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- Oh boy!

- That's beautiful!

- [Teacher] Take the next card.

- Yeah!

- I'll take another one.

- Thank you for joining us tonight for After Dark Online: Bees. My name is Kathleen Maguire and I'm part of the team that puts together the Exploratorium's weekly After Dark Online series. While tonight's program has been recorded remotely, I would like to acknowledge that the home of the Exploratorium, Pier 15 in San Francisco, is located on unceded territory traditionally belonging to the Ramaytush Ohlone people. I pay my respect to elders past, present, and future for their care-taking and shepherding of the land. Tonight's After Dark Online: Bees is made possible with the generous support of Ghirardelli Square and Levi's Plaza. These properties maintain beehives onsite to support a thriving ecosystem. Later on in tonight's program, we'll dive into honeybees. as we watch the short film "Detroit Hives" and hear from the subjects of the short and founders of the non-profit Detroit Hives, Tim Paul and Nicole Lindsey. We'll also hear from Cameron Redford about his project Black Hives Matter and his work as a beekeeper. We'll close the program with a short from "Deep Look", a series produced by KQED that gets up close to alfalfa leaf cutter bees. That piece will be introduced by "Deep Look" coordinating producer, Gabriela Quiros. Up first we'll be hearing from Dr. Gretchen LeBuhn about pollinators in the Bay area and the citizen science project, The Great Sunflower Project. Dr. LeBuhn is a professor of biology at San Francisco State University and the director of The Great Sunflower Project. At SF State, her research group focuses on the effects of human-induced climate change on wild lands in California and beyond. They've used pollinators and plants as models for understanding the key drivers of biodiversity in urban parks, vineyard landscapes, montaine meadows, and other wild lands. They have a specific interest in developing cost-efficient monitoring the role of climate change, as well as the effects of urbanization on wildlife. The other major area of the group's research is the development of citizen science projects, which ties very closely to Dr. LeBuhns role as the director of The Great Sunflower Project the largest citizen science project focused on pollinators in the world, and something you'll be hearing quite a bit about in her talk. One thing, before we get to Dr. LeBuhn. Throughout tonight's program, we'll share a few short photo shows of up-close images of various bee species. These images are courtesy of the USGS Native Bee Inventory and Monitoring Program. The USGS Native Bee Inventory and Monitoring Program design and develop large and small scale surveys for native bees and, as part of their program, they produce these amazing high-res images of the specimens they track, thousands of which you can find on their Flickr page.

