there are many things to know and i want you to open your minds here keep them open and change your perspective about honeybees notice that this man is not getting stung
he probably has a queen bee tied to his chin and the other bees are attracted to it so this really demonstrates our relationship with honeybees and that goes deep back
for thousands of years we 're very co evolved because we depend on bees
for pollination and even more recently as an economic commodity many of you may have heard that honeybees are disappearing not just dying but they 're gone we don 't even find dead bodies
this is called colony collapsedisorder and it 's bizarre researchers around the globe still do not know what 's causing it but what we do know is that with the declining numbers of bees the costs of over one hundred and thirty fruit and vegetable crops that we rely on for food is going up in price
so honeybees are important for their role in the economy as well as in agriculture here you can see some pictures of what are called green roofs or urban agriculture we 're familiar with the image on the left that shows
a local neighborhood garden in the south end that 's where i call home i have a beehive in the backyard and perhaps a green roof in the future when we 're further utilizing urban areas where there are stacks of garden spaces
check out this image above the orange line in boston try to spot the beehive it 's there it 's on the rooftop
right on the corner there and it 's been there for a couple of years now the way that urban beekeeping currently operates is that the beehives are quite hidden and it 's not because they need to be it 's just because people are uncomfortable with the idea
and that 's why i want you today to try to think about this think about the benefits of bees in cities and why they really are a terrific thing
let me give you a brief rundown on how pollination works so we know flowers we know fruits and vegetables even some alfalfa in hay that the livestock for the meats that we eat rely on pollinators but you 've got male and female parts to a plant here and basically pollinators are attracted to plants for their nectar
and in the process a bee will visit some flowers and pick up some pollen or that male kind of sperm counterpart along the way and then travel to different flowers
and eventually an apple in this case will be produced you can see the orientation the stem is down the blossom end has fallen off by the time we eat it but that 's a basic overview of how pollination works
and let 's think about urban living not today and not in the past but what about in a hundred years what 's it gonna look like
we have huge grand challenges these days of habitat loss we have more and more people billions of people in one hundred years god knows how many people and how little space there will be to fit all of them so we need to change the way that we see cities
and looking at this picture on the left of new york city today you can see how gray and brown it is we have tar paper on the rooftops that bounces heat back into the atmosphere
contributing to global climate change no doubt what about in one hundred years if we have green rooftops everywhere and gardening and we create our own crops right in the cities we save on the costs of transportation
we save on a healthier diet and we also educate and create new jobs locally we need bees for the future of our cities and urban living
here 's some data that we collected
through our company with best bees where we deliver install and manage honeybee hives for anybody who wants them in the city in the countryside and we introduce honeybees and the idea of beekeeping in your own backyard or rooftop or fire escape for even that matter and seeing how simple it is and how possible it is
there 's a counterintuitive trend that we noticed in these numbers so let 's look at the first metric here overwintering survival now this has been a huge problem for many years basically since the late one thousand nine hundred and eighty s when the varroa mite came and brought many different viruses bacteria and fungal diseases with it
overwintering success is hard and that 's when most of the colonies are lost and we found that in the cities bees are surviving better than they are in the country
a bit counterintuitive right we think oh bees countrysideagriculture but that 's not what the bees are showing the bees like it in the city laughterfurthermore they also produce more honey
the urban honey is delicious the bees in boston on the rooftop of the seaport hotel where we have hundreds of thousands of bees flying overheard right now that i 'm sure none of you noticed when we walked by
are going to all of the local community gardens and making delicioushealthy honey that just tastes like the flowers in our city so the yield for urban hives in terms of honey production is higher as well as the overwintering survival compared to rural areas again a bit counterintuitive
and looking back historically at the timeline of honeybee health we can go back to the year nine hundred and fifty and see that there was also a great mortality of bees in ireland so the problems of bees today isn 't necessarily something new
it has been happening since over a thousand years ago but what we don 't really notice are these problems in cities so one thing i want to encourage you to think about is the idea of what an urban island is
you think in the city maybe the temperature 's warmer why are bees doing better in the city this is a big question now to help us understand why they should be in the city perhaps there 's more pollen in the city with the trains coming in to urban hubs they can carry pollen with them very light pollen and it 's just a big supermarket
in the city a lot of linden trees live along the railroad tracks
perhaps there are fewer pesticides in the cities than there are in rural areas
perhaps there are other things that we 're just not thinking about yet but that 's one idea to think about urban islands and colony collapsedisorder is not the only thing affecting honeybees honeybees are dying and it 's a huge huge grand challenge of our time
now the varroa mite is what changed the game in beekeeping
and you can see at the top right the years are changing we 're coming up to modern times and you can see the spread of the varroa mite from the early one thousand nine hundred s through now it 's one thousand nine hundred and sixty eight and we 're pretty much covering asia one thousand nine hundred and seventy one we saw it spread to europe and south america
and then when we get to the one thousand nine hundred and eighty s and specifically to one thousand nine hundred and eighty seven the varroa mite finally came to north america and to the united states
and that is when the game changed for honeybees in the united states many of us will remember our childhood growing up maybe you got stung by a bee you saw bees on flowers
think of the kids today their childhood 's a bit different they don 't experience this the bees just aren 't around anymore so we need bees and they 're disappearing and it 's a big problem
what can we do here so
what i do is honeybee research i got my ph d studying honeybee health i started in two thousand and five
studying honeybees in two thousand and six honeybees started disappearing so suddenly like this little nerd kid going to school working with bugs laughter became very relevant in the world
and it worked out that way so my research focuses on ways to make bees healthier i don 't research what 's killing the bees per se i 'm not one of the many researchers around the world who 's looking at the effects of pesticides or diseases or habitat loss and poor nutrition on bees we 're looking at ways to make bees healthier through vaccines
through yogurt like probiotics and other types of therapies in ways that can be fed orally to bees and this process is so easy even a seven year old can do it
you just mix up some pollen sugar and water and whatever active ingredient you want to put in and you just give it right to the bees no chemicals involved just immune boosters
humans think about our own health in a prospective way we exercise we eat healthy we take vitamins why don 't we think about honeybees in that same type of way bring them to areas where they 're thriving and try to make them healthier before they get sick
i spent many years in grad school trying to poke bees and do vaccines with needles laughter like years years at the bench oh my gosh it 's three a m and i 'm still pricking bees laughter and then one day i said why don 't we just do an oral vaccine it 's like ugh so that 's what we do
these are three hives on the rooftop of the fairmont copley plaza hotel and they 're beautiful here i mean we matched the new color of the inside of their rooms to do some type of a stained wood with blue for their sheets
and these bees are terrific and they also will use
where this is a nonprofit venture we 're spreading the word around the world for how honeybee hives can be taken into the classroom or into the museum setting behind glass and used as an educational tool
this hive that you see here has been in fenway high school for many years now the bees fly right into the outfield of fenway park
nobody notices it if you 're not a flower these bees do not care about you
we have also some images of honey from brooklyn now this was a mystery in the new york times where the honey was very red and the new york state forensics department came in and they actually did some science to match the red dye with that found in a maraschino cherry factory down the street
also in london and in europe across the board they 're very advanced in their use of green rooftops and integrating beehives
and i 'll show you an ending note here i would like to encourage you to open your mind what can you do to save the bees or to help them or to think
of sustainable cities in the future well really just change your perspective try to understand that bees are very important a bee isn 't going to sting you if you see it
the bee dies honeybees die when they sting so they don 't want to do it either laughter it 's nothing to panic about they 're all over the city
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