Episode 3 - Helpers: Insects

MB = Michelle K Berry

EW = Emily Wakild

MH = Molly Hunter

MB 0:00

Hello, my name is Michelle Berry.

EW:

And I'm Emily Wakild, and we are your hosts for More Than: a Podcast. We're both historians, but before you push stop, let us explain what kind of history we study. We're both environmental historians.

MB: 0:18

Oh dear, Emily, I'm not sure that that makes us seem any more interesting. How about this instead? Basically, we tell stories about the past and try to make sure that our stories include animals, plants, bugs, dirt, weather, and the like. And we have created this podcast to convince you that history and even nature are more than you ever thought they were.

EW: 0:42

We also both live and work in the U.S. Mountain West. Think of the region connected by the Rocky Mountains, where we've spent most of our lives. We met in graduate school and we've been friends for almost 25 years. In this podcast, we bring you stories about different parts of the ecosystems that you can find throughout the U.S. Mountain West, from the Sonoran Desert, where Michelle lives, to the Northern Rockies, where I live.

MB: 1:06

These stories have fascinating historical components and connections to contemporary issues. In addition to hopefully showing you how much more history can be, we also call the podcast More Than, because unlike typical history, we're going to put the morethanhuman at the center of each episode.

EW: 1:25

We are convinced that once you hear about the power the more than human has had in the past, you will love history and nature even more than you do now.

MB: 1:38

Now, each of the topics we have chosen has many histories, so we're only picking a few to focus on in each episode. But for many of the episodes, we'll also have a special guest or two to tell us even more about that particular topic. Join us as we explore more than you could ever expect to in a podcast about the environment and history.

Welcome to episode three, Helpers. In this episode, we will be discussing historical insects in the Mountain West. Now, we know that insects are all around us. It's hard not to see one on any given day. But we suspect that if some folks had it their way, that would not be the case. And we think that's largely because of a cultural fear and a misunderstanding of insects. Rather than learning how important insects are for life on Earth, many of us learn early about how scary and destructive insects are. We are taught to fear spiders, termites, bees, and any host of what Western culture actually calls creepy crawlies. In this episode, we want to rethink some stories about historical insects in ways that might help us understand how they are more than simply pests. And we think after you've listened, you may agree with us that insects can also truly help us to understand how human history is more than human. In fact, nothing we do would be possible without insects. We don't want to bug you with too many scientific details. Get it, bug you? But we do want to start by talking about what insects are. An

MH: 3:16

insect is an animal that has three body parts, six legs. That's how you recognize an insect.

MB: 3:25

That is Molly Hunter. She's an entomologist. Fancy word for insect scientist. And her favorite insects are parasitic wasps. She studies them in her lab at the University of Arizona. And we decided she was the best person to ask, why insects? She explained that before she became an entomologist, she was actually an entomophobic.

MH: 3:47

You know, I overcame, came my entomophobia when I learned about parasitic wasps. So parasitic wasps are just way cool. There are a zillion of them. There's probably a million species of parasitic wasp and they have these wild lifestyles and do all sorts of things. And so I've been working on one parasitic wasp that attacks one species. group of parasitic wasps that attack white flies since I was a graduate student. And they're a millimeter long. They have a stinger, but they don't sting humans. They're the size of a period on a printed page. And they have a very fascinating biology.

MB: 4:26

Now during our chat, after she waxed poetic about the teeny tiny wasps that she has literally devoted her life to, she explained to us why insects are so cool.

MH: 4:37

Among described species of animals, 75% of them are insects. So for every single species of mammal, and when we think of animals, we often think about kind of the soft, furry mammals. For every species of mammal, there are 200 species of insects. We don't notice them because Most of them are not bothering us at all. And we're a prisoner of our scale. We're some of the largest animals and most insects are among the smallest.

MB: 5:14

Now, many of the stories that we tell about insects in the Mountain West are about how they interfere with human aims. They devour crops. They eat structures. They can even carry disease. But Dr. Hunter would encourage us to understand that insects are are more than all of that?

