The Queen Bee of Pollination | Phyllis Stiles of Bee City Asheville

There are about 400 Bee City USA programs across 47 states, all with a mission to sustain pollinators by increasing native plants and nest sites while reducing the use of pesticides.

The entire Bee City movement started in Asheville 12 years ago with the efforts of Phyllis Stiles. During the thick of a month of pollination celebration here,  I talk with Stiles about her path to pollination through beekeeping and the start and growth of Bee City Asheville and Bee City USA.

We talk about how to responsibly keep pollinator-friendly gardens, the dangers of non-native plant species and the ecological challenges and stakes at hand. We also get into what governments and other institutions are doing to stave off pollinator loss and promote conservation. 

A week of pollination-focused events in and around Asheville starts June 17.

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Transcript

Matt Peiken: Now, when you went to college, were you ecologically focused? What was your sense of Your role and place in the world when it came to or not What sense did you have or not when it came to the ecology when you went to college?

Phyllis Stiles: I think i've always considered myself an environmentalist, but that was not my area of study. In fact, I majored in french english and education, so I didn't see that as my future and I was certainly never in the science field. So it's ironic that i've landed where i've landed today. 

Matt Peiken: How did you land?

Phyllis Stiles: I blame it all on my husband. Back in 2007 the word got out about colony collapse disorder with the European honeybee, and an appeal went out from the state of North Carolina to get more people into beekeeping, hoping that somehow, with more people involved, we could crack the nut of why the honeybees were declining. And my husband coaxed me reluctantly into becoming his fellow beekeeper.

Matt Peiken: Was he keeping bees at that time or what was it about that issue that galvanized him and then by extension you?

Phyllis Stiles: For many years he had thought about keeping bees and it just never had worked out before, but with that sudden urgency being expressed in the state of North Carolina and really worldwide, it piqued his interest and he thought, okay, now is the time.

And suddenly we found ourselves with two beehives. And we were going to bee school and going to Buncombe County Bee Club chapter meetings. And we were immersed in the world of beekeeping. 

Matt Peiken: When was this? What year? Do you remember? 

Phyllis Stiles: Oh, we got bees in 2008 and I went to bee school in 2009, I think. 

Matt Peiken: So you went to bee school. What's involved in raising, housing bees? 

Phyllis Stiles: As any beekeeper will tell you, you never learn everything. There's always more to learn. It's a fascinating field and there are the old days, before we had the Varroa mite come to North America which is a major problem now, but now there are invasive hornets that are threatening.

Matt Peiken: Yeah, you hear about the murder hornets that go specifically after bees. 

Phyllis Stiles: Right, and there's this yellow-legged hornet that's a new invasive hornet. It's endless. You're always learning. But they're very exceptional. The honeybee was brought here in the 1600s by the colonists. And so it's not a native pollinator in our continent. And because of the way that we do agricultural in this country today, mostly on very large scales, it's become essential to the way we do agriculture. Our native pollinators are completely capable of doing all the pollination we need. Under other circumstances but because we can carry honeybees around in boxes on flatbed trucks and move them with the crops, they've become an easy way to pollinate.

That doesn't mean that they're the best pollinators in the world. In fact, they're not. They are just very numerous. They live in colonies with the queen, but our other bees by and large are solitary. So they just Aren't as numerous as the honeybees and they don't live through the winter like our honeybees do. So that's why they've become the preferred way To pollinate large scale crops. 

Matt Peiken: Now when you got involved with two hives and you entered this community, What was this community of beekeepers like here? And what was the economy around local beekeeping and pollination?

Phyllis Stiles: We only have a few commercial beekeepers in our area. Mostly the beekeepers around here are hobby beekeepers. And mostly a hobby keeper might want to extract Honey every now and then just for fun to say, it's my own honey. But we have a very energetic group of hobby beekeepers in our area.

And they're very invested in always learning more and better beekeeping methods. And so they were welcoming when we came because they love sharing their interests. 

Matt Peiken: And when I first reached out to you, I was conflating beekeeping with pollinator and you were making a distinction to me between beekeeping and keeping a pollination garden.

Is that what you would say? 

Phyllis Stiles: No, I think the distinction I was trying to make is that the world is filled with hundreds of thousands kinds of pollinators and they include 20, 000 species of bees, only 11 of which are honeybees and they include butterflies, beetles, all manner of flies, bats, hummingbirds. Who did I forget? Moths. 