- Thank you so much Kathleen, I'm really excited to be here. This is one of my favorite things to do. So today I wanna talk about not honey bees but actually native bees, and in particular, I wanna talk about the role that they play in producing things that we really like. And then about a citizen science project that I started a number of years ago. We're actually beyond our 10th year and how you can help pollinators by participating in a project like this. But I also think it's really interesting to see how these projects are put together and how the different pieces come together to sort of give us some answers and to improve habitat and conservation. All right. So, I wanna begin with putting pollinators, and in particular bees, in a context, and I love this GIF because I want you to stop for a moment and think about breakfast. I imagine that you had a little toast, maybe some cereal, some orange juice, a little coffee. Maybe you put some cream in your coffee. And as this GIF elegantly speaks to you, without pollinators, it's a different story. So without pollinators, you don't have the fruits and berries on your cereal. You don't have the nuts in your cereal. The butter's gone because cows are largely dependent on pollinators for their alfalfa that they eat. That also means if you're dependent on cream in that coffee, you need to have those pollinators producing that alfalfa. Your orange juice is gone and probably most importantly, your coffee, boom. Coffee's actually not bee-pollinated. It's fly-pollinated but it is dependent on pollinators for production. So how does this get put together? I always think it's a good idea to go back and review some basic biology. I had to laugh when I asked my very own child exactly what pollinators did. She very elegantly explained to me that bees, this little thing up here is a bee, pick up pollen from flowers and then they carry it over to other flowers where they sprinkle it around and fertilize the plant. Clearly she didn't have the same meaning for fertilization that I did. So let's look at this. What scientists know is that the number of species of pollinator and the abundance of pollinators, meaning the number of individuals of pollinators, those two things combine and determine the number of visits that any plant gets by pollinators. And the number of visits that a plant gets determines the number of seeds and fruits that are produced by that plant. And so what pollinators do is they pick up pollen from the male part of one plant and carry it to a new or different, to a different flower usually, and in the process of landing on that next flower, they hit the female part of the flower, the pollen sticks and it grows down and it fertilizes what's called an ovule, which is like an unfertilized egg, and once that ovule is fertilized, it can become a seed within a fruit. So how much of a difference does this make? Well, it turns out that if you think about it, it makes a difference in two ways. It first makes a difference, because the number of fruits that are produced, number of fruits and seeds is less, but it also has an impact on the quality of fruit. So here are some pictures of pollinators. Let me see why I'm not going forward. There we go. Of what fruits look like without pollinators. So here you see three different strawberry fruits. The first one is a beautiful one that, you go to the farmer's market, you'd say, "Hey, yeah, that's mine, "I want a bunch that look like this." For the second group, what the scientists who did this experiment did is they put netting around the strawberry plants and did not allow any pollen to come in that was brought in by wind or by an insect. And then they thought, "Well, let's also see what happens," sorry, this middle one allows wind in. They also looked at what happens if you prevent wind also. And you can see that while you do actually get a fruit, and there are a few seeds on the outside of these strawberry fruits, they do not look like something you would pay top dollar at a farmer's market for. So there's a real incentive to have pollinators for plants. They allow plants to produce more and better fruits and seeds. So you had to have been stuck in a desert with no contact with anyone to not have heard that bees were in decline. And the first thing that got people's attention was colony collapse disorder, which affected honey bees. Well, honeybees are just a single species and... I know, it's sort of crazy, people don't really realize that there's only one honeybee in the United States that does all of that pollination. It turns out that here in the United States we actually have about 4,000 species of native bees. Here in California, we have about 1,500 species of native bees and probably in the Bay area, if you take the greater Bay area, somewhere between 300 and 400 species. So think about that. We have 300 to 400 species of bees, only one of which is a honeybee. And those honeybees are actually brought into the United States. Originally, they came into Jamestown on boats from England, because that was a way to have sugar, something sweet on the boat, sweet, because the bees were producing honey. So we discovered that honeybees were declining because people who manage honey bees keep really good track of how many of their hives are doing well and poorly. Colony collapse disorder was identified and honeybee farmers went from losing about 15% of their bees over a year to 30%, So it was a significant decline. When that happened, we started looking more closely at native bees and we realized that we knew virtually nothing. There were no long-term monitoring programs. There was no one really tracking what was happening with native bees. And one of my students, Quinn McFrederick, a former graduate student of mine, did a study here in the city of San Francisco and looked at honey bees. And wouldn't, you know, he was unable to locate about half the honey bees that were known to San Francisco, including one of the most common bumblebees in the western U.S.. Completely disappeared from San Francisco and no one noticed. And I have to say, even I, a bee expert, did not notice. That's how bad the situation was. So in that context I started something called The Great Sunflower Project. And the goal of The Great Sunflower Project was to identify the areas across the United States where pollinators were doing well and poorly. And I wanna tell you a little bit more about it. So the Great Sunflower Program, the goal is to engage the public to do conservation for bees. And there are three programs; there's what we call the Great Sunflower Program where people plant sunflowers, and we use this to identify what the drivers of pollination service is. Pollination service is that process, by which means bees moving pollen for our plants. And then we have the pollinator friendly plants program which identifies the critical plants that support pollinators in different parts of the country. So, we ask people to go out and count visits to as many plants as possible and let us know how many visits they're getting, and then we aggregate that data to identify which plants do best in different parts of the United States. So it may be that the East Bay, there are different plants that support pollinators than in San Francisco. I would expect at that close a distance that's not true, but we may see the differences between Sacramento and San Francisco. We have pretty different climates, different bees. There are lots of reasons. And then our last program is the Great Habitat Challenge and this is a program where we evaluate and improve habitat for pollinators. So let me show you how these are put together and I'll give you a little history of the project. The first thing we had to do when we came up with the idea to start the Great Sunflower Project was come up with a simple protocol that the general public could do where we thought that the data would be easy to collect and accurate, 'cause we really wanted to make sure that we could use these data for analysis. So what we came up with is this. People who participate go out, they watch a single flower. We originally started with sunflowers. We have people all use the same variety, the lemon queen sunflower. You can get it at almost any garden store in the Bay area now, so please go out and buy one. You go out and, once the flower's blooming, you watch how many pollinators visit that flower. So you can see on this lovely lemon queen sunflower, there is a single bee visiting. You might watch for five minutes. This particular sample happened for 15 minutes and you just count how many bees visit. If you know the kind of bee it is, you can report that. So for example, this person Dolores reported that four bees visited her sunflower; three bumblebees and then a bee that she didn't know what it was. The other data that she records is the date on which she did this, she did this over 10 years ago, the number of flowers that she watched, she watched one. If you're a botanist, you might point out to me that each of these ones, and here's a little flower, but we go with the whole inflorescence. Then we have you report where you are, giving us an address that we convert into a latitude and longitude. And then we need to know how long you followed the, sorry, how long you recorded for. So this was a 15-minute sample. So she saw four bees in 15 minutes and we convert that to our key metric, which is bees per hour per flower. 16 bees per hour per flower. This is typical data. You can participate. You can participate in the Sunflower Project by doing this type of count on a lemon queen sunflower or, if you just have other plants in your gardens, we'd love to have that data, and those data go into the pollinator friendly plant program. And the perfect thing to do for that is to collect data from each of the plants in your yard and then you will know which of those plants are attracting the most bees. It's fun. All right. So what do we do with that data? Well, I'm an ecologist. I study how landscape change influences pollinators and what I do with a typical... What I do with these data is aggregate them. So here's actually the site where Dolores from the previous slide is. She's in Lovettsville, Virginia, and you can see here that she's in a relatively agricultural area. We take this data and we basically put a circle down over this site and we calculate things like the percent of land that is in agriculture. How much of the land is cement? What's the density of housing? What's the weather like there? How much pesticide is used in the crops in this area? And we can use those things to evaluate what are the drivers of pollination services. We talk about this as pollination services, because our metric is the number of visits that a plant gets. So one of the questions I always get is "Does it matter if a bee visits twice?" And it doesn't matter at all, because what we're paying attention to is how many visits plants are getting. We're looking at that service that bees are providing. Now, if you remember back to when I first started talking, one of our goals, or our main goal, was to identify where bees were doing well and doing poorly. Where are the pollination deserts? And here's what it looks like. So here, we've done an analysis where we have grouped the data from all of the sites. For this particular analysis, we focused on the Eastern United States and the Western United States, because we had the most data. Now, areas that have the dot color range from red, meaning that there are high pollination services there, to blue where there are low pollination services. What I want to draw your attention to are these maroon circles. So our analysis has identified two areas of the country that have significantly lower pollination service than the rest of the country. The first one is here from Southern California going up through the central Valley. We see lower than expected pollination services there. And then in this region of the, what do I wanna call it? Central Midwest? That's another area where we see lower than expected pollination services. Interestingly, up here in the Pacific Northwest and here in the Northeast, we actually see higher than expected pollination services and we're not completely sure why. There are a couple of hypotheses we've been looking at for why these areas are more impacted. Of course, through the central valley, we think it's a combination of chemicals used in agriculture, disturbance of the land, but also that this region of California has experienced drought over the 12 years that we've been doing this project. And so we think that there's an impact of all of those things that's driving the effects here. In the central Midwest, this is also an area that has higher than expected levels of pollution but we're still working to understand what might be the drivers of this decline. So, you see that we see declines. Well, one of the other things that's interesting about working on a citizen science project is that you interact with the public and almost immediately, when people started participating, we started getting this, "Oh my gosh, I have no bees, what do I do?" So here's a map of the Bay area. Here I've zoomed in on San Francisco proper. Oh I need to move my, sorry, my circle's moved down. Oh, let me go back. Sorry. We had a lot of people say, "Oh my gosh, I see no bees. "So what do I do, how can I change my garden?" And so what we've done is we've developed what we call the Great Habitat Challenge and we've put together a checklist of questions that you can ask about your garden. You can do a habitat assessment and it asks things like, "Are there areas with sandy, loamy soil?" And we teach you how to actually tell if it's sandy loam soil. You can run through that and then we suggest some things that you can do for your garden. Now, for those of you who are interested in how effective this type of program is, we were surprised and delighted to discover that when we looked at how many people took action after participating in the Great Habitat Challenge, we found that over 75% of the people who participated, who ran through that checklist, actually took one of the actions that we suggest after they do that thing. So I am a huge supporter of citizen science. I think it gives people agency. You can find out how your yard is doing and you can compare that to what else is happening in the Bay area. You also can find some tools to actually think about making some changes and we think that by getting large numbers of people, to be aware, to have agency, to have some tools for doing conservation, this is actually how we're going to do conservation in the future and, in particular, how we're going to affect bees or improve habitat for bees and improve habitat for all of us and make sure that breakfast is conserved. Thank you so much.

