Taped live during the Buzzkill celebration in New York City on March 3, 2025, this is an engaging conversation on urban pollinators moderated by Sewell Chan, executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, with Buzzkill host Teresa Cotsirilos, Sara Hobel, executive director of the Horticultural Society of New York, and Rebecca Louie, executive director of the Bee Conservancy.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Teresa Cotsirilos: You’re listening to Buzzkill. I’m your host, Teresa Cotsirilos.
So by now you’ve probably binged the series, which took on the pollinator crisis and what we can do to stop it. This podcast was a true labor of love for me and the rest of our team here at FERN, and we’re not quite ready to stop obsessing over pollinators yet. So, we have a bonus episode for you!
Last week, we celebrated the launch of our show with a panel discussion in New York. It was moderated by Sewell Chan, the executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. Sewell interviewed me about Buzzkill’s reporting and key findings, and then the conversation went really deep on this one part of the show: urban pollinators. What can those of us who live in cities do to help threatened bee populations survive and thrive?
I was joined on this panel by two urban pollinator experts: Sara Hobel, the executive director of the Horticultural Society of New York, and Rebecca Louie, the executive director of the Bee Conservancy. They had a lot of ideas on what we can do to foster healthy habitats in our own backyards.
A quick note before we get into the program: Sewell refers to me as Buzzkill’s “chief reporter,” and man, as flattering as that is, I would not say I led the reporting effort here. This show had a whole team of reporters and producers and was truly a group effort.
I’ll let Sewell take it from here.
Sewell Chan: Yes, thank you so much. I’m honored to be here tonight. Let’s bring the panelists up, starting with Teresa Cotsirilos, who is the chief reporter behind the podcast.
Sara Hobel of the Horticultural Society of New York. Better known to some of you perhaps as the Hort. And Rebecca Louie, who is with the Bee Conservancy.
Thrilled to be here. Let’s get right into it.
Teresa, you start with a very powerful scene. The series starts with you and your wife at the local grocery store. You reveal that the average American supermarket contains 30,000 distinct items. Start off with, what impact do bees have on our food supply?
Teresa: You know, our big takeaway when we started researching that and getting ready for that segment is that if bees and pollinators at large disappeared, we’d technically make it.
Sewell: We would disappear.
Teresa: Well, we’d make it. It would suck, though, and we’d all die really young. We’d all technically be alive. We went on the shopping trip; it was very funny, and it was probably the easiest part to report because it just took convincing my wife to wander around with a mic in her face and get disappointed about dinner. And the end result, I mean, it was just anything good and genuinely nutritious. Like for the most part, those items, we could not put them in our shopping cart.
Sewell: From blueberries to hazelnuts.
Teresa: Exactly.
Sewell: From almonds, I believe, to tomatoes.
Teresa: Yeah, absolutely There’s a really concerning Harvard study that came out, I believe several years ago, that found that globally, already you can trace — I believe the number is half a million or nearly half a million deaths to pollinator loss because of various different levels of malnutrition and lack of access to certain types of foods with certain vitamins throughout the world. And they can trace it back to pollinator loss.
Sewell: So Ted brought up this topic, but I would like to explore it further with you. About 15 years ago or so, there were a lot of headlines about colony collapse disorder, and suddenly bees were in the news. And I think I love that this is a very pro-bee crowd. That’s good. I love the bees. But some of that attention actually had some unintended consequences. Tell us about those.
Teresa: Yeah, absolutely. And I’m very curious what our panelists, other panelists, would say about this as well. I found this to be really interesting to work on. You know, I think that for a range of reasons, including certain Western biases, when we think of bees in this country, we think of honeybees. And one of the things that surprised me the most about the situation with bees in this country is that I would not want to say that the honeybee on the whole is doing well.
No. No pollinator is doing well right now, but out of all the bee species, they’re doing way better than all the other bee species. And in fact have the capacity in certain circumstances to edge out native pollinators that are at even higher risk, because they will compete against them for minimal resources.
Sewell: So define for a layperson what some of these other important pollinators are.
Teresa: Absolutely. Oh man, the panelists to my left might know the actual stat better than I do, but there are tens of thousands of bee species beyond the honeybee, and the honeybee is really kind of the odd man out. I mean, the honeybee, it feels like an industrialized, you know, like they build these hives, there are tens of thousands of them in any kind of colony.
I believe, Sara, you compared native, most native pollinators to single moms just trying to raise their kids. You know, we’re talking about small family pods with very limited territories. They often don’t sting, they look completely different than what you think of when you think of a bee.
