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Sarah Red-Laird wearing her beekeeping clothing and caring for bees in a hive

Saving the Bees with Bee Girl Sarah

About This Episode

Sarah Red-Laird is “the bee girl” who started the nonprofit The Bee Girl Organization to educate and inspire communities to conserve bees, their flowers, and our countryside. The nonprofit helps to regenerate soil, bees, and communities through educational programs and events for both kids and adults. They also partner with universities, public land managers, and private companies to conduct bee health and habitat research.

In this episode, Sarah shares why bees are so important for agriculture and the environment, the problems facing bees, and simple action steps anyone can take to save bees.

Guest: Sarah Red-Laird, founder and executive director of The Bee Girl Organization

Learn more and make a donation on The Bee Girl’s website and follow @sarahbeegirl on Instagram.

For more ways to make a difference, check out beegirl.org/helpourbees.

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Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors:

Branden Harvey

Bees play a vital role in our food supply. They pollinate nearly three quarters of the plants that produce 90% of the world's food. But at the same time, bees are facing a lot of challenges. They're facing habitat loss, climate change, pesticides and more. We need to save the bees. Bee conservationists, like our guests today, are working diligently to do just that. This sounds good. I'm Brandon Harvey. I am joined today by Sarah Red-Laird, the founder and executive director of the Bee Girl Organization out of Ashland, Oregon. Sarah's nonprofit works to educate and inspire communities to conserve bees and their flowers through habitat research and education programs.


Branden Harvey

And I love getting to sit down with Sarah to talk about why bees are so important. I truly came in knowing nothing what kinds of challenges bees are facing. And lastly, most importantly, how anyone can take some really simple action steps to save the population. It's a great conversation. I learned a lot. So that any further deal, let's just jump straight into it. Sara, I am so excited to be talking with you today. To be honest, I know nothing about except for how many times I got stung as a child. And so I'm so excited to be talking with you and to get to learn from you today. Wonderful.


Sarah Red-Laird

Well, thank you so much for having me. I am very inspired by your ability to easily seek out good news and good things. And I am honored to be a part of this project and this podcast.


Branden Harvey

It's funny because I feel like so much of the time. I know my way around a lot of different types of nonprofits. I know my way around a lot of different issues and causes, but something that I have not paid that much attention to, and I really should have been. It's been a blind spot is the world of bees, and I like pay attention to big animals. I pay attention to food. But bees intersect with so much. I'm excited to get into all that. But maybe we should start off with a little bit of backstory on you and how you got into this world because you've been in the world of bees for a long time.


Branden Harvey

How did you get into beekeeping? And where did your interest in bees start?


Sarah Red-Laird

I think my interest probably started when I got stung as a little kid. And I know most people that is the one experience that most people have with bees. And so it's complicated because people now there's quite an awareness around bees, and the bees are in trouble, and they need help. And so people are feeling a sympathy and a compassion towards them that they never had before. Because when I first started this work about ten years ago, really like when I would table or work in the public or talk to people about bees.


Sarah Red-Laird

All I got was stinging stories and, oh, I hate bees. And that has really transformed to a very beautiful awareness around bees and their issues and also just a curiosity about them like you are currently having. And so my first experience started with curiosity. When I got stung, I was blown away, and I couldn't believe that something so small could be so powerful impact such a punch. And that just created this lifelong fascination with these teeny, little, fuzzy, charismatic mini fauna that were also so incredibly powerful and inspiring to me.


Sarah Red-Laird

And then I also honestly was absolutely obsessed with the book and the movie Fried Green Tomatoes when I was Redgood was my personal hero and probably still is. And she was the beach armor who could go up to a hive and pull honey out of a tree. And I just wanted to grow up to be her and just a social justice warrior honey taker of trees, honeycomb take her outer from trees. And, yeah, I think I carried that fascination and that curiosity until I found from the back of a pint of ice cream Hagendas honey ice cream that all of the bees were dying from this mysterious thing called colony glass disorder back in about 2007 2008.


