82 Sarah Kincaid – Promoting Bee-Friendly Farming (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, Dr. Adoni Melopoulos, assistant professor in pollinator health in the Department of Horticulture. Oregon is not only a great place to eat, we grow some amazing food in the state, but it's also home to some of the most exquisite and wonderful native bees. In this week's episode, we're going to talk with Sarah Kincaid from the Oregon Department of Agriculture about a program called the Flagship Farm Program, which is part of the Oregon Bee Project. For those of you who know Sarah Kincaid, she's a real wealth of knowledge here in the state on native bees, so this is a wonderful episode for both talking about farm practices and some of the farms that are doing amazing things for pollinators in the state, but also there's some wonderful natural history nuggets in this episode about the bees of Oregon. So pop out to your fridge, grab some beautiful Oregon cranberries or cherries or herged tomatoes, and sit back and enjoy this episode of Pollination. Okay, I'm really excited to be sitting across from Sarah Kincaid from the Oregon Department of Agriculture. Welcome to Pollination. Thanks for having me.

It's really good to have you on the show because I think you and I probably talk on a daily basis, yet it took 70 episodes before I got you on Pollination.

Speaker 2: This is true. I sometimes forget though that you don't work at the ODA. That's how much I talk to you.

Speaker 1: That's right. I do want to come around because we both work in the Oregon Bee Project and I think people know about the Oregon Bee Project through the episode, but I think probably in this episode some of that will come across and we really do need to do an episode with the other partners, Department of Forestry. We should all get around the room and just talk about what we do because it seems like we do a lot. That would be great. So okay, the one thing I wanted to talk about was this thing, the flagship farm program which has been going on for about two years.

It's in its second year. Yes. And it strikes me that most people know when I am in the state and traveling around talking about ODA and bees, these beautiful postcards, these beautiful images, this really nice book about the bees of, it's like the bees of Oregon agriculture.

Speaker 2: These common bee pollinators of Oregon crops.

Speaker 1: Something like that. We will link it in the show notes. For those of you who have, if you're in Oregon, you've seen these, they're really beautiful images. They're very crisp. And it strikes me that the origin of these bees was a project that ODA did a couple of years ago around farms in Oregon. Tell us a little bit about that project and what you found. Yeah.

Speaker 2: So starting in 2012, the Oregon Department of Agriculture got a grant through the specialty crop block grant program. This is a USDA-funded program to survey native bees in different agricultural areas throughout the state. This is a project I think went on for three years.

We ended up looking at 30 different types of crops throughout the state. And this was a really wide distribution of survey sites all the way to Eastern Oregon, nothing along the coast, but extensively through the Willamette Valley, some in the Portland area and I believe a couple down south as well.

Speaker 1: And these were on, this was not like in remote areas. This was on farms. Nope.

Speaker 2: This was just, I think there are usually four different collection sites at each farm location. Yeah. Just tip of the mill field, some were small veg farms, some were very large, more industrial, agricultural locations.

Yeah. And it's out of that work that led to the guide as well as a few interesting findings. Most notable to me was the fact that some of our native groups, especially the really common groups, the sweat bees, were more numerous at some of these locations than honeybees, which is quite impressive since some of these farms were actually bringing in honeybees.

Speaker 1: We have this conversation many, many times in trucks driving around the state, but just the way in which Oregon agriculture is a lot different than say the Midwest. Absolutely.

Speaker 2: We're a specialty crop state. We produce over 200 different crops here in the state. Many of those depend on pollination and if they depend on pollination, that means that they're providing a resource for the bees themselves. And honeybees certainly play a huge role in commercial pollination, but there are a lot of native bees here in the state. I'm sure you've mentioned possibly over 500 species that may be contributing to that pollination as well and are utilizing those on-farm resources to complete their life cycle.

Speaker 1: And it reminds me of an episode we had with Sujaya Rao when she was here at OSU, where she had made the observation in a lot of these cropping systems, there's unusually high bee diversity for agricultural systems. Absolutely.