There are tens of thousands of them, and these are the pollinators that you know, the ecosystems of North America rested on their shoulders prior to colonization. The honeybee is from Europe. And so our native pollinators that keep our ecosystems going are way more at risk than the honeybee.
Though, to be clear, it’s not like they’re doing great either.
Sewell: So before we go to their urban habitat, which I want to go to in a moment, I do want to talk about industrial agriculture, because your scenes were kind of stunning.
Teresa: Thank you.
Sewell: There’s a lot of detail in the podcast — we cannot capture it all here.
But tell us a little bit about these insecticides. I was joking with Rebecca earlier, bad joke, but that I did not know what a neonic was. I didn’t know how it was different from the neonatal ICU. Tell us what neonics are, and why we should all know about them.
Teresa: Neonicotinoids. I mean, I think that the great irony of neonics — they are a type of insecticide, pesticide, and one of the most commonly used — is that when, my understanding is that when they were first developed, they were supposed to be the good ones. They were to replace other toxic chemicals. And farmers were really sold on the idea that this was a safe one that they could use.
And they were, in fact. considered so safe that one of the main uses of neonics, it’s not just to spray on your plants if you’re an industrial farmer. Many industrial farmers now also buy seeds that are coated in neonics to begin with in order to protect them from pests. Um, neonics, we have now found out, mess with bees neurologically.
It messes with their flight paths. They seem very addled. I mean, they have symptoms of toxic exposure. And we believe that, many scientists believe that neonic exposure may be the main driver behind this rise in what we call colony collapse disorder. I mean, it did seem to suddenly come on the scene that coincides exactly with the rise of neonics.
Sewell: It’s like scenes of a horror movie. You’ve got bees falling out of the sky.
Teresa: Literally dropping out of the sky.
Sewell: Yeah, like a Twilight Zone episode. What is being done about the neonics and tell us a little bit about the Guardian project and about what regulators have been doing about this problem.
Teresa: Yeah, I mean, so this varies widely state to state and region to region, I would say. Yeah, I think that quite a few different states and then regional areas throughout the country are really trying to regulate neonics as much as possible and really eliminate their uses, whenever they’re not deemed absolutely necessary.
New York State has done some really interesting work on this, which is really exciting. We are in New York. What we probably need, frankly, is a national solution to this.
Sewell: That may not be coming.
Teresa: That might not be coming soon.
Sewell: Or at least right away.
Teresa: But yeah, I think regulations in certain different regions and states have been quite effective.
I will say, it’s really interesting talking to farmers about this, because when farmers, in my personal reporting experience, get frank with you, they don’t like neonics either. They’ll also say that they are caught up in a system that is lean, that has some very harsh bottom lines, and that they don’t know if they’ll be able to make it if they don’t use some kind of pesticides.
Every farmer I talked to about this said that one of the things they were most concerned about is, all right, neonics are bad. We’re getting rid of them. What’s the next one going to be? Because everyone believed that unless we make really broad systemic changes to agriculture, there will be another chemical, and it will also be toxic.
Sewell: Sara, let’s turn to you for a moment.
Tell us a little bit about the, well, what’s the bee landscape right here in New York?
One of the things I learned from the series, sorry, is that New York’s actually incredibly more hospitable to bees than I would have expected. I would have thought, concrete jungle, no bees to see here, maybe in Central Park.
You paint a much more complex landscape.
Sara Hobel: Well, particularly when we’re spreading beyond talking about just the honeybee, which —and I think most people realize this — the honeybee is nonnative, right? It was imported from Europe in order to support what was becoming big agriculture in the United States.
So we have these marvelous native bees, and in fact the whole world has native bees. They do not hive, so they’re solitary, most of them. Most of them are tiny. The bumblebee is the one you’re probably most familiar with. But these — unlike the honeybee, which travels kind of a great distance in order to collect its food, and is sort of a generalist.
It’ll go after just about anything. The natives actually travel very short distances. And they really require a local community. I like to liken it — you were teasing me before about it, so solitary, yes. I think you all know that bees are intriguing about their genders and, you know, the worker bees, they’re all girls. It’s fantastic.
Sewell: Why am I not surprised?
Sara: Yeah, not surprised at all. But among the solitary bees, the mothers are single, they raise their young, they create their eggs. They locate them, and they raise them by themselves. So they’re single moms. And in a place like New York City, they’re just looking for a nice little neighborhood, close by, close in.
It’s got to have a grocery store. It’s got to have a little place for when the kids want to go out and play. Really close by, right?
Sewell: It takes a village.
Sara: I mean, it’s not that much. They, you know, they do not interact with people. They don’t confront the same way that a honeybee does. And most of the time you go by, you’ll never even see one.
