the spray will. It is more expensive than the damage.

Speaker 2

Mm-hmm. Yep. You're spraying. You're even if the exact say cheap, you're spending some money to save none. And in fact, it might be hurting you. Yeah, because we, like we said the pollinators. Yeah.

Speaker 1

The pollinators, OK, that sets us up perfectly. We're gonna take a quick break and I want to come back and talk about how your research is getting at defining these trade-offs for farmers, right? OK. So we're back and so tell us a little bit about your research. You've sort of set this up, the integrated pest management and these watermelon growers with these high value crops and these pests that can do a lot of damage. What was your research question?

Speaker 2

Yeah. So our research question. Is, like I said, watermelons are important in Indiana, but they are surrounded by row crop agriculture and are the way we're thinking. It's not just the watermelon crop that we have to control. It's the whole agricultural system. It's not just the Monroes, it's what's going on around them. And so we've got this really interesting. Experimental design where we've got a 1/2 acre watermelon patch and that watermelon patch is buried within 15 acres of corn. It's surrounded by. Corn. And so it's little Melon Island in.

Speaker 1

Which is, I guess what the state looks like.

Speaker 2

It's a yeah, it's. A snapshot of Indiana agriculture, right? You've got these high-value specialty crops in an ocean of corn and we have pairs of these sites and they're in two different systems. What we're calling our conventional system. In our conventional system, 15 acres of corn has a seed treatment of thiamethoxam, thiamethoxam is one of the more common neonicotinoid insecticides. Centrum is that supplied on the corn and the melons when we. Take the melons and we transplant them onto our field. They are given a metoclopramide, which is another neonicotinoid insecticide in the transplanting water. When we put them in the ground, they get a big dump of water on just to help them get acclimated. And they put insecticide in that. And those insects are systemic, systemic plants take them right up. And so they're expressed in the plant.

Speaker 1

Issue gotcha and.

Speaker 2

To replicate what a grow would do throughout our summer, they got 4 foliar sprays of pyrethroid. Warrior two is the trade name of that, but it's a prophylactic insecticide no matter what the pests were looking like. We just went up there and. Sprayed them and the opposite end of the spectrum. Is our IPM? Integrated pest management approach that same 15 acres of corn was given no insecticidal seed treatment, so that corn. No one said said at all. And our melons in the same way had no neonicotinoid applied when we transplanted them, and the only time we would ever apply a pyrethroid to those insecticides, if through IPM scouting, we found enough cucumber beetles that they reached that five beetles per pent threshold. If we saw that, we would do a reactionary spray. Suppress the beetles and then.

Speaker 1

Let the plot recover just so we made sure we weren't seeing economic damage to our melons because of The Beatles. And I guess the core part is that it seems you got two different crops, but that the one cropping the pest management on the corn might the sea treatment on the corn might affect. You're focusing on the watermelons, but it might have an effect.

Speaker 2

On the, yeah. So what has made neonicotinoid insecticides so effective is they're really mobile. They can be taken up by the plant and they can move through the soil. They're water-soluble. It's. But what's really bad about them is they are very mobile and they're water soluble and they can move into adjacent plant material. So a lot of papers have shown that these neonicotinoids can go into flowers growing in the margins of fields or weeds in the ditches. And so thinking of that we thought well. Even if a watermelon grower has the best intentions and is not putting insecticides on his melons, if he's neighbors, all are growing corn. And they're using insecticides. Those residues could be moving in and technology is amazing these days. We have tests that we can look at specific chemical residues and look for them in the tissues of different plants and the flowers and soil. And so we're hoping that we can see where the insecticides that we apply both into the corn and the melons are moving.

Speaker 1

Got you.

Speaker 2

Within our system.

Speaker 1

Oh, what a great and nice setup for being able to discriminate those effects, OK?

Speaker 2

Yeah. Yep. And so though the conventional and I PM system that was. They are paired with three kilometers of distance, so relatively similar climate and there are five pairs up and down. Indiana from all the way about an hour from Chicago, all the way down to the southern part where we're you're basically into Kentucky. So I did a lot of driving. Summer I got very, very intimately familiar with the Indiana back roads, so it was really great to see a variety of Indiana climates. You know, cell differences in the landscape, it's not all flat. There's there's some hills, especially when you get from down South, but.

Speaker 1

There is I remember this and. You drive down South. The accident changes somewhere.

Speaker 2

It really does. So the 2 Southern sites really start to it. You're like, wait, did I cross into Kentucky or not?

Speaker

It's it's, you know.

