 And also, I believe a huge part of the Center for Sustainable Systems, so welcome. Thank you, Jody. We're going to be the Garage Cultural Center, certainly. I'll tell your high school's teacher again. I think that was a bunch of us. I am one. I'm the status teacher of the high school. I'm also the director of the Center for Sustainable Systems. I know a bunch of you probably are like, what's that? I've never heard of that. Well, the CSS is an educational non-profit based out of the high school, which has enabled us to do a lot of the sustainability work that we do there, including a lot of the work around food systems. So if you've been behind Montpellier High School along the bike path, and you've seen the greenhouses, and the gardens, and the chicken coops, and the pizza oven, and all that, that in part is the work of the CSS. It also funds a summer program called Food Farm Society, where students get credit and they get paid for their work. We have an alumnus here, Aaron Kelly, who did some fantastic work with bees this summer. We're excited about that. We also have Grace Valentine, a Montpellier High School student, who's doing an independent study on pollinators, and has been working with LEAF, one of our panelists, building basic bee houses, and doing a bunch of cool work and helping organizing these events. So I want to thank Grace. Awesome. So the layout for the night is, I'm going to have the panelists who are just incredibly impressive panel right here, certainly. I'm going to have them introduce themselves, and I have just a few questions that I'm going to ask them to make sure we kind of cover the foundation of the topic here and their work, and then open it up for questions from the audience. Before we get to that though, excuse me, I just want for them and myself to get a sense of this room here. So if you could, if you keep bees, have kept bees, raise your hand please. Okay, a sense of that. We're taking notes over there. Who's not registered? If you have or currently do its profession, commercially, raise your hand please. Now there's no reason to add. I'm considered a sideline. Under 150 I think is a sideline. I say under 350 to 300 is considered a sideline. Okay, if you're a sideline original. I'm under a thousand. That's good. If you, let's say, if you have been involved in advocacy work around bees, maybe the recent legislation, all right, I'm sure we'll get to that tonight as well. All right, so let's just get moving here with the introductions. I want to just briefly go through name, job, title, kind of what puts you on this panel. And then we'll come back around and we'll do some questions. Great. Do I go first? All right, my name is Brooke Decker and I am the new state bee inspector and the job is actually combined with a position that was created through the Act 35, which I think a lot of you know as H205. It's the pollinator health specialist. So it's a combined job that I get to work on pollinator stuff all the time. So full-time year-round position. How I got here, the road to success is often long and winding. I had a love for bees my whole life. I grew up keeping bees with my mom. We always had bees. I got addicted to honey so then as an adult I wanted to keep bees myself and I've been keeping bees myself for about 12 years or so and I have about 20 colonies that I manage for pollination on an organic farm and also for some honey. I also have a master's degree in environmental science from Antioch University and prior to my job working with the state, I did kind of what Tom was talking about, sustainable farming, education, work at a non-profit at Hildine in Manchester, Vermont. So it was a really unique program. The local high school would come and we would do educational farming program but we really about everything that we worked on was, what would the pollinator, you know, what could we do to help promote pollinators? So it was very pollinator heavy. So we did a lot of education around pollinators, a lot of habitat building for pollinators and managed the honey bees there. We definitely managed the grounds through IPM and integrated pest management. We didn't use pesticides so pollinators were big on that location. And then for three summers I worked with David who's here. He's the old bee inspector. I was his part-time summer assistant. So it was an easy fit when he retired. He applied for the position. And yeah, so that's how, that's my kind of quick background. Thank you. Yes. Hello, I'm Malia Richardson. I am a bee researcher and I focus for the most part on bees other than honey bees, on wild or native bees. I've been at it for quite a while. I've had also had a winding path to where I am. I've worked in government, I've worked in academia, and now I work for a business, all doing science. So I have a PhD in ecology and evolution, which I'm from Dartmouth about five years ago. My research at that time and still continues to be, is aimed at looking at the interaction between plants and bees at pollination interactions and what kinds of traits of the bees and traits of the plants mediate that interaction. So things like the sugar on the net or the chemistry of pollen, the disease status of the bees themselves. All of these things interact to affect outcomes of floral interaction. It might result in pollination of the flower or it might not result in pollination of the flower. It results in a meal for the bee, but is it a good meal or less good meal? And so in particular, I was working on the chemical ecology of pollination and I think we're going to talk about this a little bit more later, so I'll skip the details there. I did a first talk at UVM after that for two years, two and a half years, which was focused on the agricultural pollination by wild bees in Vermont. So we were studying high-wish blueberry on farms, mostly in the Champlain Valley, but also some over here. And looking at the way that high-wish blueberry is impacted positively by below-ground mutualist fungi, like microfiber fungi that associate with the roots and help the plants acquire nutrients. And then they're also helped by bees that pollinate the flowers and increase the yield of the crop on these farms. What we found is there was an interaction between the two partners. So the plants do best when they have both the fungi and the bees. I can talk more about that later. Now we work for Stone Environmental, which is right across town. And I do a whole array of different projects related to bees and agriculture. So I do inventories of bumblebees. I look for the endangered rusty-patch bumblebee, places like Cape Cod this summer, West Virginia and Virginia this past summer. Maine, Northwestern Vermont. So we just, we go out, we net bees. In the case of bumblebees, we identify them and then we release them. So there's no killing involved, so we get a lot of data. Or there's very minimal, actually, sampling. I do, there's great projects that I want to plug at some point. It's called Bees of Vermont that is run by the Vermont Center for Eco Studies. We've just started it this year. It's a citizen science project to inventory all the different types of bees in the state. We have about, we think about 325 different species of bees just here in Vermont. We think that. I used to say we have 275 species. And we started this project and this guy that we work with, as part of the project, is very good at identifying bees and he keeps finding new ones. So the idea is we don't actually know what we have here. We don't know what we've lost. We don't know what we've stands with. So the idea is to inventory the bees now. Then we can check again in 10 years or 20 years and see how they're doing. And I do a lot of pesticide research at Stone Environmental. So this involves looking at data, risks to bees and thinking about ways to mitigate those risks. It also involves a lot of field science. So actually going to the field, setting up an experiment, making a pesticide application, letting it drift downwind, collecting