Honeybees get all the attention, but native bees are the underbugs to root for. Photographer, author, and National Geographic Explorer Krystle Hickman shows us the wonders of indigenous bees through her lens focused on conservation of bees and their habitats. She covers their lifecycles, tunnels, turrets, fuzzy butts, frat house cuddling, and sexual dimorphism. We also chat about taxonomic fisticuffs, bee hotels, the mustard blight, monocultures, the teeniest livestock, and how to appreciate and photograph all of the marvels you’ve been overlooking. So grab a sunhat, order her deck of native bee flashcards, fill up your water bottle, and let's stare into the bushes to meet some tiny new friends.

Oh, hey, it's that suitcase that you haven't unpacked yet.

But in the US, 18 states have declared that their state insect is Apis mellifera, the honeybee.

Here's the thing, that's not native to this continent.

It was imported for wax and honey and pollination.

Every honeybee you see in the US is feral.

What you may not know about are the native bees, the ones that have been here for eons, yet none of them are state insects.

So today we'll meet them, and within an hour, you're gonna become the kind of person who's obsessed with indigenous bee species.

So this episode started in my backyard over a year ago when we decided to pair up with my old friend David who runs a native plant nonprofit in LA.

Fast forward 18 months and we have this thriving, buzzing hill of plants and David mentioned a native bee expert he knew and I begged her to hang out with me and before I knew it She and her camera were here making memes.

So if you know anyone named Melissa, their name means bee.

And you may remember that we did a Melanotology episode in 2018 that was wonderfully informative and charming.

It also covered a lot of Apis mellifera and backyard beekeeping.

So we are returning to the topic of bees, but this time with a more focused lens with a photographer, an educator or conservationist.

She's a 2023 National Geographic Explorer grant recipient.

She's an author and an advocate for these native creatures and their habitats.

She also just launched a deck of flashcards all about native bees.

And in some of the audio, I decided to use some outtakes from this interview because I got a super sneak peek at the deck, which is for sale now and will be shipping later this month.

So we'll sit down with her, but first a quick thanks to everyone supporting the show at patreon.com slash ologies and submitting questions for telling a friend and for rating and for wearing ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com.

Also, you know I read all your reviews, Including this fresh 1 from an unpronounceable string of consonants I think it looks as though it was typed with the smear of an elbow, but they said thanks to this podcast I was able to respond to my therapist telling me don't drink out of a fire hose with a full explanation of dolphin reproduction.

Okay, go grab a sun hat, fill up your water bottle, let's stare into the bushes to meet some native bees and learn about their tunnels, turrets, fuzzy butts, sexual dimorphism, taxonomic fisticuffs, bee hotels, the mustard blight, monocultures, the tiniest livestock, and how to appreciate and photograph all of the marvels you have been overlooking with native melatologist Crystal Hickman.

My name is Crystal Hickman, and my pronouns are she, her.

Now, were you excited about photography, the outdoors, bees, bugs?

Yeah, it's weird to say this, but I feel like I came kind of like pre-programmed because like everything I was really into as like a toddler I'm doing now as an adult.

Yeah, so I was obsessed with my mom's camera.

We had rose bushes on the side of our house and I used to stare at like the ladybugs and the honeybees in there for hours.

And I remember 1 time there was a snake in our yard and I was so excited to see it.

I really love insects, photography, like all of it.

I think like as an adult though, I kind of got away from it because like it wasn't a career.

So I went to college for like something I wasn't even interested in.

And then I started working these office jobs And I just kind of like left with like no backup.

Like I had a little money in the bank, but I was like, I'm going to do every single thing that I'm interested in.

What was that day like when you decided, fuck this job, I'm leaving?

I felt like for a little while I was getting dumber.

Yeah, I was just sitting, I was like literally, I remember I was looking at my schedule and I could predict what I was gonna be doing every single day for the rest of the year.

And I was just like on autopilot and I was like, I am so sick of this.

And the first thing I did though, it was like art cause I'm also really into art.