Speaker 2: And I have to give homage to Sujaya she was my major professor. I learned much of what I know about native bees working in her lab and ag systems. And Oregon, through my work, I've really observed we have a real special mix here. And part of that is the crop diversity, the sheer number of different flowering plants we have, but it's also some other factors. So it's the fact that these are high-value crops, so we're not eking out every single inch of land for production as they are in areas where they predominantly grow corn and soybean. So we have a lot of wonderful margin habitat. We have a lot of natural areas. They're kind of a patchwork through the landscape. And it's the fact that these crops are also being grown right next to each other.

So we have an overlap of bloom, you know, in a square mile radius. Species of bees have access to different crops starting in the spring all the way to the fall.

Speaker 1: I don't remember, so Jaya would say even the crops that aren't providing nectar resources like the grass seeds get become this, you know, she had measurements of bumblebee nest density in some of these grassy fields in the room. Yes.

Speaker 2: And in fact, the highest density of bumblebee nests that I personally have observed in the field other than in areas of cranberries are usually in grass seed fields or along the ditches and edges.

Speaker 1: Because right across the street will be a blueberry field or a clover.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And in addition, there are crops that don't require pollination that bees are able to utilize, you know, particularly really early and late in the season. I know we've talked about how honey bees will forage on hazelnuts, for instance. Even grass pollen, I had the opportunity to do some pollen analysis early in my career. And it's really surprising what bees will forage on. They have their ways of identifying whether something's a good resource or not. And it doesn't always make sense to us why they choose what they choose.

Speaker 1: As an Albertan who's used to one flowering crop canola being everywhere, I was always, you know, I remember a pivotal moment for me was coming onto the I-5 and seeing a little ODA sign saying, chickery. I was like, they grow chickery out here?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Chickery is a beautiful crop too. It's a beautiful kind of periwinkle blue. It's tall. Swepees. I found a lot of sweat bees on chickery. In fact, there was a high-density, nesting, lazy orgasm site right north of town in a chickery field. OK.

Speaker 1: So this sets up. We've got an agricultural system with a lot of diversity. And so ODA got another specialty crop block grant for the flagship farm program. And I just, you know, I have to say, like the genesis of the idea of the Oregon Bee Project was that grant. So it's like, it was for us here in Oregon, it was a really important stepping stone for our overall pollinator health. But so tell us a little bit about what the flagship farm program is and what it was intended to do. Yeah.

Speaker 2: So that program really came out of my work with pollinators at the ODA and in particular my graduate work with Sujaya Rao working on a lot of these farm sites and having the opportunity to meet the farmers throughout Oregon. And they really care about insect biodiversity and it's not always because they have a pollinated crop. Some of them just are really interested in being good stewards of the land. And I noticed that many of them were kind of taking it upon themselves to try to find novel ways of promoting pollinators on farms. And this could be reserving patches of native landscape.

Some farmers have been experimenting with their own seed mixes to bolster resources for pollinators during, you know, the time the crop is not in bloom. But I've always been really, really impressed. And I also was really impressed with how many spaces on Oregon farms there are that are occupied by bees. And given that there's a narrative out there that really paints agriculture in a really negative light when it comes to insect biodiversity, we kind of came up with the idea that, hey, there's a positive story that we can tell here.

There are a lot of ways that farmers are promoting and protecting native bees and maybe there's a way we can incentivize it. So that's kind of how the Flagship Farm Program was born in the Oregon Beed Project as well. To start the process, we started reaching out to other agencies, you know, EU and other folks at Oregon State University, Oregon Department of Forestry. We've reached out to NGOs, Xerxes Society, NCAP, and basically anyone who had some skin in the pollinator game. And we said, hey, we're thinking about putting a bee-friendly certification together.

What advice do you have? Do you want to be involved in the project? And it kind of morphed into something else, a little more kind of institutional in a sense, where a group of dedicated individuals from different state agencies who want to put in some infrastructure and help really tackle problems that pollinators face over the long haul. And then the Flagship Farm Program, which attempts to incentivize bee-friendly practices on farms kind of became a side initiative off of the Oregon Bee Project.

