 A lot of you would be familiar with the idea that bees are really important and you've probably seen on the internet or in the news this idea that bees are at risk, they're declining and that this matters to people. So I just want to talk a little bit about that story because actually that's an ecosystem services story as well once we understand it. So to explain that I'm going to go a little bit into my own history as a researcher. When I was first getting into research I just loved this idea of pollination that you have flowers that attract animals and that when the animals visit those flowers they help the flowers to reduce seeds and fruit and that that then helps the plant to reproduce. So I thought that was really interesting, I still do and I studied that in wild places so in the forest, in national parks and there's lots of beautiful stories about pollination. But over time as a researcher I began to think well how do I take the stuff that I'm excited about and make it actually more relevant to people's daily lives. And the obvious connection there is the fact that just as for wild plants the crops we grow, many of the crops we grow also need to be visited by an animal to help them produce seeds and fruit. Not all crops but a lot of them. And so this is what we call crop pollination. And it turns out that the most important group of animals for crop pollination are bees. So I started to shift my emphasis in my research from working on these wild places to actually working on farms. So I was working in apple orchards and fields of canola and then almonds. So it turns out that almonds, I really like eating almonds, but almonds need a lot of pollination. The almond trees need a lot of pollination if you're going to get an almond crop. So the growers of almonds care a lot about getting all of those bees because if the bees don't visit their flowers then the flowers aren't going to turn to nuts, they're not going to make any money and we're not going to get almonds as food. So to put it in ecosystem services terms there's the provisioning service of nature providing food to people, but it is supported by supporting ecosystem service of pollination. And so as well as starting to understand exactly how pollination worked on farms and how it's important to the economy of farmers, I was starting to understand the economics of it and the ecosystem service sort of thing. How do we build a broader environment that helps ensure that that service keeps happening. And when you think about it there's actually two different groups of pollinators. The kind of the best way because it's for free is wild pollinators, so just the insects that are buzzing around the environment, they live in the landscape and then when an almond tree or whatever flowers they visit that flower and then the farmer gets a free service of crop pollination. But then for some crops, if the farmers are worried that they're not getting enough of these wild free living insects, especially bees, they bring in their own bees and this is the classic white box of bee hive that provides honey bees where you can make sure that you've got thousands of bees, in fact millions of bees on the farm at the right time. So one of those versions is the free wild ecosystem services version. The other version is almost like the technological solution where actually we had to pay someone to bring a box of bees. And so from a farmer's point of view you need to figure out what's the best solution economically and in terms of guaranteeing that we get almond production.