PolliNation Podcast

American foulbrood (AFB) is one of the most damaging diseases of honey bees. Up until now, beekeepers have lacked an early warning system to know whether the disease is rising in their colonies. In this episode we hear from Dr. Sarah Wood about an innovative system for surveying for AFB in honey,

Have you ever wondered which fuzzy yellow bee you just saw visiting a flower? In this episode, guest host Jen Hayes interviews Nicole Bell about two new and free resources that explore 67 species of bees found in Portland area gardens. Jen and Nicole are both graduate student members of OSU's Garden Ecology Lab.

As nursery catalogs start to show up in our mailboxes and we think about the plants we want to grow next season, it's easy to get overwhelmed. In this episode, guest host Nicole Bell talks with Jen Hayes about two handouts that can help you better understand plant labels and discover if the plant in front of you is a wild-type native plant, a cultivar, or some other plant form! Jen and Nicole are both graduate student members of OSU's Garden Ecology Lab.

This week we hear a facinating conversation between an established mutimedia artist (Jasna Guy) and young artist and melittologist (Marek Stanton) on how art, ecology and the natural world overlap.

There have been extreme temperatures during the pollination of early season crops. In this episode we explore how these temperatures not only influence the activity of pollinating insects, but also the pollen they are shuttling around.

Prairie ecosystems are essential to many pollinator species across North America. Generating prairie after its been lost can be challenging. This week we travel to Iowa to hear from the STRIPS (Science-based Trails of Rowcrops Integrated with Prairie Strips) team. They have been perfecting how to get growers to install prairie strips on the edges of their farms.

We continue on our bee friendly gardening kick with a trip to Albuquerque, New Mexico to hear how one naturalist transformed his front yard into biodiversity hotspot. Using tools like iNaturalist, he has documented over 90 bee species and 1,200 other insects on less than a quarter acre of land.

This week we continue our September on Bee Friendly Gardening with a southern Oregon Master Gardener who has a passion for native plants.

With the season for pollinator gardening winds down, it is a great time to start planning your garden for next year. In this episode we we learn about a national program to connect gardeners together and provide them with resources to up their pollinator gardener game.

The Oregon Bee Friendly Wine Tour is coming to an end for 2023. We hear about what makes King Estate a great place for bees, get some gardening tips and hear about an event hosted along with the Save the Bee Foundation.

This week we hear from Dr. Phil Allen who has the audacious idea of reducing water use and increasing benefits to pollinator by replacing lawns with subalpine meadows.

Bumble bees nest in the darndest places - like bird houses and water meters. In this episode we learn about how to relocate bumble bee colonies. We also figure out how to get bumble bee nests where you want them, by rearing colonies from queens that emerge in the spring.

Beekeeping takes a lot of training and mentorship. In many states, the place to learn the finer points of this trade is in state Master Beekeeper programs. We hear about the Oregon program through its annual field day.

It's National Pollinator Week next week. We hear about what makes effective public engagement on pollinators and of a new event in Vancouver, Washington, the Pollinator Festival.

A number of Oregon vineyards are working together to enhance the habitat for bees (which includes over 700 species in Oregon). In this episode we visit one of those vineyards, Sokol Blosser Winery, and learn about how they are working to improve habitat for their bees.

This week we hear about what this cold and wet spring has meant for Pacific Northwest beekeepers (and the crops they pollinate).

There are some amazing things happening for pollinators in Washington State these days. This week we hear about the brand new Pollinator Health Research and Extension Program.

This week we hear why the strength of the colonies, not just the stocking rate, matters for blueberry pollination and how growers can evaluate strength in the field.

This week we hear about one of the best kept secrets, a newsletter from USDA that gives a regular update on what is going on in the pollinator world.

Pesticide applicators frequently add adjuvants to help their pesticide applications be more effective or safer to use. Adjuvants, however, are not assessed for their risk to bees by regulators. We hear about new research that assesses the safety of these products to bees.

Oregon is going to be getting a new bee plate. We hear about our inspiration from beekeepers in Georgia.

Extension guides often offer blanket recommendations for honey bee colony stocking rates on a field scale. This week we learn about new blueberry research that suggests these recommendations need to take the landscape into consideration.

Breeding honey bees is notoriously difficult. New molecular techniques may help.

Beekeepers across North America depend on an acaricide containing amitraz to manage varroa mites, the most challenging pest problem bees face. In this episode we learn of a large scale effort to determine whether the mites are still susceptible to the treatments and what beekeepers can do if they face amitraz resistant mites.