the particles that we didn't want to see drift downwind and quantifying how far a thing moves and what the risk is to bees. That's an example. So I'll leave it at that. Welcome back to that. You know I've been using that 275 number and you never told me about it. Sorry. We're going to hold questions. We have plenty of time for questions but we do want to come in through this. I'm Samantha Alger. So I'm from Rhode Island originally. I graduated in 2009 with an undergraduate degree in business and biology. And it was difficult to find a job at that time so I did a lot of different things. I went to Hawaii to learn a little bit about farming and that's when I started beekeeping and got an interest in polyam conservation. Decided it was time to go back to grad school. So I went to Vermont in 2013 and started a PhD program there in the biology department. And there I studied disease and wild pollinators and honey bees. And so I finished my PhD last year and since then have started working as a research professor in the plant soil science department at UVM. Still working on the pollinator research there. We got a specialty crop block grant to start the bee lab at UVM. And we're going to be testing samples of bees that come in from either beekeepers like yourselves or from the agency of agriculture for different pests and pathogens. Because currently beekeepers can or the agency of ag can send samples to the federal lab but this is, you know, can have issues due to staffing shortages or federal shutdowns we saw at one point. And so we're trying to create like a local place where beekeepers can send samples to get this testing done. I also teach beekeeping at UVM. I started teaching that last summer. And I'm on the board of the Vermont Beekeepers Association and I run the National Honey Bee Survey here in Vermont. So it's a nationwide effort to gather baseline data on bee disease. And so we collect samples from Vermont beekeepers and send them to this lab in Maryland to get tested for pathogens and also pesticide analysis. So I've been doing that for the past five years now. So we have some of the first standardized data on bee disease and pesticide data. This is a lot through this farm bill funded program, the National Honey Bee Survey. And so I've got my one foot in research and that's at UVM. And then my other job, which is I work about 30 hours a week as a consultant at this company called DHB. It's an engineering, architecture firm, consulting firm down in South Burlington. And you wonder how someone with a pollinator background or biology background is working at an engineering firm. Well, they were convinced that there was enough momentum behind pollinator protection efforts to hire somebody with my area of expertise. So some of the biggest clients that we have are like VTrans, for example, and Green Mountain Power. And so I've since working at DHB starting in March, we've been working with these groups and trying to figure out ways to improve pollinator habitat in a big way along roadsides and maybe also under utility corridors and things like that. So I've sort of got one foot in the academic world and another in the consulting business world like this. You guys are all doing good work. Glad to be here. I think we have four D inspectors in the room now. Could you put up your hand if you were once for a Vermont D inspector? Oh my gosh, this is troubling. You were too? Oh, nice. Rick, follow me. Oh, right. I was actually the very first full time in agriculture. Oh, right. Excellent. Did you create that job? Did you get a grant or something for that? I was brought in, I was in the Finger Lakes of New York State after I had school, working with the elders. And the Department of Agriculture did something very quietly. They paid for my training in Western New York. So I could come here and be the D inspector for three years. There's a tremendous wave of American falterwood coming into Vermont from New York State. And we think about computers now and everything, but it was very radical at that time. I got these big yellow index cards and each beekeeper had their map on it and a number of colonies and all that. We mapped everything pretty carefully. That was great. I love my time as the bee inspector in Northern Vermont, Northern 9 counties back in the late 70s and early 80s. It was really wonderful. I started with my brother, Tommy, when he was 9 and I was 12 with a beehive on our family farm. And I was just enchanted by the bees and really been with them all my life. After the work in New York State for the beekeepers in the Finger Lakes, I came to Vermont 40-some years ago. And I eventually was running a couple thousand beehives in 63 locations in the Champlain Valley of Vermont and San Juan River Valley of Northern New York. It was a tremendous experience. 1900 hives. It was a complete roller coaster, you know, coming into the spring from the winter and die off. In the early years, we made incredible crops, 120-140 pound averages. And then they just kept declining as the mites came more onto the scene. And I saw this tremendous loss. It was very depressing, but we kept going for years. But we continually added more value-added products. Wild cherry cough syrup with raw honey. I think I helped bring back raw honey to the country to take 60 years off. Certainly the beekeepers all made fun of me when I went and bought raw honey. Because we didn't have enough in Vermont to make wild cherry cough syrup, elderberry syrup. We're still buying honey from that at Bar Hill down the road here. Long, long relationships. And now they understand how important raw honey is. But we make cropless spreading, sad. I brought a lot of the products, and they're in the back on the side if you'd like to take a look at them. There's honey from New Zealand and sweet Spain. I've consulted these areas and picked out jars of honey. And eventually we started adding honey to gin to make the Bar Hill gin and making the Bar Hill pot scratch with honey. And I turned that company over to the team four and forty years ago. And now Farmer, Green and Elderberry has been raised bees in Greensboro and Farmer Hill Park. Still very much connected to bees. It's become a very rich area for honey bees. There's a grain all with an understory of two or three lagoons. So now we have a hundred acres. It's really a paradise for bees as we plant a cover crop. There's an understory to the winter rod that we grow for caligun spirits. And we made a good crop of honey this year, which is really exciting. And probably the most wonderful thing that happened to me this summer is another person came. I do bee venom therapy and everyone I work with has gotten over their life issues. And I'm just so respectful of the bees and their healing power, not only in the raw honey, the propolis and the pollen, which has really been my life. But at the venom, everyone that has come for bee venom therapy has gotten over their life issues. It's really, really important. I wish there was more work being done on that. But those who want to can come to people all over the world and get bee venom therapy. These are very generous with what they do. And it's really exciting to continue to be a part of the bee venom therapy and the raw honey and now working and the very part of my person for caligun spirits and also growing great for them. So that's how I do it. Prime Minister, your first question. Thank you. So, first of all, thank you for talking to me. We're going to hear from the current bee inspector about the two researchers here. We have two researchers here with current, you know, most recent David out there. But while you're on a roll here, aside from Varroa Woods, and you've been keeping bees for 50 years, how else hasn't changed? For better, for worse, what are those factors that are influencing that? Well, the other part of the story is, thank you, bee hives die. I can't keep them alive. In the bucket list of this part of my life, that's the goal, to keep the bees