[Nature Sounds and Music] In this valley, we grow 50-plus seed crops that require pollinators.

And people see honey bees out there.

Honey bees, they're an amazing creature.

How 80,000 individuals can all work together as one organism, it's phenomenal.

But what are the other kinds of bees that we have?

And what can we do to protect some of these bees?

We can't just let them disappear.

Bees travel.

And we need a lot of habitat for our pollinators.

So, we will have to continue to work to manage their health and manage the environment that they're in as well.

[Music and Nature Sounds] [Narrator] Funding for Outdoor Idaho is made possible by the Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation, committed to fulfilling the Moore and Bettis family legacy of building the great State of Idaho, by the Friends of Idaho Public Television, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

[Theme Music] [Bees Buzzing] Bees, theyre the most amazing creature that God has made for us.

Theres so much to learn from them.

I don't think there's any other way to do what the honey bee does for us.

[Buzzing and Music] In the world theres 20,000 species of bees, We zoom in on North America, and, there's probably close to 4000, 700 here in Idaho, one honey bee.

[Jim McMahon, Beekeeper] Honey bees are not native to the United States.

They came over from England and points in Europe.

In fact, the Indians called them the white man flies.

So, there's been bees around for a long, long time, not only here in the States, but certainly all the way back to Egypt.

Realities are is that without the bees pollinating, there are a whole host of things that I like to eat that we wouldn't have, apples, pears, oranges, and more.

I would say anywhere between 10 and 30% of the fruits and vegetables that you're able to buy would not be on the shelves.

Hobby beekeepers have a significant impact on the pollination, mostly in city areas.

Lots of people have flowers and vegetable gardens, this sort of stuff, and all of those things that need pollination are often pollinated by the hobby beekeepers.

Here in the Treasure Valley we have the Treasure Valley Bee Club.

And the advantage of that is, is we have commercial beekeepers all the way up to people who would like to keep bees.

[Marc von Huen, Treasure Valley Beekeepers Club] I would have to say we are the primary resource for backyard beekeeping.

Is this going to pollinate all of the crops in the Treasure Valley?

The answer is no.

We're not about that.

But we are about propagating bees.

I don't want to say it's a service.

But it is a way that people that are interested in bees can learn.

[Shanna Burbank] It's one thing to be an environmentalist, but it's also one thing to be a part of the environment.

And for me, being a beekeeper is being a part of the environment.

[Mark and Shanna] There she is.

You found her.

Yay!

Okay, put your finger out.

[Shanna] I see nature when I open the hives.

I see the ecological system, I see how important it is to not spray.

[Marc] Okay, The queen is this girl right there.

She's got the, bald thorax and the longer abdomen.

[Marc] We teach people how to help their bees survive.

And in today's world, honey bees will not survive without, knowledgeable people taking care of them.

So number one, education.

[Ross] This one was the heaviest, so obviously it's got a lot of honey.

That one had a lot of pollen on it.

[Jim] Keeping bees is unique science.

There's a distinct difference between having 1000 or 10,000 hives that you're running commercially, and you're moving them all over the country, and 15 to 20, or 2 or 3 hives in your backyard.

My bees overwinter here.

[Ross] That one had pollen on it, a lot of pollen on it.

[Jim] The commercial guys take them to a large building.

[Tenney Lamoreaux] Beekeepers are super adaptive.

They've done a great job of figuring ways to keep growing bees commercially and raising honey and pollinating.

but it's getting harder.

And that's what this is has, has helped the industry do.

The best way that anybodys figured it out is to put them into cold storage and actually, almost put them into hibernation.

This building is 65,000 square feet of storage space.

thats climate controlled.

We have stored as many as 85,000 hives in this one building.

And this is one of three buildings.

The other two buildings are about half that size.

You know, there's 3 million hives in the United States, and we're only storing 130,000 of them.

All of the bees that we store come in here for 3 to 4 months during the winter and then go to California to pollinate almonds.

We can bring five semis in here at one time.

As we're unloading one were staging the next ones and getting them ready so we can be more efficient.

Its a big game of Tetris.

We're constantly juggling and figuring out where we're going to stack everything and getting them in the right order.

Beekeepers don't want their bees to be touching anybody else's bees.

because there's so many variables with keeping them healthy.

Bees do not see red light.

So, the red lights just keep them a little calmer.

Storing bees indoors has really dramatically changed.

It's a tool in their tool belt.

Its helped give the beekeepers a way to protect their bees for a part of the year.

[Music] [Jim] We talk about Varroa mites being a particular problem right now.