MH: 5:33

Very, very, very few of insects are pests. Most insects are, a lot of them have nothing to do with us. They're living their best lives, doing their own thing. But then a lot of insects are critical for us as humans. Insects are decomposers. If we didn't have insects that were decomposing dead things, dead animals and dead plants, there'd be all this stuff lying around, dying, dead stuff that's just sitting around for a long time. Pollination. If we didn't have insect pollinators, a third of our crops are insect pollinated. And so we really rely on those, on bees, but also other pollinators. And then another big thing is a lot of the insects that are pests have predators and parasites that attack them. And so they're also allies in controlling pests.

MB: 6:32

When we asked Dr. Hunter for a story that shows something other than adversarial relationships between humans and insects, she reminded us of the cottony cushion scale. Okay, we admit, we have never in our lives thought about the cottony cushion scale, so it wasn't really a reminder, but she did inform us about them. Listen to what she has to say.

MH: 6:54

There was an insect pest called the cottony cushion scale, and it was an incredible pest on citrus. Really, the first case of biological control in the US was when someone went to Australia, where the cottony cushion scale was originally from, and introduced a very specialized predator of the cottony cushion scale called the Vidalia beetle, and introduced it to the United States. Since then, more than 100 years ago, the cottony cushion scale is not a pest. It doesn't require any pesticides. The Vidalia beetle is still there. And when the cottony cushion scale becomes, you know, the population spilled, the Vidalia beetle comes and eats it. So that's just one example where insects are, well, in this case, there's a pest, but there's also an ally of ours.

MB: 7:53

Like the cottony cushion scale, insects in the Mountain West are essential to life and to history. So let's make like a grasshopper and jump right in to episode three, helpers.

MB: 8:08

Hi, Em!

BOTH: 8:11

hi! how are you? doing great. How are you? I'm doing great.

MB:

So, you know, we just heard from my friend, the extraordinary Molly Hunter about how insects are more than pests. So it's fun that we're here in, in episode three. And I think we, you and I both know that they are more than pests, but also today we want to talk about how they are also more than just, you know, in present in our lives. They have a lot of history to them.

EW: 8:41

Absolutely. But before we move on from the pest part, can I just say that my least favorite insect is a mosquito? I don't think they really have any purpose. I mean, the buzzing and the biting and the disease they carry, it's so annoying. There's a lot of history there, probably more important history around the mosquito than maybe any other sort of tropical insect. But we're not talking about the negative contributions of insects. We're going to talk about the beneficial ones. So we're going to set the annoying mosquitoes aside. And I think one of the ideas that Molly brought up that really resonates with me deeply is the sheer numbers of them. And that's one way that they're more than human communities, right? It's mind-blowing to think about the scale of hundreds of millions of insects being equivalent to a mammal or a tree, right? And also how focused they are on accomplishing the same thing. Like the same little task. And how the millions and millions of pieces of effort really add up across that individual thing and that's part of why there's so many variations of them - like millions of kinds of beetles doing similar but slightly different things and when we think about other animals right we can think about generalists like deer or raccoons that have lots of places where they can thrive, lots of habitats, lots of niches, lots of ways where they can be generally compatible, especially with humans and human life ways in urban, suburban, rural areas. But insects have very basic needs and they do their thing over and over really fast. Their generational cycles can be weeks. And thinking about that alongside human communities is kind of mind-blowing from a historical perspective because insects make history when they get moved out of their original place and get relocated largely by people and often on accident.

MB: 10:55

And also they make history because I think when they move is when we notice them, right? And so like the imported red fire ant is a great example because it's not in the consciousness of Southern U.S. farmers until the 1920s when it arrives on a ship from Latin America. And then, you know, that little darn ant has been making history ever since. And when they do their thing... whatever the thing is and wherever they do it, they're really powerful. And so in many ways they become more than just insects, they become cultural symbols, especially the Mormon crickets, which we'll talk about in just a second. There are insect symbols on petroglyphs from indigenous peoples in the past. So we know how much cultural weight ideas and understandings and stories about insects carry.

