00:00:02 Speaker 1: Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. I'm your host, Lake Pickle. On this episode, we're going to learn about one of the most vital but commonly overlooked elements of our ecosystem, pollinators. Now, if you're sitting there thinking, man, that sounds awful lot like a beehive, well then I would say to you, that's a keen ear you got there, because it is definitely a beehive. And if you're also sitting there thinking it sure sounds like that, dude's awful close to it, then I would say, well, you might as well be an NHL goalie, because nothing's getting past you today. I am indeed very close to it. It's a beautiful mid July morning, roughly seven thirty am, and I am on a mission to learn more about pollinators and their vital role in our wild ecosystems. And I thought to myself, what better way to do that than get some hands on experience with the most widely known pollinator in all the land, the honey beee. 00:01:20 Speaker 2: So this is a this is a frame that you at hardest okay, because it is one hundred percent cap. 00:01:28 Speaker 1: Luckily for me, I didn't have to look far to get this experience. The mother of my wife's lifelong best friend, Miss Linda Easterling, has been beekeeping for the better part of a decade, and she was nice enough to have me over one morning, lend me a beekeeping suit and give me a crash course in this unique hobby. 00:01:47 Speaker 2: So when the nectar that they put in the seals is ready, they cap. 00:01:52 Speaker 3: It has to be a certain. 00:01:54 Speaker 2: Water content to it. 00:01:56 Speaker 3: Gotcha. 00:01:57 Speaker 2: When that wonderful content drops, then lay it's ready to cap. They know somebody's in the hive, so they are starting to store. They're loading up on honey in case something happens to their house. 00:02:10 Speaker 3: I see, sir, now, I don't know. 00:02:15 Speaker 2: How you can feel it with love hands. 00:02:20 Speaker 1: Miss Linda and I just opened up a beehive and now she is showing me a honeysuper that is ready to harvest. You'll be able to see this interaction fully on the YouTube video, but for my audio only listeners, imagine a rectangular box lined across with wooden slats that maybe have an inch spacing between each of them. These wooden slats are honeysupers. They match the box's length and depth and essentially provide framing for the bees to make and store honey. We pulled a fully capped super to get a closer look. The most shocking thing for me holding this in my hands, you know, besides the hundreds of bees flying around my head, was the weight of it. An empty Honeysuper weighs maybe three to four pounds, but this fully capped honeysuper weigh closer to thirty pounds. These bees had been busy, pun very much intended. 00:03:13 Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I would not expect it to be that heavy. Yea. 00:03:17 Speaker 2: So it's here. Isn't that amazing? How that's and since I am kind of messed it up a little bit, they're on your microphone too, you hear some jim buzzen. 00:03:26 Speaker 3: That's what I was hoping for. 00:03:28 Speaker 1: Can I Can I take this and hold it in front of the camera there? 00:03:33 Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, tostally honey honey production. 00:03:36 Speaker 3: Yea, easier to see the breard and that box. 00:03:39 Speaker 2: Go to that box. 00:03:41 Speaker 1: Once we get through looking at this full honeysuper, Miss Linda wants to show me a different, smaller hive that will have much less honey production and will allow us to see the brood. It was when we went to the next time that we had a little bit of excitement. 00:03:56 Speaker 2: That's the part and make people nervous when they're coming up with your veil, your kind. 00:04:01 Speaker 3: Of get seeded. One's in my veil. 00:04:03 Speaker 1: This then weird. 00:04:04 Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm gonna back up and let her out. 00:04:06 Speaker 1: Yep, you heard that correctly. A single bee has broken the force field and is now inside the veil of my bee suit. Thankfully, Miss Linda walked me through what to do in case this very thing happens. I'm supposed to back away from the hive, pull open my veil and calmly waft the bee out of there without getting stung. Is the key part of all this. Let's see how this goes. 00:04:28 Speaker 3: We're still down there. Yeah, if she hadn't stung me, come on, sweet to get out of there. 00:04:35 Speaker 1: She's right there. 00:04:36 Speaker 3: Say her bread. 00:04:39 Speaker 1: Here, I thought. 00:04:40 Speaker 3: I'm sorry, you can't relate. 00:04:42 Speaker 1: Despite our best attempts, we just can't seem to get this single bee to fly back out. And at that point is when we get another little dose of excitement. 