How you can help save the bees one hive at a time Noah WilsonRich
Pollinator decline is a grand challenge
in the modern world.
Of the 200,000 species of pollinators,
honeybees are the most well-understood,
partly because of our long history
with them dating back 8,000 years ago
to our cave drawings
in what is now modern-day Spain.
And yet we know that
this indicator species is dying off.
Last year alone, we lost 40 percent
of all beehives in the United States.
That number is even higher
in areas with harsh winters,
like here in Massachusetts,
where we lost 47 percent of beehives
in one year alone.
Can you imagine if we lost
half of our people last year?
And if those were
the food-producing people?
It’s untenable.
And I predict that in 10 years,
we will lose our bees.
If not for the work of beekeepers
replacing these dead beehives,
we would be without foods
that we rely upon:
fruits, vegetables,
crunchy almonds and nuts,
tart apples,
sour lemons.
Even the food that our cattle rely
upon to eat, hay and alfalfa – gone,
causing global hunger,
economic collapse,
a total moral crisis across earth.
Now, I first started keeping bees
here in Cape Cod
right after I finished my doctorate
in honeybee immunology.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Imagine getting such a degree
in a good economy –
and it was 2009:
the Great Recession.
And I was onto something.
I knew that I could find out
how to improve bee health.
And so the community
on Cape Cod here in Provincetown
was ripe for citizen science,
people looking for ways
to get involved and to help.
And so we met with people in coffee shops.
A wonderful woman named Natalie
got eight beehives at her home in Truro,
and she introduced us
to her friend Valerie,
who let us set up 60 beehives at
an abandoned tennis court on her property.
And so we started testing
vaccines for bees.
We were starting to look at probiotics.
We called it “bee yogurt” –
ways to make bees healthier.
And our citizen science project
started to take off.
Meanwhile, back in my apartment here,
I was a bit nervous about my landlord.
I figured I should tell him
what we were doing.
(Laughter)
I was terrified; I really thought
I was going to get an eviction notice,
which really was
the last thing we needed, right?
I must have caught him
on a good day, though,
because when I told him what we were doing
and how we started our nonprofit
urban beekeeping laboratory,
he said, “That’s great!
Let’s get a beehive in the back alley.”
I was shocked.
I was completely surprised.
I mean, instead of getting
an eviction notice,
we got another data point.
And in the back alley of this image,
what you see here, this hidden beehive –
that beehive produced
more honey that first year
than we have ever experienced
in any beehive we had managed.
It shifted our research
perspective forever.
It changed our research question away from
“How do we save the dead and dying bees?”
to “Where are bees doing best?”
And we started to be able
to put maps together,
looking at all of these
citizen science beehives
from people who had
beehives at home decks,
gardens, business rooftops.
We started to engage the public,
and the more people who got
these little data points,
the more accurate our maps became.
And so when you’re sitting here thinking,
“How can I get involved?”
you might think about a story
of my friend Fred,
who’s a commercial real estate developer.
He was thinking the same thing.
He was at a meeting,
thinking about what he could do
for tenant relations
and sustainability at scale.
And while he was having a tea break,
he put honey into his tea
and noticed on the honey jar
a message about corporate sustainability
from the host company of that meeting.
And it sparked an idea.
He came back to his office.
An email, a phone call later,
and – boom! –
we went national together.
We put dozens of beehives
on the rooftops of their skyscrapers
across nine cities nationwide.
Nine years later –
(Applause)
Nine years later, we have raised
over a million dollars for bee research.
We have a thousand beehives
as little data points across the country,
18 states and counting,
where we have created paying jobs
for local beekeepers, 65 of them,
to manage beehives
in their own communities,
to connect with people, everyday people,
who are now data points
together making a difference.
So in order to explain
what’s actually been saving bees,
where they’re thriving,
I need to first tell you
what’s been killing them.
The top three killers of bees
are agricultural chemicals such as
pesticides, herbicides, fungicides;
diseases of bees, of which there are many;
and habitat loss.
So what we did is we looked on our maps
and we identified areas
where bees were thriving.
This was mostly in cities, we found.
Data are now showing that urban
beehives produce more honey
than rural beehives and suburban beehives.
Urban beehives have a longer life span
than rural and suburban beehives,
and bees in the city are more biodiverse;
there are more bee species in urban areas.
(Laughter)
Right?
Why is this?
That was our question.
So we started with
these three killers of bees,
and we flipped it:
Which of these is different in the cities?
So the first one, pesticides.
We partnered up with
the Harvard School of Public Health.
We shared our data with them.
We collected samples
from our citizen science beehives
at people’s homes and business rooftops.
We looked at pesticide levels.
We thought there would be less pesticides
in areas where bees are doing better.
That’s not the case.
So what we found here in our study
is – the orange bars are Boston,
and we thought those bars
would be the lowest,
there would be the lowest
levels of pesticides.
And, in fact, there are
the most pesticides in cities.
So the pesticide hypothesis
for what’s saving bees –
less pesticides in cities –
is not it.
And this is very typical
of my life as a scientist.
Anytime I’ve had a hypothesis,
not only is it not supported,
but the opposite is true.
(Laughter)
Which is still an interesting
finding, right?
We moved on.
The disease hypothesis.
We looked at diseases
all over our beehives.