Speaker 1: I remember you actually have been on an episode. I forgot. You're on the Garth Mulkey episode with the famous line that he had. He has bumblebees the size of house cats. It was a great episode if you didn't catch it, but he's a Flagship Farmer and it's a great example of somebody who wasn't promoting that he was doing this, but he has this great crop diversity and he's like one of the major seed producers of like a key cover crop for protecting pollinators, Facilia. So he had this example of a person who was just out there doing this already, but no acknowledgment. Nobody knew he was doing this and it seemed that we wanted more people to follow Garth's lead. Absolutely.

Speaker 2: And he really is an exemplar of exactly what I'm talking about. On his farm was the first large patch of Facilia I'd ever gotten to experience. And for those of you who haven't had that experience, it's the common name is Scorpion weed. It's this carling purple flower. It's attractive to probably the broadest number of pollinators of any seed crop really that I can think of. And it's a joy to work in.

It's just that wall of buzz that surrounds you when you're out there and you're absolutely right. No one knew he was doing this. He didn't do it for recognition. He self-funded that as well as some of his early experiments in putting together seed mixes for pollinators. He and his wife put in a kind of pond surrounded by wildflowers in natural areas. So they actually took some land out of production to do this.

Those are the exact types of farmers that we are trying to reach trying to let the public and the extension service and everyone else know that farmers are doing this and to try to encourage others and also to prevent an opportunity for others to learn from these folks and for us to build on the body of knowledge we have about what actually works to promote pollinators.

Speaker 1: Okay. Let's take a quick break. We'll come back. I want to talk about some of the farms that are enrolled this year and also we have an open call for people to get involved. So let's talk about how you can get involved and also some of the challenges and opportunities around this kind of being able to recognize yourself as a bee-friendly farmer. Okay.

We're back. Let's start with some of the farms that were enrolled last year. Tell us a little bit about some of the farms and I think we're going to have some episode with Garth. We're going to be having another episode with one of the nurseries coming up and Linda Boyer is going to be on in a couple of episodes. So we're going to talk to some of these farmers but just tell us a little bit about some of the things that you saw last year in some of the farms. Yeah.

Speaker 2: So we have a really great mix of farms. They are spread throughout the state. Most of them are in the Willamette Valley. We're hoping to kind of expand that a little bit in the future. We have some mixed veg farms, Gales Metal Farm outside of Forest Grove is a really charming little farm. They do a lot of fresh market for the farmers market. Their specialty is varieties of tomatoes and peppers and they're also kind of a teaching farm as well.

Speaker 1: Oh right. I remember going there. Bring a lot of interns and they also have been experimenting with dry land farming and seed saving for some time. We have a cranberry farm down on the southern coast of Oregon, Hooters Bogs, which is a really wonderful place to get to spend some time. Cranberry is a crop that is really, really great for bumblebees in particular and the whole landscape down there is kind of bumblebee heaven. All the natural plants in the landscape are all those umbel-shaped flowers, you know, all in the blueberry of the Aracaceus family. So you have wild solale, you have manzanita, you have the cranberry itself, and lots of other kinds of wild plants in the landscape. I remember walking along, you and I were there and we were walking along and you were pointing out all the, it's iconic because I use it at all my slides, you're sort of your finger pointing to the berm where there are all these ground-nesting bees that are making their home right there in the middle of that agricultural system. Yeah.

Speaker 2: That's probably one of the best things about that site so I'm not sure if your viewers have ever, or listeners, sorry, have ever been to a cranberry farm, but they're bogs and so they have berms around them and in this location, the berms are made out of kind of a compacted sandy road and it ends up being the ideal substrate for ground-nesting bees and so there's thousands of ground nesting bees surrounding all of these bogs and some of them might not even be interested in the cranberry. Cranberry is kind of a unique flower that I'm not sure that all bees really take advantage of, but they're there really because of those compacted sandy roads with no vegetation. Having open space is really kind of rare in the natural environment and ground-nesting bees really utilize those types of spaces.

