Episodes
My Article Featured in the Pollinator Partnership Bee Friendly Gardening Newsletter - American Bumble Bee
Exciting news — Kelly's article on the American Bumble Bee (Bombus pensylvanicus) was just published today in the Pollinator Partnership Bee Friendly Gardening Newsletter. In this short episode, she s...
The Bumblebee Who Rolled a Ball 117 Times for Fun
One bumblebee. One wooden ball. One hundred and seventeen times - with no reward, no training, and no reason anyone could explain. In Part 2 of our bumblebee play series, we follow PhD student Samadi ...
Can Bumblebees Play Soccer?
What happens when a scientist hands a bumblebee a wooden ball and a target — and offers a drop of sugar as the prize? She scores a goal. In 2017, researchers at Queen Mary University of London discove...
Bumblebee Queens Can Breathe Underwater — And Scientists Just Figured Out How
Bumblebee queens spend up to nine months hibernating underground — and sometimes, that ground floods. A 2021 lab accident accidentally revealed they could survive a week fully submerged. A new study o...
The First Ceramicists - When Native Bees Taught Us About Clay
🎉 Featured in Ceramics Now Magazine! The article companion to this episode was just published at ceramicsnow.org The First Ceramicists: When Bees Taught Us About Clay is live now in Ceramics Now Maga...
No Bumble Bees, No Hatch Chile: The $60 Billion Pepper Secret
Dedicated to the Hatch chile pepper farmers of New Mexico and the Chihuahua desert region of Mexico. My grandmother Susie Parks was a national heroine of the 1916 Pancho Villa raid on Columbus, New Me...
Your Avocado Toast Owes Everything to a Bumblebee!
An avocado tree produces a million flowers to make a handful of fruit — and each flower switches gender across two days. Honeybees don't even like the flowers. So who's actually pollinating your avoca...
Giant Fuzzy Bombers: Bumblebees Behind a $10 Billion Crop
One scientist called them "a monstrous, fluffy, ginger beast." Meet the giant bumble bees — the only pollinators that can buzz pollinate tomatoes, blueberries, Hatch green chiles, cranberries, and egg...
The Billion Dollar Chocolate Crisis!
Research published in January 2025 from Penn State revealed a shocking truth: flies, the world's second most important pollinators, are more vulnerable to climate change than bees—and that threatens c...