EW: 11:50

And they're also partners in the sense that some insects have produced some of the most valuable, intimate pieces of human material. Shellac bugs are another one. And they produce this kind of polish that's used on records and on furniture. And even...

MB:

Wait, I had no idea that that came from a bug. Is that really?

EW: Yes, totally. Before they were petroleum-based and synthetic kinds of polish, it all, to make things shine, that came from shellac bugs.

MB: [laughing] I should have read our show notes. That's really cool.

EW: 12:50

Yeah, absolutely! And so there's this like accidental partnership around detecting when someone died, which is fascinating.

MB: 13:29

So now, now our podcast has moved into the true crime sphere, which is really, you know, that's what everybody wants to listen to. So don't say we didn't do it listeners. You know what else I was thinking about? I'm on these, I'm obsessed with bugs and I am on a couple of different groups on, I know this is dating myself, but on Facebook and they are fabulous. And what's really funny is people will post pictures of a carpet beetle and they'll be freaked out that it's a bed bug. And so they'll post it and they'll say, please tell me this isn't what I think it is, meaning bed bugs. And then the administrators who are actual entomologists and are brilliant are like, no, it's just a carpet beetle. It's very funny. Sorry, that was a tangent. Keep going!

EW: 14:09

I love it! Well, so they're partners, right? On these like really discreet tasks, but they're also these amazing political metaphors.

MB: 14:39

Speaking of bugs making history - they also make movies, turns out. And I don't know if you ever saw Ants, the movie. It used to be one of my all time favorites. And in preparation for the recent chapter that I'm writing with you in the Oxford project, I rewatched the movie because I thought, oh, maybe I want to talk about Ants, the movie. And it's really funny because it kind of starts out as this socialist discussion of of ants and their behavior and then takes us into individualism and whatever. But we could go on forever in a cultural analysis of that movie. But how cool that they are also like culturally in our mainstream consciousness.

EW: 15:26

Yes. And where that sort of organization invokes an alternative, it's often an insect-based alternative, right? But they're amazing helpers too. And pollination is probably the most crucial piece. Our agricultural systems would collapse without insects to serve as pollinators. They provide pleasure, right? You're a tea drinker, Michelle, just like I am. And tea without honey is incomplete. Absolutely my favorite sweetener. But the lengths at which people would go to get honey before sugar was a ubiquitous part of our diet are really kind of fascinating. And this is another example of partnership, right? One of my favorite examples of this, the historian of South Africa, Nancy Jacobs, has written about, and it has to do with a bird native to South Africa, the greater honey guide. And it's called a honey guide because the bird literally guides humans to bees' nests so they can get honey. And the bird's not just like providing a service for humans because it's been trained, but the bird eats wax and larvae out of the bee's nest and the humans get the honey. And so this partnership and cooperation relies on the bird leading humans to the beehive and then the humans opening it with their hands or with smoke or sort of cracking it out of the tree. And neither the bird or the human are dependent on each other, but they both benefit from that collaboration. The bees don't so much, right? They get to start over.

MB: 17:00

That's what I was just thinking. I was like, God, I'm feeling sorry for the bees right now.

EW:

But it's a neat way to think about more than human relationships that either include or don't include other groups of animals.

MB:

We can't talk about all of them, but there are these those certain species that capture our imagination and that really lead us to thinking about the ways in which the more than human creates worlds, quite literally, right? They make up 80% of all known species. So just there, just as you said, numerically, they're so profound. And then as Dr. Hunter explained, we hardly ever see most of them. And an example of an invisible insect that has been hugely powerful and world-making is the mountain pine beetle. And I know we both, you and I both love forests and we spend a lot of time in them and we have a deep appreciation for to use a term that I don't love, "the ecological services" that they provide. You know, we recognize that. We understand that they also provide deep spiritual and recreational benefits to a lot of people. And of course, homes to lots of animals, et cetera. And so as we've witnessed kind of the epidemic of the mountain pine beetle, it's been hard. It's been, I think, sort of, you know, almost grief inducing and me, especially because I unfortunately got to really witness the decline of Colorado forests that became terribly infested with this beetle 20 plus years ago, especially in the central Rockies, right around Frisco and Breckenridge and sort of that I-70 corridor. And, according to the USDA, the mountain pine beetle and the fungus that it carries have impacted trees all along more than 1,200 miles of trails, 4,600 miles of road, and...acres of developed recreation sites, and that's over 6.3 million acres of forests in Montana, Colorado, southeastern Wyoming. And these pine beetles, these spruce beetles, they attack two different different kinds of trees, obviously, but they still work in the same way. They attack the trees in these large numbers and then they overcome the tree's defenses. And are you, I don't remember when I was up visiting you a few years ago, is it, are you seeing a lot of this in Idaho forests as well?