Sarah Red-Laird

And Glenn Doyle's work often is to follow your heartbreak to really dig deep into that. And I feel that that's what I did there. I was so moved and so heartbroken that I knew I needed to do something about it. So I just started shifting my focus in that direction. And it was always just kind of there. And when I decided I wanted to go back to school and finish up my degree, I knew I wanted to work in conservation and resource conservation. And as I was looking at colleges to go to, I found that University of Montana and Missouri had a honeybee lab, and they offered a position in the lab as work study.


Sarah Red-Laird

And I was like, oh, well, then that's obviously where I have to go. So all signs pointed to Missoula. And then I got a position in the lab and loved it. And when I graduated, it was in 2010, and there were no jobs in conservation or anything else. We were in the middle of a recession, and we were in the middle of the Tea Party, having taken over the budget in Congress and acting anything that had to do with climate change. And that's where a lot of my work was kind of focused.


Sarah Red-Laird

And so I just had to rethink what I wanted to do when I grew up and the B lab loved having me around and dug up some money to offer me a full time position as a research assistant. And the rest is history. As they say, that was 20, 09, 20, 09, 20 10. I decided to create my own little nonprofit to work on what I found and saw needed to be done and just kind of thought that that would be something I would do to get me through the recession.


Sarah Red-Laird

But it's been ten years now. I am currently working my dream job. It couldn't be any better. I love every day. And so, yeah, that's the long of it.


Branden Harvey

I love that. And can I just say, I really appreciate the fact that it began and your catalyst was this heartbreak? Well, the first heartbreak was perhaps getting stung by a Bee. But then the bigger heartbreak was seeing this piece of bad news about something that you cared about and knowing that you had to do something, you could have run from that heartbreak, or you could have closed yourself off enough from the bad news that you wouldn't pay attention to it. But by remaining open to the pain, feeling it all the way through and then saying, I have to do something about this because I care about it.


Branden Harvey

It brought you all the way here. And then. I also love the fact that we talked a little bit before we started recording. And the Bee Girl, it sounds like the organization started off as a small, short term project, and then it just continued. And I think there's something really special about, like when you just show up to do some work and you show up to solve a problem, you never know what it's going to lead to. And if you had gone in saying, I'm going to create this incredible organization with all these people and all these facets that's super unattainable in the beginning.


Branden Harvey

But by just sticking with it, that's what it became. And so starting small and being driven by that heartbreak is so powerful.


Sarah Red-Laird

Yes. And I have a very hard time with watching suffering, especially if it's something that is I don't want to say voiceless because I think these very much do have a voice. They just don't speak English. But I just felt like, oh, my gosh, this is a thing I need to be there for them. I need to help these creatures like, I can't just stand by while they all die. And I don't know what that looks like or how I'm going to pull this off. But I need to dive into the situation, and I need to learn everything that I possibly can so I can figure out how I can help.


Sarah Red-Laird

And honestly, in my first few months of working in the lab, it became extraordinarily apparent to me as to what was going on and how it could be helped. And I felt like there wasn't enough translation from academia into the normal people world. And I felt like we were at the time, as has been for a long time. Honeybees are the most studied insect on the planet. But the rest of the world doesn't know the things that are being discovered in academia. Nobody reads the Journal Science.


Sarah Red-Laird

That's not a thing that you have on your table unless you work in academia, and it's just totally inaccessible. No one can afford a subscription. Normal people cannot afford a subscription to the Journal Nature or the Journal Science, so they don't know what's going on or how to help. And so that was the first thing I identified was, wow, we are discovering some very interesting things here in academia, and we do a Press release and we get on the news. And there's a couple of magazine news articles written about us, but in our work.


Sarah Red-Laird

But then we move on to the next thing. And I just felt like, wait a minute, what are we doing to teach people about this and talk to people about what they can do in their everyday life to help our bees? And how are we reaching kids so we can get people on the right path from the very beginning? And we did do a two day kids camp through the Ocean Lifelong Learning Institute that was like this really super fun summer camp with grandparents and their grandkids.


