Want to change the world? Think like a bee. | Marianne Gee | TEDxKanata

[Music] in the winter of 2009 my husband Matt and I bought a house just 10 minutes north of here and we were first-time homebuyers and we were so excited for spring when move-in day finally came we just couldn't wait we were so excited we were much less excited when on arriving at the house we discovered that it was already occupied by a colony of honeybees living in the wall in between the first and second story we really were it was the literal example of buyer beware and we weren't really sure what to do they were amazing to watch with balls of pollen on their legs and they never once tried to sting us but at the same time we didn't want hundreds of pounds of honey accumulating in our kitchen ceiling and so I'm a nature lover but my husband Matt he takes things to the extreme he'll go to extreme lengths to rescue injured Turtles injured cats injured birds on the side of the road he'll shoo a spider away before I can get a fight fly swatter so I shouldn't have been surprised when one morning he announced today's the day I'm gonna get the bees out of the house are you out of your mind you're gonna get stung undeterred I watched him put on a rubber rain suit we weren't beekeepers at the time wrap a towel around his head and put on a hat and climb a ladder and proceeded to take row after row of honeycomb out of our wall meanwhile I have a smouldering stick and I'm running back and forth because we had a vague sense that smoke calms bees down this was the first time that we asked ourselves the question how to save the honeybees and I had no idea that that question would redefine the better part of the next decade but I'm jumping ahead so Matt took all this comb and put the honeycomb in a cabinet with all of the bees and we put this cabinet in the woods and we figured that that would be the end of our a honeybee adventure and then a few days few weeks later we're sitting in the back yard and an enormous swarm of honeybees flies over our garage and lands on the same spot on our house where the previous bees lived now most people when they see this they're either scared or terrified but I ran and grabbed the video camera and stood there in what I can only describe as giddy awe as thousands of bees went back into my house this is the second time that we asked ourselves the question how to save the bees now this time we did what we probably should have done the first time and we called a beekeeper who came out and she helped us find the Queen and we put the Queen in the box and we watched as all of the honey bees poured out of our wall and went into the Beehive it was the closest thing to magic I had ever seen in my life and I was hooked so now here we were two beekeepers with two beehives and no beekeeping experience and we pretty much left them alone for that summer partly because we had no idea what we were doing and also because we figured they'd had enough and winter came and we were excited to see how they were doing in this in the in the spring and when we went to check on them both colonies had died and I was heartbroken but we were hooked and so we started again this time the way most people get into beekeeping and we bought two beehives and all of the proper equipment and started learning everything we could about how to care for them we read books we took courses we watched videos we joined beat clubs and we discovered that our challenge keeping our honeybees alive wasn't unique it was a widespread problem and we wanted to help so now we asked ourselves - for the third time how to save the honeybees well what we knew how to do in the beginning was take bees out of places where they didn't belong so that's what we did over the course of a few summers and our spare time and on weekends we both had full-time jobs we ran around and we took bees out of all sorts of places out of walls out of trees out of chimneys and it felt really great we were helping people we were rescuing these bees from extermination and our beer it was growing but I was struggling with the scale so over the course of a summer we'd maybe rescue ten honeybee colonies it was really insignificant many many many honeybee colonies died about nowadays in Ontario about 30 percent of colonies died over the winter twenty-five to thirty five percent that's up from what used to be about 15 percent we've had winters with 50 percent mortality rates over the winters that's 50% of all colonies in Ontario dime last year the United States saw a mortality rate of 50 percent now so we started asking ourselves this question again and what a lot of people don't realize is that a big part of the bee business isn't about honey at all it's about pollination which is what this little bee is doing here bees travel from one flower to another spreading pollen around and this transforms a flower into a fruit or a vegetable every year millions of colonies of honeybees are put on transport trucks and shipped to pollinate our crops now I use almonds as the example not to demonize almonds but because they're it's a nice example almonds are grown in California in an absolutely enormous monoculture it's eight hundred thousand acres which is about the equivalent of six hundred thousand football fields it would take you seven hours to drive across it because there's nothing but almonds there there's a beautiful period of bloom for two weeks in February but the rest of the time there aren't any flowers so the native pollinators the bumble bees and the butterflies aren't there to do the work of pollination so to compensate honey bees are put on transport trucks and shipped to California 80% of all the honeybee colonies in the United States and while they're there they can transmit diseases between each other they're exposed to all kinds of chemicals sprayed on the trees and if it weren't bad enough it doesn't end in California from there they're shipped to pollinate all sorts of things apples oranges watermelons one-third of the food that we eat it's here in Canada as well blueberries canola apples and so we started wondering if there might be a different way to keep bees and around the same time we were starting to wonder could we do this for a living and so we started a honey company with the idea that if we could spread our bee hives out and put them in places where they wouldn't be exposed to agricultural pesticides like backyards and rooftops and spread them apart so that they couldn't transmit diseases between each other and teach people about beekeeping at the same time because there's only 16% as many beekeepers today as there were in 1946 that this would be a really great way to help and so that's what we did and our very first client was actually this hotel the Brook Street and our beehive is on the roof and today we have about 200 beehives in all sorts of different spots across the city on rooftops and in backyards but what I didn't expect is that these honeybees over the course of a few years would completely redesign our lives we sold our house and moved to an urban farm we abandoned our careers and we found ourselves surrounded by a whole community of people who loved the same thing we do but most of all we were transformed from passive consumers to active producers and it's the best feeling in the world but I was still struggling with this problem of scale and feeling fairly insignificant in the big picture our 200 beehives are really just a drop in the bucket