00:04:52 Speaker 2: Won't chip almost has another one getting in now that one just got eat right right, turgoes wanting, but there goes one day. 00:05:03 Speaker 1: Then, unbeknownst to us, a few bees followed me over when I backed away from the hive, and when I opened the veil of my face mask up to let the bee out, more flew in. At one point I had three bees inside of my face net at once, and I am more than happy to report that I managed to get out of this small snaffoo with zero stings. The key component to all of this was just staying calm. Small side mission of this episode. I will always and forever have a soft spot for critters that are often misunderstood. And while the main premise of this episode is to explain why pollinators are of crucial importance to our landscape, I also want to rid the mindset of every bee U se is on a mission to sting you. They most definitely are not. At one point, one of those three bees landing right on top of my ear and it's still withheld fire. I think my point proves itself. I spent the rest of the time with Miss Linda, with no more bees inside my head net and taking a look into the rest of the bee hives. That she had on her property. And let me tell you, if you ever get to experience what I experienced that morning, you'll never wonder again where common terms like busy as a bee or that person's a regular worker bee comes from. These hives are constant work in motion, bees making and capping, honey bees constantly flying in and out of the hive. One of the coolest parts was watching some of the bees fly back into the hive with visible poland that they had collected and brought back to work for them. Really never stops. Big shout out to Miss Linda Easterling for giving me such a cool experience. If any of y'all ever get the chance to tag along with the bee keeper, I promise you it's worth your time. But let's zoom out on all of this. You may be sitting there wondering why I'm making such a big deal about pollinators and honey bees in particular. You've probably heard people mention that pollinators are important, but have you ever heard the ants than as to why. I've learned over the years that in many areas of wildlife and habitat management, the smaller the organism is, the easier it seems to be for us to overlook it, regardless of how important of a role it plays. So sit back, turn the volume up a notch, and listen in because you're about to learn how vital these little bugs are to not just our wildlife and wild places, but to our own health as well. I promised you this. At the very least, by the end of this episode, you'll never feel the same about going and picking up a jar of honey, that's for sure. Sarah Dant is an American historian that specializes in the environmental history of the American West. She's also a distinguished professor and experienced beekeeper, and the author of one of my new favorite books, Losing Eden. Truly, it's a fascinating read. Y'all should check it out. I want to open up the conversation with Professor Sarah Dant coming right out the gate with the fact about honey bees that most people don't know and are very surprised to learn. 00:08:06 Speaker 3: Honey bees in particular are unique. There were no native colony building bees in the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans. You know, you do have like small groups of bumblebees. They tend to live, but only in groups of like ten or fifteen. Nothing like the big honey producing palm building chives and colonies that you see with honey bees. Those are European bees that came over with Europeans. 00:08:37 Speaker 1: I'm sure y'all heard that the first time, but just in case you didn't, or you need to hear it again for the sake of making sure you heard it right, I'm going to repeat it for y'all. Honey Bees one of the most famous insects in the entire country, one of the few bugs that proliferate themselves in American pop culture by being mentioned in nursery rhymes, folklore, and song lyrics. Are not native to America. So how did they get here? Did the European settlers bring them here? On purpose? 00:09:05 Speaker 3: Absolutely? They did, absolutely brought bees. Because you think about it, some of the most addictive substances that we know of are sugar and salt, and sugar is not naturally occurring in any kind of great quantity commodity in the natural world. It's one of the reasons we crave it because it's such a great source of energy, and we forget that nowadays. You know, with high fruit toase, corn syrup and Halloween and soda pop and McDonald's, we forget that if you think about it, in nature, sugar is really rare. And so when people I mean, and we're talking about people as far back as Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, they're cultivating bees because bees make honey, and honey is delicious, and if sugar is a rare commodity, then you want to do whatever you can to facilitate your access to it. So when Europeans came to the Americas, starting with the Pilgrims, are really who we think are one of the first groups to bring honey bees with them. Absolutely, they deliberately brought them because they wanted to bring with them that wonderful, rare source of sugar. But bees being bees, they swarmed and moved away from human habitation into the wild. So you have both. You have wild bees and you have kept domestic bees by colonists, and they're so successful that native people actually call them English flies because they absolutely associated the presence of honeybees with the arrival of Europeans. 