It is often assumed that a single blend of flowers could serve all bees equally. In this episode we hear about some new research that considers how it might make sense to tailor resource availability in restored habitats to bee preference in an area.

Much of what we know about the life history of mason bees is based on very few observations. This week we hear from a new study that shows how many of our assumptions about these bees have underestimated these amazing bees.

Blueberries are a big crop in the Pacific Northwest, but the question of how blueberry yield might benefit from outcrossing among cultivars (like apples and cherries) is not clear. This week we hear about research to determine the benefits of outcrossing in blueberries.

If you are interested in native bees and a member of the public where do you go? Washington has a new approach, namely the formation of a native bee society, which enables people across a wide range of interests to get together and work towards the preservation of the bees of the Evergreen State.

Gardening and landscaping for urban wild bees is growing. While there is a lot of attention to the flowers to help bees, what else drives diversity? Also, how is diversity measured? In this episode we learn about the broader factors that determine diversity and the biases involved with measuring bee diversity with pan traps.

As water pipelines are buried to conserve water, this leaves a lot of land that could be converted to pollinator habitat. In this episode we learn of an initiative from Hood River County in Oregon.

Urban farms are becoming more common on school grounds. In this episode we hear how bees can be a critical part of student experience at school urban farms.

2022 was the year we were able to get back out to public events to talk to the public about pollinators. Some of us were a little rusty. In this episode we hear about how to pull off an excellent event and how to involve Master Gardeners.

The Canadian prairie region is home to the bulk of that country's colonies. Last year it suffered crippling losses to varroa mites. In this episode we see what we can learn from these periodic heavy varroa infestation years.

Integrated pest management (IPM) is a key dimension of pollinator protection. This week we head to Chispas Farm in Albuquerque, New Mexico on how they use an integrated method to protect their plants from pests and encourage pollinators.

Varroa resistant bees have been on the horizon for over a decade. This week we learned how close these lines are to being used commercially through a recent study of the POL line.

A new study uses machine learning to classify whether a pesticide is toxic to bees or not.

Central to honey bee mating are drone congregation areas (DCAs). In this episode we learn how to locate DCAs using unmanned aerial devises (aka, drones).

It's been a cold and wet spring across the Pacific Northwest region. In this episode we learn about what impacts it may have had on cocoon production and what you can do to ensure you maintain bee productivity across a range of spring conditions.

Honey bees have complex societies, which makes their response to environmental stressors difficult to understand. Consequently, the ways in which pesticide risk is assessed for bees can be complicated, nuanced and overwhelming. In this episode we cut through the tangle of all this complexity through a new extension publication.

Grasslands are often overlooked in terms of pollinator habitat. But they are key to many of the bee and butterfly species in the U.S. In this episode we hear about programs from the World Wildlife Foundation Fund to preserve grassland habitat in Montana.

British Columbia beekeepers have made a major investment in preparing for the future in launching a tech transfer program. Hear about this program and the challenges it hopes to address for beekeepers in BC.

The Western monarch butterfly population appears to have recovered from a tremendously low number of butterflies returning to overwintering grounds a few years ago. In this episode we try to understand what still remains unknown about this remarkable migrating butterfly species.

There has been a long tradition of people working together to help bees across state and provincial boundaries in the Pacific Northwest region. In this episode we discover where this cooperative approach came from.

The federal Endangered Species Act is almost 50 years old and it has been a key mechanism for assisting the recovery of many insect pollinators and plant species they depend on. In this episode we get a crash course on how the Act works.

This week the tables get turned on the host of PolliNation as guest host Miranda Jones asks how did Andony get into bees in the first place.

The holy grail of beekeeping is taking mated queens from the summer and banking them so that they are available the following spring, at a time when queen supply is tight. This week we hear about work underway to figure out how to bank queens through the winter in Oregon.

Creating habitat for beneficial insects is a key part of Integrated Pest Management (IPM). In this episode we hear how an Oregon blueberry farm has gone large scale in creating pollinator hedgerows.

The data we have on the natural history of birds, as well as their ranges, is far richer than for insect pollinators. This week we learned about an innovative approach to use bird data to inform what we know about insect pollinator populations.

When people think about beekeeping, their minds turn to honey bees. But humans have influenced the course of natural history for other bees as well. This week we hear about a wonderful new book that considers the ways humanity has shaped the fate of bumble bees.

Sometimes bees will swarm into structures. Getting them out of the structures is not as easy as some on YouTube make it seem. This week we hear about how one bee club has figured out how to easily remove bees from tricky places.