Sarah Red-Laird

And it was like, this whole, AHA moment. I was like, I need to do this every day. Everyone needs to do this every day. We need to be working with just the light that I saw turn on. And these kids when we were working with them. And the curiosity, the fascination from these bees that sting and there's, like a fearfulness and that's so easy. That such a strong emotion, fear. And it's so easy to just push people right over that line into fascination and love, especially kids.


Sarah Red-Laird

And so I was like, this is just the thing that has to be done. And then I also saw through our research that I've done pesticide research. And I was like, Man, pesticides are a problem, but it's not just the pesticide. It is the landscape system. It is how we are farming. It is how we're eating food. It is how farm policy is working that is basically enabling a system of abuse for our landscape, and our bees are included in the landscape. People are included in the landscape, our waterways, our fish, our soil are included in that landscape.


Sarah Red-Laird

And I read a lot of Wendell Berry, and he has been speaking to this since the 60s and 70s, and I just reread Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, and he is speaking to all of this decades, decades, decades ago. So there's been a lot of knowledge about this for a long time, but I'm feeling like it's coming to the surface, which is wonderful. And I just am hoping to utilize bees and the fascination that people have with them to just start talking about these landscape wide issues that we have in agriculture and everything that's downstream of agriculture.


Sarah Red-Laird

So those were the things that I saw right away. And so when I started BeGirl, I just started with what I had, which was knowledge about how to keep bees alive. And that's what I could offer to the world. And that's what the world wanted was hobbyist. Beekeeping and backyard beekeeping had become really popular. And I was like, okay, so this is my son in the door. Over the first few years, I taught beekeeping classes, and I worked one on one with beekeepers, and I tabled at every county fair and different event that I could get to to talk to people about these and the importance of these and beekeeping.


Sarah Red-Laird

So that's how it started in my heart of hearts. I always wanted to work with kids, and I always wanted to work on landscape conservation issues and sustainable and now regenerative farming. It can be as simple as reducing the amount of pesticides that you're putting on the landscape and increasing the amount of flower diversity that you put on the landscape. So that is currently my work and what I get to do every day.


Branden Harvey

So fascinating. And I love this journey again, just starting small with what was in front of you and then allowing that to pivot and change and holding loosely to it over time. I want to get into some of the nitty gritty and you've already alluded to it about what the problems facing bees are. But first, I feel like it'd be helpful to just talk about what is so important about these. One key aspect of this, of course, is just the connection that you and the children you've worked with, the communities you've worked with, the connection that you created with bees and just almost like a relational way.


Branden Harvey

But what about just almost like, the selfish ways that bees are good for us? Bees are helpful. Bees are important.


Sarah Red-Laird

Yeah. Well, thank you for picking that up, because that's usually the last thing that I talk about is that because it's kind of an odd thing to talk about, really, for me, my benefit from working with these is this kind of otherworldly spiritual connection that I have with them, which is something that humans have had with bees for thousands of years. Bees are mentioned in every religious text. Honeybees and humans have a very long and very fascinating relationship. And I know many, many people who have been able to heal PTSD and complex PTSD from beekeeping.


Sarah Red-Laird

So I think that there's, like, this really cool, like, six months additional plain thing there with bees. And so that's one of my wives for working with bees. But on the whole, bees feed us. Honey bees pollinate one out of every three bites of food that we eat and drink in the US, in North America. And there's I think around 200 different crops they pollinate, and they also pollinate cotton. So I guarantee every person listening has something on them that is cutting or they're sitting on a chair that is cotton.


Sarah Red-Laird

Or not only do bees pollinate food, but they pollinate cotton directly, and then they also pollinate my work. Currently, my biggest project is improving pasture for grazing livestock, animals and alfalfa is currently the feed for dairy, cattle and bees, not honeybees, but leaf cutter bees pollinate alfalfa. So you can even thank your bees for ice cream, even though it seems like a stretch. And I just did a little campaign with a local organic ice cream company for Earth Day. And it was Lemon Cookie Honey Ice Cream.


