- Good afternoon, everyone.
We would like to welcome you to the segment
in regards to Wisconsin Pollinator Protection Plan.
We have three speakers in for this segment.
This is how it's gonna work.
Liz Meils and Mike Murray are gonna
co-present the first segment,
and then Dan Dummer will come up
and he'll do the second segment.
And if you can, hold off all questions
'til afterward if you would, please.
So at this point in time, I'd like to introduce Mike and Liz
and give a little bio on each of 'em.
Liz currently is with the Wisconsin
Department of Ag, Trade and Consumer Protection,
and she's in the Plant Industry Bureau.
She's a plant pest entity specialist
and has been managing the nursery, apiary,
biotechnology regulatory service
and sub-programs since 2006.
The primary goal of these programs
is to screen and prevent the movement
or spread of regulated pests and diseases.
Liz is a state apiarist and has served
as Regional Director for the Apiary Inspectors of America.
She is also the current president
of the Horticulture Inspection Society Central Chapter.
Liz has recently worked closely
with DATCP pesticide program
and researchers at UW-Madison
to develop Wisconsin's first Pollinator Protection Plan.
She has been with the department
in various positions since 2004
and is a native to central Wisconsin.
Liz graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
and has received degrees in environmental biology
and land use geography.
Mike Murray is a pesticide program manager
with DATCP in Madison.
He manages a programs for the certification and licensing
of pesticide applicators and commercial businesses,
and licensing of restricted use pesticide dealers.
This includes overall strategic
pesticide program planning and administration.
He coordinates inspectors and enforcement actions
with the department compliance staff.
Mike provides information and clarifications
for pesticide use policies and rules
for regulated community and public and other agencies.
Partnering with the University of Wisconsin
Pesticide Applicator Training Program,
he provides and develops relevant training materials
and certification exams for ag and non-ag pesticide use.
Mike, along with Liz, has led for the creation
of Wisconsin's Pollinator Protection Plan.
- So we're gonna tell you all about
Wisconsin's first Pollinator Protection Plan today.
First off, I'll start out with a little background
on pollinators and some of the challenges they're facing.
And then Mike is gonna talk about why we were inspired
to write the plan and then talk a little bit
about the plan itself.
So when you hear people talk about pollinators,
they're talking about insects, birds, and bats.
We don't have any pollinating bats in Wisconsin,
those are more found in the tropics.
And we do have one bird pollinator,
the Ruby-throated hummingbird,
but we've got a lot of insect pollinators:
butterflies, moths, beetles,
flies, wasps, and the most efficient of those pollinators
are the honey bees and the wild and native bees.
Our plan that we've written
sets out to provide recommended actions that anyone can take
to protect these pollinators,
particularly the managed bees
and our native and non-native wild bees.
In the US, there are around 3,600 bee species
and about 400 of those are found in Wisconsin.
So, first off, some basic needs of pollinators,
they need nesting sites.
So pollinator habitat needs differ by species
but they all need a safe place to live,
to raise their family and over-winter.
honey bee nests are provided by the beekeepers,
but wild bees build their nests underground
at the bases of bunch grasses like the little blue stem
or in old rodent burroughs and hollow stems.
Pollinators also need food
and bees are essential place foragers,
meaning they travel limited distances
and return to their nests with the food,
and therefore, they need food sources close by.
So in an ideal pollinator habitat,
you're gonna have a variety of different species
of plants blooming in early spring
when some of the early-emerging bees come out
and then different species of flowers
coming out later in the season
when the late-emerging bee species come out.
And all these plants would also be providing
different types of pollen for the honey bees
throughout the entire season.
So, why are we concerned about pollinators?
Well, the number of managed honey bee colonies in the US
has dropped from 5 million colonies in the 1940s
to about 2.5 million today.
But the need for pollination services has increased.
1.6 million or more than half of the colonies in the US
head out to California each February to pollinate almonds.
And they're making a lot of stops along the way, too,
pollinating crops in other states.
And bee pollination is responsible
for about $15 billion in added crop value
in the US alone for almonds,
berries, fruits, and vegetables.