alive. I used strips when they first came out, the chemical strips. They give the bees a little boost, then they die. That was, you know, 30 years ago. I've been organic ever since. I kind of notched it up this year. I used formic acid, which is considered organic. And that did work. So that's a great sadness to me, you know, to get two nukes next spring from Josh White. It's really a pleasure to visit him for the first time. Three months ago, I went to a high-frame nuked for an observation guide for how the bees here is really impressing what he's doing. He's had to shift from organic to chemical just to keep coming. And I respect that. So the change has been where we used to have a 10, 50% litter loss for bees. It's been 100%. And I guess I'm really sad about that. And I hope I can have 20 hives someday. A critical mass to raise queen bees from survivors. For years, I would, you know, raise queen bees from survivors and they get stronger and stronger. The queens. But then when they all die, you wiped out your years of research. So that's been a major change. And that's why we went into value-added products. And that's why we continue to work with 300 beehives instead of 1,500. Because I can see from a lot. And we would trade 100, 200 beehives and get money back. Because I saw the writing on the wall. It's a tough business. It took 27 years to break even as a commercial beekeeper. And that was a year we got elderberry-linked syrup. A year of swine silk. Elderberries and antiviralism. And so, see that continue to decline with your life work. Pretty depressing. But I'm not giving up. I'm sure the crowd's going to have plenty of questions. Speaking of colony losses, Clover Brook, from the ABR inspectors of America webpage, quote, honeybee colony losses have steadily increased over the past decade from an average of 26% loss in 2006 to 44% in 2017. Is this consistent with what we're seeing in the months? I would say it is. We were talking about this earlier. Those numbers are hard to quantify for many different reasons that I won't bore you with. Right now, obviously, you really want to dive into it. 30% is the number I kind of find is, I don't know, it hovers around 30%. Rick and I were talking about this too earlier. That's what a lot of sideline or commercial-sized beekeepers find that they're losing year after year now. So that's pretty consistent. So if you have two, it will be 100% loss. The numbers are hard. If you lose all your colonies, that's 100% and how does that factor if you're a commercial beekeeper and you lose 30%. Yeah, that's where those numbers get confusing. But there are a lot of winter losses. And winter time is the time in Vermont that we see most of the losses. So it's not having reserves for the cold? It's usually has to do with the varroa might. So I could talk about that a little bit. So honey bees have a parasite called a varroa mite. And it's a, it would be like us having a tick besides a small dog on our backs. And it feeds on fat bodies, which controls a lot of the functions in the bee. So it's depleting their kind of immune system, I guess. Is that the right, would it be the immune system? I see the results where they, so their immune systems are compromised but then just like the tick with us, the viruses are spreading, there's transmitting viruses to the honey bees. So in the summer, they're able to, well, we're treat, we're able to treat in the summer, I guess, and monitor the mite lows. But in the winter, when the bees become dormant, they just for a variety of different reasons aren't able to make it through the winter. And it's usually mite related. Sometimes it's lack of honey, but generally if you see a colony that in the spring you open it up, there's tons of honey and no bees left. They're just dead on the bottom. It's obviously, it wasn't that they ran out of honey, it's that they had some disease from the mites. So Samantha, this brings us perfectly to you. The viruses, yeah. Our research looks at disease spillover among wild and managed pollinators. Published this work. You've been on DPR speaking about it. Could you explain the direction and intensity of disease transmission among pollinators? Sure. Yeah, so there's been a lot of other previous work looking at just different kinds of diseases spilling over between managed bees and honey bees. And my work specifically focused on the viruses that Brooke was just referencing. So we know that these varroa mites vector viruses so they'll transmit the viruses to honey bees. And so the mites are really twofold. They're eating the fat bodies of the bee and they're also transmitting. These viruses are threefold and they're affecting the immune system of the honey bees. But these viruses were detected. So when I started my PhD in 2013 there were a couple of papers that started detecting these viruses in other bees besides honey bees. And so the question was how are these viruses getting transmitted to bees besides honey bees? Because the varroa mites don't vector other bees. They're specific to honey bees. So how are these viruses getting around? And so in my PhD work, I went out and sampled bubble bees throughout Vermont and looked to see if I could find these viruses in bubble bees. And in fact I could. And one of the viruses, the black queen cell virus, there was 75% of the bubble bees had this virus. Deformed wing virus, which is like the telltale of the varroa mites honey bees. We found that about 12% of bubble bees here in Vermont. But we also found that bubble bees that were living near honey bee aviaries were way more likely to have these viruses. And so it suggests that these viruses could be coming from honey bees into wild bubble bees. But we also asked, well how are they getting transferred? Like it's if it's not the mite, how is this happening? And we tested flowers, because we thought this could be a place where bees can commingle on flowers. When they're on flowers, they leave behind salivary secretions or feces when they're foraging. Just like the flu, you know, when you're sick during the flu season, maybe a doorknob can serve as that, you know, as that place that you might get sick. Think of that as being, we use the dirty doorknob as an analogy of flowers out in the environment. And so we tested a lot of flowers both inside or near honey bee aviaries. So an apiary for those of you who aren't beekeepers, which is just a place where bees are, honey bees are kept. We test flowers in honey bee aviaries or near honey bee aviaries, and flowers where there wasn't an apiary within at least a mile or so, or more. And we only found bee viruses on flowers near honey bee aviaries. All the flowers that we tested outside of honey bee aviaries were negative from viruses. So this showed that this could be happening through flowers, and it appears that where the honey bees are located are hot spots for where these viruses could be coming from. And that sort of propelled my next work, which was how can we reduce, lessen the risk of disease spillover from honey bees to bumblebees, because we're not going to erratically the viruses, but if we have good beekeeping practices that keep varroa mites low in honey bees, that might keep viruses lower in honey bees and hopefully reduce the chances of the spillover from honey bees to bumblebees. So that's part of what this whole Vermont bee lab process has been, to try to work with beekeepers in the Agency of Ag to kind of help with the disease in honey bees. So, Leif, there's two animals I want to ask you about. First, though, we're talking about bumblebee moss. Can you just sum that up for us? What's this about? Sure. So, I'll talk about a project that the Vermont Center for Eco-Studies did in 2012 through 2014, and I worked with them on this. It was a citizen science bumblebee inventory. So we had, I just described this all bee species inventory where we have volunteers collecting samples of all 325, I think I said, species. This was just the bumblebees. There were 17 