So I actually picked up a pen While I was sitting at the desk and I just drew I think it was a dog.

then I was like, oh, let me just keep drawing and then I kept drawing And then

was like a month of me just drawing every single day from the show skins that I was obsessed with

So this was a darkly comedic British TV series about teens and college students and it came out in 2007 and it is heavily steeped in what's known as the indie sleaze culture an era of DJs and sideswept bangs and chunky jewelry.

There was carbonated, caffeinated malt liquor options.

And this show featured some well-written subplots about mental health and disordered eating and frustrated sexuality in a time before everyone had face filters on their social media.

So Skins was created by Brian Elsley and Jamie Britton.

And Crystal, as a fan of the show, started drawing portraits of the series actors, starting with a character who usually wore a fedora, which I'm sorry, that was just, that was groundbreaking for the era.

The guy at the store said, I'm the only guy he's ever seen pull it off.

And then after I finished drawing, I put in a video and put it on YouTube.

And then I found the creator online and I sent him the video.

And then within a month of me starting to draw, he hired me to work on the show.

So for quite a while, I was just doing a lot of art.

How glad are you that you just went for it?

Yeah, it was so random and I was like, oh, someone wants to pay me for that, that's my favorite show.

So I wrote and directed my own short film.

And then I was just following every single path.

So I did the same thing with the bees and it kind of linked to the artwork because I wanted to get a camera

I can take original photos for my artwork but then also photograph bees because I'd been drawing everything like based on other people's photos when I was like, I wanna take my own photos.

So Crystal picked up photography by taking source photos for her ink drawings.

I think so much we don't think about that is how much we use photo references, but having your own must feel like it's really, really yours.

Yeah, and like I started creating like really strong messages At the time I just met this girl, we did a talk together and she was 1 of the founding members of Black Lives Matter.

And I saw a picture of her at a Black Lives Matter protest and I told her she looked like Angela Davis and then she's like, hey, I actually know her, do you wanna meet her?

Yeah, and then like, I think it was maybe less than 2 weeks later,

Yeah, So basically we recreated that image of Angela Davis with her fist up.

So she was in ballpoint pen, and then I used black spray paint for the Black Lives Matter logo slash name.

And then I did a custom frame where I put I think

people who had basically lost their lives in like activism.

My friend brought her chicken over to my place.

And I got 1 shot of the chicken looking directly into the camera.

When someone has a pet chicken, you need to know what they named it.

And that piece features a live chicken standing on a dinner plate as a commentary about eating meat.

And also if you want to know more about chickens, we recently did an entire chickenology episode.

Also after we recorded this, I pulled up the 2018 time-lapse video of Crystal's hands with nothing but a blank sheet of paper and a ballpoint pen, rendering a photorealistic and stunning portrait of the Black Panther character T'Challa, which was shared tens of thousands of times on social media, including by the late Chadwick Boseman, who added, Crystal Hickman, your pen work is incredible.

Thank you.'" I watched this video, this time-lapse video of her making this art, and it was so stunningly gorgeous, I started crying, which was very embarrassing because I had just met her, but it was absolutely gorgeous.

So she was already finding success and acclaim in the art world, but she started picking up more and more skills.

And you will learn that that is kind of what she does.

She is 1 of those people that is just good at everything.

You got this camera, so you were making art and you thought, I want a camera that maybe I can shoot people and bugs and nature.

How much Googling did you do to find a camera?

Because I was doing bee photography with my cell phone for 2 years.

Like I was saying, I pick a lot of hobbies and like I try to go through with all of them.

I wasn't sure I was gonna stick with this 1.

So I wanted to know I was gonna stick with it first.

So after I knew that I was, I did so much googling and I was trying to decide between Nikon, Canon, and Sony.

And then I ended up picking a Nikon D500, which is a crop sensor lens.

And this was before like mirrorless was like really big.

And I just YouTubed the crap out of this camera.

Cause I was like, oh, this is a great camera for making small things look large.

And it was a camera that I knew I was gonna have to grow with.

It was like the most expensive piece of equipment I'd bought.