EW: 19:55

Oh yeah, they're coming here too. And you know, it's slower, but they're definitely here. And once you know what it looks like to see a stand of trees that's been infected, it's hard not to notice the slow spread across the landscape because the pine needles go from green to brown and it almost looks like these evergreen trees are turning fall colors, but they never turn back.

MB: 20:21

Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. And when you look at it, you can sort of think, it's almost pretty that the color, you know, the green and then that kind of weird rusty red is interspersed throughout. But then, like I was saying in the Central Rockies, there was this moment that there was no more green and it was shocking. And then, you know, as we began to understand that it's the tunneling beneath the bark by the adult beetles and their larvae that really disrupts the food, the movement of the food. I always forget. It's the phloem or the xylem. I don't remember, but whatever. The part of the tree where the food is moving and also water. It can also create sort of exacerbate drought conditions for trees. And so that whole process is the combination of the fungus and the beetles stopping the natural processes of the trees and that's what results in the tree's death. And there's lots of theories about why the epidemic has happened, but we know for sure that one of the contributing factors is too warm of winters. The beetles are not dying off in the winter. And then drought conditions have really exacerbated this issue. And, you know, of course, like all things in ecology, the beetles have their natural predators. So there's birds that eat them and there's parasitic wasps, you know, like Dr. Hunter's talking about. Those parasitic wasps are some of the most powerful beings in the world is what I've decided. We don't even know that they exist really for the most part. Anyway, so there are things that will eat the beetles, but man, when they get going in the numbers that they have done, especially in the central Rockies, those natural enemies, just can't keep up. And then we see the kind of epidemic proportions that we've been seeing in the forest in the last 20 years.

EW: 22:11

Well, and that's exacerbated by climate change, right? And as you said, the lack of the winter, the lack of the hard freeze enough to is curtail the insect spread. There's been a lot of research done on treatment and management, sort of how you can thin a stand of trees and remove the infected trees or take out the slash and the branches to stop the spread. But the challenge there is that might be true on your five acres that are privately owned. But when you think across the 46,000 acres that the Forest Service manages, those aren't intensively managed in the sense that you can extract where insects have infected at any meaningful scale. So it's also a really wicked problem in that sense because of the climate change and the need for intensive management in order to slow it down.

MB: 23:07

And you know, it's funny because what's really interesting is that this, the beetle, which I didn't know, I think I used to always understand it to be that the, the beetle itself was doing most of the harm, but in fact, the fungus that it brings also is important. It plays an important role in all of this and the beetle and the fungus have a symbiotic relationship with each other. And so that's kind of cool. And, you know,

EW: 23:31

absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And that's a great example of the insect helping the fungus do its own thing. So, so the, The beetles are the helpers of this other organism. It's just not a human-centered one, right? And so they're crucial to help that fungus survive, but it gets in the way of our aesthetic appreciation of the forest, our uses of the forest, but it sure makes the fungus happy.