and so I started looking at this problem of honeybee losses again now if you haven't seen it dr. Marla Spivak gives an absolutely fantastic TED talk on why bees are disappearing so I'm not going to go on in length at length but in short it comes down to four things monoculture farming and migratory beekeeping which I've already told told you about the global spread of parasites and diseases in particular one called varroa destructor which is a parasite that decimates honeybee colonies and actually jumped species from one type of bee to honey bees in the 80s pesticides that are absolutely everywhere in particular a class called neonicotinoid pesticides and lack of flowers because we've paved paradise we're redesigning the landscape now because there's no single cause no one smoking gun' there's an incredible amount of finger-pointing going on and it can be incredibly difficult to know where to help you have beekeepers telling farmers not to spray you have chemical companies telling beekeepers to control for varroa you have environmental groups telling governments to ban neonics and the rest of us are told to plant a few flowers but when I looked at this again these four things are not independent of each other you can't fix one and the problem goes away they're all related to the way we grow our food we don't have a big honeybee problem we have a big agriculture problem honeybees are the symptom of the disease in the same way that fish dying in river ways polluted with too much nitrogen fertilizer that causes toxic algae blooms are a symptom of the disease in the same way the deforestation drought flooding and climate change are symptoms of the disease the way we grow our food is at the heart of the matter it's the agricultural system and the system demands that farmers clear-cut meadows to plant single types of crops it in which in turn demands that the landscape is soaked in agricultural pesticides which in turn demands that honeybees are shipped on transports which in turn facilitates the spread of diseases the system demands all these things because we demand it because we eat food and I don't know anybody who's gonna stop eating to save the honeybees so here I was naively looking for the big solution to our big honeybee problem and I found myself looking at a problem so big that it's an it's impossible how can two people possibly imagine to redesign an agricultural system people would still ask me how to save the honeybees and I couldn't bear the answer I I'd smile and say plant flowers but my answer had actually become we can't save the honeybees but then something remarkable happened I remembered something so small about bees that it changed my entire perspective on the problem and may change entirely possible I was working in the bee yard looking at frame after frame of honeybees and I remembered that a honeybee in her lifetime makes only 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey it's nothing it's completely insignificant but the colony has a big problem it needs to make at least a hundred pounds of honey to make it through the Canadian winter now the honeybees she doesn't look at this problem and say it's impossible she gets to work and she and her sisters collectively make not only what they need to survive the winter but two times three times that amount but the most remarkable thing isn't that she does the work it's that she doesn't even do it for herself she won't live to see the winter she only lives six to eight weeks she's doing it for her sisters who will be born in the fall and will take the colony through to the next season her 1/12 of a teaspoon counts this one small fact became the most empowering realization of my entire life I am insignificant but my 1/12 of a teaspoon counts so if I want to redesign an agricultural system overgrow it that I need to grow food and that's what we're doing we're gonna grow as much food as we can for our family and if like the honeybees we have an extra to share then that's a bonus and now everywhere I look I see opportunity to grow food on rooftops and backyards in schoolyards on corporate campuses there's lawn everywhere and we have access two more tools and better technology and more shared knowledge than our great-grandparents ever have and now I just need to ask millions of people to do the same thing at first it seemed ridiculous how can one tiny insignificant person do that but it turns out that the honeybees have an answer for us here too and it comes back to that swarm of bees that landed on my house in the first place honeybees are social insects they live in a colony of about 50,000 bees and it's not a monarchy ruled by the Queen decisions are made by consensus and they are masters of mass movements and so how do they do that well I've told you about the winter and the struggle to get through it but there's another period in the honeybee colonies life cycle and it happens in the spring when everything is beautiful and in bloom and there's plenty to eat at this time of the year the honeybees bring in so much nectar that they fill every single cell of honeycomb full and the Queen runs out of space to lay eggs well this triggers something amazing in the colony they start to raise a new queen and then one sunny afternoon usually in June half of the bees pour out of the hive all at once and they land in a ball in a tree now this is a precarious situation they can't stay where they are they can't go back to where they came from and they can't stay where they are because it won't be very long before a June thunderstorm rolls through and wipes them out and so they need to make a decision they need to find somewhere to live so how do they do that well most of the honeybees they stay right where they are but a handful are sent out as Scouts and they go off in all directions looking for a new place to live and so the honeybee she flies off and she finds maybe a hollow tree or in my case the side of my house and she says that this is great and so she flies back to the colony and she's going to tell the bees what she found and gonna do it not with words but she's gonna do a waggle dance and she's gonna move her body and she's gonna go around and a figure eight and the direction of her waggle is gonna tell the bees where this spot is and the excitedness of her waggle is gonna tell them how great it is and she'll convince maybe a handful of bees to go with her and they'll fly off and they'll check it out and they'll agree and they fly back and then pretty soon over the course of a few hours at most a day the whole colony is waggling it is visibly shaking you can see it and then all it said all of a sudden the swarm is triggered and like magic it lifts off in this swirling cloud of chaos and it flies off to the single place that that single be found and so that's what I'm here to do I'm here to waggle I'm here to ask as many of you as I can to grow food in the hope that you will and that guilt in turn waggle I'm here to remind you that you're 1/12 of a teaspoon counts today when you ask me how to save the honeybees I ask you to grow food over grow the system and waggle and maybe with a little magic we can trigger a swarm thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 169,769

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Health, Activism, Behavior, Biosphere, Change, Climate Change, Farming, Food, Love

Id: wyJp41VK6_k

Length: 18min 20sec (1100 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 30 2018