When you had 2 years of cell phone B pictures down, were you using like, Oleo clips or what types of lenses or?

Yeah, like my old photos, like people thought I actually had a camera.

I mean, you did, it was just part of a phone, right?

Yeah, I think like honestly, cell phones, especially when you're like learning how to use a camera, you can take better pictures with your cell phone.

And for more on macro photography, I will link our whole episode on it.

It's called Epi-reology and it's with Joseph Saunders.

Did you find that, oh, you really liked taking the pictures, having the source material, and then also getting that practice of like getting out and looking for them too?

Yeah, I really enjoy the process of just going out into nature.

I think that's like 1 of the main reasons why I keep doing this.

Going out to places where there's no cell phone reception, it's just kind of you and whatever you're doing.

And I also feel like a lot of times in nature, just nothing revolves around people, which is really nice.

So you can't really be like selfish in nature.

And it's just, I don't know, it's kind of like therapy or like meditation.

I bet the idea of getting out of your head and getting off of your phone is so hard to do literally, unless there's like no service or you've dropped your phone down a well.

It was funny when people come back from like camping or something and they're like, yeah, it's great.

Cause like the longest trip I've ever been on was a 10 day trip.

I was in the Trinity Alps, it was like 2 years ago now.

And it was just so interesting coming back because all of this media that I could Zoom before, like really regularly, I didn't realize how negative it was.

That's why I try to go out somewhere every single day and I'm so happy.

And I also like everyone around me also, I don't know if

I'm just attracting people who are happy or like what exactly, but everyone's super positive.

It feels like when you know that you're doing something you really like, that enthusiasm is really infectious.

People want to get on your team because it's clear that you like what you're doing, which is great.

And then you never know, the bees might be talking to each other about you, just a general...

Now you liked ladybugs as well on growing up and other type of bugs.

What was it about bees that really just got you?

I wish I had like a really definite answer.

I would just say that I liked all insects, all bugs, but the thing that got me specifically into looking at bees was this...

There's this quote that's attributed to Einstein.

It says, if the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have 4 years of life left.

It was like, no more bees, no more man, no more pollination.

And it's funny because now when I actually think about it, I'm like, that doesn't make any sense.

But yeah, also Einstein never said it either.

Someone just put like Einstein's name on it in like the 90s.

So that got me into, I was like, I want to save the bees.

So I was like, I'll get involved with this.

Cause you know, it was an idea I wanted to follow through with, So I followed through with it.

And then I was doing that for quite a long time.

And then I accidentally took a photo of a native bee.

It's funny too, is I photographed a native bee on mustard.

Which is just, I think that's really funny.

Especially the history of why mustard is so prevalent in California.

From what I understand, like missionaries would just kind of throw it behind them on their path.

Yep, West Coast missionaries led in the 1700s up what's now the California coast by a Catholic priest named Junipero Serra, tossed out invasive mustard seeds as they went along this El Camino Real or the Royal Road that connected all the missions, creating what was described as a ribbon of gold in their wake.

And botanists have even broken apart the adobe bricks of the missions.

And as time marched on, they were able to see more and more mustard seeds within these mud bricks and they could trace the spread of them.

But what is the issue with mustard flowers?

Well, it's choked out indigenous plants and thus animals.

And just like he left a wake of highly invasive weeds, Junipero Serra also believed that indigenous people could be modified to suit religious aesthetics.

And according to 1 book, Into the West, the story of its people, indigenous populations were punished for the sake of salvation, the missionary said.

Junipero Serra also said at 1 point that so long as they were converted beforehand, their death could be seen as a joy.

So California nature lovers, when they see these sunny yellow fields of wildflowers, many don't know that a lot of it is mustard and it's anything but native.

And the El Camino Real route in California is still commemorated with these rustic roadside bells along the highway shoulders.

But recognizing the face of Junipero Serra might be harder because many statues of him have been beheaded in recent years.

So thanks for the genocide and all the mustard, dude.

I was actually at a farm last week and they were using mustard as a cover crop.