MB: 24:01

Yeah, that's right. And that's, again, that's just that cool way of thinking about, to use a big term, positionality, right? But just basically perspective. It depends on the position you're in as to how different kinds of things look. And if we're human-centric or maybe even if we were to think about some of the mammals that make the forest their home or the birds that need the trees for nesting and et cetera, I think most perspectives lead us to bemoan the beetle-killed forests. But if you take it from the perspective of the fungus, maybe not such a terrible thing. And then another way of kind of rethinking some of these things in a turn we may not have foreseen, the fungus creates these blue streaks in the wood that a lot of people find really beautiful. And you can see a picture of the wood on our website. And oddly enough, this fungal death machine has kind of inspired a new kind of industry. And the technical name I think is sustainable lumber. But it's so fascinating to think about the ways in which it's disturbing to see millions of acres of dead forests. And we witnessed that death and we mourn that death. We viscerally understand the power of these beetles. But then you pause and you think, well, they're doing all of that. And they're also creating a demand for a brand new kind of beautiful wood that completely changes an entire industry and demands that humans pay attention to forests in a way perhaps we never did before.

EW: 25:34

It almost sounded like you were describing artists, right? Which is this whole different way of thinking about them as helpers. They create beauty. They create pleasure, which I think is super, super interesting. There is a brilliant book about insects, the history of insects in particular, that came out in 2020. So it was lost when we were all talking about viruses and were sort of distracted with other things. But Edward Melillo wrote a book called The Butterfly Effect. And in this, he reminds us that humans fear insects, that there's all of these depictions of swarms of creepy crawlies that are villains in all of these stories and movies, but that the tiny creatures that, as you've said, make up the majority of our living world are actually factories for so much of what animates the modern world. But they're invisible, as Dr. Hunter mentioned, but they're invisible sort of from our culture in that way. But they contribute fabrics and dyes and foods and cosmetics and pharmaceuticals and even art that you just described. And so insects sustain so much of what we think of as modern even though they've had these deeply historical contributions that have really been under-recognized. And I think one of the most important lessons of that is the ways they've created these elaborate partnerships that are far more common than the hostile, sort of scary, creepy, crawly, villainous ones that are much more recent. And so Malilo's book, which is titled The Butterfly Effect, borrows from this idea from the 1970s, where Edward Lorenz, a pioneer of chaos theory, suggested that small causes in the ecological world could have really large effects on a global scale. And he posed the question, does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? And this was an idea that allowed people to envision the ways that small things rule the world and really shape its complexity. And the ways we're all connected, whether it's through meteorological cycles or through sort of the biological processes, but really kind of in that awakening post-1960s of an ecological consciousness was this idea of the butterfly effect. And it also gives us this opening to appreciate the contributions insects have made to history that are in direct resistance to or opposition from this idea that all nature has been commodified or has served humans as some kind of extractive resource. And so, for example, silk, like we talked about a few minutes ago, was so expensive in part because it was so rare. And silk moths could not be cultivated in industrial ways that maximize their growth. And same could be true for sort of other products, if you will, that insects provided. They were, by their very nature, rare and so desirable by elites.

MB: 28:49

Yeah, that's amazing. And to think about, I mean, I always love the butterfly effect, the whole notion of... from Lorenz about the fact that any little thing that we do has larger ramifications. You know, you think about throwing a pebble in a lake and then the ripple effect of that. It's all conceptually really interesting to me. And here's another really, speaking of flapping wings and being connected with human beings and really driving, not just, you know, economies of scale, not just driving as you said, commodification, but even creating myth, creating legends and stories. And I think one of my favorite stories from the Mountain West about insects is the cricket war that is connected to the Mormon crickets, Anabras simplex. And it was the cricket war of 1848. And I'm excited because we've talked a little bit about how Utah was not getting as much attention from us in the podcast. We're like in Idaho and Arizona and a little bit in New Mexico and then, of course, in Colorado and poor Montana, Wyoming and Utah, not as much stuff thus far. But here we go! Here we are in Utah in 1848. And the story goes that shortly after Mormon settlers arrived in the great Salt Lake Valley, their crops were attacked by millions of crickets. And William Hartley wrote a really interesting article in 1970. And the point of it, and this is in the Utah Historical Quarterly, so it's almost a primary source, it's almost a historical source itself. But the point of the article, really interestingly, was to verify whether or not the gulls that the Mormons reported on in helping them in their quest against these crickets were actually, had been there before and were actually there or to what extent was the cricket arrival was really sort of this mysterious, miraculous kind of thing. Was there a longer history here? Anyway, I won't bore you with the information from the article, so you can go check it out on our website. But he writes, quote, "the cricket war of 1848, popularly known as the miracle of the gulls, has assumed legendary characteristics in the folk history of the Rocky Mountain West." And I love how, you know, we rename it to be the miracle of the goals instead of the miracle of the crickets. As usual, the poor insects. Anyway, things seem to be going really well after these early plantings by LDS settlers. But by late May, because they've just arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, and by late May of 1840, it's obvious that insects were going to change their history or at least their memories of their history. And completely unexpected by the farmers, huge armies of crickets attacked their new plants. All the new shoots looked like they were going to do great and they're just getting chomped away on by these crickets. And John Taylor, an LDS settler, noted that crickets in some fields as early as the middle of May, even though there had been a lot of frost sort of in the late spring, Mrs. Lorenzo Dow Young despaired over their destructive appearance when she wrote in her husband's diary at the end of May, quote, "we have grappled with the frost, but today to our utter astonishment, the crickets came by millions, sweeping everything before them. They first attached a patch of beans for us and it 20 minutes there was not a vestige of them to be seen by them" I assume she meant the beans "they swept next swept over peas then came into our garden took everything clean we went out with brooms and undertook to drive them but they were too strong for us."