Branden Harvey

Oh, my gosh, that sounds so good.


Sarah Red-Laird

My gosh, it's amazing. And I went through the label and I was like, wow, I can actually, except for the wheat and the cookies. I can relate every single thing here back to bees and Bee Pilotation. So I think that's the most important thing that they do is and there are landscapes that don't have honey bees that have a very different diet than we do in the US and don't rely heavily on Bee pollinations. We do. So it's not like this is a completely universal thing I'm thinking about, like, Indigenous community.


Sarah Red-Laird

I grew up partly in Alaska and thinking about Indigenous communities up in the Northern regions of Alaska. Of course, honey bees don't pollinate whale fat. So just calling out that it's not like a completely universal thing, and we will survive without bees. There's a misquoted quote to Albert Einstein that goes around saying, if honey bees fell off the face of the Earth, humans would cease to exist in less than four years, which is not true because our diets would get very boring. And we would probably have some nutritional disease because especially the Western world, we are used to a rainbow of flavors and vitamins and minerals and foods in our diet.


Sarah Red-Laird

And our honeybees pollinate most of that rainbow. So many of the foods that have the highest density of vitamins, minerals, color, flavors. Those are your Bee pollinated foods.


Branden Harvey

Fascinating. Okay. So what I'm understanding is the connection that we have with bees and the ways that they make our lives more colorful, literally. So what is happening to the bees and what are the ramifications of what's happening with the bees, then?


Sarah Red-Laird

Yeah, it's so complex, which I'm learning to become friends with because I love that we want everything to be simple. Humans want everything to be very simple and very answerable. And like a checklist of like, these are the problems. These are the solutions. And I think that there is some of we can point to some specifics for sure. But nature is complex and bees are complex. The bees are dying. There is some truth. And then there's some complexity to that because we do honey Bee losses. So the Bee Informed Partnership organizes a honeybee loss survey every year.


Sarah Red-Laird

But it's a self reporting survey. The majority of people that answer it are hobbyist beekeepers. There are commercial beekeepers that are involved with being from partnership and giving really great data. We need to remember that honeybees are a domesticated animal. They're domesticated wild animals, and they very much. We've kept them for hundreds and hundreds of years in the US, at least, like the majority of the different strains of bees or lines, genetic lines of bees that we have are very reliant on humans to take care of them.


Sarah Red-Laird

And honeybees are not native to the United States. Honey, the honeybees that we keep here in the US are native to Europe. So already we are tinkering with nature by even having honey here. But also the vast majority of foods that we enjoy are also nonnative to the United States. And so we have to have this non native bees to pilot. All these non native foods, like lemons are not native to the United States. Most of the foods that we enjoy on a daily basis are not native to the United States.


Sarah Red-Laird

So like I said, it's complex. So the B losses that we see are very real. The colony collapse, the hive losses. I believe it's because of the situations that we are putting the bees in. So oftentimes I hear every time I go in public, which is not often these days. But I had a winery last week and the vineyard manager, owner and winemaker was like, oh, I'm so inspired by the last time you were here and you're passionate for bees and Bee habitat that I got a hive and they died.


Sarah Red-Laird

And then I started again. And then they died. And I was like, yeah, because you have to take care of them and you have to know what they're doing. You can just go get a horse because you were worried about horses like, you wouldn't just go get a polar bear for your backyard because you've heard the polar bears for a dime. You have to understand the bees. They're classified as livestock, and they need care, and they need management. And so for most of the bees that I know that die in a hobbyist or a backyard beekeeper's yard, it's because of mismanagement.


Sarah Red-Laird

They're not fed or taken care of or checked for pests or diseases the way that they should be. And then on the landscape scale, the agricultural scale, it's oftentimes we are putting them into very unhospitable environments that are drenched and pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and lack of diversity of floral resources or food. They need a diverse array of vitamins and minerals from flowers themselves. And my current research is looking at soil health and how soil health can affect Bee health. So it's complex. But our honey bees are struggling.