- Thank you so much, Dr. LeBuhn. And if you wanna learn more about The Great Sunflower Project and how you might participate, you can visit www.greatsunflower.org. Up next, we'll watch the short film "Detroit Hives" and then hear from the subjects of the film, the founders of Detroit Hives, Tim Paul and Nicole Lindsey. Detroit Hives is a nonprofit organization working to create sustainable communities and bee populations by transforming vacant lots into pollinator friendly spaces. This short film was co-directed by Palmer Morse and Rachel Weinberg. You can find out more about their work at sprucetonefilms.com. And after the film, Tim and Nicole will join us to share a little bit more about what's been going on at Detroit Hives since the short was made. First step, though we'll take a quick pause for another photo show.

- [Nicole] Detroit is a place of innovators, creatives. It's a great place to come and start over again. I think it's definitely important for people who belong to that community to kind of help rebuild it.

- During the crisis and during the foreclosure and the bankruptcy of Detroit, a lot of people lost their homes and moved out. Unfortunately within the area, the city is not building any new homes. By activating these vacant spaces and transforming them into urban farms or bee farms, we're able to have vast amounts of fresh vegetables that our bees and our pollinators can cross-pollinate to provide for the community.

- What we do is transform Detroit vacant lots into urban bee farms.

- [Tim] All my life, I've been born and raised here in the Motor City. My grandmother would always create home remedies whenever me and my brother would get sick. So when I got sick in December, I went back to those methods. I came across the power of local raw honey from a local store in Ferndale, Michigan.

- When that worked, it clicked! Like, "Okay let's study more about this honey "and its medicinal properties." Since we started, it has been the Year of the Yes. When opportunities come, we say "Yes," and it has helped us get to this.

- Spring-summer season, We're definitely changing the typical stereotypes of beekeeping, particularly here in America. You typically don't see too many beekeepers of color. By my actions I wanna help inspire others that they can do the same thing. It's important to expose our children to something that I know they're not familiar with. For one, we never know where it might take them. A lot of these children have never even seen a honeycomb before and they have very little knowledge of bees so it feels great to educate them on the importance of honeybee conservation. Growing up as a kid, it wasn't cool to be into science or to keep bees or to be outside in nature. So we really didn't see a lot of those positive figures or people out there. So I think it's important for someone like me to be in a position of leadership, to inspire other people that it's cool to learn about science. It's cool to give back to your environment and your community.

- [Nicole Voiceover] When people find out about our organization, they're like, "Wait, you're in Detroit?" The shock value when we get people and we tell them that we're beekeepers, they look at us twice. You don't have to have a million dollars in your bank account to start an idea. Go for it.

- [Tim] Starting a nonprofit organization within the community, it helps and inspires others to feel that they can do the same thing. It's important to pass on this education to our generation so they can create a better future for themselves.

- [Nicole] There was a problem that we've seen in our city. There was a problem that we've see with our honeybees. What we're doing here is solving both of those problems.

