What's the buzz in school gardens? Part 1

00:00:02 Rick

Hello everyone. This episode is entitled What's the Buzz in school gardens? Where Michelle and I interview Andony Melanthopoulos, an associate professor at Oregon State University and one of the world's most foremost authorities on pollinators. This is part one of a two-part series. So let's buzz on over to the studio and see what's going on.

00:00:38 Michelle

Welcome to the farm to school podcast where you will hear stories of how youth thrive and farmers prosper when we learn how to grow, cook, and eat delicious, nutritious local foods and schools across the country, and the world.

00:00:49 Rick

We're your hosts. I'm Rick Sherman

00:00:51 Michelle

and I'm Michelle Markesteyn. We are so fortunate to have one of the world's foremost experts on pollination and bees in our backyard. Literally, please welcome to the program, Andony Melanthopoulos.

00:01:06 Andony Melanthopoulos

Hey. Hey.

00:01:08 Rick

Hey, how are you doing? (applause sound effect) I have been dying to use one of these special buttons on my little podcast device, so thank you for that, indulging me.

00:01:23 Andony Melanthopoulos

Your backyard has so many people in it.

00:01:26 Rick

Yeah, We bring in a crowd.

00:01:29 Michelle

And chickens? He has a lot of chickens in his backyard.

00:01:31 Rick

We're at my house, everybody, just so you know, in in my studio kitchen as it were. So, Andony you have to excuse me, I have a really good friend that I coached for years named Antony and you’re “Andony” and it messes up my brain all the time so…

00:01:49 Andony Melanthopoulos

It's the perpetual question is what is my name? And I, my girlfriend and my mother say it differently. So you guys are good.

00:01:52 Rick

Yeah. Well, Michelle says her name differently every time. She says. She says MarkeSTEIN and MarkeSTIN. It depends what she...

00:02:03 Andony Melanthopoulos

I can't hear the difference like in my ears.

00:02:06 Rick

That's another podcast. Yeah. So everybody, I just found out something neat. One of our podcasts, we explored my humble beginnings in the farm to school world. And I was a runner for Western Washington University. I just found out that Andony ran for our very much...

00:02:07 Michelle

Interesting.

00:02:26 Rick

How do I say it? It was our rivals.

00:02:29 Andony Melanthopoulos

Hated.

00:02:36 Rick

Well, you said hated, but he ran for Simon Fraser University in in BC, Canada. And so he is a proud, proud Canadian, which I applaud and I love that, but I'm not too happy that he went to our rival school and he ran cross country and track for them as well. And I did not know that.

00:02:36 Michelle

Wow.

00:02:48 Andony Melanthopoulos

Yeah. Was it? It was a rough start to this podcast and we discovered.

00:02:51 Michelle

That we almost canceled it. We almost cancelled the entire podcast.

00:02:54 Rick

Yeah. So and then he tell us a little bit, how did you like, how did I know how I started from humble beginnings as a runner? And I morphed into this job. How did you start from back then in British Columbia. And how did you know that you wanted to get into bees and pollination and all that? And how did you end up here where you are now?

00:03:19 Andony Melanthopoulos

You know I love bees and I've loved them for decades, but I didn't start out that way. The thing I love about bees is that they're deeply tied to agriculture, but I'm a city kid. I have, you know, I grew up playing video games and listening to, you know, music and stuff. But when I went to Simon Fraser University, I remember biking every day up that Long Hill and I would see this thing there. I thought, oh geez, I know what that is, and I then there was this bee biology course. It was the last one ever taught honeybee biology. And the professors first question was, has anybody seen a beehive? And I said, of course, I've seen this a thing said no, that's a weather. Those are my humble beginnings. I had no idea what I was getting into, but it has drawn me into so many directions, and particularly when it comes to apiculture, the study of honey bees.

00:04:10 Andony Melanthopoulos

It has connected with all of these beekeepers. There are beekeepers in every country and you can drop in and you have this common language of these insects that everybody keeps to for producing honey. But also, you know, it's this huge has this huge role in agriculture in terms of pollinating.

00:04:32 Rick

Well, I want to be fair here. Like when you say there's people that are beekeepers and there are people that are interested in bees, that's one thing. But Andony, like Michelle introduced in the beginning of our podcast. He's one of the world's foremost leaders in the subject and he has a lab over at Oregon State University in Corvallis, OR. And we were actually fortunate to go there and it's about the size of my kitchen. It's a small little place, but yeah, you're an associate professor. Is that correct? That's correct.

00:05:10 Andony Melanthopoulos

Right, yeah.

00:05:14 Rick

And so when we were there, how many bees do you have cataloged there? And when I say cataloged, just to be a little graphic here, it's like you see a critter that has a pin through them on a on a board and they're identified as a certain genus species name and everything. But there was a few there. How many, how many would you guess that you had there on hand?