Sarah Red-Laird

But then we also need to be thinking about our native bees because we do have at least 4000 different species of native bees in the US that also pollinate our food, and that pollinate wildflowers that turn into berries and nuts that feed grizzly bears and songbirds and everything in between. And no one is taking care of them, and no one is giving them medicine or extra food. And so it's up to them to survive climate change and pesticide over application. And both in urban communities. I don't mean to sound like it's all on agriculture, because actually, the vast majority of pesticide overuse is in our lawns and gardens and golf courses and such things.


Sarah Red-Laird

And so we have to be thinking about our native bees, too, as we apply yard chemicals and mow, dandelions and clovers and the things that sustain our native bees.


Branden Harvey

So if we were to consolidate down this problem that we're experiencing with the bees with this kind of idea of the hashtag save the bees. Are we talking about native bees? Are we talking about honey bees? Are we talking about the bees in people's backyards? What is the specific problem that we're talking about that way we know exactly what solutions we're talking about as well.


Sarah Red-Laird

Yeah. Great question. I think that when people hashtag save the bees, they're thinking about honeybees, probably because that's the Bee that humans have a connection with. They make honey for us, which is a delicious human food. They're the only insect that produces a commercially viable food product unless you're into eating crickets.


Branden Harvey

But I'm not there yet, but maybe one day.


Sarah Red-Laird

But crickets kind of I guess you could say they produce their body, but they don't really honeybees produce this delicious, sweet, gorgeous, good distinction food for us. And so people think of honeybees. But I would like to have people also think of native bees. I would love for people to go into their backyard and find three new types of bees that they didn't know existed before. Try really hard to understand the difference between a honey Bee and a Bumble Bee, and then look for two additional bees that you might think are flies in your backyard.


Sarah Red-Laird

And there's even a book called Bees in Your Backyard that will help you understand and identify the different bees that you might have in your backyard. So I think that's first, let's just educate ourselves about the different bees that are out there and the different services that they provide. And there are bees beyond honey bees. And I'm a beekeeper. I'm a beekeeper first. I'll always be a beekeeper. I love the beekeeping, the community, the people that I know who are beekeepers. But there are so many more bees out there that need our attention and our love.


Sarah Red-Laird

And so the real problems, if I could distill it down to the essence, is there are not enough flowers, and there are too many chemicals in our land fields. And that means in our front yards. And that means in our peripheries of our towns and our edges, our parks, our golf courses. And that also means in our agricultural landscapes and agricultural. I'm thinking of cultivated crops. And then I'm also thinking of our grazing lands. I think that we could be grazing the vast majority of land in the United States, the largest land use in the United States is actually our grazing and pasture lands.


Sarah Red-Laird

And I think that we could graze in a different way to encourage more growth of flowers that would help our bees. And that's a whole nother broadcast. But if you want to look into that, that is called regenerative or holistic grazing.


Branden Harvey

Fascinating. I love when we're able to get into something really nerdy or like specific. And then everybody who's like, this is me. This is me is going to have this whole new keyword to Google and to research. So thank you for that.


Sarah Red-Laird

Yeah. But even like, so that's my work is working with farmers and ranchers to get more flowers and more flour diversity and less chemicals on the agricultural landscape. If you would like to join in the network, donate to our organization, beer. Org, donate and the community's work is to plant more flowers or to just let flowers exist. So it's currently no Mo may. And one of the vineyards that I'm working with, one of the first things that we did together was totally change the mowing program in the vineyard.


Sarah Red-Laird

So they are just not mowing until it gets really dry and creates some sort of a fire hazard. And it is amazing the amount of common lawn flowers that are blooming today versus blooming this time last year, when they still had a really intensive mowing program. It is a pollinator paradise out there right now because of the dandelions and the clovers and the lawn daisies and these really super common free flowers that just want to grow in your yard anyways and your lawn anyways, and by just cutting out mowing for just a month, just don't do it for a month and see what happens.