00:11:02 Speaker 1: That really is some wild information we just got there. Humans have been colonizing bees for the collection of honey for thousands of years, with evidence dating back to the ancient Egyptians. Bees were so successful when they were brought to the Americas by the European settlers that native Americans referred to them as English flies. And here's one factor I want to focus on next. In that last bit, you heard Professor Dant use the term swarming. Her exact words were they swarmed and moved away from human habitation. That fact is very important to the whole point of this story. And let's break down the many reasons why a swarm of bees is oftentimes brought up in a negative connotation, usually associated with people getting attacked, stone and all sorts of other horrors, when in fact, bees swarms serve a very specific purpose that has nothing to do with such horrors, and I think we should learn what that actually is. 00:11:55 Speaker 3: Well, one of the things that I think some people may be familiar with is a bee swarm and why do bees swarm? What does it mean? All of that? To me, that's that's really interesting, and it's it's one of the for me, it was always one of the great teaching moments when I would get a call for a swarm, because actually what I did was I gave my name and number to a couple of pest control companies and the nine one one people, because people would either call them and say, oh my god, you're gonna come spray these bees, or they would call nine one one, oh my god, we were being invaded. And fortunately all those groups would say, okay, let me give you somebody a call, and so I would I would go out and get the swarm. And it was a great opportunity to interact with people who were completely freaked out that there was this big wad of bees in the tree in their yard and here's this girl with no gloves on and a veil just kind of walk out there in jeans and not freak out at all with efty thousand bees buzzing around, and yeah, it sort of makes you feel like superhero. So what happens is in a hive, they'll get really two crowded. They've been successful, they're too many bees in a hive. They need to split up. So the queen that's in the hive will take a portion of the bees and they'll fly usually somewhere within one hundred yards or so of the hive itself. So when you see a big, you know, basketball of bees, what you're seeing is solid bees, and in the middle is the queen. They're all around her. She's in the middle, and they're just hanging out, usually literally in a tree, and they've got scouts going out all over the kind of side looking for a new home. In the meantime, in the hive, they have started the process of making a new queen. And you have to feed baby bees a certain substance called royal jelly, and if you keep feeding it to them, don't grow into queens. You can only have one queen in a hive, and so whicheverone comes out first, goes through the hive, finds every other ges stating queen and kills her. So I'm number one and that's it, and then she becomes the new queen. But at that point she's infertile. So the swarm is up in the tree with the original queen, a lot of bees, and at this point they're they're most vulnerable. They're also pretty easy to manipulate because they don't have anything to lose except the queen. So if you've ever seen the thing where somebody does like a beard of bees, that's what they're doing. They're messing around with a swarm they don't have a hive, they don't have honey, they don't have brood, they have nothing that they need to protect. So they're up in a tree. They've got scouts going out looking for a good place to go. And when one of the scouts comes back and says, I found it. This is the place. Bring them young, like, this is the place we got to go, then they all fly and so if you've ever seen a swarm, it's pretty exciting. In a tree, they're just kind of up there like a basketball. But then when they decide to go, they all go, and the din is incredible. It's really loud. They're all moving, and then they'll be gone. So the moral of that story is if you see a swarm, you don't have to panic because they're not gonna stay. They're looking for a new place and that the most they're gonna be there for two or three days. They don't have food, they don't have water. They're sending people out to get that, but they don't have that, so their motivation is to find a new house. 00:16:06 Speaker 1: Important honey bee fact number one, and it's mainly tied to a function bees swarm when they're trying to move to a new home or a new hive might be a better term. And we heard earlier that bees were so successful when brought to the Americas that they swarmed and left places of human habitation. And here's why that's interesting. Think briefly back to the last episode on Mississippi Black Bears, right, Remember the historical record we read from the book by James T. McCafferty. It had a documented Delta pioneer making use of wild honey in the eighteen hundreds. Think about that for a second. I don't know about y'all, but that leads me to ask the question, how quickly can these tiny bugs spread? 00:16:48 Speaker 3: Probably the Pilgrims bring bees with them. I don't think the Spanish conquesitors did, who would have come before that. But the first Pilgrims come in Jamestown is in the early sixteen hundreds, and we do know that by the eighteen fifties their bees in California. So it just does not take very long at all for them to move, and to move pretty efficiently and quickly across the continent. 00:17:18 Speaker 1: Not only is a swarm the bees function for spreading, but it's an incredibly efficient function for spreading By that quick math. It means that honey bees managed to cover the entire country from east to west in around two hundred and fifty years time. And when you think about how tiny those bugs are, that's quite an impressive feat. But now we have to address why that's important. 