And it's one that we've learned to handle with different types of hive management methodologies that we use.

We learn a lot from the commercial guys who often have the ability to take and see a little further down the road because they have so many hives and so much interaction with other people around the country, that they can quickly see we have a problem coming, etc.. [Marc] Honey bees are in trouble.

Not as much as the native bees.

[Ron Bitner] Most of the native bees nest in soil or in plugs.

But they struggle.

I'm Ron Bittner.

I've been working with pollinators for more than 50 years, and I'm hoping that future generations will have these bees.

[Andony Melathopoulos] Ron is a legend.

Ron has been working in extention with non honey bees for a very long time.

in a part of the world where bees that aren't honey bees are really important.

The alfalfa leaf cutting bee to the alfalfa seed sector in eastern Oregon and Idaho is central.

And Ron was pivotal at getting that industry off the ground.

But in the process, he really developed an appreciation, he was one of the pioneers of understanding the wild bees of Idaho.

[Ron] I've been around enough to know that we need to do some things differently.

Most people, when I give a talk or I'm standing on my deck out in Sunny Slope, it leads to, well, I hear about bees all the time.

Is there another bee other than the honey bee?

I didn't know about a lot of them until we got a research grant to survey the bees on the agricultural crops here in this valley.

Most of them, they're ground nesters and we're losing them.

It was a specialty crop grant.

Comes down throught the USDA and the Idaho Department of Agriculture.

I started thinking about it, how many bees do we have in the state, different kinds that pollinate our crops?

Over a period of three years, we collected 6 to 8000 bees.

It surprised me.

Today we're out here at McIntyre Farms, looking at a field of collard seed.

setting up whats called a blue vane trap.

Bees are attracted to the blue color.

There's a soapy water mixture in there.

They'll drop down in that.

I'll come back in about a week.

We'll take that out, rinse them off, put them in alcohol, take them to the lab at the College of Idaho, dry them out and start to pin the bees that aren't honey bees so we can get them identified.

We're working on an Idaho Bee Atlas with Oregon State and University of Idaho, working with Brad Stokes who was teaching the Master Gardeners, He loves bees.

He just came up from Mountain Home.

And we worked with the USDA bee lab out of Logan, Utah to start identifying those bees for us.

[Skyler Burrows] The US national pollinating insects collection here is the largest bee collection, certainly here in the US, and one of the largest bee collections in the world.

The bee collections go all the way back to the late1800s.

We have between 3 and 4 million bees.

[Ron] We're lucky to have Skyler because he has a passion for it.

Hes requested all over the world to come in and set down, what kind of a bee is this?

We have found at least 70 species within 15 miles of where we were collecting.

They're very all important, and most people don't realize they're even there.

[Skyler] The importance of projects like what Ron is doing and especially things like the Idaho Bee Atlas is in most of the states in the country we don't have a baseline to start from of what bees should be there.

and what we're doing to maybe damage their community.

[Ron] While we were out sampling on a weekly basis, a lot of times we had to move out of the way of earthmovers.

Ninety percent of the bees that we sampled are ground nesters.

These bees I'm talking about that nest in the soil down to 10 or 12 inches were being scooped up by the thousands.

Subdivisions were being planted over them.

[Skyler] We're never going to be able to go back to this time and and say, oh yeah, we really wish we had good information on what might have been displaced by all this new building and things like that.

[Brad Stokes] Idahoans, we all, always used to say, that used to be a farm.

My dad used to say that.

He used to pheasant hunt near Eagle Road as a kid.

And we're seeing our vast agricultural land being developed very quickly.

[Armando Falcon] Having a list of all the species and being able to identify them accurately, It's, it's really, really important.

It's critical.

Sometimes it's more important than any other thing.

Because if we're not able to identify our bees first, we can't tell anybody we're losing our bees, or we are doing better.

[Andony] What this Idaho program is going to do is make those lists way more precise.

My name is Andony Melathopoulos, and I am an associate professor in the Department of Horticulture and Oregon's pollinator Health Extension Specialist.

Back in 2013, there was a pesticide kill of bumblebees at commercial parking lot outside of Portland.

It made international news.

I started in 2016, and it was by 2018 it dawned on me, when it came to the wild bees of Oregon, we didn't even have a list of the bees that lived in the state.

And that's when we started the Oregon Bee Atlas.

We knew that in order to be able to get an inventory of the different bees, we needed a lot of people in a lot of different places.

[August] Got her.

So, this is Halictus ligatus.