Sarah Red-Laird

And then there's also these purple dead Nettles, which is a native flower, which is extraordinarily important to bump Queen bumblebees coming out of their nest first thing. So we didn't know were there before and they finally were given the chance to emerge this year. So yeah, just simply it can be as easy. It's just not mowing your lawn or writing city Council and asking them not to mow parks and meridians until the dandelions go to seed and don't spray the dandelions with roundup. It can be just as simple as not doing something or you can just take action and do something.


Sarah Red-Laird

You can plant sunflowers. I'm involved in this project called the One Flower Project, and you can order a little packet of educational materials and seeds to plant flowers. Plant sunflowers for your bees. And there's people all around the country now that are planting like sunflowers just in pots on their front porch or their front stoop or the window of their apartment building. Planting a sunflower is something that is an easy action that could have real effects. It is absolutely for two reasons. A, you're feeding bees and B, you're engaging with nature.


Sarah Red-Laird

You're so excited to go and watch your sunflower and wait for it to Bloom and then see who comes to visit. And that's a really good place to actually find what native bees might be in your backyard because there's a plethora of bees that are interested in sunflowers, not just honey bees.


Branden Harvey

We are going to take a quick break. And when we come back, Sarah is sharing some super simple action steps that anyone can take to save the bees. Sounds good. It's sponsored by Libro SM and I like to use these ads sometimes to just talk about the audiobooks that I am loving right now. And for me this month, this episode I've got to tell you about Seth Rogen's new audio memoir, comedy. It's called a yearbook. It just came out and I downloaded it. I'd seen some hype.


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Branden Harvey

You're kind of making me fall in love with bees here, and I want to do some good for the bees in my community and just across the country, across the world. And so I know that you've got four action steps that anybody listening and myself can take to make a difference for bees. So tell me, what is the first action step that all of us can take?


Sarah Red-Laird

Well, you can think about the difference that you want to make in the world three times a day or four times, however many times a day you eat, you can think about the world and how you want the world to look and how you want the world to look for bees by voting with your fork so you can choose to make a positive difference in your community and in the lives of your bees by supporting by eating seasonally and supporting your local farmers through local food co op, local farm shops, visit the farmers market, find a local CSA and really seek out those farmers who are farming organically farming, regeneratively, reducing or eliminating their use of chemicals on the landscape, and then also those farmers that provide extra habitat for our Bee species and are thinking about pollinators and what they do.


Sarah Red-Laird

And that's another advantage of going to the farmers market is you can strike up conversations with farmers and just ask like, hey, do you have additional flowers on your fields for bees? Do you host honeybees at your farm and don't do it in a splendid way where you're like, this is what you need to do, but just be curious and ask the question and show them that that's what their customer base is. One thing is a farm that cares about pollinators beyond just for pollination services, but really for the good of the high, for the good of the colony, for the good of the different pollinator species that are around.


Sarah Red-Laird

And so voting with your fork and then also vote with your vote. And that can look really different on different levels. So in your local city, in your region, if there's candidates coming up for Mayor, candidates for the school board, candidates coming up for the city Council, show up to city halls and ask them, what are your plans for making the city more be friendly? Would you be interested in working towards eliminating pesticides on local golf courses and creating buffer strips with flowers for bees? What about schools like, would you be interested in having a school garden and planting flowers, having specific intentional places around the campuses with flowers for our pollinators?


Sarah Red-Laird

And then also that goes to the same questions on the state level and on the national level. My questions right now to our electives are how can we support farmers and ranchers with money and education to help them farm more ecologically and regeneratively? And then that person is going to get my vote and then, of course, always taking it back to planting flowers through ordering a seed pack through one flower project or just researching what are the really super beneficial native flowers in your area that your native bees will love and then last is number four would be to make a space in your heart for our bees and base that in curiosity.