Speaker 1: I remember one of your comments there was there was an inordinate number of Caledys compared to other farms.

Speaker 2: Yes, in particular I myself, I find Caledys really, really beautiful. These are the polyester bees, and digger bees and they have heart-shaped faces. They kind of look like they're wearing these little white furry vests. They're really, really beautiful, fast flyers.

For whatever reason they rarely show up in pan traps and blue vein traps and so for me to see them all over a site like that was really exciting and that's the first time I had ever seen a Caledys nesting site before. So okay. Yeah, very cool. All right, cranberries. Yeah, we also have a grass seed farmer, Lachlan Farms in Yamhill. This is a really great space and what I really in particular love about this farm is I think almost nobody would associate a grass seed operation with native bees and yet this is a really special site. This farmer, Michael Lachlan, is actually also in Oregon, B Atlas, a really fantastic volunteer, a master gardener, and a really knowledgeable all-around guy who has really maintained a lot of the margin habitat around the grass fields. Around here in this part of the Lamont Valley, a lot of the flowering hedge species that we see, we see, you know, nutca rows, so wild rows, you know, a lot of flowering tree species, big leaf maple, a lot of little tiny brassicas that are kind of all along the edges and there's just a real interesting abundance of bees there and a lot of bombers. It's in an area where there's a lot of red clover kind of sprinkled throughout the grass fields and so a lot of nesting that we've found as well. So that's been a treat to work with him and again, a farmer, he's not getting any benefit from...

Speaker 1: Yeah, he grows grass.

Speaker 2: Yeah, he grows grass. He's not an economic incentive for him and yet he's put a lot of time effort and money into developing these areas for bees.

Speaker 1: I also, just for the California listeners, we do have an olive orchard too.

Speaker 2: Absolutely, which I was so excited. Locreole Orchards, which is outside of Dallas. Bogdan is the farmer and he is another one who is a mover and a shaker. He is always looking for different things to help his property out, and different programs to be involved with. It has a really, really beautiful site. It's very, very sloped. Again, there are a lot of bare open-ground spaces kind of between vegetation. So a lot of ground nesting bees. He has actually put in about half of the property he's dedicated just to natural habitat down at the base there. So yeah, and a lot of really early spring bees at his property, I know it's a lot of Andrina that are out there. And it's kind of nestled in this little valley. Again, a lot of kind of natural areas surrounding it. Okay.

Speaker 1: And you also, I remember you have that, there's that place down in Applegate where we saw those crazy little fluorescent yellow.

Speaker 2: Lemon yellow bumblebee. Yeah, yeah. So that's Ridgeline Meadow Farms. That's a farm that's kind of tucked away in the Applegate Valley, a really beautiful area. And actually, an area that most people don't realize has a lot of high crop diversity as well. It's actually with some of the first orchards in the state. Actually went in that valley, a really early agricultural area of the state. He produces kind of small batches of specialty seeds on contract, as well as being for the fresh farmers market. And so a lot of crop diversity, a lot of changing bloom. My favorite part is they have carpenter bees down there, which being from the Central Valley, I rarely get to see. So that's always true.

Speaker 1: You gotta go south of Eugene to see them.

Speaker 2: Yes, for the most part. They make it up here occasionally, but not very often.

Speaker 1: All right. And with the vineyard, we've got a vineyard.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So this year it was really exciting. We added two vineyards and then some nurseries as well. So there's Winter's Hill, which is a really, really beautiful spot in Oregon, wide country, beautiful view out of the valley and the mountains. And again, a family that is really, really interested in providing habitat for both insects and wildlife in general. They started, I think, providing milkweeds for monarchs.

And then that really started them off as providing a whole host of blooming species for all different types of insects. And they have been gracious to open up their site for our Atlas volunteers. It's actually a collection site. So some really...