species of bumblebees native to Vermont, as far as we can tell. We found specimens of 17 different species collected in Vermont over the last 120 years or so. We have about, I don't know, 6,000 total specimens of bumblebees that go back through that century. So this is how we know about the past. And it's honestly not very great data. It's a point here and a point there. It's a UVM undergrad taking an entomology course who conducted a hymenopterin, which turned out to be a bumblebee, and somebody put it on a pen and it went into this collection at UVM and we're lucky enough to have that datum. But we need a lot of information to understand the diversity and the abundance and what we have now versus then. So anyway, we did compare that historical data to about 12,000 specimens collected by those volunteers in 2012, 2013, and a little bit in 2014. And so the news is not particularly good for Vermont's bumblebees. We've got, as I said, we had 17 species historically. We now can find 12 of those, and reliably we can only find nine or 10 of those. This work results in the listing of two of them as endangered at the state level, one of them as threatened at the state level. There's a fourth that is petitioned right now to be listed as endangered in Vermont. It's not endangered worldwide, but it has gone from Vermont and it used to be abundant in the Shanklin Valley in the 1960s. What's the name of it again? Well, it's called the American bumblebee. That's a common name for it. That's bad. So we had 17 species. We've actually lost those others. They're not extinct everywhere. They still occur in different places. So it's important to understand the difference between local extinction and full extinction. We think that these declines are probably being driven by a combination of factors. So there's good evidence that bumblebees are negatively affected by the following four things. These are umbrella stressor groups, but climate change is one of them. Pathogens, including the ones that these guys have been talking about, but also some others that are specific to bumblebees. There are parasites and pathogens that live their whole life inside the body of a bumblebee and jump to the next host like that. So it's not just a disease that human beings accidentally introduced or something through mismanagement of something in agriculture. These are native. These are animals that occur here, belong there alongside bumblebees, and some of them have changed somehow and are now driving declines. So climate change, pathogens, pesticides, and there's a lot to talk about there, and then land cover change. So loss of habitat, loss of floral habitat, loss of the abundance of the right types of plants. In the case of bumblebees, they're generalists. They're not quite as generalized as honeybees. A typical bee is very unlike a bumblebee or a honeybee. A typical bee is solitary, so the mom, after mating with a male, she goes and excavates a tunnel underground, lays something like five to 10 eggs, provisions each one with its own little ball of pollen and the nectar closes them up. Like it's an Egyptian tomb from 3,000 years ago. So it's an actual outside chamber as opposed to the other half-olied, diploid methods that are in different realms. It's not a social insect. It's solitary. It's just like a chain. Interesting. So a lot of those guys have just one floral dose. They need pollen from sunflowers, sunflowers only, or squash plants, and they can only get pollen from squash plants. So if you don't grow squash next year and you have that bee in your garden, it has to go somewhere else. It cannot survive without your squash plants. But bumblebees are like honeybees. They can eat hundreds. They can eat thousands of different things. The point I'm long-windedly trying to get to here is that it's not specifically a loss of native plants. It's a loss of plants. So bumblebees do great, just as honeybees do, with a lot of non-native, really vaccine weeds. They produce great food for bees, right? So it's a loss of habitat, but not necessarily a native plant. Those, but also some of the others. So there's much more to say about bumblebee losses. The only other thing I'll say about it for now is Vermont's not unique, right? We see parallel declines in adjacent states and provinces in other parts of the country. And so the story is really, it's a bigger one. It's a continent-scale problem. Indeed, it's a global problem. Some of these that have declined or disappeared here are related closer to others from Siberia, from Tibet that are also in trouble. And so there's a taxonomic similarity and then the pathogen problems I mentioned, there's a possibility that we're looking at, you know, differential susceptibility to disease with certain groups of bumblebees. Can you explain to folks who may not have considered bees other than the honeybee why this is such a problem? What's the big concern about losing something like a bumblebee so rapidly? Yeah, so I'm going to preface this by saying I love honeybees, but now you're going to hear me say some negative things about honeybees. I mean it, I really do. I think honeybees are amazing. I have kept honeybees, I have honey, but let's be honest, we're talking about a farm animal and we're here talking about bees in general, so we're talking about one farm animal and 20,000 wild animals and we're putting them all in the same box. There are about 20,000 species of bees worldwide and only a few of them are farmed, maybe 20 or 50 or something at most, right? There are very few honeybee species in the world and this particular one, apis malifera, is unique, it's very special. There are other species of honeybees in the world, they're also farmed for honey, but to answer your question, honeybees are important pollinators and especially not farms, but so are these other bees and research is starting to show us that in some cases it's the wild bees that are doing the majority of the actual work on farms, aside from the people, pollinating the flowers. So as the example of a high-wish blueberry in the Champlain Valley, lots of the growers that we work with, they spend money to get to red hives, right? I don't know what the cost for high rental is, but it's a couple hundred dollars at peace, right? Well, it depends on the crop, but... Almonds? Almonds, yeah, you're getting like 200 dollars, but pumpkins, I think it's like 50 and apples are maybe 80, so 50 to 80, like in-state, I would say. So as a grower of blueberries in Vermont, this is a business expense, you just have to do it. But research at UVM by some of our colleagues is showing that for this particular crop, beekeepers know that blueberry is a little challenging for honeybees anyway, but what we're finding is that honeybees are not contributing very much to the success of the farming operation at all. It's almost a hundred different native species of bees that are commuting from the woods to the farm, feeding on the flowers and then going back into the woods or the field edge or wherever it is that they're nesting. And not all of those are great pollinators, but a solid five to 10 species are doing almost all of the work, and they're all native species, and none of them are being tracked or monitored, so growers are completely unaware that these guys have habitats that extend beyond the flower itself, right? No, because I'm not saying anything negative about blueberry growers, but we just don't think about those externalities to grow in our food. And so in addition to doing better with honeybees and helping honeybees with the problems that they have, it's really important that we realize that we are losing the ecosystem service of pollination, and for the most part, we're not even aware of what we're losing, because the research has just taken place in these little pockets. So that's the importance of losing bubbles, which are actually really fantastic pollinators of a lot of crops and a lot of plants. I have one more question that I think will then