PolliNation Podcast

Harry and Andony welcome back Northern California queen producer and almond pollination broker Russell Heitkam of Heitkam's Honey Bees to discuss looming challenges for the 2027 almond season. Heitkam reports high trucking costs driven by diesel prices (especially in California), labor increases, and expensive but necessary mite treatments, arguing beekeepers need to negotiate a per-hive increase of at least $15 per hive to cover transport and stay viable. He shares regional intel on elevated mite pressure, poor honey crops, tight finances, and early demand for Florida-made splits, suggesting pollination hive availability and quality could be tight even before winter losses. He also warns that a potential "super El Niño" could require heavy feeding and strong stocking rates.

Join us for a conversation with Shannon Mayhew, Stewardship Director and Biodynamic Estate Gardener at Brooks Wine. Shannon and the Brooks team were honored with the 2025 Oregon Bee Project Bee Steward Excellence Award for their outstanding commitment to pollinator health — from diverse flowering cover crops between vine rows to two acres of gardens designed to provide consistent forage for bees and other pollinators across the entire growing season. In this episode, we dig into what day-to-day stewardship looks like at a biodynamic winery, why pollinators matter to wine, and what other growers can learn from Shannon's approach.

Links:

Brooks Wine: https://www.brookswine.com

Oregon Bee Project — Brooks Wine: https://www.oregonbeeproject.org/brookswine

Dr. Jordanna Sprayberry, Associate Professor & Director of Undergraduate Biology at Stony Brook University, joins the Pollination podcast to explain how agrochemical odors interfere with bees' ability to find flowers — and why that matters for entire ecosystems. Dr. Sprayberry is a pollination neuroethologist who studies how nervous systems process sensory information and how that processing drives foraging behavior. In this conversation, she breaks down her lab's groundbreaking "odor geometry" system for measuring olfactory pollution thresholds, shares findings from wind tunnel experiments on how bees search at different distances, and makes the case for replacing lawns with native plants — even before the science is fully settled.

KEY FINDINGS DISCUSSED:

Fungicide odor alone (without ingestion) changes bee foraging behavior

Bees searching far from a flower patch weight color and odor equally; bees searching nearby rely primarily on color

Beyond 30° of odor "distance" (measured via Euclidean odor geometry), bees no longer recognize floral scents as food

Odor pollution may be most impactful for bees searching for new flower patches, not those foraging in established meadows

Bumblebee colonies that fall below a resource threshold cannot produce queens, potentially crashing local populations

Atmospheric pollutants (ozone, nitrous oxides) degrade floral odor blends as they travel, reducing perceptual range

LINKS:

Dr. Sprayberry's Lab (SPRAY Lab): https://sites.google.com/stonybrook.edu/spraylab/home

Stony Brook University Department of Biology: https://www.stonybrook.edu/biology

Slovenia — a country the size of New Jersey — is home to 575 bee species, more than a quarter of all species known in Europe. It's the birthplace of the Carniolan honeybee, but it's also a hotspot for wild and solitary bees. This week, we sit down with Dr. Danilo Bevk, a researcher at the National Institute of Biology in Ljubljana and founder of the SloBees Society (Čmrljica), to talk about Slovenia's remarkable pollinator diversity, a citizen science project tracking bumblebee queens across the country, and a new Europe-wide monitoring scheme about to transform how we track these crucial insects.

Links:

Dr. Danilo Bevk — National Institute of Biology: https://www.nib.si/en SloBees Society (Čmrljica)

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cmrljica

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cmrljica_slobees/

This week, we catch up with Sam Droege with the US Geological Survey and Clare Maffei with US Fish and Wildlife Service to discuss the origins and evolution of the Bee Lab and its role as a support hub for bee biodiversity work. Sam describes shifting from designing national monitoring programs for birds and other taxa to pollinators, finding bee monitoring statistically difficult due to high year-to-year variance and identification bottlenecks, and pivoting to developing sampling techniques, the Very Handy Bee Manual, Discover Life online ID guides, photography resources, and a large specimen database with substantial backlog. Claire outlines her path through a US Fish and Wildlife Service pollinator fellowship into a refuge-support role, producing updated bee inventory/monitoring frameworks and protocols, data management, and publishing over 500,000 records to GBIF. Together they emphasize collaboration with students, refuges, parks, and researchers, training via weekly livestreamed bee ID videos, and ongoing method development (e.g., emergence trapping, brine in traps, hanging shrub traps) while noting funding uncertainty and focusing on practical conservation through plant–bee relationships and better baseline data.

Bee Lab website: https://www.usgs.gov/centers/eesc/science/usgs-bee-lab-eastern-ecological-science-center

Dr. Bryan Danforth of Cornell University joins the podcast to discuss a new Apidology study led by Steven Hodge on emergence dynamics and host–parasite associations in a massive cemetery nesting aggregation of the solitary bee Andrena regularis. Using emergence traps checked daily for 40 days at East Lawn Cemetery near Cornell, the team estimated a mean population size of 5.5 million emerging bees within a compact area and documented synchronized host emergence with more gradual, delayed emergence by Nomada cuckoo bees, plus low-frequency associates including a meloid beetle and a conopid fly. Danforth explains A. regularis biology and its exceptional importance and effectiveness as an apple pollinator, highlights evidence for greater female investment as a potential sign of abundant resources, and argues cemeteries and other nest sites may be overlooked conservation assets, supported by Cornell's Ground-Nesting Bees iNaturalist initiative.