Matt Peiken: I guess I hadn't even thought of that in that realm. This is not my realm. And so when you were talking about this month of celebration and events, it's around all of pollinators, correct? Exactly. You entered as a beekeeper. How did your investment and knowledge in. the larger pollination world take hold for you and become really important? 

Phyllis Stiles: That's a wonderful question because when you think about pollination ecology, the flowers are actually seducing their pollinators, literally seducing them.

They don't need nectar at all for themselves. The only reason they produce nectar is to seduce a pollinator. And so I like to say That the bees and other pollinators seduced me. And I couldn't forget everything I was learning. It was so compelling. It was so exciting, so challenging. And I just had to know more.

My appetite was endless. And I started going to conferences and following the leaders in the research field and just very hungry to know more about this area that previously I'd known nothing about. 

Matt Peiken: How did that manifest in terms of your own development of a pollinator garden or expanding beyond beekeeping yourselves, you and your husband?

Phyllis Stiles: And I have to say that as much as I love honeybees and beekeepers, it wasn't long until we realized that we were focusing on the wrong bees. That the honeybees were not the ones that were in the most trouble. It was the other pollinators, particularly the bees, who were at risk due to climate change and due to pesticide use and a lack of habitat.

That's huge. And so to your question, what became apparent to me was that because of co evolution over millennia, all these incredibly intricate relationships had developed between pollinators and the flowers that they pollinated. And we know now that a full, almost 90 percent of the world's flowering plants Cannot reproduce without the help of a pollinator.

75 percent of these crops that we hold so dearly as humans need a pollinator's help to produce fruit or just to reproduce the plant. And so we are vitally dependent on these little creatures that we overlook for all the ecosystem services they provide, we are incredibly dependent on them.

And not only are we dependent on them as humans, but all the other life on Earth, terrestrial life is dependent on them for the habitat that we all share. And when I realized that just our yards could be pollinator habitat, that we could help reverse these declining trends among pollinators just by our choices in our own yards, that got me excited. That was something that I could do something about. My neighbors could do something about, we didn't need permission from any government body. We didn't need permission from anybody. It was something we could do on our own at a very small scale. But when we put all of those yards together, creating a huge impact to start reversing our pollinator declines.

Matt Peiken: You said this is something we can do. You did and your neighbors can do. We'll talk in detail about what can you do? But first, is there a threat to this? Is the territory welcoming to pollinators? Is it shrinking in our region? Are there fewer sources for pollinators to then do the work they do? 

Phyllis Stiles: Even among my closest friends, I find myself educating and educated and educating on this topic because I'm asked frequently about some exotic plant that is beloved for landscaping and why isn't it just as good as the native plants?

And they can see the bees and the butterflies and even hummingbirds visiting those plants, and they'll say, look, they're visiting those plants. They're going there for nectar and pollen. And that's true. But if you look around our yards and in our public landscaping, at institutions, organizations, what have you, you'll find that the vast majority of the plants in those spaces are exotic.

They did not co evolve with our native pollinators. And I give you the example of the Passiflora bee. The only pollen that it will feed its young is from the Passiflora lutea flower. That's a very small native passion flower vine of a teeny tiny little yellow flower that's That looks pretty insignificant when you think about trying to landscape with it.

But were it not for that flower, we wouldn't have the Passiflora bee. They have co evolved to have that special relationship. Another example is the famous Monarch butterfly relationship with milkweed. Now most people understand That the Asclepius genus is the only genus that a monarch mother will lay her eggs on, and that's what her caterpillars will grow up on, and eventually it'll pupate and become an adult butterfly.

So there's lots of species of milkweed that we can choose from, and they're beautiful and we can incorporate them into our landscapes. But over the past century, we have tried to eradicate the milkweed from fields, from roadsides because it's poisonous to many animals, including cattle and horses.

Some argue that cattle and horses opt not to eat milkweed when they find it out in the field. I'm not sure how all that works. If they're desperate, maybe they would. They can sense the difference and they'll avoid it. But because we've learned to genetically modify our fields of corn, for example, and soybeans and wheat, such that we can spray them with round up and kill all the weeds that we don't want, leaving the plant standing that we do want.

It used to be that those fields could be filled with milkweed and other weeds that were beneficial to pollinators and birds, but now all you'll find standing in those fields is the chosen plant. because it's been genetically modified to tolerate those weed killers. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah, but then obviously there's a huge environmental cost to using Roundup and the like.