And because they are solitary nesting, you don’t have some of the failures that you tend to have in a hive. Like you can have the collapse of an entire hive. But if you can think through the city of New York, where really wherever there is a small planting, that’s a potential nesting site for one of our native bees.
Sewell: Tell us a little bit about the role of hobbyists. A lot more people after the colony collapse disorder news started to, you know, keep honeybees. And what I’m hearing, I think, is that’s not harmful, necessarily harmful. But it may not be the most effective approach. Or it can’t be the only approach.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
Sara: Well, I know I’ve worked in conservation for quite a long time in my life. And, you know, I’ve met a few people, they have tigers in their apartments.
Sewell: I remember the one …The police had to extricate from a Harlem apartment.
Sara: I was involved in that one.
Yeah, they want to have exotic animals, they really want to participate hands on, you know, and the reality is that the hobbyist is not going to save bee populations, particularly not the native bees. It’s more the generalist. And when we are introduced in society, in our culture, early on about the value of some species, how it contributes to everybody’s well-being.
I think, number one, what is the symbol of climate change? You know, it’s the polar bear. Nobody really would like to have a polar bear in their backyard, but when you see that sad polar bear standing on a melting glacier, you know, that draws attention to the fact that if we allow climate and global warming, we’re going to lose these keystone species.
So, you know, overall, when I think about it, it’s really knowing more, being educated about what’s important, understanding that it doesn’t necessarily have to be your obligation to raise it in your side yard in order for there to be enough.
Sewell: So, Rebecca, I’d love to hear more about your organization’s work. But let’s start with, you know, what you make of the attention on the honeybee.
Has it kind of crowded, what, in other words, has been crowded out by that attention?
Rebecca Louie: Sure thing. Okay, so big picture. You know, we’ve heard something like thousands and thousands, like the world has 20,000 species of bees, and about eight of them are honeybees, or produce honey. And, you know, bumblebees, the other superstar, they call them charismatic species, right?
It’s like, polar bears, love them; pandas, love them; bumblebees. Bumblebees, 250. So, the other 19,000, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Sweat bees, tickle bees, leafcutters, masons, this whole universe of bees. So when you ask, like, honeybees, why do we love them so much? It’s partially yes, they’re a huge agricultural force.
So we all know. We love honey. We have it in our tea at the break room. Blah, blah. Our cosmetics. I’m, like, oh, bee pollen. I look young now. Whatever. But you know, it’s a branding issue, right? Colony collapse disorder was a big deal because it impacted agriculture. So we were talking about it then. And everyone got excited.
We want to save the bees. It sucks. Of course no one wants them to collapse. They didn’t want hives to disappear. And even now, honestly, we’re still seeing a consistent 40 percent year-over-year colony honeybee die-off in the industrial. And there’s some alarming study that recently just came out in February from Apis m.
It was actually an opt-in survey, not a study. But they’re seeing numbers that are above 60 percent as well for beekeepers that participated. So yeah, still bad. But everybody else, like New York City has or New York State has over 400 species of bees. And so when we talk about these single moms, you know, they’re living.
They’re cavity nesters, which is 30 percent, stems, holes, logs, sometimes, you know, carpenter bees in your deck, which is unfortunate for some folks. And then the other 70 percent are underground. They’re like in the personal subway cars underneath us, like doing their thing with their kids. And people don’t know that, so this is the branding issue, right?
Like this is the conversation. So it’s amazing you’re all here. Go home and do a TikTok. And there are all these other views, how weird. But like they’re super-diverse. They do very different things. They’re green. They’re fuzzy. Some of them are just sticky and not that fuzzy. They can be a couple of millimeters, they could be over an inch, and they all have their own jobs, and so like when Sara was speaking to them having a smaller range.
Honeybees can go super far, great, gathering all this pollen. But these local native bees — why we’re saying native is that many species have actually coevolved with local ecology, right? They are literally helping stabilize the environments that we’re in. And so when A, we’re doing, we as humans are doing things that are harmful, whether it’s pesticides, whether it’s planting like Florida palm trees in the middle of Central Park, like things where like those native bees, you’re taking away their food and they’re the things that are like covering up their land with a lot of mulch like those, you know, under subterranean bees can’t get home because you’ve mulched out their house.
Those are sort of the opportunities, right? And those are the actions, and those are the things that people don’t know. So it’s not anyone’s fault, really, because we talked about honeybees a lot. But now, so exciting, the conversation is changing.
Sewell: What are some concrete, so to speak, ways that we can take action to help bees here in New York City?
I mean, obviously, greater consciousness, obviously greater planting of flowers and other flowering plants. But what are specific takeaways? What can I, as a Manhattan co-op dweller do? I feel helpless. Should I change my consumption patterns? Like all of it?