So, as you can see,
we're making them work really hard for us.
And why does Wisconsin care?
Well, Wisconsin is known
for its many high-valued pollinator-dependent crops:
apples, cranberries, cherries, and pickling cucumbers.
We're also known for our white clover honey.
And because of our diverse landscape,
we've got a lot of migratory beekeepers
that have their home base in Wisconsin.
So, what's going on in Wisconsin
can really affect bees and agriculture around the country.
Now, you probably all remember
first hearing about colony collapse disorder in 2006,
and that's when bees first started making the headlines.
At first they thought that CCD was a new pest or pathogen.
But the more it was researched,
it turns out it's more of a collection of drivers
from weather to genetics to nutrition.
The big one is the varroa mite.
It's a parasitic mite that spread to the US in 1987
that can kill a colony of bees in just one season
if the beekeeper isn't treating to control for it.
And it's also a vector for a whole slew
of honey bee viruses and diseases,
and some of those viruses have also been found
in the wild bee populations as well.
Another big challenge is the lack
of quality habitat and forage,
and a lot of that's due to the expanding world population
and the increasing demands on agriculture.
Pesticides are also playing a role,
mainly insecticides meant for pests
of crops and ornamentals,
but also the fungicides and herbicides...
and especially combinations of those different pesticides.
And it's not just the direct bee kills
but also the sub-lethal doses
that disrupt the foraging abilities of the worker bees
and they may not make it back to the hive.
Or if they do, they may be feeding contaminated nectar
and pollen to the bee larvae
which then grow into lower-quality adult bees
with shorter lifespans.
Native and wild pollinators
are also facing many of these same challenges
and that's concerning because wild pollinators
are desirable to farmers to have around
to supplement crop pollination.
And they've also been shown to increase yield,
and in some cases they're better pollinators
than honey bees, depending on the crop
and inclement weather conditions.
For example, the bumblebee forage longer hours
than honey bees and they can buzz pollinate some crops
like tomatoes and cranberries
that honey bees don't pollinate as efficiently.
Unfortunately, we're lacking data
on most of the wild pollinators,
but a few that we have some data on
are the monarch butterflies, the Karner blue butterflies,
and the rusty patched bumblebee,
all of which can still be found in Wisconsin,
but their populations have all
significantly declined over the years.
For honey bee data after those big honey bee losses in 2006,
a lot of bee research started happening
and the USDA has been a big part of that.
In 2009, they began funding
an annual national survey of honey bee pests and diseases,
and this is a cross-country survey
that continues to be the most comprehensive
honey bee health survey to date.
And it provides essential disease
and pest load baseline information for the country.
Another avenue for data collection
is the BeeInformed survey, which is an extension project
working with beekeepers to understand
which management practices work best
and to understand how those different management practices
affect honey bee health and over-wintering success.
So, with all that background in mind,
in June of 2014, President Obama issued a memorandum
establishing a pollinator health task force
which was co-chaired by USDA and EPA
to create a national pollinator health strategy
that promotes the health
of honey bees and other pollinators.
So, the three overarching goals
of the National Strategy
are to reduce honey bee colony losses during winter
to no more than 15% in the next 10 years.
And just to give you a point of reference,
last year, Wisconsin lost close to 60%
of our over-wintering hives.
The second goal is to increase the eastern population
of the monarch butterfly to 225 million butterflies
by the year 2020.
And the third goal is to restore or enhance
7 million acres of land for pollinators
over the next five years.
So, here I'll turn it over to Mike
and he can talk about how we got to where we are today.
- Okay, I'm Mike Murray.
I'm with the Department of Agriculture
and I'm gonna talk a little bit about
what's happened over the summer
with our development of the Pollinator Protection Plan
and I'll start here with EPA actions.
You know, Liz mentioned this National Strategy
that came out.
Well, EPA is a federal agency that has been one of the leads
for working on pollinator issues,
one thing they've had started to do
a lot more the past couple of years
is when they're registering pesticides or insecticides,
herbicides that can be used,
they're looking at their impacts on bees.
And they're trying to see,
are these products gonna harm bees or not?