EW: 32:38

I mean, I just can't get that image out of my head, right? It seems like they're impossible to swat, even if they're swarming. And it's fascinating to me that they then become called Mormon crickets, right?

MB: 32:56

Tthat becomes their name. Yes. It's kind of funny to think about going out trying to get the crickets that are hopping around anyway. The story goes on, and the reason it's called The Miracle of the Gulls is that these seagulls arrive in order to feed on the crickets. And Hartley writes that, quote, What? What? Is that funny? I don't understand that one, but okay. No one knows when these gulls first arrived to assist the settlers. But for sure by June 9th, Valley leaders are describing the dramatic effect in a letter back to their leader, Brigham Young. And they say, quote, "the seagulls have come in large flocks from the lake and sweep the crickets as they go. It seems the hand of the Lord is in our favor." So the LDS faithful have this experience with these insects. These insects lead them to interpret an entire episode as a test from God and then they see the gulls as a miraculous gift for this errand into the wilderness. And in 1913, and we always think about how, I think it's really fun to think about how spatially we remember things. And we've had a lot of conversations in the dominant culture about statues and commemoration in sculpture of late. In 1913, the LDS folks in Salt Lake erected a grand monument right in Temple Square honoring the seagulls who saved them from what became known, as you just pointed out, Mormon crickets. So I think what we can take from the story is that insects have very material uses and reasons for being in the world. But then they have this power to create myth and memory. And they're essential to growing flora and crops and all the things. But they're also consumers of the same. And their powerful presence almost across the board is often more than anyone expects. And I love the cricket war because it helps us to see how historical developments and the trajectory of entire cultures are often propelled by the flap of an insect's wing.

EW: 35:27

oh yes and these crickets were noticeable. we talked about how often insects are invisible but the numbers and the size the whole spider plus buffalo thing I mean that's amazing and I've seen these when we get mormon crickets up here in Idaho my kids love them because they could be hamsters right they're enormous!! And they're so interesting looking. But most are invisible. And many insects we almost don't notice at all. And one of the smaller ones, which is one of my favorites, is called cochineal. Cauxus is the scientific name. But this is sort of a cross between a beetle and a rolly poly, right? It's a really small, they're really not actually beetles. They're called scale insects. But I learned about it living in Tucson. You probably have some in your front yard, Michelle. And you can find these cochineal on most prickly pear cactus. So if you see a prickly pear that looks like somebody left a dirty Kleenex on it, that is the cochineal nest. And they live in that little white area. And during the Spanish colonial period, these tiny little bugs were the most expensive commodity by weight, which is mind blowing, right? Why? Because they...

MB:

You never hear about the cochineal rush.