Phyllis Stiles: Absolutely. It's affecting bees, for example, in sublethal ways. They have microbiomes in their guts just like we do. And those microbiomes have far more have fungi, bacteria that help them digest their food so that it's nutritious for them. When they are exposed to these herbicides like glyphosate that kill beneficial let's call it organisms in their guts, then they can't effectively digest their food so that it's beneficial to them. It also affects their reproduction. We know that it affects bumblebees ability to navigate. So there's all kinds of consequences to using those pesticides. 

Matt Peiken: And you're saying there's consequences to using non native plants and having gardens with non native plants.

So it sounds and correct me if I'm wrong in this, but That part of your program is to educate people on how to develop pollinator gardens using native plants. 

Phyllis Stiles: Absolutely. The more we can integrate plants that were truly native to the region you're in, the more we will provide habitat for pollinators as well as birds and all kinds of other species.

Matt Peiken: Now, how difficult or challenging is it to, let's say somebody says, I want to get involved in this. I want to use native plants. I want to be responsible. How difficult or challenging is it then to have a backyard that becomes pollinator rich? 

Phyllis Stiles: I like to give my husband and myself as examples of that.

Before we understood how important native plants were for native wildlife, We planted all kinds of Japanese plants in our yard and you will still see them today. We're in a city lot, a third acre, and we have a lot of Japanese plants. They have lots of evergreen choices. And when you look at native plants for Western North Carolina, we never seem to have as many evergreens as we would like on that list.

We have some wonderful evergreens, but as landscapers, we'd like to have more. After we started understanding the impact of native plants on sustaining pollinators, we got educated and we started choosing plants that were native to Western North Carolina and had not been treated with neonicotinoid systemic pesticides.

That would endure in those plants sometimes as much as years if it was a woody plant like a shrub or a tree. And so we paid attention to sourcing our plants from a nursery that we trusted. And we started filling Any opening in our yard, for example, one year there was a heavy snow and it took out our oldest American holly tree.

And so we had sunlight in that place that we hadn't had before. So we filled it with all kinds of native perennials and a serviceberry tree, even though the American holly had been a native plant for sure. And we started reducing our lawn and expanding our Plant beds to include more and more native plants.

So now we have a very small lawn and very large flower beds in our yard, surrounding our trees. We have a lot of trees in our little third acre lot. 

Matt Peiken: Do you have to tend it? Are these plants that you have to be careful about how much water they get or how much sun they get? Or once you plant them, do they take care of themselves?

Phyllis Stiles: No plant, unless it's Japanese knotweed or kudzu, seems to take care of itself. But the saying goes with native plants that the first year they sleep, the second year they creep, and the third year they leap. And so if you're patient, your native plants will just thrive in your yard if you put them in the right conditions for moisture and sunlight and shade.

So we learn along the way, and all gardeners do, you're constantly replacing things that didn't work out, you're moving things, you're dividing things. So I don't think they're any harder than getting annuals or exotics, But it does require a little bit of education. 

Matt Peiken: Are there nurseries or online resources that are known to be good first steps as primers, or here's your first step in developing a pollinator friendly local garden? 

Phyllis Stiles: Going back to the beginning, My eyes were opened to the colossal problem we had on our hands with pollinator loss and getting educated on what it would take to turn that around.

I started an organization called Bee City USA. And the elements of becoming a Bee City USA included coming up with a list of local suppliers of native plants and a local native plant list that were truly native to your region. And so here in Asheville we have a Western North Carolina plant list that we developed with the Blue Ribbon Task Force of very informed experts in our area to make sure that what we put on that list, whether it was a perennial, a tree, a shrub, a vine, a grass, that it truly was native to Western North Carolina. 

So it co evolved with our local native pollinators and we researched to find out which local nurseries were growing those plants and the condition of being on our list, that it had to be available from a local nursery. And so what we do, which is highly unusual, I'm not aware of anybody else who does this, is we have a column in our plant list for which nurseries actually supply each plant. And we link each plant to more resources so that, to your earlier question about how hard is it to grow these plants, that you can go to that resource, which for the most part is the North Carolina Plant Toolbox from North Carolina Extension Services, and you can learn all about that plant, what conditions it prefers, so we have the list of local suppliers and we tell you on the plant list which supplier Supplies each plant.

So we try to make it really easy to find and integrate these plants into your landscape. 

Our plant list is downloadable. Our Western North Carolina plant list is on our site at bcdashville. org. And we hope everybody will plant as many native plants as possible. It really does make a difference. And you can see it in the first year.

You can actually Celebrate what you're doing for pollinators right in your own backyard. 