Rebecca: Is this for me?
Sewell: Yeah.
Rebecca: Okay. Or everyone. Well, first of all, change everything. Change yourself completely. First of all, advocate, and that means a lot of things. Yes, you can go to Albany. Yes, you can go to D.C. Or you could go to your kid’s school and ask, “Oh, look, there’s a patch of grass. Can we do something here?”
Can you integrate this topic into the curricula? Because also the kids are going to save us. Honestly, they know so much about this stuff, and we, our generations, are, like … So that’s one thing. Community science is really exciting. I don’t, does anyone raise their hand if you’ve heard of citizen science, community science?
Okay, yes, great, so you got, so basically we have the power as individuals to support all these scientific initiatives. So if you like your phone and taking pictures and like oh it’s sunset and like look at that beautiful bee, great, you take the photo and then you upload it to a platform like iNaturalist which is um, you know, like something like a million researchers and scientists and ecologists use it and it basically creates localized data points.
Why is that important? There’s lots of bees. They’re very small, they’re not elephants, and people don’t know where they are and why they are and when they are and what plants they’re on. And this matters to science, this matters to conservation, so if you’re out there snapping a photo, great, you have power.
Sewell: And the geocoding fits into the …
Rebecca: 100 percent, you know, the robots take care of it inside the app. It’s great.
Sewell: You gotta actually find the bees. That’s the human part.
Rebecca: Yes, and you can do this with kids, and that’s amazing. Our consumption pattern, sure: talk to your farmers, go to the organic spots — anything that is helping to prop up the infrastructures that you believe in that make a more wholesome, more holistic world. Great, do it.
Donate. Donate your time, your energy, your skills. Maybe you don’t want to stand in a field full of bugs. Don’t. But maybe you’re like an influencer, or you’re a graphic designer, or a filmmaker. Do help the orgs that are standing in the field, maybe getting sweaty, but that might want someone to take a lovely photo of it because that will go in their annual report, or advance the word, or end up on social.
So those are some initial thoughts.
Sewell: Yeah, Sara, what does the Hort recommend?
Sara: I’d like to start with one that I think most of us who garden know about, and that’s the rise of those gorgeous hydrangeas that everybody’s planting. The big, blue ball. So raise a hand. Who wants one of those plants or has one of those plants?
Well, it’s safe space, safe space. The reason I bring it up is because they actually don’t feed pollinators. So they do not have pollen. So I’m sure none of you know that, and why would you ever think about that? You go to a beautiful nursery, you pick out this gorgeous plant, and you’re …
Sewell: Are you coming after my orchids next?
Sara: Well, that’s a whole other — let’s not go there. But the reality is, and I’m going to home in on first and foremost, educate yourself. Force the world to really be educated along with you. One of the things the Hort does is we maintain more than a hundred public plazas in the city of Newark. We do all the horticulture for them.
So we actually were able to work with the Department of Transportation subtly, slowly. We went from, they wanted us to plant tropicals, because they’re really showy. And don’t think that you haven’t walked past places like Times Square and squealed over the fact that there’s some magnificent tropical plant in a pot that is absolutely, utterly useless to supporting the pollinator population. And not just bees, but birds as well.
So at DOT, we’ve been slowly but surely switching out the plans. To natives.
Sewell: Wow.
Sara: And there are some obstacles to natives. They’re not as beautiful. They’re not as showy. Sometimes they don’t flower as long. Sometimes they, they’re just blah, but they’re essential and we ought to be smarter. We’re humans, we’re in charge.
It isn’t only about beauty, it’s about the fact that we are in a built environment. We need to make better choices ourselves about what we do. If you want something everybody can do, leave a little dish of water out if you have a window. Bees need water. Native bees need water to make mud in order to plug the little holes in their solitary nests where they lay their eggs.
So, I mean, that’s a very easy thing anyone can do. Insist, if you’ve got children, that they don’t only learn about the honeybee. Because the native bee is adorable. Look, just go online and Google. See if you can find a single children’s book about a native bee. Instead of a honeybee. Good luck. So these are things that we are all influencers.
We’re influencers with our children. We’re influencers with ourselves. You know, people look and they say, oh my god, you’re introducing bees. So we’re putting these, um, both bee hotels and also the particular kind of soil. Like everybody, she’s joking because I say, you know, compost sucks for native bees.
Because they, most of them, will make little colonies in the dirt. Well, compost is too soft. It rains, it collapses, it kills all the bees. They need a sandier, more rigid soil. We can do that. We make, our parks department makes all the soil decisions. Every tree pit in New York City is a human decision. We can say, okay, this one’s not going to be loamy.
