Episode produced by Gurpreet Bedi, Madeline Loman, & Sully Nessa

We have all seen bees. We have all heard bees. But how much do we actually understand these buzzing pollinators and the relationship we have with them? In this episode, we took a slightly different approach to our fuzzy friends’ crisis by focusing on the narrative, the story, and the relationships. We decided to speak to Dr. John Wood, a storyteller and anthropology professor at the University of North Carolina Asheville. He is also a former professor of one of our hosts, Madeline, who interviews him for the majority of this episode. The interview covers everything from dairy farms to living in Africa and focuses on our interactions with nature. The takeaway is about noticing that the world around us, that our lives are intertwined with the lives of other beings, and their challenges, especially the plight of productive pollinators like bees, are very personal to our own. In Dr. Wood’s words, “And we're part of a kind of family and that if we start to cultivate that capacity of thinking of ourselves, as in relationship to that world, then we're more likely to look out for it, and to be careful in our own behaviors with it.”

References:

Berenbaum. M.R. (2014). Bees in crisis: colony collapse, honey laundering, and other problems bee-setting American apiculture. American Philosophical Society. 158 (3) 229-247

Cruz & Grozinger (2023). Mapping student understanding of bees: Implications for pollinator conservation. Conservation Science and Practice, 5(3), e12902.

Johnson et al (2014) Bee-wild about pollinators! An interdisciplinary study introduces primary students to the importance of bees. Science and Children. 52(4) 44-48.

MacInnis et al. (2023). Decline in wild bee species richness associated with honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) abundance in an urban ecosystem. PeerJ (San Francisco, CA), 11, e14699–e14699

Pope et al. (2023). The expansion of agriculture has shaped the recent evolutionary history of a specialized squash pollinator. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(15).

Van Vierssen Trip et al. (2020) Examining the public’s awareness of bee (hymenoptera: apoidae: anthophalia) conservation in Canada. Conservation Science and Practice. 2(12) 1-12.