And so there's more focus on that,
and some of those public concerns Liz talked about
have been coming forward.
The EPA, they also recognized
that what they do in Washington
and what they say on pesticide labels or regulations
that might come out aren't gonna solve the problem.
So, they're really promoting what they're calling
the development of state pollinator protection plans
because there's so many diverse crops
and different farming systems,
different landscapes throughout the country,
that they're promoting the idea
that states should work with people in their state,
both government, private entity, private sector,
to come up with plans that might benefit pollinators
in that state, do things that are gonna be helpful.
And there's probably half the states,
maybe about 30 states now
either have pollinator protection plans
or they're working on developing them.
And there's a wide variety of what some of these plans say.
Some might only be specific to honey bees
or certain types of crops.
Others are more broad or inclusive.
So, there's a number of states doing this,
primarily it's voluntary plans
that the states are developing.
A few states have incorporated regulations
that deal with pollinators,
like in California, they have some specific regulations
that impact what growers can do.
But this industry is also coming up with
their own kind of initiatives
to deal with this pollinator issues
and the honey bee hive loss
and some of the wildlife decline of native bees.
So different agribusinesses or grower groups,
they're kinda understanding pollinators are an issue
and trying to promote different management practices
or things that growers or farmers can do
that might actually help keep pollinators in the landscape
or minimize negative impacts.
So, these things have been going on
for the past few years at least
and they're gonna continue into the future.
And that brings us to, here in Wisconsin,
we decided that we really do wanna have
one of these statewide pollinator protection plans.
And what does that mean?
You know, we had to figure that out too,
because it's the first time that Wisconsin
had a Pollinator Protection Plan,
so we were developing one from scratch.
And some of the overreaching goals
that we thought were important when we were developing that
is we wanted to be a broad-based plan
that covers a lot of different sectors.
So, it's gonna focus on agriculture,
non-agricultural interest,
a whole variety of different stakeholders.
We also wanted the plan to be fact-based,
science-based particularly.
We wanna recommend things that work,
and we wanted to have voluntary recommendations
that are gonna be in the plan.
This isn't a exercise in developing new regulation,
it's gonna be voluntary actions
that people can take if they want to.
So, to make this happen, the Department of Agriculture,
DATCP, we partnered with University of Wisconsin-Madison's
Entomology Department and then we formed a stakeholder group
to help come up the ideas that went in to the plan.
So, you might wonder why is Department of Agriculture
the one leading this effort.
And partly it's because Liz runs our apiary program.
We deal with beekeepers.
We have our pesticide program, our fertilizer program.
We do a lot of different interactions
with a variety of stakeholders in the state,
so we decided we'd be the entity
that would help pull the plan process together,
help write it.
We'll host it on our website over time.
But, like I'm gonna get into,
we wanted the stakeholders and different people
to contribute to what the plan says
and they can help own the plan as well.
It's not just a DATCP plan.
So, to do that, we formed a stakeholder group
earlier in the summer, and in August we began meeting.
So, some of the entities we had on there
were from agriculture, different grower groups
and different agribusiness interests.
We had different industries on there,
people that manage right-of-ways, highway right-of-ways,
utilities, the lawn care industry,
commercial flower growers, that group was in there.
We had some different government entities
like the Natural Resources Conservation Service
and people that cost-share farmers
to do different practices.
Or Department of Natural Resources was on board as well
because they manage a lot of land.
And then we had some non-profit groups
like the Xerces Society, who does insect conservation.
And we tried to bring this group together
and have 'em decide what was important to put into a plan.
And we had three big goals
that kinda came up at our first meeting.
One of them was just to make sure
that people really understand
what are the challenges facing pollinators,
and by that we mean honey bees,
as well as the native and wild bees that are in Wisconsin.
So, make sure people understand what these challenges are.
Another one was the group agreed we wanted voluntary actions
that would be in the plan.
It's just things people can do if they choose to.
And then the last thing that was kind of
a big point the group agreed on was that,
how do we communicate this information
between the different groups or between beekeepers
and the farmers they're working with?
