- 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)