segue into the larger Q&A. While we're looking at what can be done to protect pollinators, you mentioned habitat losses and threat, something that can be focused on. Climate change, we're going to leave that one there for now. Cultural practices to reduce mites with programs in place where you can become a better beekeeper. Then we get to pesticides, right? So we have the pollinator protection bill H205, which is now law addressing that. I know there's folks in this room with a lot of experience and opinions on that, and I'm sure that will be part of the discussion. Next to the whole panel here, what about that law that gives us a reason to celebrate and where, maybe, is there more work that needs to be done? We can celebrate that we have bricks. Yes, definitely. It's important that we not go woods, right? I'm going to celebrate that too. I can say something about it. So yeah, definitely celebrating bricks exists in this position, in that it is a first step towards taking action on the things that the Pollinator Protection Committee put together. They put together, so the belief is on that committee? No. Surprise. But they got together for a better part of a year and wrote this report that laid out recommendations for improving pollinator health. And so H205, I thought, was the first step towards taking action on that bill because there weren't any personnel to do anything. There wasn't any funding to do anything. They just had this blueprint, but no one to do any of it. So I'm just going to start pushing that forward, which is great. In terms of specifically with pesticides, I think that the bill was a good first step in pulling some of the most harmful pesticides, make it to noise off the shelves and make them less available for homeowner use. They're still available for untreated seed articles, which is definitely an issue and might be coming up in this next legislative session, which I've learned recently. But we can talk about treated articles for a long time if you want to. Other opinions? I will second what Samantha just said. So the bill makes it illegal to sell products that contain neonicotinoids that are just for homeowner or backyard uses as opposed to... Sorry, I think the way the bill reads is that you have to be a class A licensed pesticide applicator to apply neonicotinoids, and that involves taking a course and then taking a three-hour exam with the state. And most people who use pesticides are backyard gardeners or something and don't have that training. Anyone who applies pesticides on a golf course or is a farmer or is a crop consultant is going to have this training. Because I do some research with pesticides. Most people don't, and so the idea of that language in the bill is we aren't going to see people buy the thing that blows and then apply 10 times what they should in their backyard, which is, I guess, is something that happens if people... If the label says use one teaspoon, but you have a really bad problem, maybe two teaspoons is better. So that's positive. But to be honest, I actually think it's a largely symbolic victory for these. Don't actually think it's going to take much of anything to help these. I'm sorry to say that. I'm enormously respectful of the people who worked on the bill and worked so hard to get it passed. The neonicotinoids that are not being applied because of this change represent a fraction of 1% of the total mass of neonicotinoids applied in your monitor. So if you accept that that is a problem, that neonicotinoids are a problem, you've just looked at this pie where there's this tiny, tiny little sliver and then the whole rest of the pie is the other sliver, and you've taken out the tiny one. And so what does it really do? It can't be harming these. It might actually not be helping them all that much. It makes us feel better, but I would cement that there's a lot more heavy lifting to do and not only pesticides, but also climate change. I understand why you don't want to talk about it. It's just too much. How do we get started helping bees by solving that problem? That's next Tuesday. That's next Tuesday. So if you were to, you know, I've said that the vast majority of the neonicotinoids applied in Vermont aren't being removed from the shelf. So what could, if you think that's important, what could we do? We can't really have a dairy industry in Vermont without those chemicals at this point. We could de-ball the dairy industry to the thousands of small farms again if we could, right? But we can't have dairy at the scale that we have it now without most of the producers using pesticides. And many of those people are struggling just to make a living in anything, right? And it really does come down to money for a farmer. And so it's not so simple for the legislature to decide to have a lot of neonicotinoids. I would actually bet you that it's not possible in Vermont because we love agriculture so much. And because farmers, because people will quickly see, we can't really have dairy as we know it without these chemicals. Are you talking to somebody? Are you talking to somebody because of the treated seeds? Yeah. I should have said this. So the treated seeds, so corn is 99% of the corn that's grown everywhere is grown from these treated seeds. And so these neonicotinoids and chemicals are coated on the outside of these seeds. And when the seeds are planted, the chemicals are taken up in the plant systemically. And so if an herbivore eats the leaf, then that's how the insect will be affected by the neonicotinoid. But the issue is that these neonicotinoids, because they're systemic, they're also expressed in the pollen and the nectar of the plants. And so, well, corn is not a good example, but in other plants, that's how pollinators can get exposed just because they'll visit the flower and they could expose these neonicotinoids. This is systemic pesticide. And so any seed that's, or any plant that's grown with these treated seeds is a prophylactic use of pesticides because you don't know whether you have the pest and not when you plant the seed. You don't have the pest when you plant the seed. And so, typically, you should, through integrated pest management, show that you need to use a chemical because you have a pest before you use it, which is impossible with the treated seed model of growing things. And so because most corn is grown in treated seeds, that's the link to dairy. Sorry. Yeah, because dairy is cozy. Is that a support? So, okay, so neonicotinoids is, people commonly say neonix, right? Neo, N-E-O. And then the word nicotine, we've got the neoland, and then O-I-D-S. Neonicotinoids. She's got it here. That's right. I don't have a spell check with you. That's close enough. I'm glad you asked that question because that's one of the important points about pesticide use, and pesticides and bees can risk to bees. So, neonicotinoids are relatively new class of pesticides. They were invented in the 70s or 80s. They did not become commercially available until the 1990s, and their use very rapidly increased. And neonicotinoids largely replaced a bunch of other more toxic, a bunch of other pesticides were more toxic to vertebrates and sometimes to plants. So, they are safer except unless you're an insect and they're a lot less safe or they're equal with what came before. So, what I wanted to say is that there are four or five different neonicotinoids and many different products that contain those four or five chemicals that are used in Vermont. On corn, it's one or two of the five. But when we think about banning something we should think about the consequences and the unattended consequences. And so, I hear constantly from people who want to ban neonicotinoids and I don't think it's a bad idea necessarily but I'm not sure it's going to accomplish the goal that the person has. And the reason is most farmers use pesticides and most farmers who have that tool taken away from them and those of you who are beekeepers know a lot about this, right? This scramble