Speaker 2

It's getting there, but yeah, so it's really cool. And we kept these melons. What are 5 pairs as similar as we could? There are certain things we have to do if it rains a lot up north and doesn't in the South, we might have to irrigate a bit more, but we at least kept management on the pair of sites the same. So whatever happened to that conventional site, the I PM site got the same except for the insecticide input so. We're really focusing on. Either having or removing just that one key management input and looking at how that affects 3 big parts of the system are pests. You know you're applying this insecticide to control pests and monitoring them is really important yield no matter what you try to convince a farmer yield is going to be the most effective way. That's. Their bottom line and our pollinators. Any negative effects that we might see in the watermelons might be a loss of pollinators and so on.

Speaker 1

Right. Which order do you want to take them up on? Pests you. Want to start with pests?

Speaker 2

Sure. We can start with pests. And so like I was describing the good old fashioned scout and get on your hands and knees. We did that. So we planted our melons and the next week we came back and we started scouting. So we took random plants, looked them over top and bottom, and counted the cucumber beetles. And we did that.

Speaker 1

OK.

Speaker 2

For the next. 10 weeks, which got us either right before we began. To harvest or a little bit into it. But that's the key period where a farmer would be really worried about his melons. And we monitored how those cucumber beetle populations grew. And at the end of it, if you can do the math in your head, it was a hundred of those beetle surveys, 50 in our conventional 50 in ours. Yeah, there's.

Speaker 1

There's a lot of driving. A lot of.

Speaker 2

Driving. However, in our IPM plots, only one field at one date reached our economic threshold of five fields per plant. And so you can think of it the. Every other field during every other time. If you had chosen to apply an insecticide, it would have been, Yep, you wouldn't have needed it at all. And so that one field that it reached we it.

Speaker 1

You wouldn't have. Needed it.

Speaker 2

Was starting to. Raise? Maybe, but I think the week before is that. About 3 Beatles performed. We're like, oh. Let's watch it. The next week came back. It was. A little over 5. The next day it received a pyrethroid spray and that kept The Beatles down throughout the rest of the summer, and it never needed another one. And so.

Speaker 1

I guess that's. A testament to a really well-worked-out threshold. Like if you've got a nice rigid threshold you could do that and you feel confident.

Speaker 2

Yep, Yep. And so. You can. Really connect, connect that to you and that's what we did, yeah.

Speaker 1

So just so, so just so that point doesn't get lost, so that at the end of the day, so when you looked at the main Keystone Pass that really only in one circumstance in one field, OK, that's good to know, right?

Speaker 2

Yep, so it's it's the thing. We're really worried about and more often than not, good.

Speaker 1

I would expect then if that was the case, the IP M fields and the conventional fields would have the same. Yield. Is that not the case?

Speaker 2

Right. That was actually not the case when we found it. So our half acres of watermelons, I didn't know a lot about growing melons before we started. I assume there was some sort of harvesting machine. You know, we have all sorts of technology that is, that is not the case. The primary method to harvest watermelons is in our case.

Speaker 1

Ah, OK.

Speaker 2

His grad students and.

Speaker

Oh my God.

Speaker 2

So I also didn't know that in 1/2 acre. Of watermelons a good yield is about 20 to 30,000 pounds.

Speaker 1

Oh my God.

Speaker 2

Yeah. So I'm not a I'm not a buff guy by any stretch of the imagination. Well, by the end of it, I definitely, yeah, definitely tone up and realistically, there's no way we could measure that with accuracy, but.

Speaker 1

But you were at. The end of that summer.

Speaker 2

We had some plots. Kind of randomly placed throughout each of these. We combine those to give us a proxy of yield and when you looked at those, comparing the IPM to the conventional sites, they were different, but it was actually that our IPM melon plots had greater yield than our conventionally managed ones. And that was driven by two of our five sites that were.

Speaker

Quite a bit.

Speaker 2

Fire. They were just head and shoulders. Greater yield. I think it was a couple £100. If you look at all of our. Subplots combined that the IPM plots outperformed are conventional.

Speaker 1

In my mind, it makes me think about the third thing you're going to talk about the pollinators.