So, it kind of increased
that understanding and communication
of the issue and some of the potential solutions.
So to achieve these goals,
we had some strategies we thought up and wrote down
and tried to consolidate into a plan
over a series of three meetings.
Habitat for pollinators obviously is the way to go
for these native bees because they need a place to live.
Like Liz mentioned earlier,
they need things to forage on, things to eat.
honey bees need the same.
So get better habitat in the landscape and better quality.
Another thing was to minimize all those stressors
that Liz had talked about, so people might be able
to manage disease and minimize that impact
or improve forage, different things.
We wanted beekeepers in particular
to manage their hives a little bit better
and know what kind of actions
they might be able to do to improve their hive health
and that over-winter survival.
And then again, it's increased awareness of the issues
and what can be done as an industry
or as yourself, maybe as a homeowner or a grower,
what can be done.
So, we came up with a draft plan
and it's basically two big parts,
the introductory part about pollinator health
and what it is, what it means.
And then we have our what we're calling
our best management practices,
and that's gonna be subdivided
into these four different chapters, so to speak,
that are standalone kind of documents.
So, things that are relevant to gardens and lawns,
things beekeepers care about,
what farming and people that need pollination services,
that would be a chapter as well.
And then the last one would be roadsides and open spaces,
what can they do?
So that said, I'm gonna go through a little bit
what each of these four chapters are gonna talk about.
Understand though, that a lot of the concepts
kind of are the same throughout them
but the solutions might be tailored differently
for each kind of landscape.
So, for the first section, what people can do
in gardens and lawns.
Habitat, that's really a key thing that homeowners
or people that are owning golf courses, things like that,
they might be able to incorporate more flowers
or flowering plants that are beneficial.
One of the recommendations
is to try and have three different plants flowering
or blooming that are beneficial for pollinators at one time
and have it throughout the year.
'Cause while it's nice to have spring flowers,
if there's no flowers in fall or middle of summer,
there's nothing for the bees to eat.
So, better habitat, longer, consistent.
Nesting areas as well.
They can be incorporated in different areas
of the landscape and that's possibly something
that could happen.
And there's also a recognition throughout the plan
that if you're gonna make habitat or plant flowers,
not all flowers are as beneficial for bees.
Some are better than others.
Some are bred for looks,
and they might not mean much for pollinators.
But the key takehome message would be,
suit your plantings to the landscape you're working in.
And that doesn't quite matter if you're a homeowner,
if you're managing a highway right-of-way or you're farming.
If you want to do something for pollinators,
fit what's gonna work into your landscape and then do that.
So, we have a section on beekeepers.
Again, it's nutrition to bees,
making sure you're putting the hives in areas
that have good places they can forage and get food.
Make sure they're getting enough nutrition
so they can survive the winter, managing for the disease
and pests that might impact them.
And if you're gonna travel around the country
to provide pollination services,
make sure you're preparing to do that the best you can.
One thing that we currently do in Wisconsin
is we have our DriftWatch program.
It's a voluntary website
that pesticide applicators can check
and we've historically had it for organic farmers,
different specialty crops.
Well, now there's a component just for bee hives,
so if you wanna know if there's bee hives in your area,
you can look on this website.
We recommend beekeepers, they could list their hives.
If they don't wanna put them on the website,
beekeepers should always try and communicate
with their neighbors and try and figure out
if there's things their neighbors might be doing
that could impact their hives
and try to work out solutions.
All right, this is probably what you care about most here
is what we're gonna say for agriculture and pollinators.
It's very similar to some of the other things
I mentioned with habitat.
It's wild and managed pollinators that we care about,
so for those apples or cranberries,
those crops where they contract with people
to bring in bees, work with that beekeeper
to make sure it's gonna be beneficial to both parties.
For wild bees, that might just be your CRP land
or what's in fence rows.
Or maybe it's the crop that you actually have.
If you have a pasture and it has blooming flowers in there
that could really be beneficial to pollinators.
And maybe that's not your goal is to benefit pollinators,
but you got a pasture.
Put some flowers in there, you increase habitat by a lot.
So, there could be simple things you do.