to try to use amatres and then to use formic acid and thymol and all these things to treat against mites. We keep trying different things because we lose efficacy or we lose the galleys in some cases. So, my point is neonics are a problem for bees but we're not sure how big a problem and we're not sure how big a problem could be. So, I think we need to think long and hard about unintended consequences with legislating around pesticides. Thank you. I'm going to lay out a few ground rules for our Q&A. But first, Andrea, I want to give you a chance to remark on the legislation. Sure. Sure. So, I totally appreciate what you do. I'm Andrew Sander and I've worked with Role for months. I'm part of a large coalition of groups that worked on passing HCO5 which became the so-called Pollution Protection Bill. A lot of people didn't know that part of one of the bill was that it gave us some additional staff at the Agency of Agriculture to include a book and another staff person which were desperately needed to support the bee person and get some more data that would help us understand what's going on with the bees. Some groups that worked on this bill understood from the beginning that it was a tiny, tiny step. But what it did is it broke a five, seven-year lock jam in the legislature where every year for the last five or seven years bills have been introduced and just not gone anywhere. So, fortunately, Chip Triano was the lead sponsor of the bill who did a lot of work to get a lot of legislators to work with it. The other thing that happened that I think was really valuable was we educated a lot of people by virtue of people coming and testifying. Samantha came and testified. A lot of people from the Beekeepers Association came and testified. So there's a whole bunch of legislators up at the State House now who understand a lot more about what's going on with bees and what all these interacting factors are. Rover Ron is particularly concerned about unintended consequences and also the feasibility of removing certain tools from the toolbox that are considered to be dangerous. But it has been done in other places. Canada has a program where farmers have to show that they have the pest problem that is addressed by the chemicals that are on the treated seeds until they can be used for treated seeds. We don't have that requirement here. And in fact, the pest that is most generally treated is a very common problem. So there is this enormous overuse of a pesticide that's not really treating a particular pest. It's just getting into the environment systemically. So we recognize that any kind of change that these treated seeds would have to be done in a phased way that provided farmers with alternatives in particular non-treated seeds or seeds that are not treated with this particular pesticide. So the coalition is continuing to work on this. There is a bill that will be introduced this year that will work on phasing out treated seeds. A lot of work that's going to have to happen there but I would encourage everyone here if you care about this issue start talking to your elected representatives. Let them know that you have this concern and that you want them to continue to do this work. There's likely to be another bill that would be a more global bill looking at the Vermont Pesticide Advisory Council which was created about 20 years ago with a specific mandate to guide the state toward a reduction in the use of pesticide number of acres and all that. And they have not done that and largely they have not done that because they have no teeth. The body as it was created was not given any power to speak of other than making recommendations and it hasn't been used as a tool to move the state in that direction. So look for those pieces of legislation there will be more information coming out. So what I want to do right away is corner your legislator and say this is an important issue I want you to pay attention to what I want you to work on. Thanks for the self-praise. So just a couple of ground rules really norms for Q&A we have just a half an hour here please introduce yourself keep your question concise as possible I know often framing context is required mind at a time direct your question please if it's for an individual panelist or for the whole panel and then just in an effort to try to encourage as much participation as possible we'll try the old three before me you ever heard of the three before me? Oh yeah, I was there. Ask the question and then I'm sure you have another question I have like 275 questions I have one and then I wait for two of the three questions before I ask my next question and I'll point at people as you have questions Yes Hi, my name is Harry Conn I'm from California in the U.S. I made this question for a lead person How should we think about the relative impact on the B's across those four influences that we talked about? Is there one that's really sort of in the lead in terms of being a villain here or we're not really sure can you talk a little bit about how we should think about this problem? Sure Well, I don't I don't know if any one problem is more causing more of a problem than the others I can say that we know that part of the problem is that there's synergistic these threats are all interacting so if a B's not getting the proper nutrition it means because there's not enough flowers it's going to do worse when it gets introduced to a pathogen for example or if it gets challenged with a pesticide at the same time and it's not getting enough food or you think about it when you run your body down because you've been working late and you know it's the same kind of idea so there's that which kind of complicates things but I do like the idea of maybe in my mind I've been sort of prioritized the threats in figuring out which ones I want to work on first in my own research and I don't have friends who are working on other problems first and so think about where you can make the biggest difference in your own world climate change is a big one of course but we can all do things related to that if you're a beekeeper so this is something I'll get up on my soapbox I get a lot of people who are interested in saving the bees and so they become a beekeeper and as Leif they'll say oh I'm really interested in becoming a beekeeper and do something about the bees I think it's important to have more bees around and as Leif mentioned earlier honey bees are an agricultural livestock animal so I equate it to saying you want to do something about bird conservation so you can be from a chicken farm it's sort of like it's not the same thing it's great if you want to be a beekeeper but by becoming a beekeeper you're not saving the bees by becoming a beekeeper you can actually be causing more of a problem if you're educating yourself and taking care of your bees properly you can be as earlier spreading disease to other beekeepers or to the wild bees so that's something to think about and think about how you can change things in your own world if you want to be a beekeeper great but spend some time getting educated first I'll add two things one is just take Samantha's class and the second one is I think it depends on which bee we're talking about so honey bees have the Varroa mite to deal with and as Samantha said earlier honey bee does not attack any of those other native bees so that is not a threat to them category we just not unless you think of the indirect threat where they spread disease to honey bees and honey bees spread disease to the native bees so it depends on which which bee we're thinking about and I just underscore that the synergistic effects are really turning out to be where the interesting story is in many cases like the effect of a certain dose we can characterize that but then if you add a gut in the parasite it's so much worse or a bunch aside I also wanted to just put in your head that we're not usually talking about one pesticide at a time these are exposed to in studies of honey bee