Episodes
What Happens to Wild Bees When Data Centers Cover the Ground?
Most native bees don't live in hives — they live alone, underground, in tunnels a single female digs herself. This episode is about what those ground-nesting bees need from a patch of bare earth: the ...
Do Native Bees Fight Like Tiny MMA Fighters?
Do bees actually fight? Yes, and it's more brutal than most people imagine. In this episode: a desert bee whose large-headed males duel underground in fights that always end in death, an Australian bu...
What Do Bug Zappers Actually Kill? It's Not Mosquitoes
That snap from the bug zapper on the patio? It's usually killing a night pollinator and almost never a mosquito. When researchers counted every insect six zappers killed over a full summer, only two-t...
Bees Make Natural Polyester That Chemists Can't Replicate
Cellophane Bees Make Natural Polyester That Chemists Can't Replicate Transcript: Speaker A: welcome back to Secret Pollinators. I'm your host, Kelly Parks. And today is a really interesting episode be...
A Wild Bee That Shears Wool from Plants - The Wool Carder Bee
Say "wool" and you picture a sheep — so what do you do with a bee that shears wool off a living plant? Meet the wool carder bee: a thumbnail-sized native that scrapes the soft fuzz from fuzzy-leaved p...
A Wild Bee Vanished for 144 Years... Or Did It?
Can a wild bee really disappear for 144 years? A volunteer with a net just proved the answer is stranger than you'd think. We follow the rediscovery of a wool-carder bee last recorded in the 1800s, a ...
4,000 Native Wild Bee Species in America? Yes, It's True
Happy Pollinator Week! Tell someone you love native wild bees and they'll start talking about honey every time. But the honey bee is a European import — it's not even one of the four thousand native w...
Bonus: I Got My Governor to Declare Pollinator Week — Here's How You Can Too
A quick bonus update: how a five-minute email led to an official Montana Pollinator Week proclamation — and how you can get the same thing done in your own state before Pollinator Week wraps up. www.s...
How One Woman's Idea Turned 400 American Cities into Native Bee Habitat
It started with one woman's frustration and a unanimous city council vote in Asheville, North Carolina, in 2012. Fourteen years later, more than 400 American towns and college campuses have made forma...