00:05:36 Andony Melanthopoulos

I would say rough estimate 200,000 bees, each one meticulously prepared by volunteers in the state of Oregon. Yeah, and they had little tag under them, just like the old library with the Dewey Decimal cards.

00:05:50 Rick

Yes.

00:05:50 Andony Melanthopoulos

And they each told you where in the state of Oregon they were collected, each one.

00:05:56 Rick

So that was my follow up question. How many bees, how many different varieties of bees are there in in Oregon in our state?

00:06:06 Andony Melanthopoulos

When I first got here, we had this bold statement. We said 500 species and then we had to keep revising it upwards because it turns out there's more and more.

00:06:16 Rick

Yeah.

00:06:17 Andony Melanthopoulos

We have a taxonomist at Oregon State University, Lincoln Best, who has done the sort of piercing together all the pieces of the puzzle, things that we should have but don't have his number is 720.

00:06:31 Michelle

That's a different species.

00:06:31 Rick

And you find more every day.

00:06:33 Andony Melanthopoulos

Different species in the state of Oregon.

00:06:36 Rick

You told us.. you showed us. There was one guy and most of them looked like flies to me. That you know what I would think looked like a flies or... Yeah. And then there's the bumblebee and all that, you know, the and the wasp and Yellow jackets and all. I'm using the…

00:06:42 Michelle

Or ants flying ants.

00:06:51 Rick

..terms that I know of, but you said for instance there was one bee that only lived on one hill in Eastern Oregon and because there was one flower there. Could you tell us about that?

00:07:05 Andony Melanthopoulos

There are all sorts of “one bee” lives in this little place in Oregon, like Oregon is a wonderful, you know, we have everywhere from the coast to Mel here. Think of all the different landscapes. Yeah, the, you know, we have the high desert, we've got the mountains like the Steens and the Wallowas.

00:07:08 Michelle

Wow. Wow.

00:07:23 Andony Melanthopoulos

You go to the Southern Oregon. It's we have everything. So each one of these nooks and crannies has a lot of bees that are common to all of them. But there are these specialists that have evolved over time in these little nooks and crannies. And that means you find this level of like you find them once in a decade. You know, people don't see them very often.

00:07:48 Michelle

Well, and that's what you were saying, that it relies on volunteers. Can you tell us more about the citizen scientists you work with?

00:07:54 Andony Melanthopoulos

They are amazing. These people that just humble me. I developed a program. I knew that to be able to find all these bees, these rare bees and these nooks and crannies, you either needed to have this huge, you know, Agency or you needed to find people who were passionate about it, and there turns out to be a lot of people are passionate about bees. And so we give them the basic training and then they go out and to their hearts content. They it's like a treasure hunt. They go looking for all of these odd bees. And when we started it we thought.

00:08:31 Andony Melanthopoulos

Well, we'll just started as a small thing, but it grew and it's become this program like the Master Gardeners, it's called and it's hilarious. The name is hilarious. It's called the “Master melattologist”. And I thought like when we started it off, we'd call it something simple like oh, it's the bee enthusiasts. And they rebelled. They said no, we're really serious people. We're doing also the serious work. So call us what we are and said, OK, master melattologist.

00:08:44 Michelle

That's a mouthful.

00:08:58 Rick

That because your name is Melanthopoulos?

00:09:01 Michelle

Well, you get that all the time.

00:09:03 Andony Melanthopoulos

It's funny cuz the last name, no. This is the hilarious thing. My last name literally means honeypot. I just like you know, I was like.

00:09:10 Rick

Ohh.

00:09:11 Michelle

You were made for that!

00:09:12 Rick

I know what to call you from now on.

00:09:13 Michelle

No, we're not. No.

00:09:15 Rick

No, we're not going to do that.

00:09:24 Michelle

OK, so one other thing. We kind of glazed over. That was eye opening to me. Is you mentioned agriculture and most people, when they think of bees, they think of honey, but in the economics of it all, honey is really a byproduct that what is huge for Oregon agriculture in the.. I don't know where we're at.. Like 2-3 hundred million in in economic impact for our state is pollination services. And like, what does that look like for people like what actually is that?

00:09:45 Andony Melanthopoulos

It was fun, you know, driving down here. I was just counting bee colonies along the highway. You know, the Meadow foam is now in bloom. That's all. Those oil seeds need to be pollinated by bees. Yesterday it was in a valenza Cloverfield. It's an annual Clover. And it had to be pollinated by bees to make the seed. We just finished blueberry pollination in the state, it's a large pollination to get that those big juicy berries. You're going to need bees all the way out if you go to Hermiston that Hermiston melons. Best melons on the planet. I have to say, like the cantaloupes and the watermelons from Hermiston.

00:10:20 Michelle

I have to agree with that.

00:10:21 Andony Melanthopoulos

They are delicious. You need bees to pollinate it.

00:10:24 Michelle

And even Oregon bees go all over. Don't they travel?