collected pollen we're seeing an average I think this is generally speaking maybe 30 to 40 different types of pesticides as residues in the pollen and single pollen single bee that's what she found in the world when she went out to get food so some of those they don't interact with each other but some of them really do and so some of the biggest problems with pesticides are not the one thing you can name they're these complex mixtures just one quick anecdote there's this emerging story where it's a very intensively farm crop we have to bring honey bees to it if we want almonds at all so more than a half of US honey bees go out to California for six weeks or less each year just to pollinate them lots of pesticides applied during the bloom there are these adjuvants that are added to the product to make them stick to leaves better to make them make the droplets get smaller depending on what you need some of the adjuvants themselves so these are other chemicals that are not regulated and they're not pesticides per se they're like organic silicone but they're industrial chemicals those are toxic by themselves and some of those potentiate the pesticide to make it more toxic so when we talk about these risks I think we have to kind of define the terms a little bit it's a very complex thing and in most cases we can't tell you which is the worst but it's everything any questions yes the word climate change seems to be a big umbrella word and I'm wondering if you could say exactly what is the effectiveness of climate change that's effective for pollinators yeah I've done some research on this so we took I was talking about dead bees on pins we used that data to look at where bees occurred before climate change really took off and then we used more recent data to look at where bees now are and what we've seen on two continents for about 65 bee species is this coherent pattern where they are for bumblebees they are dying out at the southern margins of their ranges where conditions are highest so a bee might occur from Georgia to Vermont let's say the populations in Georgia are blinking out it's just too hot now the ones in Vermont are still fine same species but the ones in Vermont are not moving north we're tracking the warming and we see this with plants and butterflies and many other types of bumblebees for some reason you have a northern limit and a southern limit and it's the southern limit moving northward but the northern limit is stuck and then they're also moving up in elevation so the net it's a loss of their pollination there's a lot more to say about how climate change affects bees a lot of it on a single generation kind of micro-site level but these are just the early warning signs of what climate change is doing to species distributions I think you're going to see a lot more about that with respect to bees normally when something in nature gets wiped out, something else takes its place do you think that will happen with pollinators or is there any evidence towards that like when you go out into the Champlain Valley ad country are you seeing like maybe there's less bumblebees but there's more alfalfa leaf cutters or something that are going to take their place I think we're seeing a simplification of species compositions so we're losing a little bit of this research there we see declines in about half the bumblebee species but some species are actually doing better so some of the more common general species are actually doing better so we're seeing an oversimplification of the system which could be an issue if there are specific bees that pollinate specific plants then we're losing those connections the wild plants that use specific pollinators to pollinate that plant so oversimplification and there are consequences so to my question is still the same word in the original question I had was when you went to like do your study on the bees of New England with the group you did it with do you know if anybody assessed the rodents in caca at the time because it seemed to me like there's a pretty recent study like within the last few years explain what you mean about rodents why they're important because recently in Nantucket this study was introduced after an experiment done on the artificial selection mice in order to counteract the diseases that ticks and closely related mites carry by finding a pathogen in one of those ticks and are actually multiple they started the ticks and then once they saw that it was working on the mites they introduced it to squirrels in the area and then they were going to do it on mice so that they could not eradicate Lyme disease but first they had to assess the damage done by the pathogen that was going into the recessed members of the the tribe that exponentially multiplied what's the connection to bees I see one because the damage may have been done on bees but they don't know by genetic modification I'm not sure I can't I don't really know anything about the system you're talking about I'll just say briefly that genetically modified crops so far are not a problem for bees we don't know of any issues like that we raised the question of rodents and for one type of bees rodents are really important because they can't dig their own underground nests and they need an existing hole in the ground so they go searching in this room looking for nest sites and they fight over sometimes they kill each other over the best nest site and the best nest sites are often chipmunk burrows and whitefooted deer mouse burrows and so there's been a lot of speculation it actually goes all the way back to I don't remember 60 or 70 years ago or something that if you have a lot of predators you have fewer rodents and you have fewer bees and we don't really know just how strong the links are but it seems like there is something between rodents and the links that's really good I have no questions Jody Kelly I'm just interested, for our help are you looking to use something other than honey in the future if that becomes a major issue? we've made spears with burdock root from the cake farm in Plainfield we're doing trials with elderberries we used to make elderberry in Portugal we're open to the fruit of the Vermont agricultural landscape distilling has a long history of farming and we're doing trials to use local agricultural products and bring these to the marketplace we have room full of whiskey that's mature all made with butcherite, barley there's no honey in that without the release next year whatever is local and people want we are open to doing the process the agency is going through to implement the new law as minor as it is one of the pieces of it is, as I understand it the pesticide, the annual pesticide registrations are timing out and so the process of getting the the unit of the noise off the shelves is now beginning because they're not going to renew the registrations for these kinds of products is there anything that you can talk about that the agency is doing to get the word out about that or that people here can do in interacting with their local stores like for instance we heard testimony last session that auctions right here in Montpelier was already taking those things off the shelves mostly because they were getting pressure from their customers people saying why are you still selling this and other stores some of the bigger stores are starting to take them out but can you say anything about what's happening with the agency or what people can do to assist yeah we do have a field inspector who his job is to go around and look at stores, look on the shelves and make sure that there are no need next on the shelves so if you are out in the store and want to walk down the pesticide aisle and read some labels you can definitely do that and call the agency of agriculture and you know just make a report and we can send somebody out to check it out and probably find the people for breaking the law can they still be selling them in the store I think it should be off the shelf period yeah and