What is up everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. I am Kevin and again I'm joined by Peter

Nelson who's the director of the Pollinators documentary and today we're going to be talking about the difference between honey bees and

native bees. We've gotten a little bit of this primer from Dave over at

Crown Bees who was on the podcast a couple months back from the perspective of the

native bee and now what we're going to do is we're going to take a look a little more

holistically at Honey Bees versus Native Bees, the roles that they might play given everything we've

listened to this week about how managed honey bees actually run much of the pollination

of many of the crops that you and I eat. One third, one out of every three bites on

your plate is is pollinated in that way. So Peter, could you give us just a quick

overview of the honeybee species versus the native bee species. What are the

primary differences there? Yeah, so the common honeybee that we all think of

that's in a beehive is not native to North America.

It was brought over with the first settlers and I just recently saw a map of where they had

a sort of historical context of where honey bees were reported in written documents and they go back to like

1642 or so in North America with the very first settlers.

And that has spread relatively rapidly

across the United States because bees,

their population can swell and they will split

and create, which is in the split and create a new hive.

And so they became very ubiquitous in the North American ecosystem, if you will, the settlers brought them because they were not only an important for pollination, I guess, but mostly at that time they were important for beeswax and honey

which was the sweetener right because there was no sugar cane or anything else so it's a real practical thing

for the settlers to have and they would go out and they'd gather

...