Sarah Red-Laird

And then follow that curiosity and learn more about your local beekeepers. Learn more about the native bees that you have in your backyard. Learn more about the different flowers you can plant, like, really, just create a space for curiosity and a space for love for our bees because we cannot conserve something unless it's intentional and we cannot be intentional about something unless we love it. And so I really do encourage people to just sit with that for a minute and really generate some love in your heart for our bees.


Branden Harvey

This is so helpful. And I just want to reiterate these four action steps. The first is vote with your fork. The second is ask for a good honeybee policy. Make elected officials create systemic change that makes a difference on a deeper level. Number three is plant flowers. Do it in your yard, maybe sneak them into a neighbor's yard. I don't know. I didn't say that. And then number four make space in your heart. Show some love so that that love can motivate action and create change. This is so helpful, Sarah.


Branden Harvey

And I guess as a final question to wrap up this conversation, what makes you feel hopeful about the state of fees and the progress we're making? What keeps you motivated and helps you feel hopeful and will hopefully allow others to feel hopeful as well?


Sarah Red-Laird

Well, you make me feel hopeful, Branden. Like, in this moment, it's your curiosity and your interest in bees and what's actually going on with bees and wanting to share that with your audience. That gives me hope that there we in the Bee industry. We keep kind of joking about, like, oh, when is our 15 minutes going to be up? Because we've been in a spotlight since 2007. And we just keep thinking, like, last year when the world blew up, I was like, who's going to care about bees in the middle of a racial reckoning?


Sarah Red-Laird

Who's going to care about bees in the middle of the most brutal election year we've ever had. And people just still keep caring about bees because it is all connected. And it does all just come from, like, if we could shift our mindset into more of abundance and generosity mentality, then there is room for all of it. There's room for social justice and environmental justice because they really are the same things. And so people's continuing interest in my work and bees and what's going on with bees and what are the problems and what are the solutions is the thing that gives me hope every day.


Sarah Red-Laird

And anytime I start feeling like, oh, my gosh, this work is so overwhelming, and I'm all by myself and nobody sees the world like, I see the world. Then someone like you comes out of the woodwork and with just genuine curiosity and interest and love in your heart for wanting to understand and know more about bees and what's going on with bees. And that's what gives me hope.


Branden Harvey

That's Sarah Red-Laird, the founder and executive director of the Bee Girl Organization. You can learn more, make a donation and check out other ways to make a difference on the Bee Girl website BeeGirl.org. Truly, if you make a donation, it will make a huge difference in support of bees and also those other action steps that are listed on their site are so cool. It's a great way to make a difference. We've included a link in the show notes. You should also totally follow Sara BeGirl on Instagram that's her username to keep up with all of her beekeeping and conservation efforts.


Branden Harvey

This podcast was created by Good good, good, good, good, good, good, good at good. We help you feel more hopeful and do more good. You can find more good news in ways to make a difference, whether it is bees or Israel and Palestine in our weekly email newsletter, our beautiful printgood newspaper or online at Goodgoodgoodco. This episode was created by Kailey Thompson, Megan Burns and me Brandon Harvey. It was edited and sound designed by the team at Sounds Good Studios, and you can find their website at soundonsoundoff.Com.


Branden Harvey

Make sure to hit the follow button wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it's Apple Podcast Spotify or the cool app that only you use and of course tell a friend as well. We love reaching new people who care about celebrating good news and becoming good news. So send your favorite episode to your friend who's always trying to make a difference where you're always learning something from. We would love to hang out with them too. And with that, that is a wrap for this week's episode. Go out and take one action step up to save the bees and we will be back next week with more good news and good action.


Branden Harvey

Sound good?


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May 31, 2021
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About Sounds Good

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Sounds Good is the weekly podcast that hosts hopeful conversations with optimists and world-changers about the headlines we can be hopeful about — and how you can get involved and make a difference.

Every week, Good Good Good founder Branden Harvey sits down with the people driving positive change against the world's greatest problems. Each episode will leave you with a sense of hope about the good in the world — and a sense of direction on how we can all be a part of that good. Episodes are released every Monday.

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