00:17:41 Speaker 3: I think the way we could sort of sum up what we're going to talk about here today is like this, pollinators need you, and you need pollinators. When we're talking about pollinators, we're talking about a really broad group of insects and even small mammals, of which bees are certainly but you know, bats are pollinators, birds are pollinators, there's bees, there's other kinds of insects, all kinds of animals pollinate. They are so essential and that basic service that they provide accounts for one out of every three bytes of food that one of us takes. So you think about that the next time you're at a meal and you go, okay, one bite of food, two bye of food, third bite, you have to say thank you pollinator. Every third byte of food you have to be saying, man, thank you pollinator. That's how essential they are to the world around us. And they're not charismatic megafonn it you know. So if you get an elk or a bear or something like that, people want to type it this is a bug, and it's a bug that stings you sometimes. So it's one of those really essential things that people just k a take for granted that Well, of course I have fruits and vegetables and various cooking oils, and you don't ever really stop to think, so what made that possible? And the answer is if it came from something that flowers or makes seeds, it needed a pollinator to make that happen. You need pollinators because without them, suddenly most of the food in the world is going to get shut off. 00:19:33 Speaker 1: Okay, so we now know that honeybees and all pollinators are important to us, and it truly affects everything facilitating plant reproduction, food reproduction, agriculture, biodiversity, wild plant success, and ecosystem health. As you can imagine, this affects a whole lot, from something as large as row crop yields to something as specific as the deer hunting quality on your property. And that's no joke. But here's where the story or it gets deeper and more nuanced. You already, I hope. So because we're diving in. One of the first big and interesting facts we learned about honeybees is that they were not a native species to North America. And most of the time, not always, but most of the time, when you hear a story about an exotic species being brought to North America, it commonly ends with a negative outcome. But that's not the case with honeybees. And why is that. 00:20:32 Speaker 3: Made of pollinators in particular have been suffering for the last one hundred years. I would say a lot of that has to do with again development, agricultural expansion. You used to pesticides and other kinds of poisons. But you know, it's really hard when the plants that they evolve to pollinate are not there, not there because we we've mowed them down, we've plowed over them, we've paved over them, or you know, again going back to this idea of climate change, as the earth warms up, we're seeing plant regimes moving. And when those plant regimes move, the pollinators don't necessarily know to go with them. It's it may be too far to fly, it may be all of those things. And if it's warming, sometimes those plants are blooming earlier than they used to before the pollinator has typically whatever hatched out or moved into the area. So we have these miskined bloom and fertilization issues that are the consequence of climate change. And again we don't even think about those kinds of things. But several species of native bumblebees, for example, have declined in geographic range and their numbers in the last twenty years. I think I talked about in my book. For Western states now no longer have bumblebees. Idaho, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Oregon they don't have bumblebees. Bumblebees were native to the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans. Now they're gone completely in those states, and that matters because the native plants that they co evolved with now don't have this fundamentally important elevator to go with them. And so honey bees, in particular, the number of highs in the America is just, you know, to sort of ball park it. Between the nineteen forties and now, the number of managed hives has dropped by about half. And that's in part because it's really straining to be a bee keeper, even a hobby bee keeper. Since about two thousand and six, as I wrote about in my book, there is this phenomenon that scientists called colony collapse disorder or CCD, and they're mystified by it, not quite sure what causes it. Is it pathogens, is it parasites, Is it pesticides? But and we don't know. It could be again this kind of perfect storm of all of them coming together. But what it means is that every year, on the order of one third to one half and sometimes as much as seventy five percent of domestic bee hives don't make it every year. And it's it just breaks your heart. You know, you go out, you work your bees. One week in Likember, the hive is thriving. You've got brood, you've got a queen, they've got honey. Everything is good. And two weeks later to go out to check on your high and there's nothing there. They're just gone. And they can't leave in late September, that's not when they swarm. They're not going to be able to make a hive, gather enough food get themselves through the winter. So they're all going to die. But they don't die at your hives. They're just they're just gone. 00:24:46 Speaker 1: So why are we so focused in celebrating the success of the honeybee, a non native insect, because our native pollinators have been severely depleted. Some studies show up to one fifth of our North American pollinators and an