- So thank you so much, Nicole and Tim for joining me. And we just got to watch the short film, "Detroit Hives" that sort of documents your journey getting started that was made in 2019. And I think you've grown quite a bit and changed a little bit. So could you tell us a little bit about that growth and where you're heading?

- Absolutely, absolutely. Detroit is the place to be. Since the last time that video was made in 2019, we've been buzzing, we've been buzzing, have been able to fulfill our mission. So just starting with, we've been able to educate over 2,000 students on the importance of bee conservation through our Bee to Change program. We've also expanded in over 13 locations, managing over 45 beehives right here in the city of Detroit. Our original goal was to manage over 200 hives. But as we took a step back, we wanted to find ways to support biodiversity and inclusion, meaning that we now support our native bees and honeybees. And Michigan is home to over 450 native bees. We also partner with the Gerald F. Ford School of Public Policy to recognize Detroit as an official bee city. Nicole and I co-founded National Urban Beekeeping Day which is celebrated annually on July 19th. We also expanded nationally with MO Hives KC and Kansas city, Missouri. And we've been able to just keep things buzzing. We got a lot of great things in store for this year. We can't wait to share.

- Yeah.

- I'm also curious, could you share a little bit about how COVID has affected your work and how you had to change during this time of shelter in place and social distancing?

- So, 2020 was a very interesting year, very challenging for most. Of course, with COVID-19 in place, we had to close our doors to all of our in-person tours and education opportunities, close our doors to fundraising events, speaking engagements and that pretty much set us back. However, Nicole and I had to find ways to be creative and pivot around our challenges. So in response to COVID, we delivered over 300 Bee Will care packages that consists of basic relief of honey, beeswax candles, protective face gear. We deliver this to our local heroes our frontline responders and our healthcare workers. We also made a switch to pivoting into a virtual educational platform, provide virtual tours, educational workshops. And last week we launched our first ever Virtual Forager 5K, which is the 5K wall to educate the general public on how to spot pollinators on any native plants while walking and running. It encouraged you to get outside. Everyone was doing it. Everyone was stuck inside during the stay at home and shelter. We wanted to find ways for people to go out and exercise but also find ways to incorporate a nature journey path.

- Oh, that's amazing that you did so much during such a challenging time and sort of moved so quickly to think about what you could do to bring more attention to bees and your work.

- Absolutely. But also trying to find ways to incorporate people and pollinators as we want to create communities for pollinators, but we also wanna effect and improve the lives upon the neighbors and residents that live with them as well.

- And related to that, could you talk a little bit about the work that you're doing around food and security and how your bees are doing a lot of pollination for fresh food for Detroit?

- Right. So the city of Detroit currently has well over 75,000 vacant lots and most of these areas that are underserved, that are within underserved communities are people of color that don't have access to fresh organic food. We have access to liquor stores or gas stations or fast food restaurants. So through our bees, we partner with community gardens who provide food security. Our bees have food security through nectar and pollen. And in return, bees pollinate those flowers to provide fresh festivals for our tables.

- So I'm curious too. You two came to beekeeping somewhat recently as we learned in the short film. And I read Nicole, you actually had a little bit of fear of bees. So I'm curious if you could talk about how you got over that and your advice to people to sort of be open to new experiences and learning about bees or other things they might be scared of.

- Absolutely. So we were actually both had a fear of bees, but it's through education, that it was education about learning about bees that that fear transformed into love. And so we learned about how great these little creatures are and how they're important to our environment. That fear just kind of went away and then having hands-on experience and working with them and just largely that differences between wasps or yellow jackets and honeybees 'cause a lot of people have fear of what they think are bees you know as we educate people on that and kind of eases their fears and especially when they come and do tours at our bee farm, they can get a hands-on experience. Then I can tell the difference between the two because they're two different personalities when you're working with yellow jackets and honeybees. So my main key advice is education, which is actually one of our components with our mission with Detroit Hives. We focus on education and conservation. And so that's how I help people get over their fears.

- What about girls and the organism?

- Yeah and so also we're working with young girls 'cause we get a lot of Girl Scouts come by and through schools and a lot of them have fears just like I did. And so I helped them ease their fears to kind of introduce them to the world of insects. And so I'm making sure that they're getting over their fear, but I also tell them that a honey bee hive is actually a female-run super organism. And so it kind of gives them that bad girl empowerment or women's empowerment. And then, you know, it kind of gets them at ease too. So they're kind of excited like, wait, it's females that's running this honey bee hive and I was like, yes, you know, the bees that you see out working hard and to the nectar and pollen those are females and it's ran by, you have a queen inside the hive. There's no king. It's all females working inside of the hive.

- Well, thank you both so much, and I'm wondering we can almost see what your sweatshirt says but before we go, can we get our full view You're fantastic.

- Yeah, absolutely! Detroit is the place to be.

- Yes, it is. Well, thank you both so much both for talking with us and for all of the amazing work that you're doing with Detroit Hives.

- Thanks!

- Awesome, thank you. Thank you for having us.

- Thank you.

- Next up, we'll hear from Cameron Redford. Based in Nevada city, California, Cameron recently became the owner of Black Sierra Honey company and initiated the Black Hives Matter project. In his work, he aims to bring equity and inclusivity to beekeeping as well as provide food and educational opportunities to his communities. He also seeks to uncover and connect to the history of African beekeeping, which he has found to be undocumented and underrepresented. In this conversation with my Exploratorium colleague, Estelle Davis, Cameron will share more about the Black Lives Matter project and discuss his perspective on the history of beekeeping. But before we get to Cameron and Estelle, we have one more bee slideshow to share with you.