It was just fields and fields of mustard.

And it's funny because until you learn that it's invasive, you just think, oh, wild flowers and they're so yellow.

Now I love a native plant so much that in the past year, Jarrett and I have enlisted the help of 1 David Newsom of a nonprofit called Wild Yards Project, who has made our dry backyard full of invasive weeds into this thriving pollinator garden and a critter habitat.

And because of him, I see the hillsides of LA so differently.

I really appreciate native, untouched, or reintroduced native species.

And also before this, I had never cringed at a flower, and now I do.

1 of the funniest conversations to have is just ask them like, what do you think about?

And then just name any invasive plant and then just sit back.

It's like those rants are so good to hear because they're so impassioned.

And when it comes to native bees versus the European honeybee that we're accustomed to, most people don't know that honeybees, at least in the US, are feral, right?

Yeah, I call them just like flat out invasive at this point.

Yeah, it's really frustrating too, because like people mix up facts between honeybees and native bees.

And also you see all these things about save the bees and then there's a honeybee.

At World Bee Day, I was at a fair, I had a booth and like you had all of these people so happy about supporting the honeybees.

And I realized after a while, like it probably wasn't the best place to throw out facts about native bees.

It's just interesting that science has become so debatable when there's like really solid facts about what's happening and people still want to debate you.

So these Save the Bees campaigns you might see in America, well, they're usually focused on honeybees, which are completely introduced species in America that are still used, obviously, as farming livestock.

So each hive has around 30, 000 workers who farmers take to different orchards and fields for pollination services.

So a Save the Honeybees campaign in the US is kind of like a big, well-funded push to breed more feral cats.

And granted, backyard beekeepers do rescue feral swarms, which is kind of like, I guess, homing stray kittens, which is fine by some people, not fine by others.

But the biggest issue facing bees isn't the loss of livestock bees, but really monocultures and habitat loss for all kinds of creatures, including native bees.

But like a positive thing I've seen, at least in California, is There's a lot of farms that are actually starting to farm alongside native ecosystems.

I started seeing it within the last 5 years.

I don't know if I should say the farm's name, but I saw so many native plants.

Specifically, I was looking at this tomato field and I actually took a lot of photos of their.

So it doesn't just encourage native bees, but it's like anything that's in that ecosystem.

So instead of relying on this 1 invasive pollinator, you have like a whole ecosystem of creatures that will pollinate your plants for you and they'll do a better job.

While Crystal is originally from Omaha, Nebraska, she is beyond fluent in local native species.

We're in California now and you are also making a very cool product for native bees of the Western United States.

Putting a pin in that because it's very exciting.

But when it comes to different habitats, How many native bees are out there?

Yeah, so in the entire world, there's a little over

Yeah, in the US there's a little over 4, 000.

And last year someone actually counted in California.

So there's 1, 643 as of last year in California.

So we have more bees in California than in some countries.

I mean, we have so many different climates too.

I'd say specifically, I'll just stick with California is that we have a Mediterranean climate And Mediterranean climates are really unique just because we get winter rain, we're next to large bodies of cold water.

We normally have like mountains and like a desert, but Mediterranean climates take up only about 2% of Earth's land, but they also have about 20% of Earth's biodiversity.

So we're in a crazy, just biodiverse hotspot here.

And I think that's 1 reason why I absolutely love documenting not just bees, but nature here, what's happening to their ecosystems.

Because land loss is just a huge factor in decline of bees.

So I started taking like landscape photos of areas I've been visiting because I realized even just after going for like 5 years, there's so much development happening.

And even within like, if there's neighborhoods within a mile, there's people are starting to do fire abatement and it's destroying areas that I've been visiting or I've been looking at old records and I want to visit them again, but there's like a university building there now.

Crystal says that she once spent 2 years trying to get a photo of a particular bee on its niche favorite flower.

And then she went back a week or 2 later only to find that the whole area had been bulldozed.

And when you say fire abatement, what exactly does that mean?

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Native Melittology (INDIGENOUS BEES) with Krystle Hickman