elevated risk of extinction. And honey bees aren't exactly thriving right now either. So what are the implications of this? Is there anything we can do to combat it? And honestly, why isn't it being talked about more? I run into this, especially also when we were talking about quail. It does seem like, you know, talking about it being you know, them not being charismagmatic megafauna. There has to be some sort of connection there, because it's like the smaller the object, the smaller it seems in like objective life, Like there's not people interacting with honey bees or bumble bees every day, and so they're easy to forget about because they're so small, and it's not it's not all the time in front of us how beneficial they are to us in our environment. And the thing is like one of the biggest eye opening things for me and I even you know, I knew what pollinators were. I knew that bees played a huge role in our ecosystem, and an ecosystem, health and native plans. But I other think for me was being able to actually see it right. And the first time that I saw it was a place that I get to go to just about every year in South Florida, in the Mayaka Prairie. And man, it's gonna sound like I'm indulging the story a little bit. When you go to a place like that, like they like they have bees, they produce honey off that's called my Aka Prairie honey. My friends at black Beard's Ranch put it out. It's it's great stuff, obviously, but it's not just the bees. Like that whole area like is permeated and it's just teeming with life. The plants. There's gopher tortoises, there's turkeys, there's ephemeral wetlands, and there's ducks in there. There's all sorts of water birds and it just all like congruently works with one another. The instant issue that I see there is I'm like, man, I know what this does to me when I see it, But you can't how do you get everybody to see that? You can't walk everybody in the world, and everybody that dwells in the cities and everybody that doesn't know this stuff, you can't walk them out to a prayer like that and go see. I wish you could, but you can't. 00:27:13 Speaker 3: Well, and I think you're onto a really important idea and it's something that you know. I certainly see that you're doing with this entire podcast, which is people care about what they know, but sometimes they don't know what to pay attention to and why what they see might matter. And so when people can know more about something as simple as a honeybee or a pollinator bee, then this start looking for it. And once you pay attention, you see it. It's like when you learn a new word and then all of a sudden, oh my god, the thing is everywhere. It's just that you weren't paying attention before. And so the great thing about pollinators and honey bees in particulars you can see them anywhere. You can see them out on a prairie, you can see him right in downtown where you are, and if you don't see them, that ought to be a good indicator that something's off here. Bees and pollinators in general are really good ecosystem indicators. They're the ones who tell you this is working or it's not working, And I'll add my little anecdote to your story. I got to go to Central Park in New York City a few years ago, and it was in the spring, and I mean the park was just erupting in bloom, and the host that we were with was just exclaiming about, Oh, this is so wonderful and it's nature in the city and da da da da da. So I was under a crab apple tree and it was a it must have been one hundred and fifty years old. It was huge into the air, the branches draped all the way to the ground, and I was surrounded by pink. The air was pink because of all the blooms, and there was not a bee to be heard. There was not and that thing should have just been humming. So I'm at our place in Phoenix right now, and in the backyard is an alverti tree that was just blooming, covered in yellow flowers, and I mean, there's a din from the bees up in that tree. It should have been like that, but it was in the middle of Central Park, and so I thought, yeah, it looks like nature, but it's not complete nature, because you're missing this really essential player. And so when people start to pay attention, just like you're talking to When you pay attention, you realize, man, that is so cool, look at this one. And then when you pay attention you realize, Okay, there's six different kinds of things working on these flowers. It isn't all just a bee. It's lots of different things. So yeah, I'd love to encourage people to pay attention because when you do, you learn, and when you learn, you care. 00:30:27 Speaker 1: If you haven't caught on yet, one thing that I really like to do when someone drops some seriously good information on us is to key in on one or two phrases that stick with me. Professor Dant said, people care about what they know, and to pay attention because when you do, you learn, and when you learn, you care. I can tell you from a quick personal anecdote. When my wife Lacy and I bought the home that we currently reside in, it, like many other homes, consisted of a front and back laan made up of completely exotic plants that offered little to no value you to any sort of wildlife, and in the springtime, when all of it was in bloom, it was void of any bugs, birds, or really anything living besides the plants themselves. In the past few years, I've gotten rid of many of those exotics and planted some native pollinator plants like butterfly weed, blazing star, eastern cone flower, prairie flocks, and partridge peas. And let me tell you something, it's borderline silly how happy I get when I walk outside or look through the window and see a beer moth buzzing around those plants. It's a lot easier to appreciate and love something when you understand it. I want to round this episode off by letting Professor Dant give us her opinion on the future of pollinators here in the US, as well as things that we can all do to help preserve them. And if it's all right with y'all, I then want to go back to the beehives with Miss Linda. 