- All right, Kim, welcome to After Dark Online, I am Estelle, I work at the Exploratorium, but Cam, it's good to have you here because I've known you for several years from Oakland Bay area from before Black Hives Matter. So it's good to see you in this new project you're in and share your work with the Exploratorium or Exploratorium community. So could you start us off just telling us a little bit more about you, where you and your bees are located and tell us about the Black Hives Matter project?

- Thanks, Estelle. Yeah, so as Estelle introduced me, I'm Cameron Redford, also known as Cam. I've been working with the project, the Black Hives Matter project since June 29th. I remember the date I launched it because that was also the day my daughter was born. Project is basically

- Which is incredible by the way that you started a brand new business on the day also of a birth, twins.

- I never thought about like that. Yeah, I guess they are twins in that way. Something else I'll share is my daughter's name is Oyin which is the Yoruba word for honey. And so our project was launched here in Nevada County, California and we keep our bees here mostly in Nevada County. We have them all the way from down at an elevation of about 900, a thousand feet close to the San Joaquin Valley and then going all the way up to the crest of Donohue Pass up in the Sierra Nevada. And then even to the other side of the Sierra into the Sierra Valley. So it's a big, big range of about almost 200 miles.

- Thanks, Kim. So I will ask you a little bit more about beekeeping books later because I don't even understand how you get to cover 200 miles. But before we talk about your trade, I was wondering if you could share a little bit more about you and what brought you to Nevada city and how you were introduced to farming and beekeeping?

- So, I'm originally from Florida, I was born and raised down in South Florida and really enjoyed like being in the wilderness and outdoors there, which was a kind of formative for me and yeah, my journey to this. And so moving out of like the Everglades region, I came to California, really not knowing what I was doing and lived in the city for a while. And I got involved with the permanent culture projects, urban permaculture projects. And through that, I was connected to a permaculture design course. And through that, I met most of the people who are really formative in my life today. Yeah, and that was by a woman named Star Hawk put that on and through that I've yeah, things have just really expanded for me in this agricultural realm and the realm of urban ag. But now I live in a rural area, so yeah, shifting it into that too, as well.

- Okay. You mentioned when you launched your project that Nevada city is one of the least diverse or the county is one of the least diverse counties in the state.

- Yes.

- So what's it like out there as a farmer?

- It can be interesting, you know. There's the way in which like farming is it's kind of isolated, you know, like isolating. As I came into this area and started doing this work like as COVID started, you know, as we are here at the one year mark for COVID, like I noticed, I was like I don't know if anything about my life has really changed because I spent most of my time just me and the one other person who I work the hives with, who is also my sister-in-law. So yeah, it can be isolating in that way but we have experienced discrimination. There were some things that were said and done towards me when I set out to do this mission that, yeah it was definitely like prejudice, racism involved. And you know, we work with that and that's just something that's part of it here. And we've had some greater issues in the community around some of that stuff and just the disconnect.

- And so the Black Hives Matter project, can you tell us some more about how you came to that name for your beekeeping company?

- So that's a fun story. As I set out to do this and work in telling the story of black agriculture in America, black beekeeping in America, the journey of, what I like to call like the diaspora of bees and African peoples in America, and I was trying to come up with names and I was brainstorming with some people and someone you know, like almost jokingly was like, "Black hives matter." And I was like, nah, not that name, I'm not gonna use that. And it kind of stuck with me cause it was catchy. And I was like, you know, it's gonna upset so many people like, you know as I said, like, I live in this very non-diverse county with a lot of conservative views and I was like some people see the words "Black Lives Matter" and their heads almost explode. And I was like, how am I gonna get, you know the help I need with that? But as I thought about it more, I was like, you know, I'm really seeking support from people who are seeking to be allies. And then I finally looked it up and as I looked it up, you know like Googled the name "Black Hives Matter" to see if anyone had already said it because I was like surely someone has thought of the connection between the two. And what I found was someone was selling a bunch of T-shirts that said "All hives matter." And I was like, that seals it. Like we're doing it. Black Hives Matter, we're going all the way. So that's that story.

- And so that fundraiser that you launched to launch your business, I had just looked at it recently and it has over 675 supporters already, which is incredible. Do you find that like, the way that you're now known is that seemed to be a very, very regional support or are your supporters and the people who are aware of the project statewide or national? Where do you notice that those supporters are coming from?

- We have seen the most epic outpouring of support literally like it's com, it's Metta, it's from coming from everywhere. We've seen support coming from this community in a big way. A lot of people stood up and supported us in this community. A lot of organizations and businesses and co-ops in this area came and supported us here in Nevada city, Nevada County area. And on the wider scale, I've received support from folks in London. So it's also like international. We've actually received like international support, support from all over California, different states connected to other black beekeepers who are doing similar work. That's been just amazing to make those connections and find other people out here doing the same work in the world, through the power of the internet. Thank you.

- Yeah, it was fun for us at the Exploratorium to be able to connect some of those projects from across the country together here today too. Well, so shifting over to beekeeping, you mentioned that your hives span over 200 miles and I know a little bit about bees, but not a lot about beekeeping as a business or how it actually looks day to day. How do you manage to get across 200 miles? What does that mean? How many hives are you maintaining and how often do you visit them?