00:10:27 Andony Melanthopoulos

That's The funny thing. So you've seen these documentaries where the bees go into California and they're shipped all across the nation. Think about Oregon. Our bees leave the state briefly in February to go down to California to pollinate this massive almond crop, but then they stay in the state. It's really unique in the in the US, they don't travel everywhere. They come back into the state and there's so many pollination contracts they had contracted, paid by the farmer to pollinate it that they just kind of.

00:10:56 Andony Melanthopoulos

Bounce back and forth in the Willamette Valley, maybe over into Madras and maybe over into Eastern Oregon, but they stay in the state. This is really unique.

00:11:05 Rick

And so about all that pollination stuff, we keep hearing the term colony collapse. Is that a real thing? Are bees on the decline? Should we be freaking out? Tell us more about that.

00:11:19 Andony Melanthopoulos

Yeah. No, it's the term colony collapse disorder came from like, 2006. If everybody remembers this, bees were not on. I was a lonely bee researcher. Nobody talked to me. They'd say I'd say I'd study Bees. They say I was stung as a child.

00:11:35 Michelle

Ohh No.

00:11:39 Andony Melanthopoulos

Yeah. That was the pre 2006 worlds.

00:11:40 Rick

Wow.

00:11:41 Michelle

So you made-up that term to get more.

00:11:47 Andony Melanthopoulos

No, that would have been very mischievous, but.

00:11:49 Rick

We're your. We're your friend, Andony.

00:11:53 Andony Melanthopoulos

Thanks! It happened differently than what happened was there was these bee colonies which suddenly lost all their population of bees about this time of year and they were left with immature bees, but no adults and this was called colony collapse disorder. It turned out to be episodic and didn't return, but that stuck in the media because collapse. You know, the colonies collapsing. There's still problems with bees. That particular symptom that people latched onto back then doesn't appear now. But honeybee colonies are still experiencing , you know more than average losses. The good news is that the beekeepers are ingenious. They're very creative and they make up those losses every year. So our overall supply is steady, but it costs a lot more money for them to be able to do that.

00:13:00 Rick

Well, I think you answered my next question, which is why should we care about bees and so that that that's really important. And they're also, I've heard the term kicked around like bees account for the majority of all pollination. There's other things that pollinate, but bees do most of it. Do you know, like how much do they pollinate? What percent?

00:13:09 Andony Melanthopoulos

Well, let's make it very concrete and for Oregon. So when you think about all the tree fruits, so the we don't have a lot of apples here. We have a little bit at Milton Freewater. But we've got pears and cherries and some stone fruit. That's, well, not hazelnuts. So so hazelnuts are wind pollinated OK.

00:13:34 Rick

I did not know that.

00:13:35 Andony Melanthopoulos

It's weird because you gotta kind of go through the crops and think about what like almonds is a nut that is pollinated, but Hazelnuts and walnuts are nuts that aren’t insect pollinated. So it's this little kind of sifting through. But in Oregon, I would say are tree fruits are berries which include right now, blooming our amazing Marionberry.

00:13:58 Rick

Strawberries. Yeah, blackberries.

00:14:01 Andony Melanthopoulos

But also cranberries, our coastal cranberries that we have here in Oregon, I would say to all your listeners, even those in Washington and other states, the best cranberries on the planet are South Coast cranberries. They are they're sweeter, they're bigger, redder, jucier...

00:14:13 Michelle

They actually are.

00:14:17 Rick

Michelle and I, through her old job at Department of AG, had this Oregon cranberry chutney recipe. I'll drop. I'll drop the recipe in the show. So good.

00:14:25 Andony Melanthopoulos

Ohh it's so good!

00:14:27 Rick

.. but it's all Oregon. Oregon Pears, cranberries and Oregon hazelnuts, and sorry for you listeners that there's far more of you listeners outside of Oregon, and sometimes we brag about what we have, but it's the best thing ever. So I'll put a link to the show notes in there.

00:14:43 Andony Melanthopoulos

You grow those of you in the Midwest, grow up much finer soybean, true.

00:14:47 Rick

True. Yeah, we really don't do here…

00:14:53 Rick

Hi again everybody. As I mentioned at the start of the show, click on the next link to listen to Part 2 of this conversation with Andoni, we'd like to thank you so much for listening today.

00:15:04 Rick

Farm to School was written, directed and produced by Rick Sherman and Michelle Markesteyn, and was made possible by a grant by the United States Department of Agriculture. The content and ideas of the farm to school podcast does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Oregon State University, Oregon Department of Education, and the United States Department of Agriculture. The USDA, Oregon Department of Education and Oregon State University are equal opportunity providers and employers.

00:15:33 Rick

Do you want to learn more about Farm to school? Check out other episodes, show notes, contact information and much more by Googling Farm to school podcast, OSU. We'd love to hear from you. Stop by the website to say hello or give us an idea for a future podcast.

00:15:52 Rick

And I'll see you next time. Bye!.