And the big ones are integrated pest management
for what you're doing.
I mean, you should all know what that means, how it works,
and be following those practices now.
Another thing to consider
would be bees are insects as well.
Pesticides, of course, has come up a lot
with the decline of bees and what might be happening,
so I'm just kinda reiterate that pesticides
are one tool of many that's available to you.
Not all pesticides impact bees the same.
Some might kill foliage, some might kill the bees,
the way you apply it makes a big difference,
if it has any impact at all.
So, using pesticides wisely is important.
Back when I talked about the EPA
and their analysis of impacts on pollinators
when they register pesticides,
well, there is language that's showing up
on pesticide labels specific to bees.
So, check those labels to make sure
that if it says you shouldn't be spraying
when bees are in the area, you know that
and you can respond appropriately.
And that's where knowing who has beehives
in your area's important 'cause then you can work with them.
So, the last section for our best management practices
that's in the plan are for prairies,
road sides, natural areas,
just kind of the general open space-type areas
that are in the state.
And some of the challenges with these types of areas
might be if you wanna have habitat
or some kind of flowers,
it might be tough to establish native plants.
Maybe you have some there, but the long-term maintenance
of these properties, making sure all the competing goals
of landowners are met is something
that really needs to be thought out
going in to these types of endeavors.
So, selecting the right types of seeds,
the right location, making sure you're gonna be able
to maintain it and get what you want in the long haul.
And again, it's like the other segments of society:
do what fits for you and your property
and you'll probably be happy with it,
and might be more likely to make it work, too.
So, the last thing, our plan does have a component in there
about how does it work or is it effective?
That's one thing that some of the other states
developing pollinator plans
have tried to think about as well
is how are you gonna know it works?
And so, what we kinda thought out as a stakeholder group
is there's two kinds of things
that might be measurables from this
and one would be, did someone read the plan
and learn something about it?
Was there increased knowledge?
And if that happens,
I'd consider it a success in some way.
Another way we could look at it,
are people actually changing what they're doing?
Are they spraying pesticides at night
when bees aren't flying,
or did they plant some flowers or some habitat,
things like that, like measurable on-the-ground differences.
That might be a way you could consider the plan
is a success as well.
And so, we have some ideas about what that might be.
And part of the reason we have that is,
in the future, this plan will get revised
and it's gonna change over time as we learn more.
People started doing things differently in the world.
And we also built in a mechanism into the plan
for updating it in the future.
Because it's, like I said, it's not a static plan
and it's not just a DATCP plan,
so we'd envision bringing together
some of the stakeholders to get their input as well.
But, the first big part for input will start next week.
I'm sure now that we'll have our plan drafted
and a version will be posted on our website
and will be available for everyone here to look at.
And we'll take some public comments on it.
So does the plan kinda meet
what you think a pollinator plan should say?
And that's gonna be our public comment period.
It'll go for 30 days, we wanna hear from you,
see if we're on track, if we missed anything.
If we need to clarify things that are in there
and that'll be something coming next week.
So, after we get our public comments,
we're gonna assess them, see if there's any tweaks
we need to make to the plan.
We'll wrap it up, we'll have a shiny version
that's done and it'll be finalized
for the foreseeable future.
And that's probably gonna be in March.
We'll have this project done
and then we'll see what kinda impact it has
and one we might need to pull together
the group in a year, two years or so,
and evaluate if we need changes.
And so, I think I'll let Mike Dummer talk now
about his participation in the plan as well.
- Thank you, Liz and Mike.
At this point in time,
I'd like to introduce Mike Dummer.
Mike is recently retired from, a retired member
of a four-generation multi-family
commercial farming operation.
The farming operation includes
a commercial composting operation, dairy heifers,
cash crops, and several grain elevators.
Mike has served on numerous state-level committees
and has recently completed three terms
with the DATCP Citizen Board.
Mike resides at home in Wisconsin where,
amongst other things, he's managing several hives himself.
- Thank you very much.
Good afternoon, everybody.
Thank you for staying, and thank you for caring.
I know that lunch is over
and there's an awful lot of people
who thought it a good idea to head for home
and I think that'd be hard to argue with that.