Speaker 1: Oh, it was featured in the Oregon Field Guide episode.

Speaker 2: It's featured in the Oregon Field Guide. I have to say it's one of my favorite groups to visit because they also provide wine during their group meetings. One of the members is also a former professional pastry chef.

So those meetings are pretty great together. The other vineyard is Sochar, another beautiful location. They're a biodynamic farm. And so a lot is going on in addition to having different gardens that serve food in their tasting room from produce produced on site. So both meat as well as vegetables. And then they have a lot of beautiful margin habitat kind of along the way. And again, vineyards, are wind-pollinated crops. So again, these are not... They don't require insect vector pollination for their crop, but just growers who really, really care about being good stewards.

Speaker 1: Okay. So you got all... One thing that sort of comes out in this story is the people who... In some ways, what the flagship farm program has done is really collected people who already are doing things for pollinators, not necessarily because they benefit the farm, but they may, but a lot of people who really care deeply about conservation.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. That has kind of been the goal. So to try to help find these farmers, I knew some farmers from my work in ag systems and my work with the ODA, but we really wanted to allow everyone to nominate a farm. So we made it a nomination process and you can even self-nominate if you're really proud of the work that you're doing. We also reached out to our advisory committee. Again, this is a really broad group of stakeholders, state agencies, NGOs, farmers, and conservationists who help us guide us in the Oregon Bee Projects. We reached out to them to nominate the farms that they thought would be best for this. And the goal is to hopefully inspire other farmers. If you yourself, as you listen to this, think that your farm would be a great fit for this, or know some farm that you think is really novel and its approach to protecting pollinators or wildlife in general, we would love it if you would nominate the farm. And to do that, you can visit our website, OregonBproject.org. And if you just scroll down the page, you'll find a link there to the flagship farm program.

Speaker 1: Oh yeah, right there, right below all the different categories that the project has information for. There's a picture there. That was that farm close to Portland with one of the interns standing next to the bee call.

Speaker 2: Yeah, that's Gales Metal Farm right there. And you can read about the profiles of our other farmers. I'm going to be updating that to have the latest farmers pretty soon, hopefully by the time this airs so you can read about everyone who's currently participating.

Speaker 1: Oh, that's another benefit that what happens is you get a profile on your farm and how it helps bees and so it can act as a marketing tool if you do, if you choose to. Absolutely.

Speaker 2: So how participation in the program works is once you're accepted into the program, there's a spring workshop that everyone attends. And this is a, I found them really to be fantastic last year. We got some good feedback. We have different speakers that cover things like maintaining habitat and controlling weeds. We also go into a kind of basic biological life history of honeybees and native bees, which a lot of people don't get that information. And it really helps you understand what types of resources they're using on your farm and what types of things they need to be healthy and happy. In addition, there's a component of this program where everyone has to help monitor bees on their property as well.

And this is something that's really, really easy to do. We train you at the workshop. We give you either pan traps or blue vein traps. You put them out, you know, once a month and then come back and pick up the samples. And at the end of the summer, we collect all of those. And ultimately you'll get those bees back in a collection where you can really see what bee species are living on your farm. And also that information is going to be added to our kind of Atlas database.

So we're under, we get a better understanding of what bee species are living and what types of farms around Oregon. In return, we help provide a little bit of promotional kind of resources. We write basically a blog post about your farm, including photos that are going to go up on our website. We'll also distribute it out kind of through some of our media channels.

You're welcome to use that information as well. You also get to use the logo for the project. And what's really exciting is this is the first summer where we have one of our participants who's interested in actually putting the logo on their products. It's Iowa Saki Nursery, which I believe is going to be on your show at a later date.

Speaker 1: They are. And Heritage Seedlings, which is also one of our flagship farms, also, I think, has it in their catalog now.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. That's another amazing, amazing farm.

Speaker 1: You guys are going to, if you don't know about them, you're going to be blown away by this episode. They are amazing.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And so we provide a little bit of promotional support in that way. And, you know, and I think it's wonderful too, just for farmers to get the recognition for the work that they do.