This one is going to be specifically designed to help support our native bees that make a burrow. And that’s what they do. They’re cutest little things. They dig in there, they make a little burrow. There’s only a couple of eggs in each of their little side burrows. I mean, they’re really wonderful little things.
And they take the pollen and they roll it up into a little ball with nectar and they stuff it in there. So when the larva hatches out all during the winter, usually the mommy has gone, but the larva’s all set up to eat that little pollen ball and hatch out in the spring. When they hatch out, again, they need immediate food, immediate plants.
So, insisting that people have flowering plants, preferably native. And it can be a pot, it doesn’t have to be a garden. We should insist in our city that all people who develop property have appropriate landscaping, not just, you know, the boxwood, which is a nonflowering bush in front of their building.
Sewell: And that’s not a zoning requirement right now?
Sara: No. I mean, again, if you look at our zoning requirements, they’re pretty strange. They do have to have a certain percent of space available for greening. But just pushing the amount of green space that we have to have. And again, not big. It’s the sum of all the tiny little pieces.
At the Hort, we talk about greening the in-between. We talk about, yeah, the big parks, they’re important. We do have 22,000 acres of big parks, but equally to those little bees that really can only fly a couple of blocks, it’s a little planter along the way. It doesn’t have to be that big. Listen, we have rats living in New York City planters.
Certainly we can have bees living in New York City planters.
Sewell: That’s fascinating. I would like to, Teresa, return to you to ask a little bit. I want you to talk a little bit about the episode you had involving the homeowner dispute in Maryland.
You know, many New Yorkers do have yards, and I began listening to this episode and thought, oh, this is just a classic kind of, you know, HOA, tyranny. I live in a co-op. I like rules. So at first I thought, okay, what is this going to be about? Like how many irrational homeowners are we talking about here?
But it’s actually a very telling story. Could you summarize it?
Teresa: Well, I regret to say that HOA is not the hero. So I’m very sorry if you were hoping that would happen.
Sewell: Well, but at the end there’s some compromise.
Teresa: There’s some compromise. The HOA was dragged a little kicking and screaming.
Sewell: Well, tell us about this couple.
Teresa: Yeah. Yeah. So there was this couple in Maryland. I believe their name, they were the Crouches, and they wanted to do their part to help stop the pollinator crisis and they rewilded their lawn. And then they got a note from their HOA saying that they weren’t allowed to do this and were going to get fined. Yeah.
Sewell: And the accusation was they’re now, like, it looks all disorderly. It’s not this, you know, 1950s lawn. It’s not pristine, there’s things growing all over the place.
Teresa: Yeah, which was a really fascinating collision of aesthetic ideals, too, because I mean, if you look, to be frank, if you look at pictures of the Crouches’ yard in spring, we’re talking about a wildflower field.
So to many people, this would be beautiful. And to the HOA, this just was the ultimate disordered, ugly thing that they had ever seen. And it was a complete violation of the rules. This escalated…
Sewell: Because a lot of us are socialized to like nature only when it’s completely controlled.
Teresa: Exactly. Exactly.
And, I mean, the entire point of this yard was to attract bugs, and it did, and so some people didn’t like that. And so, anyway, this escalated into a massive court case that cost tens of thousands of dollars for everyone involved. The Crouches just would not give in, and ultimately, they inspired legislation in multiple states, not just Maryland. I believe Maine was one of the other ones — I’d have to honestly go back and look.
But several states have now passed legislation inspired by the Crouches to ensure that HOAs cannot prohibit the rewilding of lawns, so that this can’t happen to another homeowner couple. And so it was a really great example of, you know, ordinary people. This is one of the massive existential global crises that a normal person actually can do something about.
They made a significant difference just by planting new plants and being very, very, very stubborn.
Sewell: Yeah, yeah, and I ask about it because, you know, we’re still a largely suburban nation.
Teresa: Yeah.
Sewell: Most Americans still live in suburban communities, and including people here in the five boroughs. So, thank you.
Wonderful story.
Teresa: Buzzkill is a production of the Food and Environment Reporting Network. Adizah Eghan, Theodore Ross, Brent Cunningham, and Tom Laskawy are Buzzkill’s executive producers. Alyssa Jeong Perry is our senior producer. Special thanks to Katie Gardner, our assistant audience engagement editor, for her production work on this episode. Our sound engineer is Lauryn Newson. Our theme song is by Sarah Lawson Ndu. Naomi Barr is our fact checker. Funding for this podcast is provided in part by the Band Foundation.
And I’m your host, Teresa Cotsirilos. Thanks for listening.