But again, thanks for caring and thanks for staying.
So, I wanna do a couple of things here this afternoon.
One, give some background and some clarification
on process on the development of the pollinator program.
You've all been in staff meetings,
you've all walked in, there's 20, 30,
40 people sitting around a table.
Everybody's gonna get a chance to speak
and say everything they want, right?
That's tough, unless you got 3 days.
And so, we had a facilitator in this process
and the facilitator done a really, really good job.
We all had an opportunity to speak.
People are people.
Some people are quick to get up and say what they think,
and other people you kinda get to drag it out of 'em.
But if you break people out into three-, four-,
five-, six-person groups, give 'em an opportunity to speak,
to write stuff down, say stuff
in the manner that they're comfortable with,
you will get good information
and we did get good information.
Everybody had an opportunity for input.
There was 30-plus stakeholders.
Everybody came with a reason and a cause.
And so, everybody had an opportunity.
I had the opportunity to represent
your Wisconsin Agribusiness Association,
and had an opportunity to represent it
from several different backgrounds.
So, very much appreciated that opportunity.
The information, as Mike said,
is going to be on the DATCP website.
I would urge you to take a look at it.
It's readily available.
It will have a lot of information,
as it should have a lot of information.
There'll be a lot of links.
I'll give you an opportunity
to go and find the information you want,
the specifics you want.
Or if you can, take the time,
read through the whole thing, great information.
I wanted to do a little research on my own
to find out what my local crop advisor knew,
so I called up Nate and said,
"Nate, where's this pollinator thing on your list?
"Where is it on your horizon?"
And he said, "Mike, it's pretty high.
"It's top of the mind stuff."
He said, "We go out to a farm,"
and I'm gonna tell you some of the stuff
that you already know right now,
but, "You go out to the farm, you sit down at the table,
"you make a sale of herbicide, pesticides,
"and the next thing they do is they fill out
"a list of information about what's on that farm
"that they need to know about when the applicator gets there.
"Who the neighbors are, are the neighbors Amish?
"Are the neighbors organic?
"Is there any beehives around? Is there any shrubbery?
"Is there things that they have to be mindful of
"when the applicator gets there?
"It goes right on an attachment onto the sales slip,
"so it goes right with the worksheet."
Struck me like a very, very good process.
The applicator then, they also checked DriftWatch
right away at the sale,
but they also check the DriftWatch
on the day of application.
So, and everybody knows that not everything goes as planned,
so maybe you get rained out
and you get forced to go to some different places.
Just about everybody these days
is carrying a smartphone.
So, you'll have access to DriftWatch in almost every case.
So, I felt some sense of assurance
that the bee hives are being watched over,
are being given some care and I was glad to hear that.
Couple of other things.
I also, as they mentioned,
a retired member of a farming operation.
I found out I was kind of a damn poor retiree,
so I didn't last very long not working.
So, it didn't take too long
and I was back working at an orchard in the area
where, for those of you,
orchards have a lot of insect issues.
We also have 15 beehives that it's our number one job
to keep them right-side-up as well
'cause we need them during the whole flowering process.
So, we do, the bulk of our insecticides
are put on in the dark in, at night.
The tractor really doesn't care.
The sprayer really doesn't care.
And it's just the operator that needs to get their mindset
in the place that dark and day doesn't really matter.
So, just for that as that point of information,
the bulk of our insecticides are put on at night.
And, we do have to bear in mind a little bit
that warm air rises and cold air don't.
So, maybe thinking about that if you're in the valleys
or on the hills and putting on insecticides
in terms of drift,
something we've had to pay a little more attention to
than we initially thought we were gonna have to.
And the last comment I wanna make,
and that's from the perspective of beekeeper,
what do you think my number one goal is
in terms of keeping bees?
Most people would say it's actually to get honey.
Actually, my number one goal as a beekeeper,
to try to keep them little critters alive.
The honey'll come if I can keep the bees alive.
And so, that's proven to be a much bigger challenge
than I first thought it was gonna be.
So, thank you and I think we're open for questions.
(applause)