It's a sweat bee, really common bee that you can find pretty much anywhere, something that we see a lot.

[Ron] They're just cutting edge.

They're all over the country.

Andonys got different things going on.

But they get these people out in every county in Oregon.

And they have a Master Melittologist program.

So, if you're serious about bees theyll teach you how to identify them.

[Michele Sims] They assume that you know nothing, and they take you through everything very carefully.

[Lincoln Best] Our participants in the Master Melittologist program and Oregon Bee Atlas, the demography follows the known demography for volunteerism, in general, majority female and majority educated.

Many of them have PhDs.

Many of them are retired from a career in the environmental sector.

[Music] [Lincoln] We have individuals going to all the most beautiful parts of the Northwest in order to generate this bee biodiversity data.

[Music] [Michele] Ah, there we go.

Oh, two of them.

Sometimes you get more than you think you do.

And then they let you know that they're not happy.

[Laugh] Oh, yeah.

They're full of pollen.

There's a place for everybody in the program, which is what I love about it.

Some people only collect.

That's all they do.

They just want to be outside looking at cool plants and collecting bees off of it.

But some people, like me, are more nerdy about it and, you know, want to take it to the extremes.

Ow, jeez.

[Laugh] Sorry, little dude.

You kind of take advantage of the fact that they naturally move upwards.

So if you tilt your net up they you go into a place where you can actually get them.

You have huge jaws.

Okay.

When I collect a bee, I take a photo of the plant.

I usually try to take the flower.

You take the underside of the flower.

You take the stems, you take the leaves.

You take any basal, like, a picture of the big plant.

Because that's how you identify the species of plant that you're collecting from.

I've learned that it's very, very dangerous to make guesses.

We enter this into iNaturalist, which is an amazing program.

It's one of those community science sites where you've got experts from all over the world that will look at your submission and they'll say, yeah, that's what that is, or no, you're wrong.

And here's why.

So, then when the bees and the plants get linked on iNaturalist, they go into the OSU database.

[Andony] And then we print out those teeny tiny insect labels that everybodys petrified to make.

because it seems so meticulous.

We print them out, we put them in the mail, and the volunteers will get this little letter.

You open it and out come these little insect labels and you put them on your bees.

Imagine if they do this, and they will, 200,000 times in Idaho, you end up with this super detailed, county level ah, map of the interactions between the bees and the plants, and things start to pop out.

And I think what has been a great connection, Ron knowing Idaho agriculture, and also knowing the bees of Idaho, and us being able to provide a framework, has really led to a wonderful marriage of bringing what I think has been Ron's vision for years to realization.

[Ron] You know, I've been doing this for literally 50 years.

But it's only been within the last 15 years that people even thought about bees.

The problem we have here right now, honestly, is you know, me and four other guys are trying to do all this, you know.

And there's a lot of interest in it.

But we're not stopping.

And every year we get more people interested in it.

[Music] Younger farmers get it.

McIntyre Farms have gone into regenerative farming.

With regenerative farming, they're looking at how to make the soil healthy.

[Brad McIntyre] This is red clover that we're producing.

We're trying to do it in a, in a regenerative way.

It's actually doing really well.

Like, we have seen so many more bumblebees in the last 3 to 5 years coming back to the farm.

And a lot of it is we don't till the soil.

So we're not disturbing their habitat.

And we also are trying to keep something blooming all the time.

And it's just really important that we keep pollinators going because as the populations around here increase, that takes the dirt out which you have ground nesting bees.

and, and try to reduce, you know herbicides and pesticides as much as you can.

Our goal at McIntyre Family Farms is to leave it better than we found it.

because that will then continue to help bring those bees and those pollinators around.

[Music] [Jessica Harrold] Bees visit thousands of flowers, just in a single day, sometimes.

And so having spaces available for them, tons of flowers for them to visit.

So they're not spending their energy trying to fly all over just to find a little bit of food is really beneficial, because then you're able to build healthier, stronger populations.

Think about yourself.

You eat three times a day.

Bees are flying for food all day long.

And for them, flowers are food.

So we need a lot of flowers, and healthy flowers continually blooming throughout the year.

I'm 100% not a bee expert, which is why I like working with all of our educator partners so much, especially University of Idaho.

They have great entomologists on staff, Brad and Armando both provide classes for all the Treasure Valley Pollinator Project participants.

They bring their entomology expertise, because people really love to learn how they can benefit bees more in their garden.

[Music] The Pollinator Project was born actually out of Covid.

We had done a lot of hands on, in-person educational outreach before.

But having that made us look at different topics and how we could do it differently.