00:31:57 Speaker 3: So, now that we know there's a problem, how do we address it? And a good place to start is with paying attention, where we actually consciously look for the pollinators that are all around us, and we think about what can I do to make a difference. And I think a lot of people get really frustrated because they think, oh my god, all these problems are so huge, and I don't know how to solve them. And it's like, look, I'm going to give you a get out of jail free card. You do not have to solve climate change the loss of pollinators. You didn't single handedly cause them, so therefore you don't have to solve them. But the idea is each of us does our part. It's what I like to call the triumph of the commons, because when we each do our part, then collectively we make a real difference. And so it starts with paying attention and caring about what you know. Pollinator Week is sponsored by pollinator dot org and so you can go to their website and they have all kinds of different resources for people who are interested in pollinators, just you know, a little bit or maybe a lot, and they're very committed to this idea of providing information for people whose livelihoods depend on the land. So if you're a farmer or you're a rancher, this is not, oh, you guys are the bad guys. Far from it. It's how do we integrate pollinator planning into healthy agriculture, sustainable ranching, farming, that kind of thing. And they also have just planting for pollinators coming up with what are the native plants that are from this region. And if you don't know, this website has maps and ecozones that can tell you about that. But you can plant for pollinators. You can reduce or even eliminate your use of past the sides and herbicides. But I would say another thing that a lot of people don't think about is supporting your local beekeepers. I mean, most of us live in places where there's a farmer's market, and most of us have people who show up with a farmer's market who are selling honey. Man, if you have never had local honey, you're in for a real treat. And it depends on the time of year that you buy it. The honey that I would collect in the spring would be this really light, thin, I realize this sounds redundant, but very sweet honey because it was all of the fruit trees that were blooming. But then in the late summer when I would collect and the bees were on the rabbit brush, the chinisa, the sage brush that is like a dark amber beer, is really almost spicy, is delicious and added bonus if you suffer from allergies from any of the things that are blooming in your area. If you get local honey that was harvested roughly at the time that whatever makes you sneeze was blooming, it acts as kind of a natural antihistamine and helps you not sneeze. And we so much I like to tell people to do their best to buy local, support local farmers, local ranchers, people who are doing good, honest, sustainable work on the land itself. Those are the kinds of people who deserve our support. 00:35:39 Speaker 1: Plant a few cone flowers in your flower bed, buy local honey from the farmer's market, and just pay a little more attention to the world around us. That little bit of effort from each of us could really make a difference. And just to heads up some of the most beneficial and popular land management practices like prescribe burning helps promote native plants that help pollinators as well. To wrap this up, like I mentioned earlier, I want to go back to the bee hives with Miss Linda as we watched honey bees come and go from the hive carrying in new pollen to make honey. That's crazy to me that that little bit'd bee will range out. 00:36:20 Speaker 2: Three miles two to three miles. 00:36:24 Speaker 3: That's wild. 00:36:24 Speaker 2: Hangding on what they're after. So they're out working something. Yeah, and we may be able to see them bringing. 00:36:31 Speaker 1: Pollen in. 00:36:34 Speaker 2: Thought that one Randon had some, so something is blaming and that's one of the things that you look at in the springtime to make sure they're bringing in honey, I mean or pollen. 00:36:45 Speaker 3: That one right there, they just went in there, had yellow all over him. 00:36:50 Speaker 2: Like a bright yellow, and just fascinating little little creatures. 00:36:55 Speaker 3: That's cool. 00:36:56 Speaker 1: Fascinating little creatures indeed indispensable ones as well. I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University as well as Bear Grease in this country life. And I want to give a big shout out to onex Hunt for making this podcast possible. If you like this episode, share it with the buddy or even a family member that you don't like that much. They probably could benefit from a good podcast episode anyway, and stick around because if this podcast was a beehive, the honey is only gonna get sweeter. We'll see y'all next time.