Danforth Lab: https://www.danforthlab.entomology.cornell.edu

GNBees: https://www.gnbee.org

Hoge, S.T., Kueneman, J.G., Fordyce, R., Dobler, C., Odanaka, K. and Danforth, B.N., 2026. Emergence dynamics and host-parasite associations in a large aggregation of Andrena regularis (Hymenoptera: Apoidea: Andrenidae). Apidologie, 57(2), p.29. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13592-026-01256-6?cjdata=MXxZfDB8WXww&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=commission_junction&utm_campaign=CONR_BOOKS_ECOM_GL_PBOK_06YUE_GL_ALWYS_DEEPLINK&utm_content=textlink&utm_term=PID100052570&CJEVENT=684ba1913cbf11f182b202450a18b8fc

00:00 Bee Numbers In Perspective

00:53 Solitary Bee Megasites

01:14 Meet Dr Brian Danforth

05:13 Cemetery Nesting Twist

06:14 Bee Biology And Pollination

08:54 Why Cemeteries Work

12:27 Biodiversity And History

14:00 Emergence Traps Method

16:34 Parasites And Phenology

21:07 Sex Ratios And Health

24:04 Millions Of Bees Estimated

26:44 Conservation and iNaturalist

28:38 Can We Build Bee Beds

Wasps are an often underappreciated and underdiscussed pollinator group. In today's episode, we will dive into their fascinating world. We'll define what exactly a wasp is, the diversity of wasps around the world, their specialized hunting skills, and far beyond. Sloan Tomlinson is a science communicator, insect photographer, and regulatory contributor to wasp educational programs.

Check out That Wasp Guy on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thatwaspguy/

Visit the UMass Extension pollinator resources page: ag.umass.edu/pollinators

Log landings serve as a unique way to provision habitat in otherwise closed-canopy forests, providing refuge for wild bees and wasps. UMass Amherst PhD candidate Aliza Fassler unpacks her research on seeding log landings with native plants, and speaks to the pollinator assemblages that use them.

Learn more about Aliza's research in this technical report: https://t.ly/gM2hR

Visit the UMass Extension pollinator resources page: ag.umass.edu/pollinators

Thyra Mckelvie joins PolliNation to discuss managing blue orchard bees (mason bees). Thyra is the Managing Director and Solitary Bee Educator at Rent Mason Bees. She outlines three essential care steps: start with clean, openable nesting material of proper size, remove nests at the end of spring to protect developing bees from summer predators, and harvest/clean cocoons in fall to control pests and disease. In addition, Thyra covers the key pests of mason bees include pollen mites, Houdini flies, chalkbrood fungus, and monodontomerus wasps, plus sterilization methods.

Rent Mason Bees website: https://rentmasonbees.com

Rent Mason Bees YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@RentMasonBees

Houdini Fly Hunt - report if you have Houdini Flies: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScwkcEVe6CfNoaoTDcSlXmIpX0HYUTmhOsZJihPvn8rCXNn8A/viewform?pli=1

00:00 Welcome to Mason Bee Season

01:01 What Are Blue Orchard Bees

02:39 Gentle Bees for Schools

04:06 Bee Hotels Need Maintenance

05:42 Avoid Bamboo and Log Hotels

07:01 Three Steps to Protect Cocoons

11:49 Predators and Parasites Explained

12:05 Inside a Nesting Chamber

13:09 Pollen Mites and Houdini Fly

16:02 Chalkbrood and Monodontomerus Wasps

18:33 Cleaning and Sterilizing Trays

19:56 Sterilize Nesting Trays

20:20 Spot Houdini Fly Signs

20:41 Cardboard Liner Hack

21:22 Spring Cleanup Routine

21:56 Vacuuming and Tanglefoot

22:43 Join Houdini Fly Research

24:11 Bee Emergence Timeline

25:13 Remove and Store Blocks

26:16 Summer Storage Tips

27:55 Fall Harvest and Washing

29:54 Dispose Pests Safely

30:27 Releasing From Old Materials

32:48 Rent Mason Bees Explained

34:52 Wrap Up and Thanks

As the 300th episode approached Dr. Melathopoulos started to get nervous. He had been doing the show since 2018. When his podcasting hero Melvyn Bragg hung up his podcasting mic last year, Dr. Melathopoulos wondered if he should do the same. But no. Polli-Nation is officially outgrowing its borders! While the show's roots are at OSU Extension, we are thrilled to welcome a new collaborative hosting team. By bringing in the expertise of Nicole Bell (East Coast/UMass), and Drs. Brandon Hopkins and Priya Chakrabarti Basu (WSU), we are expanding our coverage from the wild bee meadows of New England to the high-tech honey bee storage facilities of the Pacific Northwest. Hear the different hosts visions for the future of pollination in this episode.

Nicole Bell – UMass Amherst Extension: https://www.umass.edu/bee-campus/about/directory/nicole-bell

The Pollinator Steward Certification: https://www.umass.edu/agriculture-food-environment/resources/pollinators/pollinator-steward-certification-program

Dr. Brandon Hopkins – Washington State University Lab Page: https://bees.wsu.edu/about-hopkins-lab/

Dr. Priya Chakrabarti (Basu) – Washington State University Research Website: https://priyadarshinichakrabarti.com

Harry Vanderpool – Hear our episode with Harry: https://youtu.be/CSiDXLmgxjU?si=D796BGDFkSUMMT59

00:00 Nicole Bell - episode highlight

00:25 Podcast Origins and Growth

01:45 Episode 300 New Era

03:09 Meet Nicole Bell

06:04 Meet Brandon Hopkins

08:48 Meet Priya Chakrabarti

10:49 Harry Vanderpool Updates

14:30 Co-Hosts Vision Ahead