- So it's stretched and it's gone different places. Something I didn't mention when you asked about like how I started in this business specifically beekeeping was I began working for another company which is what Black Hives Matter and under our business name Black Hives Matters is the name of the project. Our business name is the Black Sierra Honey company. And so as I went to work for someone who hired me and taught me much of what I know today about beekeeping, I started working and we had about 230 hives back then. We've had some hard years here. So the number fluctuates, I think we've gone, from as many as 300 hives to a hundred. And we've fluctuating in between those numbers. It's hard years for bees, especially with the California droughts and smoke and fires. So those are things that are all affecting them along with the greater, greater issues that bees are facing today such as mites and pesticides and all of those things. But so, yeah, and right now, we're about at a hundred and yeah, like what it means to have hives spanning across such a large distance means I drive a lot and yeah, visit the apiaries. And we have like a migratory pattern that we do basically with the bees, which is that they can go up into the high mountains, up to elevation. We keep them up at 6,000 feet around is our highest elevation. And from that elevation, we then like migrate them down the hill when the snow is calm and it gets really blustery up there and Donner past, you know, 12 feet of snow and all that. We take them out of there for that time period and bring them down into the lower elevations, like 1,500 feet.

- So how does honey fit into this entire business model?

- So honey is, we sell our local honey. Yeah, and as like I said as of this year, it's been a rough year. Basically with bees and honey production, it's like the flowers kind of operate on their own cycle for the period of time that they bloom for. And so when there's a lot of water in the ground, those flowers will stay out longer and they will continue to pump out nectar. When there's not a lot of water in the ground, and there's not a lot of water falling from the sky, basically they come out and they have a short life and that life doesn't have much nectar to it. So in these dry drought years here in California, we don't get a lot. So this year it's been pretty small and that's a challenge that we're up against and yeah, something else I'll share 'cause you asked about like kind of like the business model and how it works. Part of what I'm trying to do and our organization Black Hives Matter is trying to do is raise awareness around kind of weaning ourselves in a way and figuring out a way to better interact with the greater system of big agriculture and some of the ways that are unsustainable within those systems and working to kind of like bring more harmony to it because we do work in big agriculture as you would call it. Some folks disagree with a lot of the ways that things are done as do I. And what I've inherited here as this model that's a very like a mass produced model of beekeeping, and I'm trying to work it into this way that brings it into a holistic manner as much as we can.

- And so if you're speaking to our audience today around how bees are having a hard year and a lot of beekeeping businesses have to balance these things, is there anything that people can do at home that can support a more sustainable life for honeybees?

- For sure. The complexities of like I was saying that mass model is part of that is the complexity around almonds and bees. Most beekeepers in America are dependent on pollinating and in a big way, California almond season is where they all come and we bring these bees. And so we have this like big, almost like part of your festival here in California, where all the bees come in February and then from all over the country, literally from Florida, from Washington State from far away as Maine, they all come here and then they rub elbows and then they go home. And so any diseases and pests and things like that that the bees are picking up our pesticides go home with the bees. And so one way to help with that system is that like part of it is that beekeepers are no longer really able to sustain themselves off of just selling honey. And part of that is the influx of honeys that are coming in from around the world, such as like people doing a lot, a lot of is coming from out of a Patagonia area regions in China and things like that. Buying local honey is the best way to help bee keepers, the best way I know how, buying local honey. And secondary to that would be planting and keeping in crops or not weed whacking crops that will bloom late in the season, which here in California is like September to November. Anything that could bloom in that time period is really helpful for the bees because that's when they don't have much food to eat at all.

- All right. I do have some flowers in my yard that I'm excited about for these specifically. I have a echium front yard so they're all coming into bloom. Now, these amazing purple sort of peaked flowers and the entire front yard is buzzing at another level but I don't know if I have late season flowers. So I'm gonna do some research on that.

- That's the department to cover 'cause that's when they call it the dearth. And it's a very long dearth here on the West Coast and in the desert regions where it's just like there's nothing to eat when there's no water for it.

- All right. Well, I wanted to shift gears a little bit away from the day-to-day about beekeeping and then a little bit more into some of your research that you've done and your own sort of views around a history of beekeeping and Black Hives Matter and sort of the the rich cultural history that you've identified around beekeeping and its roots to Africa. Could you just share some of that history with us now?