We didn't just want to move everything to virtual.

I think we were all really tired of that.

[Woman] So, you can use the knife to make a hole.

[Jessica] Peaceful Bellys been our community partner on a lot of projects, and one of their big focuses is also on pollinators and habitat.

[Music] [Clay Erskin] What's happening now is we're doing a pot up volunteer day for the Ada Soil and Water Conservation District.

We're doing a pollinator project.

We start the starts in the greenhouse, and they get about 3 to 4 weeks old, and then we pot them up into a bigger pot.

And they're all kind of designed to go into people's backyards and in their gardens.

throughout the city and throughout the Treasure Valley.

Canyon County, Ada County, up in the foothills.

The idea is to introduce more nectary sources and pollen sources within urban landscapes.

[Woman] There you go.

Thank you.

[Jessica] I try to have every flower imaginable in my garden.

I would love that people recognize how much of a difference they can make, even taking up a corner of your yard, just recognizing that it's more than just about you.

It's about an entire ecosystem.

And your choices can either really benefit that ecosystem, or they can do an incredible amount of damage on it.

[Jim] All of life is interconnected.

So are the bees.

When I lived in another state, I read a lot about bees.

When we arrived here in Idaho, it was the first thing I decided I wanted to do.

We live in a homeowner association.

And the first year I went to the homeowner association meeting, I was new and they said, oh, you're the guy with the bees, right?

Well, yes, yes, I am.

And I suddenly became their best friend because their gardens, their fruit trees, their flowers had all been doing a bountiful job that year because my bees had been out visiting them and traveling all around.

The second piece of this is, I got involved in this because of the fact that it's an opportunity to take and learn.

If you go out and you spray Roundup to make sure your driveway doesn't have weeds it will kill the bees.

So you have to make some considerations about how will I choose to live my life?

[Shanna] If somebody would have told me five years ago, you're going to be living in Idaho on a little under an acre, and you're going to be having now four hives.

I'd be like, nope.

You don't know what you're talking about.

But now I just I don't see myself doing anything else.

One thing I know is my land here, it's just so vibrant.

I don't put fertilization on anything.

I have tons of weeds.

And I learn it's okay to have weeds because it's healthy.

It's a healthy ground that they're living on and they're moving from flower to flower.

Bees are amazing.

I have a whole new life because of bees, so... [Music] [Tenney] Its pretty phenomenal that we get to help an entire industry with, with this little tiny piece of what we're doing.

We have people contacting us from all over the world now asking, what are we doing here?

You know, how are we doing it?

We only operate the bee storage, the season's only four months.

And so we've decided we needed to start keeping bees mostly to stay busy in the summer and to give the employees something to do, so I could keep paying them.

This is where we raise our queens.

I love the bees.

The more time I spend in the bees the happier I am.

Shes right here.

If I have nothing to do, I love to just be out there going through hives, looking for queens.

And this is drone brood.

Were trying to split up a little over 400 hives this year, which is one truckload of bees, right?

Thats been the goal for a couple of years, is to get up to one truckload of bees.

[Laugh] But this year I think we'll we'll get there.

[Music and Nature Sounds] [Brad] This is the end product of those beautiful yellow fields that you see in the spring.

We will clean all the chaff out, get all the fines out and the small seeds, and then we'll be able to sell this as a finished product to other farmers, ranchers throughout the United States and other countries.

Bees are essential.

All the pollinators are.

Without them, everything collapses.

[Andony] You're going to get a detail of the leaf.

[Ron] It was exciting that Andony could come to Idaho and help us start the first Master Melattologist Program program outside of Oregon in the Northwest.

[Andony] Genus level.

Were doing that in conjunction with Brad and Armando.

For me it's exciting because I was an extension specialist years ago at the University of Idaho, and it's time to turn this over to these young guys that are really going to make this thing go.

[Woman] Oh, maybe its just this guy.

[Brad] Citizen science will be the key to the future of science, whether it's entomology, plant pathology, agriculture, horticulture.

We can't put an expert on every city corner throughout Northwest, right?

We have to have those citizens making observations.

And that really will help build the foundation of science for the future.

[Michele] Theres one.

I gots some of these yesterday.

Go on.

You can go.

There you go.

She's gone.

[Music and Credits] [Narrator] Funding for Outdoor Idaho is made possible by the Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation, committed to fulfilling the Moore and Bettis family legacy of building the great state of Idaho, by the Friends of Idaho Public Television, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

To find more information about these shows, visit us at Idahoptv.org.

[Music]