I think that doesn't happen often enough. And it's a real chance to show the citizens of Oregon and beyond that Oregon farmers are really proactive and good stewards and care about the work that they do.

Speaker 1: I do want to make a mention of the box of bees that they get back. A lot of the participants really treasure it. They've got this, it's this nice little index of biodiversity. It's very visible. And they get to learn about the bees as they go through.

Because as you mentioned, I've been in those trainings. People are really interested in conservation, but they don't know a lot about the bees that are on their farms. And they do come out of this with like a pretty good understanding. Yes.

Speaker 2: And I will say most of our farmers haven't gotten their box yet. It's coming. Yeah. We're waiting for our lead tax on them to kind of go everything. But all of them, I think at this point, have seen some of the specimens. And that's a pretty amazing moment. There's something about looking at a box of insects that brings out the kind of wonderment of it's like this childlike moment of wonderment.

It brings you back to when you were little and you were fascinated by how the world works. And all of them have even folks that really surprised me and didn't seem that interested.

Speaker 1: Do you remember when we went out to Eastern Washington, it was a meeting where people grew potatoes and they were not interested in bees. But when we would bring the bees out, man, we would have conversations with people who you would not expect to be interested in bees about their childhood.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. And this happens every time you bring out just a box of specimens and people really get to see the diversity that we have here in Oregon, the size and shape and color. And especially if it's accompanied by an explanation of the different, you know, the different behaviors they have, the ground nesters and the stem nesters. Every time people get pretty excited about that, it's a pretty powerful educational tool.

Speaker 1: You know, I think a lot of discussion around pollinators about their value, you know, what they contribute back to agriculture. But it's this is a great program. I really loved it because it really emphasizes how agriculture may promote diversity for its own sake, like the way in which someone, you know, some of these bees may not be great pollinators, but they're beautiful. And that may be a reason to sort of go that extra mile on your farm. Absolutely.

Speaker 2: And I don't want to ignore the fact that there are some issues on with agricultural production and, you know, pollution and things like that. But the point of this program is to really shine the light on the areas in which there is a positive role for farms to play and to provide education on ways to mitigate the problems that farmers can run into. And I think that's a mission both of what I do on a daily basis, as well as what you do, Andoni, is to really provide education. Often that is really the point is that getting people to understand where those pressure points are and ways that they can change certain behaviors.

Speaker 1: So, okay, well, so visit the website. We're going to have the link in the show notes. If you know a farm or if you're a farmer right now listening to this, and you're interested in this, we really need you to do this soon. Like in the next couple of weeks, it's a really easy process. Just register and then train. I think part of the registration is just trying to figure out where to run the training. So we need to know where you are so that we can make sure the training is not too far away from you. Absolutely.

Speaker 2: And there's a list of requirements, things you want to look over before you nominate someone. All of that information can be found on the website right next to the nomination page.

Speaker 1: Fantastic. Let's take one more break and then we have this segment that we do with all our guests. You're not getting away. I have some questions for you. Okay. All right. We are back. Is there a book that you want to recommend to our listeners?

Speaker 2: I do. I thought about it on the way over here because I knew you were going to ask me this question. And I'm picking a book that I think is one of those resources that is underutilized and it was written by one of my mentors, Bill Stevens.

Speaker 1: Yes. I've been waiting for someone to do this.

Speaker 2: I have to plug this book because it's a book that every year I find myself going back to and every time I read it, I find some kernel of knowledge that I had no idea about. It's not particularly long. It's a free book. You can download it. It's an extension publication.

Speaker 1: From the OSU publication catalog.

Speaker 2: Yes. It's called The External Morphology and Biology of Bees by Bill Stevens and Torsho.

Speaker 1: Torsho and Bo Hart. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Some other very famous names in the B world. Yeah. And it's what's also fantastic about it is it is relevant to the Pacific Northwest and it's very, very rare for any of you who have looked for resources on bees. There are so many bee books that are written for the Pacific Northwest and this is one that was written a long time ago.