- Yeah. So as I delved into what I really wanted this project to represent as I like this is my personal journey that grew outwards for me and, you know also like was inspired by the work of other people. And so as I was like, okay, I am a black man in a very non-diverse space. I'm trying to do this work in agriculture and thinking of the history of agriculture and black Americans. And, you know, of course, if you look back far enough in the history of agriculture in black Americans you will come up to the issue of slavery and track it all the way back through the diaspora, and when the first African peoples arrived on this continent and when bees arrived. And so that was like the beginning of the really interesting part of it for me was as I started looking back and trying to like understand the history before I went forward, something that I found really really fascinating was I looked back and saw the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade into the colonies of what would become America, on the British colonies it started in 1619 in Jamestown, Virginia. To the Jamestown colony, they brought the first African folks from Angola I believe it was. And that was three years before the arrival in 1622, the first beehives that they had brought over from Europe. And so knowing those two things that like almost the same, same time frame in the same exact place, also the bees came to the Jamestown Colony to the same port of call there. All this coalesced. And yet, I looked up the history of black beekeepers and could find nothing, shockingly, nothing. It seemed as if it was like a vacuum and that just didn't sit right with me. There was something send me that seemed off about it. And through some other reading I did and research, I was like, you know, we're looking at chattel slavery in America, the roles that the Africans that were enslaved they were bringing over for, mostly were the ones that people didn't wanna do themselves the hard, laborious, challenging jobs, dangerous jobs. And for me thinking that like a plantation owner who has hundreds of enslaved people, is like I'm gonna go out and work the bees, it didn't seem like that was likely to me. And yet, I could find virtually nothing. And so as I continued to just do this research, yeah, I delve deeper into the erasure of black farming in history. Yeah, I continue delving around into it and I did to discover that actually a really interesting note I found in something that was unrelated, but also related in the agricultural sense was in the Carolinas while they were still colonies as well, they began to grow rice and rice had been growing, you know all over the world, had already been disbursed pretty well. But they began to try to grow it as a agricultural crop, cultivate it. And they were really failing at it. They were doing a pretty bad job down there in the Carolinas, under the leadership of these European folks who would come over to the colonies and what they realized where they didn't know enough about growing rice, but they figured out who did. And they went to Africa and specifically took peoples from tribes in Africa who knew how to grow rice and brought them over to the colonies to head up those divisions and show them how to grow rice.

- Wow!

- Even though they were entirely actually dependent on them. They're most likely their ventures would have failed. And so that still stood out to me because of the way that there were many African peoples who have a historical and oral traditions of working with bees that have no influence still to this day from the Western school of thought, European schools through like the Langstroth and all that, which is what most beekeeping today in the Americas and in Europe and all over the world comes from. There were these peoples who had been working with these since, before anybody really knows. Our earliest depictions of beekeeping come from Egypt. And they're in literal hieroglyphs. And there's honey found in tombs in Egypt, that's still edible. And so this history goes very, very, very far back. And those peoples would have come to the Americas and seen bees in their hives and recognized them. And I can only imagine the way that they must've felt maybe some relief seeing something that they recognized on this completely different continent so far away from their home in this way.

- Wow, that's awesome. So it sounds like in addition to beekeeping, you're also going to have a future career as a historian and covering some lost histories. That's incredible. Thank you. I'm wondering, given some of that history and that you described that there are maybe around 50,000 black farmers in the U.S, now, why do you think it's important to have black representation in agriculture?

- As I was saying earlier, the way that black people created the wealth of this nation through that agriculture growing Indigo rice, all these crops that without it, this country would not have been able to grow to what it is. Those colonies would not have grown into what they were strong enough to become a country and so forth and so on. And, you know, slavery went on for another 200 years from the time of arrival and just thinking of, you know and beyond that, going into the history of sharecroppers in the South and the great migration and all these things, and the way that level of oppression that people experienced, there are ways in which I feel like people in the black community were driven away from it by wanting to leave behind that trauma of enslavement, you know, wanting to leave that behind. And then I think that there's also the way that systemic oppression came in and took lands away from people's predatory loans, bank lending, all kinds of different things, the history of the federal government not giving subsidies to black Americans and all these different ways in which that there's almost like a, I mean, there is a systemic way in which lands were stripped away and people were pushed off of them. And that connection to the land to me is so important, it really just healed me and saved my life personally. And I want that same feeling for people who wanna reconnect in a way. I believe that like, as a greater, as a whole like the whole world needs that healing with learning how to be with nature in animal husbandry and in connection to the crops and land and soil and those ways, and specifically in the black community. I just find that, yeah, it's really powerful to connect to that history and to connect to the way that yeah, we really did a lot of work to build what you see today as the agricultural system.

- Thank you. Yeah, I love the way that you're thinking about reclamation and healing, and it seems like the Black Hives Matter project is sort of part of a much greater network of folks who are doing reclaiming and empowering themselves back to the earth in that way. So thank you for sharing that as well. We're going to wrap in just a few minutes but I wanted to bring the conversation back one more time to Black Hives Matter project and ask you what's going on with next steps in that project. And if anyone who's watching today wants to learn more or get involved, what should they do?

- Yeah, so the Black Hives Matter project, as we launched it, we set our goal very small because we were like, no way, you know, maybe we'll get to the numbers that we wanna get to. And in two days we had raised our first goal which was $20,000. And then we raised the goal to 40,000 because we were like actually 20,000 wasn't gonna do much for us in the end, but you know, it was a great start. And so now we're at 40,000 and, and we passed that and that was the money that we were looking for to be able to purchase the apiary our beekeeping business, that we are now the Black Sierra Honey company. And so where we're moving from here is into more work that is a work in education, bringing in this learning and the teaching of bees. I love teaching about beekeeping and it's a passion of mine. A life goal and mission that's been for me is teaching and agriculture. And so filling out that teaching piece is something that we're moving into. And so we're still seeking funds to get us to that level that we wanna get to, to be bringing this to young, indigenous, black and Latino, POC youth in the cities and also out here rurally, bringing it into just like the inter-equity and inter representation for many peoples who are underrepresented in agriculture.

- Awesome. That sounds like a beautiful vision.

- Yeah, well, one thing is if folks wanna check out the project, we are still up in live on Go Fund Me, which is a gofundme/blackhivesmatterproject.com and come check it out. You can just Google Black Hives Matter project. We're also on Instagram as Black Hives Matter project and yeah we release lots of updates and we're still looking for help.