Speaker 2

Yes, and the pollinators really cooperated and they fit in awesomely to this side of the story and so on. At the same time, we were harvesting and picking melons and counting cucumber beetles. We were also staring at flowers. So we would take a random assortment of flowers and watermelons are they have male and female flowers. And for food to develop a female flower needs to have an insect that previously visited a male flower, got the pollen on it, visited the female flower, and fertilized that. As I mentioned before, you want multiple visits more times. AB goes to Mayflower and visits the VMA flyer that's going to improve your fruit set. Bigger, better, more delicious. Melons. And so we took sets of at least a couple of flowers. At least one male. Females sat down and watched how many bees we saw stop and visit one of these flowers and each of those bees. How many different flowers did they visit? And most importantly, how many times did we see a pollination event or a bee that was on a male flower hop onto a female flower and so we took those clusters? And a three-minute time period we sat down and watched different clusters at 5 different time periods throughout that peak flower time anywhere between late June to early August. That was the window depending on when they got planted and so we had a huge range of time that we're watching these pollinators and. In those two plots in the IPM, where we had a much greater melon yield, there was a huge difference in the number of pollinators we saw. There was overall there was about. 3rd reduction in the number of pollinators we saw. So there were in our conventional plots there were 50% fewer flower visits. So even the bees that were there were visiting fewer flowers and there were only about 1/4 to 1/5 of the pollination events that we had. Saw. And so our IPM plots had more bees. They're visiting more flowers and they were going from a male to a female. Flower more often. And I think. That's a really cool piece of the puzzle to put in there and show that you have these cucumber beetle populations. We might have had more in our IPM field. But they almost never reach the threshold. In those conventional plots where they are getting sprayed anyway with no regard to the number of beetles you're repelling the bees, or maybe even killing the bees in some scenario otherwise, ultimately you're not making a good place for them. To and so they are choosing to not be pollinated as infrequently and an unforeseen consequence of that to the farmer is. You're not getting the melon yields. You should. If you had a healthy, intact B community. And the communities of these plots would be relatively similar. We've got them just a couple of miles apart. So it's not that they're in drastically different environments. And so the big thing that is either being added or removed is this prophylactic insecticide input and it's pretty directly affecting these bees.

Speaker 1

I guess you know, we're often thinking lots of us are interested in pollinators and pollinator protection, but this is a real great finding in terms of really laying it out to farmers in terms of, you know what, what will be lost. And it's a very compelling argument.

Speaker 2

Yeah, yeah, I think it's. Having all these pieces to show them that you know they might when I show them that Beatle numbers will say, yeah, well, those Beatles were still affecting my yield and then we're going to show that concrete yield difference and it connecting it to bees. I'm really hoping is going to be enough to at least get some people to consider, you know, well, maybe. Even though these subsidies are. Cheap and I'm out there, you know. And give me something. To do maybe I'm doing more harm than good and you know that's. Entomologists. You know. That's what we have to do try to communicate the best we can.

Speaker 1

So the thing. I think is well that a lot of pollinator research is a focus. Like what's really impressive is that you thought carefully about all the elements and their trade-offs. Sometimes we look at, oh, there's a pesticide and it's having an additive impact on the pollinators. But we haven't taken into consideration the. The pest problem. This is a really nice study and it has considered all those elements.

Speaker 2

Yeah. Yep. There's a great team working on this, a bunch of faculty at Purdue University. We have some extension folks, some guys who've worked in row crop agriculture for a number of years, and some pollination experts. So I have just. So many great resources that if I'm scratching my head with a question the Super supportive to help me out and so all of this that I've been describing was done in 2018 last summer and we're going to repeat this in 2019 and 2020. So the fun is just starting, but. I think what's going to if we can see similar trends. Yeah. Yep. In the same sites and so on.

Speaker 1

The same sights.

Speaker 2

What I think is going to be really interesting to see is repeated years of either high inputs of insecticides or no insecticides at all. If we start to see these differences already, they go even further and further away from each other. Yeah, these cause a lot of these insecticides, especially our neonicotinoids.

Speaker 1

What's that?

Speaker 2

They have really slow degradations and they can be multiple years detectable in these fields and so. If it's accumulating in the tissues in the soil it's just representing a really inhospitable habitat for our pollinators and me.

Speaker 1

Right accumulate, OK.

Speaker 2

Think it would be really cool too. See what summer 2020 is looking like.

Speaker 1

Well, fantastic. Experimental design. Good job we're going to take a break and I have a couple of questions to ask you. I asked all my guests. OK. We are back. The first question I have is I ask everybody this and I feel squeamish. I've had a couple of grad students. They're like, I don't read books like these. Days but do. You have a. Do you have a book that you would recommend about polymers you found?

Speaker 2

Real. He's so that these in your backyard book. I absolutely love it.

Speaker 1

Oh yeah.

