Editor’s Desk: Buzzkill episode 1—Save the bees, yes, but which ones?

By Theodore Ross

There is a … buzz around the FERN offices these days, one that I attribute to the release of the first episode of Buzzkill, our six-episode podcast series on the pollinator crisis. Buzzkill is available for free on our website and on all major podcast listening platforms through public media organization PRX’s podcast distribution service, Dovetail. You should check it out! (Fact check: FERN is a distributed workplace; that buzzing may be a technical issue on Slack.)

“Save which bees?” investigates the impact of a modern-day phenomenon: amateur beekeeping, often by people who care about pollinators, biodiversity, and a host of other environmental issues. This explosion in beekeeping enthusiasm dates in large part to the mid-2000s and the surge in attention surrounding Colony Collapse Disorder. As bee populations dropped during this period, for complex and often contested reasons, well-meaning Americans responded by doing what they could to “save the bees.” 

But what that actually meant was saving a single bee species — the domesticated honeybee. As Buzzkill reporter Rowan Jacobsen describes it in episode one:

“The honeybee … was brought here by European settlers in the 17th century. Honeybees typically live in colonies of 50,000 individuals, and they happily live in wooden boxes. And that makes them the best pollinators in the game and a priceless partner in food production. … The problem is, when colony collapse disorder struck, millions of those honeybee hives died. As scientists raced to discover the cause, people panicked about the future of the food supply. “Save the bees” became a powerful cultural rallying cry. There were school curriculums and T-shirts, practically whatever you can think of. … The more people knew about them, the more they wanted to do something, anything, to save the bees. Which actually turned out to be kind of a bad idea.”

This episode looks at the pivotal role of the domesticated honeybee in U.S. industrialized agriculture and crop monoculture, and asks: Should we be worrying less about them and more about wild bees? Jacobsen travels to Portland, Oregon, and then into the state’s farming region, to find out what committed people are doing to strike a balance between supporting wild and domesticated bees — and learn about the benefits for the food system if we find solutions to protect all pollinators. I hope you’ll listen to it, and to the series.

Buzzkill is a major undertaking for a small organization like FERN. We produced it independently, having assembled an amazing staff of reporters, producers, sound designers, and engineers. We did it because we care about pollinators and biodiversity, and we also believe that there remains a gap in the podcast ecosystem for in-depth, fact-based, narrative reporting about food and the environment. One of our goals is to fill that gap, now and in the future. We can only do it with your support., Please consider a donation to FERN to help us keep making this kind of necessary journalism.