And what we found in a similar study
to this one with North Carolina State is:
there’s no difference
between disease in bees
in urban, suburban and rural areas.
Diseases are everywhere;
bees are sick and dying.
In fact, there were more diseases
of bees in cities.
This was from Raleigh, North Carolina.
So again, my hypothesis was not supported.
The opposite was true.
We’re moving on.
(Laughter)
The habitat hypothesis.
This said that areas where bees
are thriving have a better habitat –
more flowers, right?
But we didn’t know how to test this.
So I had a really interesting meeting.
An idea sparked with my friend
and colleague Anne Madden,
fellow TED speaker.
We thought about genomics,
kind of like AncestryDNA or 23andMe.
Have you done these?
You spit in a tube and
you find out, “I’m German!”
(Laughter)
Well, we developed this for honey.
So we have a sample of honey
and we look at all the plant DNA,
and we find out, “I’m sumac!”
(Laughter)
And that’s what we found
here in Provincetown.
So for the first time ever,
I’m able to report to you
what type of honey is from right here
in our own community.
HoneyDNA, a genomics test.
Spring honey in Provincetown
is from privet.
What’s privet? Hedges.
What’s the message?
Don’t trim your hedges to save the bees.
(Laughter)
I know we’re getting crunchy
and it’s controversial,
so before you throw your tomatoes,
we’ll move to the summer honey,
which is water lily honey.
If you have honey from Provincetown
right here in the summer,
you’re eating water lily juice;
in the fall, sumac honey.
We’re learning about our food
for the first time ever.
And now we’re able to report,
if you need to do any city planning:
What are good things to plant?
What do we know the bees are going to
that’s good for your garden?
For the first time ever for any community,
we now know this answer.
What’s more interesting for us
is deeper in the data.
So, if you’re from the Caribbean
and you want to explore your heritage,
Bahamian honey is from the laurel family,
cinnamon and avocado flavors.
But what’s more interesting is
85 different plant species
in one teaspoon of honey.
That’s the measure we want, the big data.
Indian honey: that is oak.
Every sample we’ve tested
from India is oak,
and that’s 172 different flavors
in one taste of Indian honey.
Provincetown honey goes from
116 plants in the spring
to over 200 plants in the summer.
These are the numbers that we need
to test the habitat hypothesis.
In another citizen science approach,
you find out about your food
and we get some interesting data.
We’re finding out now that in rural areas,
there are 150 plants on average
in a sample of honey.
That’s a measure for rural.
Suburban areas, what might you think?
Do they have less or more plants
in suburban areas with lawns
that look nice for people
but they’re terrible for pollinators?
Suburbs have very low plant diversity,
so if you have a beautiful lawn,
good for you, but you can do more.
You can have a patch of your lawn
that’s a wildflower meadow
to diversify your habitat,
to improve pollinator health.
Anybody can do this.
Urban areas have
the most habitat, best habitat,
as you can see here:
over 200 different plants.
We have, for the first time ever,
support for the habitat hypothesis.
We also now know
how we can work with cities.
The City of Boston has
eight times better habitat
than its nearby suburbs.
And so when we work
with governments, we can scale this.
You might think
on my tombstone, it’ll say,
“Here lies Noah. Plant a flower.” Right?
I mean – it’s exhausting
after all of this.
But when we scale together,
when we go to governments
and city planners –
like in Boston, the honey
is mostly linden trees,
and we say, “If a dead tree
needs to be replaced, consider linden.”
When we take this information
to governments, we can do amazing things.
This is a rooftop from Fred’s company.
We can plant those things
on top of rooftops worldwide
to start restoring habitat
and securing food systems.
We’ve worked with the World Bank
and the presidential delegation
from the country of Haiti.
We’ve worked with wonderful graduate
students at Yale University and Ethiopia.
In these countries,
we can add value to their honey
by identifying what it is,
but informing the people of what to plant
to restore their habitat
and secure their food systems.
But what I think is even more important
is when we think about natural disasters.
For the first time,
we now know how we can have
a baseline measure of any habitat
before it might be destroyed.
Think about your hometown.
What risks does
the environment pose to it?
This is how we’re going to save
Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.
We now have a baseline measure of honey,
honey DNA from before and after the storm.
We started in Humacao.
This is right where
Hurricane Maria made landfall.
And we know what plants to replace
and in what quantity and where
by triangulating honey DNA samples.
You might even think about right here,
the beautiful land
that connected us, that primed us,
all the citizen science to begin with,
the erosion, the winter storms
that are getting more violent every year.
What are we going to do about this,
our precious land?
Well, looking at honey DNA,
we can see what plants are good
for pollinators that have deep roots,
that can secure the land,
and together, everybody can participate.
And the solution fits in a teaspoon.
If your hometown might get swept away
or destroyed by a natural disaster,
we now have a blueprint suspended in time
for how to restore that on Earth,
or perhaps even in a greenhouse on Mars.
I know it sounds crazy,
but think about this:
a new Provincetown,
a new hometown,
a place that might be familiar
that’s also good for pollinators
for a stable food system,
when we’re thinking about the future.
Now, together, we know
what’s saving bees –
by planting diverse habitat.
Now, together, we know how bees
are going to save us –
by being barometers
for environmental health,
by being blueprints,
sources of information,
little data factories suspended in time.
Thank you.
(Applause)