Matt Peiken: That seems really useful. You mentioned your founding of Bee City USA. I know there's also Bee City Asheville. What was your initial impetus to take your involvement even this step further to develop Bee City USA and what's the mission of it?

Phyllis Stiles: Our mission is to increase habitat for pollinators, to reduce pesticide use, and to increase nesting sites for pollinators by galvanizing communities in a pollinator conservation effort. 

Matt Peiken: How many bee cities are there now? 

Phyllis Stiles: There are just around 400 campuses and Bee Cities because I started Bee City USA here in Asheville in 2012, and then in 2015, I started Bee Campus USA for universities. And so combined, we have about 400 in 47 states. 

In 2018, Bee City USA got way too big for this one volunteer to continue managing. And so I asked the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation in Portland, Oregon, if they would be interested in taking over the program pollinator conservation organization in the world.

And so to my Utter delight. They said yes. And in June of 2018, we merged and I worked for them as the director, continued as the director until the end of 2019 when I retired. And they have been running the program ever since and doing a bang up job. And we in Asheville are the first affiliate, but that's how it always works there.

You become an affiliate of the program and then you're part of the network. 

Matt Peiken: That's amazing that what you started here seeded this entire national movement. What do you attribute that to? And what was not happening that needed to happen and has been so embraced now nationally? 

Phyllis Stiles: I think that there were lots of good efforts going on already underway and our steering committee that helped me design Bee City USA looked at those efforts and we compared what they were doing to figure out what could we do that would be different and additive rather than just duplicative.

We provided an organizational structure to engage your community by going through city councils and county commissions to have them adopt a resolution to become a Bee City, accepting all the commitments. That gave it credibility at the highest level locally. But then, we said you had to have a standing committee to manage your program that could be either based in the city or in a non profit.

And that gave it ongoing staying power that year in and year out there was somebody stewarding the effort. Because we didn't want to just have a feel good put up a sign and then everybody Claps their hands and says we've done what we wanted to do. We've made our city a sanctuary or whatever. We wanted it to be an active learning network of cities And counties across the country who would teach each other.

And that's exactly what has happened. 

Matt Peiken: It sounds like in some ways, Bee City and the national network of this is a national guard fighting what you called pollinator loss. Can you talk about pollinator loss? What has been happening in the now dozen years you've been involved since you started your own program and started your own beekeeping and then evolved into Bee City USA. What's happening with pollinator loss in these dozen years? 

Phyllis Stiles: It's the same for what we're facing with biodiversity loss, generally. This era that we're in is called the Anthropocene because it's the first era where we're seeing massive species loss due to human causes.

The other, the previous six Eras were caused by asteroids or ice ages or different causes, but this one is due to human causes. And so human populations have grown and we like our comforts, our creature comforts. We like our nice houses, our cars, our roads. And so we just keep squeezing out the habitat that we share on this planet with all the other wildlife.

We're part of that wildlife too, but we are so intelligent and so able to adapt our environment for ourselves and the other wildlife are not able to do that. 

Matt Peiken: So are you saying it's a combination of loss from Man made environmental causes and man made literal construction, taking out land, taking out territory to build commercial, residential developments, roads, road expansion, all of that is contributing to pollinator loss.

Phyllis Stiles: You're right. You said that quite well. And with globalization and not, I shouldn't say just globalization. For as long as People have been traveling around the world. They wanted to bring back an animal or a plant, some exotic thing that nobody had ever seen before. But now with it so easy to travel and to transport things across borders. We do have more invasives than anybody could have ever imagined.

Everybody knows about the kudzu plant. Most people are learning about the Bradford pear that we thought could not reproduce and lo and behold we know now that it can reproduce quite freely. But the list of invasives is huge and they have supplanted our native plants. But then you add to that, that what we've learned to consider conventional in our landscapes is by and large not native.

And so we bring in all of these plants that our neighbors, have come to expect, but they're not helping wildlife. So we're creating sort of deserts for pollinators in our yards. 

Matt Peiken: Tell me if this is absurd or not realistic, has there ever been legislation proposed to curb or to outlaw, restrict non native plants from being introduced into consciously to development? 

Phyllis Stiles: In some parts of the country Made some steps in that direction. I understand in greensboro in north carolina, you can get a bounty for taking out your bradford pear tree, for example. So that's not legislation, but they're trying to incentivize rather than a stick exactly.