- All right, great. Well, thank you again so much Cam for joining us tonight for After Dark Online. And I can't wait to see what is going to be coming from Black Hives Matter projects in the next few years and to go out and visit you when COVID calms down and see the bees for myself.

- Please do. I'd love to have you over.

- All right. Thanks, Cam.

- Bye.

- To close out tonight's program, we'll check out a four-minute video from "Deep Look", a short video series that explores big scientific mysteries by going incredibly small. "Deep Look" is produced by KQBD the public media station in San Francisco and presented by PBS Digital Studios. Introducing the show is "Deep Look" coordinating producer, Gabriela Quiros. Gabriela started her journalism career 27 years ago as a newspaper reporter in Costa Rica, where she grew up. She won the National Science Journalism Award there for a series of articles about organic agriculture and developed a lifelong interest in health reporting. She joined KQBD in 2006 to produce science videos. She has won three regional Emmy's as a TV producer and has shared three more as the coordinating producer of "Deep Look". Here's Gabriela.

- Hi everyone. My name is Gabriela Quiros and I am the coordinating producer and also one of the episode producers for "Deep Look". "Deep Look" is a science video series produced by KQBD, the public broadcasting station in San Francisco, California. And we create short videos. They're about four or five minutes long about small animals and plants. And our goal is to give people a view of the natural world that is very, very close up, a view that they rarely would get to see otherwise. And we use macro lenses to get really close up. And sometimes we also put the animals and plants under the microscope to give an even closer up view. We have released 130 videos. We started releasing the videos back in 2014, and we are now in our eighth season. And because we focus on small animals, we have covered a lot of different insects and also arachnids, spiders, crickets, mosquitoes, ticks. And we try to answer interesting questions in each of our videos, questions that people might have asked themselves, or maybe they haven't. Sometimes we're covering insects that are very familiar to people, and they might not know everything about them and might be surprised to find out for example that mosquitoes actually use six different needles to suck our blood or the ticks use a mouth full of hooks to dig into us. So I have focused on covering a lot of different insects that like to suck our blood for example, mosquitoes and ticks. And, but I also love covering bees and I produced a video about honey bees and what it is that they do with the pollen that they're collecting when they're going from flower to flower. I also produced an episode about orchard bees. And the episode that you will be seeing is about some bees that probably you're not familiar with. They're used in agriculture. They're the second most important bees used in agriculture after honeybees, and they're called alfalfa leaf-cutting bees. And we went out and filmed them in the Central Valley of California in Fresno. And they were being used by farmers there to pollinate alfalfa plants that were actually going to be harvested for their seeds. So other growers could plant those alfalfa seeds to produce alfalfa hay and alfalfa hay is fed to dairy cows. California is the most important dairy producing state in the country. And of course, with milk, you can make all sorts of delicious things. So we had a great fun finding a title for the video and ended up calling it, "This Bee Gets Punched by Flowers for Your Ice Cream." And when you see the video, you'll see that these bees go through a lot to help us pollinate those flowers. And I'm not gonna say anything more, but the flowers have a trap mechanism that is very unique. And these bees are game. They don't mind getting punched in the face literally. As a producer for "Deep Look", I have a great job. I get to interview lots of scientists and come up with story ideas. I think a lot in the field with our cinematographer Josh Cassidy, and I help produce those filming days. And I come home with the material, I edit it, I look through it, I help write the script and then work on the script with our writer and narrator, Laura Klavens. As I said, I do the editing, the first edit of the video. And then I work with our after effects artist, Kea Simon, who creates all the beautiful after effects, compositions that you've seen in our videos that are one of our signatures. Another one of our signatures are the unique original scores that Seth Samuel creates for each one of our videos. And so without further ado, I'm going to leave you with "This Bee Gets Punched by Flowers For Your Ice Cream."

- [Narrator] Okay, this bee seems confused. That leaf she's gnawing on is no flower, but this is an alfalfa leafcutting bee. She needs hunks of leaves to build her nest. A lot of them. All this is her lacy handiwork. She hauls the pieces back home. Leafcutters use them to line the inside of their nest. In nature, she might use a nook and cranny in a log. But here her nest is in, what's basically a bee apartment building, a high rise made of styrofoam. These markings help the bee find her way back to her personal condo. You know, like seven B, and furnishing it takes a while because see that pile? These are the pieces they dropped. The bees are here to work in this alfalfa field in California. They're from Europe originally, but farmers here use them because they have a real knack for pollinating alfalfa flowers, which grow tiny seeds inside these curly pods. Farmers use the seeds to plant new fields of alfalfa, which is ground to make hay, to feed these gals. So really, your glass of milk comes courtesy of these bees. But pollinating alfalfa flowers is a lot trickier than it looks. Even honey bees can't really hack it. Here's why. Alfalfa keeps its pollen locked away inside its flowers. To get it, the bees have to step on a spring loaded pedal called a keel petal. Here's how it works. Pop! It releases this column that has the pollen at the end. It's called tripping the flower. Here it is again, the column has some force. The bee might get a good thwack in the face. Leafcutting bees just don't care. They can take a punch. Pop! Pop! Honeybees don't really like to tangle with that. They'll usually step around gingerly trying to sip nectar from the side without setting it off. Leafcutting bees get coated in pollen and bring it back home to their nest so they can pack it in there to feed their growing babies. Each one is bundled in a little leaf, wrapped bassinet. Aw, there they are. The siblings all lined up together, a new generation of the toughest little bees around.