EW: No, you do not. It does not drive land prices or anything like that. And these were bugs attached to plants, right? This more than human symbiotic relationship that was nevertheless one of the most powerful influences of the Americas on the rest of the world. So said another way, there would have been no cardinals in the red. There would have been no British redcoats in the American Revolutionary War without cochineal bugs.

MB: 37:36

Why is that, Em? I think I interrupted you. Did you explain what they do?

EW: 37:41

Well, before synthetic dyes, no other natural dye was as bright or had the staying power to persist for a long period of time. So other red dyes would end up pink. It was that tax that circulated the world through the Catholic Church, through the British Army, and through all of these other sort of symbolic ways that invertebrates, animals without backbones, these tiny little insects, give us a way of connecting those rural communities with political power in a really unlikely and often invisible way.

MB: 38:49

Oh, yeah, that's really cool. And this business about political power riding on the backs of insects is really important. It's one of, I think, one of the most important takeaways, hopefully, from this episode. Because it's mind-blowing when you consider the sheer amount of time and effort and even money that have been devoted to figuring out how to either corral whatever it is that insects are producing, like you're talking about the silk and the cochineal, etc., or trying to figure out how to control the quote-unquote unwanted pest insects that exist throughout time and throughout this region. And I'm pretty sure that most successes that we have had in that control have been fleeting, which I also think is another really important thing that as we move past the Anthropocene is to think about the ways in which human power is not as absolute as we think it is. I think the red imported fire ant is one of the best examples of this that I've come across. And you know, they're not tiny. They're fairly large, kind of formidable ants. But they have the power in all of their numbers to propel governments across the globe, Australia, Latin America, but also in the United States, which is, of course, what I study. And they, you know, they propel the entire United States government from the United States Department of Agriculture to the Environmental Protection Agency to try and figure out the most beneficial way to get rid of them. So control the ants and also don't kill every other bug in the ecosystem and also you know don't hurt human beings. They show up in the 20s but by the 1950s and 60s because of chemical warfare because of the increase in pesticides and insecticides that really come out of a lot of department of defense research in the 1940s and even world war one you know these red fire ants are stimulating the desire to find a chemical way to control them. And in particular, by the 1960s, there's a new one called Mirex. And it gave people great hope that this was gonna be the end of the red fire ant. And then of course, by the 60s and 70s, it's sort of becoming obvious that maybe Mirex could cause some health concerns in humans. And the federal government has to step in and investigate whether or not Mirex is safe to use in the way that the USDA is using it against these red fire ants. And so Congress does, an investigation and there's a set of hearings in 1975, you can actually go read the hearings. The primary sources are online, which is really fun. And because when you read it, you hear things like John Quarles, Jr., who was the deputy administrator of the EPA, saying that, by 1975, half a million acres per year were being sprayed with this Mirex and quote, "the ant had not been contained." I mean, it's hysterical. And then in fact, the study showed that in 1959, 26 million acres were quote unquote infested by the ants. And by 1975, so 15 years later, the number had increased to 126 million acres. And that was with the use of this Mirex and with other insecticides to try to control them. So it's just really interesting to think about the ways in which there's a persistence and a resilience in the insect world and that our illusion of control might just be that. I'll probably talk about this in another episode, but I think... agriculturalists in particular, really Iive their lives thinking about insects and microbes in a variety of ways. I'm going to save that for a different episode. But, you know, when we think about the cattle grub as an example, this drove cattle ranchers quite literally mad trying to figure out how to control the grub and keep them away from their cattle. And and they did all kinds of things - they ask the federal government for help, ask their state governments for help in figuring out ways to rid their herds of this particular insect so again just another couple of examples of the political politicization and the political nature of insects.