And even though some of the names have changed, some of the taxonomy has been a little shifted. All the information is still relevant to the study of bees today and I didn't know Torsho and Bo Hart personally. I didn't know Bill. Bill had a lifetime of experience. He was an amazing guy who worked on a lot of different projects and there are so many great little kernels of knowledge. A fellow Canadian. Oh yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. And it is really a worthwhile publication to have.

Speaker 1: It's got like the it's it's not that long. Nope. And it's got like larvae. Like how the different larvae have different tunnels like different ground-nesting bee architectures. It's really it's got all the little things that you never find anywhere. Absolutely.

Speaker 2: Harkens back to the day when people were really putting time into basic research. Bill has told me stories about just sitting in front of a bee nest for hours and hours and hours every day. They would dig up nests at different stages of development. So they dig up a nest the first day and then the second and the third then all the way. So he had wonderful examples of exactly what these bees are doing throughout time.

Speaker 1: This book sets off a lot. But you know that, interestingly, there's a lot of information like on populations and like statistical data on bees. But it seems like that was the moment when people really because you know I got all these bees and they all have different lifestyles and you can measure that in like a diversity index or something. There are this many different species but it doesn't tell you very much about like you know how quirky their lives are and how they use the land. There's a way in which that moment when that book was written was really almost a high point of trying to get at how these different critters live. Absolutely.

Speaker 2: And that's what makes the study of bees so magical to me. So we have you know maybe 500 plus species in the state of the vast vast majority of these species. We have no clue what they're doing or how they do it. We don't know what their nest structure is like. We don't know what their level of sociality is. We don't know necessarily their floral preference. Their parasites you know ways of avoiding parasites. There are so many fascinating behaviors that bees have. And many of those are at least alluded to or mentioned in this book. It's I think it's a really great introduction to the intricacies of what happens with bees. Great.

Speaker 1: Go pick this book up. Blow your mind. Okay. Do you have a go-to tool for the kind of work you do?

Speaker 2: I do and it's actually kind of a go-to tool in life and it's a good pair of forceps. We'll never go wrong. Good pair of forceps.

Speaker 1: I thought you were going to say that.

Speaker 2: And it's got to be it's got to be the needle nose style that has the very nice sharp tips. And the only problem with this is you can't drop them. I drop them every six months and then I have to painstakingly file them back into place. So you want to have one of those little protectors for the end. But a good pair of forceps will never do you wrong. Okay.

Speaker 1: Well put that on the show notes. Get your get your book and you can use the forceps to change to turn the pages as well. Okay. So the last one is do you have a favorite pollinary species?

Speaker 2: Ah as I mentioned to you in the break I hate questions like this because I really I don't have a favorite pollinator. I find them all fascinating in different ways. You know the gregarious bumblebees are lovely and all the jewel tone osmy are just spectacular. I find myself if I had to pick a group I gravitate to the sweatbees believe it or not. And particularly to lazyoglossum and that's because they're often overlooked.

They're not super flashy for the most part. They're all around us all the time. They're social they're a group that can be truly social which is unusual in the bee world. There's you know 20 something species I believe here in Oregon. They have very vast intricate tunnel systems and I think part of it is just that they're overlooked is why I find them so fascinating. They're they're in our backyards. They're around us all the time and yet we still know so little about them.

Speaker 1: Yeah nobody you know I might be the first guess to sort of bring up that genus because it is pretty common but it is also something like oh that's what it is and then they stop but it does have an amazing life history like the variation in life history in that group is really cool.

Speaker 2: Yeah and they're generalists so you see them on virtually everything and they're ubiquitous they're everywhere in the state. They're probably the most common genus throughout we certainly found them to be the most common group in all crop types throughout the state.

Speaker 1: Great well it's been a pleasure thanks so much and for those of you who get on that website if you've known some farms we really love to get some great nominations this year.

Speaker 2: Great thank you for having me.

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