Speaker 2

Going through that one and you know. Reading there's enough reading, I'm sure a lot of the graduate students like I have enough reading just for work that I have to do, but it's such fun, you know? And I'm learning some, you know, a lot of the bee species that I even ones that I either saw that day in the field or maybe I I'll never get a chance to see but the the information they have coupled with the illustrations. It's just awesome. It's a yeah, it's a really fun resource and I'm sure I'm getting tons of great info on and.

Speaker 1

And the writing is solid and the images are stunning.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I I.

Speaker 1

It is incredible the position and just the cooperation. Well, I'm sure they would never say they cooperate. That's just rolling their eyes at me. But we had we had. We had one of the authors on I think our second episode and he said they did divide like most of the writing. Look at those. Was Olivia Messenger Carol and he took a lot of the images, so they actually had a division of Labor. That makes it. Yeah, but I thought Oh I right? I thought I didn't know what I thought. Anyways, I was like, because it seems so seamless. The book is so. Well put together. Yeah. Yeah, that's.

Speaker 2

Good. That's a good one. The pallet cleanser at the. End of the. A day out in the hot sun, it's nice too.

Speaker 1

In the next edition, I'll get you to print the little thing out in the hot sun. There's nothing like reading this book.

Speaker 2

Yeah, right. That's it's just as good as. Like the Oprah. Book Club sticker is. The indictment of a grad student.

Speaker 1

OK. The second question I have is, do you have a go-to tool for all this work that you're doing?

Speaker 2

Yeah. So one really helpful thing is we have a bee vacuum. So it's a, yeah, so it's it looks and sounds like a dust Buster. It's about the loaf of bread size with the tube at the end and capturing bees sweep net style. Well, I've done it and it's a great way to. Get stung a lot. And so this bee vacuum it's got you turn it on and there's suction and you can sneak up on a bee visiting a watermelon flower. Snag it. And there's a little collection too, with some flaps that get sucked in the collection tube. But then they can't get quite out. And you can collect all the bees you want. And then. Capped and either if you're counting the bees or if you need to cattle and identify them, you can just throw that thing in the freezer, and when they're much more manageable, kick them out and check them out. Yeah, it's a really nice tool to have and my face which gets stung enough, just, you know.

Speaker 1

Just walking around feels, yeah.

Speaker 2

They miss the. The mischief that I do in the watermelon fields. It's really nice. For the actual research side too, those fewer stayings it's.

Speaker 1

Great. Well, I I remember was I I haven't used them for a decade or so, and I remember they used to be very low powered and it's like, but.

Speaker 2

Nowadays I always bring a battery or two. Yeah, you know, just just in case or, you know. Oh, crap, I forgot to charge it last night. As long as it's in the field, I forget.

Speaker 1

Stuff. So it's.

Speaker 2

Good to have a backup, but yeah. They are. They're great. OK. Awesome. The last question I have is there a pollen or species when you see it, you're just like I love that little guy. Yeah. So it's one that we see all over the place in our watermelon fields melodies by Maculata is the bee. It's the two-spotted Longhorn bee. It's it's about the size of a bumblebee. It's all black, except as you could guess by the name 2 yellow spots towards the end of the abdomen on the females and they're like. I started when I first started doing my floral collections on the Watermans. I would see them all over and they're just yeah, they are everywhere, and I.

Speaker 1

Well, they visit the watermelon. All right.

Speaker 2

Would love to. Do more and there's not a lot of information out there. I'd love to do more kinds of side projects and see this unique how some. The specific insecticide is impacting this guy, but it's just a fun one to look around. Look at just. They're so big on the melon flower that sometimes the flowers will sag and it's watching them try to manhandle them. The flower. And they're just so fluffy that at the end of that, they've been going to flowers all day. They'll just. Be covered in yellow so as much as much yellow and from watermelon pollen as they are black.

Speaker 1

They are all here.

Speaker 2

So they're a cute little guy, so.

Speaker 1

Fantastic. Well, thanks for taking time to. Talk with us.

Speaker 2

Yeah, it's great to share.

Speaker 1

Thanks so much for listening. Show notes with information discussed in each episode can be found at pollinationpodcast.oregonstate.edu. We'd also love to hear from you, and there are several ways to connect. For one, you can visit our website to post an episode. Specific comments suggest a future guest or topic or ask a question that can be featured in a future episode. You can also e-mail us at the pollination podcast at Oregon State Dot. To you. Finally, you can tweet questions or comments or join their Facebook or Instagram communities. Just look us up at OHSU pollinator health. If you like the show, consider letting iTunes know by leaving us a review or rating. It makes us more visible, which helps others discover pollination. See you next week.