They're incentivizing it. There are lists and lists by state Of invasive plants that are not allowed to be planted On public lands, for example. But we are state run in our country. We're a federal conglomeration of states, and so every state has different rules and so we have huge budgets for eradicating invasive plants, while we do continue to sell many of those invasive plants like English ivy in big box stores. There's a huge contradiction there. 

Matt Peiken: Yeah. Talk about that a little more. Are you aware of any lobbying efforts in Raleigh to try to strengthen or even introduce state laws that would restrict some of this? Or is this contradiction just something that you and we all have to live with? 

Phyllis Stiles: I think there have been efforts and there was a really positive effort On the part of and a successful effort on the part of the North Carolina legislature to get our D O T in North Carolina to plant native plants along the highways and to legislate planting native plants on state property.

So that happened, I think it was last year. That's a really positive move. Did they pass legislation saying you cannot sell invasive plants, exotic invasive plants in North Carolina. No, they did not, but they incentivized state entities to use native plants. And now that has created a huge market for growers to supply those native plants.

Those are the kind of legislative efforts that can take us to a whole new level in using native plants more widely and becoming more conscious about just how bad the invasive plants are and how serious we need to get with our removal efforts. 

Matt Peiken: You've got a month of programming to encourage pollinator participation, to encourage people to have pollinator friendly gardens.

We touched on pollinator loss and the environmental causes and the man made causes contributing. Are we talking about putting a thumb in the dike when pollinator loss, is it so great? Is it happening in real time that any efforts right now to try to do our own part, develop a pollinator garden, is it destined to not be enough?

Phyllis Stiles: I just like to say that whatever species we can save, that's one species we can save. And I'll give you a story of the Atala butterfly was being considered to be listed as an endangered, if not an extinct species in Southern Florida. Nobody had seen one for years and the landscaping industry started growing the Coontie plant, which is native to Southern Florida.

And it. Became more and more common in the landscape. People started using it as part of the ornamental landscape. Guess what? The Atala butterfly suddenly reappeared because the Coontie plant was its host plant and its host plant had almost been eradicated until the landscaping industry discovered that it looked pretty in landscapes and that they could propagate it.

And so accidentally, not intentionally, the landscaping industry of Florida saved a species. 

Matt Peiken: It almost seems like this kind of thing would, especially in Florida, would have to happen accidentally. That there wouldn't be a conscious effort from the legislature to say, we are going to plant this and try to rescue this species.

Talk about here in Buncombe County and in western North Carolina, are there any plans for particularly prone or threatened species that you think we can reverse through just home grown pollination? 

Phyllis Stiles: There, we have lost, I want to say 15%, but I'd like to get back to you on that, of our butterfly species. I'm sure what a misquote. Okay. But our butterfly species numbers are plummeting. We are at 28% Of the loss of our 49 native bumblebee species in this country. So I can't narrow it down to western north carolina except to say That nobody has seen We've seen a rusty patch bumblebee here for the past 20 years.

And if you look at the collections over at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park at their insect collections, you'll find lots of rusty patch bumblebee. They used to be common. But nobody's seen one for the past 20 years in our area. So their range has dramatically shrunk and we owe that largely to climate change.

Their range is so small. Your yard can be the universe for a bee or a butterfly. They don't have to go far. So you can do a lot to save a species, just like those Florida landscapers did, just by planting the right plants and not using pesticides.

The pollinators will flourish. 

Matt Peiken: One thing I didn't ask you, did you still have your original beehives? 

Phyllis Stiles: No, we gave up beekeeping because truly we realized that keeping bees to conserve pollinators was about like keeping chickens to preserve birds.

You're really not doing pollinator conservation. It's a beautiful hobby, but that's not pollinator conservation. 

Matt Peiken: Is there anything we haven't talked about?

Phyllis Stiles: National Pollinator Week is the third full week of June. And so that's why we celebrate National Pollinator Week for a month in June and we call it Pollination Celebration.

And so we have nearly 20 events going on this month and on June 22nd, we are thrilled that we're going to have Dr. Stephen Buckman here. He's actually credited with coining the term insect apocalypse, which is being thrown around a lot now. He's famous for numerous celebrated books about pollinators, most notably the Forgotten Pollinators, which has become a textbook for some universities and now his latest book is called What a Bee Knows.

He's coming to us from Tucson, Arizona. He's respected globally And on June 22nd, we're going to have him out at Warren Wilson College to do a talk. We'll have other events going on during the day. The day starts at 12 o'clock and ends at 6 o'clock, but his talk is at 5 o'clock.