the label isn't going to say do you want me to know if it's going to say a bit of club bread or close hand yeah so study up on those words really kind of make a cheat sheet put in your wallet and I think there are some exceptions too, I think there's some like please spray that's legal so it's products that you can be spraying right outdoors that are illegal I've not been on it and it's not widely known that the oral flea and tick medications you give your pets are immune to bugs and so I think fibrinol is the compound that's usually used in those veterinary medications and so when we think about the total mass that we apply to the ground you know we actually apply a lot of neonicotinoids via dog food and I'm not advocating that we ban those products and let our dogs get fleas and ticks but I am advocating deeply about your impact and what it really means to say this is bad we should just think about it a lot of it is getting into the environment through our local dogs and cats I came to realize that basically we're a country addicted to drugs it's just swept under the carpet drugs is anything that increases immediate and medium pleasure and loss long term our whole agricultural system pretty much is conventional chemical farming miticide, pesticide fertilizers, bactericides fungicides virusides organic it's a lot of press in Vermont as it should but it's a single digit percent of the agriculture in Vermont we are a country addicted to drugs and I think we just have to really face that we talk about opioids and they're terrible we talk about heroin the overuse of those and they kill people and these chemical agricultural products are killing people they're shortening our lives they're causing allergies they're causing cancer we have to just come to grips across our country that we are addicted to drugs and it's called the end of the system and this is the expense of what we like to think of as cheap food it's a great loss in our health as well as the loss of the soil health and here we're talking about the health of the bees and until we really face that which is kind of like what was sweeping under the carpet I don't think we're going to get as far as we need to as quickly as we do I'll sweep that into the micelle I would add too just on to what else the agency is doing so if you ever are walking around or you know walking through the city and you suspect a pesticide kill there's a fruiting or flowering tree and you see a bunch of dead bees under it that's an illegal use of a pesticide they're not really supposed to spray even if they're licensed they should know better pesticide applicators aren't supposed to spray when plants are flowering so if you suspect something call the agency of agriculture you can find my information on the website too so you can send somebody out to investigate as well Can I just tag on to that one quickly thing that I just heard and the feedback meeting was that near-makes of denoids were identified as a possible for a possible use against the emerald ash border and a lot of people have jumped on that and are hiring licensed applicators to investigate with denucentinoids but there's some new research indicating that that just is not an effective treatment but because denucentinoids are systemic if they are injected into the tree they become part of the tree they get into the soil and so on and so if you're a landowner and you're dealing with ash trees and somebody says to you excuse the denucentinoids question that because it's probably not and it is another overuse of these chemicals that we really don't need anymore for the environment I was just wondering is there any mechanism for putting the online purchase of denuids because I think a lot of homeowners don't even bother coming out of their house out for a big visit and the women and the board is offering them to get delivered to their house and not be allowed I don't know how that's monitored though I believe in the law it's said you're not supposed to it can be sold in Vermont so it can be delivered for consumer use it can be sold or delivered to the state the companies know when laws pass and the agency is making that known and the clients have to register in Vermont and order to sell into Vermont whether they're doing it online or to a store it's not perfect by any means so you're certainly in a place to get around you can also go across the state wondering is anyone doing that are they like ordering something and seeing if they can get a 500 pound bag of units from Amazon and have it delivered to their house without anything stopping them from doing that I'm just saying it's amazing the stuff 20 parts per billion is enough to her to be I think it's really easy to get it off of the internet just like you're saying I don't know how widely done this is but if you go searching you can buy 100% pure from India it's very easy to get I think one of the good outcomes of this bill is that obviously the public has become aware of this now I mean if they're going into stores and saying you should count it on your shelves I mean just the passage of the bill people might not go and seek these things to try to get it over state lines and take these avenues to go they might go to the store and just grab it on the shelf but they're now actually good at that but they might not find Rick, do we have any studies going right now to try to prove that the Neonics is a problem in places where they have and like France I guess banded a few years back I don't know if it was on all cops I don't know if it was on sunflowers but they shown that it was a problem or is it still a problem? So this is a really interesting question Neonics generalities across the board in France and then in Germany and then all of the EU over the last 10 years right so we actually have this cool natural experiment if people are right that Neonics are part of the problem for honey bees and for native bees we could ask that before and after a question in Europe and I don't know enough about it to really fully answer your question I do know Neonics like Clothianidin are still turning up in maybe Collective Pollen five years later so people are still using them but not very often so they have a stockpile but they got it elicited or is it that persistent it is persistent but on the order of months to up to maybe two years this is like a half life that's a lot and it can build up in soil the thing I just described would be from somebody using it this year I can tell you that there are ongoing bee losses in Europe even though they're no longer affected by Neonics for the most part so maybe that wasn't the number one problem I really don't know but it's a great question and there's an amazing opportunity to actually study that in Ontario and EU I hope I want to respect the time here and make a few announcements and first off though thank you Jody is not kicking us out of here there's food to be and there's bee products from Todd over on the side and I'm sure this question is in conversation that's going to go around I do want to point out and remind folks next Tuesday right here same time in place of the panel is climate change and food security back to some similar things but then wallowing it open a bit and on December 14th there's a craft fair with workshops from 9 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon if you go to the garage cultural center website and basement page you'll see more information there and you'll also have an opportunity to sign up for some of the workshops to see the offerings thank you very much for coming out on a Tuesday night and sign the book right over here if you'd like to get on the mailing list for the garage cultural center or for the CSS that's non-profit based out of high school and we're definitely trying to do more of these community events like we're doing this December and we're also teaming up with Catherine to help bring Bill McKibbin back to town on March 31st my player high school auditorium we'll see you guys