EW: 43:17

Well, and the analogy with war or warfare, sort of fighting against them and trying to control them, I think is very much part of the Cold War context of insects, right? And that's the legacies of World War II as well. But there's this piece of it that is so revealing because insects organize themselves so differently, which inevitably makes that war really different, right? And it's not sort of traditional in that you sort of take out the people that are fighting in the battle, right? to having one person in an entire society being in charge of reproduction, for example, entirely. And there's an anthropologist that writes about this, Jake Kosick, and he writes about the ecologies of empire is what he calls it. And he looks at honeybees as both a metaphor for war, like we were just saying, but also a tool in the war on terror in particular. And here, what he's looking at is the ways that Bees have remade the U.S. approach to war, and also the U.S. approach to war has remade the bees themselves. And so beekeepers, who are the humans in charge of the hives of bees as a sort of collective entity, use bees as pollinators for agricultural fields regularly, right? in the last hundred years. So for example, bees are more black than yellow than they were in specimens a hundred years ago. They're a third larger and they have a lot more hair and sort of thicker skeletons as well. So bees are changing their bodies in ways that we can visibly observe in relation to humans, right? And they're also more docile, which I think is really interesting, right? In that relationship with humans. And so one of the pieces of bee behavior that I think is really interesting is that bees can monitor contamination. So in flying out and sniffing all of the pollen in flowers and plants, honeybees can pick up trace chemicals from the pollen onto their bodies. And if you place a beehive in an area you suspect is contaminated, the bees will essentially field sample almost all of the pollinating plants within two miles of the hive. And so traces of radionuclides, which are sort of traces of chemicals, are detectable in flower pollen if it's growing in an area with that contaminant. And then the honey made by bees also has the presence of those radionuclides, right? So more than that, bees are also trainable. And that's what a beekeeper does, right? They train bees to come back to the hive where they're protected, where their queen is. And another way of thinking about this is bees are an alternative to drug sniffing dogs. They can be chemical weapons, sniffing bees trained at Los Alamos. And I'm not making this up, right? You can watch it on YouTube. I promise.

MB: 47:09

And we know that everything on YouTube is true. Totally true. Never been invented. Yes.

EW: 47:16

Exactly. But the scientists at Los Alamos call these bees nature's "rugged robots." And the bees are partnering with humans to sniff out the chemicals. And so another way to think about it is that if the bees' food sources are placed near explosive chemicals, bees learn to look for those chemicals as they're scavenging for their own food sources. So they're using their tongues and their flight patterns can be mapped to show where they're looking to alert the humans where those explosive chemicals might actually be stored. And so because of the way bees are built, they have more olfactory, more sniffing particles than dogs and probably have a few fewer biscuits for the training involved as well.

MB: 48:07

Right, exactly. And you don't have to brush them, right? The fur is a lot easier to deal with too. I mean, we could go on for hours words, I think thinking about all of the lessons that insects can provide us. And I think what's really wonderful And hopefully we've just, you know, whetted the appetite of our listeners to think more about insects and go learn more. Because insects, as we've said, as we've titled the episode are helpers in that they help us think differently about nearly everything. And I think that that is really what's fun, not just about historical understanding, but specifically about environmental historical understanding as it disrupts some of the more traditional takes that we have on a lot of the things that we've mentioned here in this podcast. And so, so, so much more, including, you know, the ways in which bodies shift and change. Bees aren't just doing that. Lots of bodies are shifting and changing over time. And so it's not just the bees, insects in general, I think just help us to think about things differently. And I think, you know, right now is a good time to start thinking about some things differently.

EW: 49:21

Absolutely. It's the bee's knees, right?

MB: 49:23

[laughter] I love it

EW: 49:23

But they do. They help us see things we didn't see before.

MB: 49:27

Yeah. Okay. The bee's knees. We're ending on that. And that's it for this episode of More Than: a Podcast. We hope you've loved what you've learned and we hope it's made you think a little bit differently about nature and about history. We hope you've learned more about the world around you and the histories and stories that make up those places and those more than human beings who are so important to our historical past. We want to thank our guests and our amazing producer, Ruxandra Guidi. We'd also like to give credit to Jason Shaw, who composed our music, Back to the Woods. We'd also like to cite our sound effects from the BBC, and we'll give more specific citation information on our website. There, you can also find sources that we've used and links to other interesting stories to continue your learning. So go check out morethanapodcast.earth. If you'd like to, please leave a review about this podcast and be sure to tune in next time for the next episode of More Than a Podcast.