yes I am an entomologist and I know a
lot of you think that strange but I hope
I’ll convince you by the end of the 15
minutes I’m allotted that insects are
actually the creatures that do run the
world and that are truly truly wonderful
and all of those 7 billion people we
just heard about on this planet their
lives are touched by insects in many
ways but in a very important way through
food because all 7 billion people need
to eat and insects are responsible for a
lot of the pollination of food crops and
I’ll be going through some of these
examples I think the words from Charles
Dickens are as apt today as ever we do
live in the best of times and we’ve seen
some of those best of times in the
technology and the healthcare and the
amazing stuff that we learn and know and
explore about our world but we also live
in the worst of times and we’ve seen
some of that related to destruction of
the natural environment it truly is a
time of light and it is a time of
darkness and I’m sorry to tell you that
for one particular aspect of the
planet’s life of its biodiversity all
the 1.7 million other species who share
our home it really is quite a dark time
and we are we are losing species we’re
losing habitats we’re losing ecosystems
and we’re losing the functions that they
provide and they support it hasn’t
always been this way and here is an
example from East Africa that I love to
share because it shows you how
intricately involved we have been as a
species with the world around us now as
a scientist I basically study
cooperation and mutualism and love and
this is one of the most interesting
examples of that you have here a sketch
based on an old cave painting from South
Central Africa of early humans
collecting wild honey now a lot of the
early humans in Africa as well
as some tribes currently were led to
these wild colonies which can be very
well hidden in trees or in rocks by a
bird called the honeyguide and that’s
the honey guide this is a honey guy that
was soliciting me to follow it in
Tanzania a few weeks ago and for a long
time we thought this relationship or
following the honey guide first evolved
between the bird and a and a lovely
animal called a honey badger but it
turns out that the relationship actually
first evolved between bird and human and
this has been worked out by scientists
studying the burana people in Kenya and
the Badger is a parasite of the
mutualism that first came around between
the two of us and bees are incredibly
important I don’t have to convince you I
don’t even have to tell you this because
you’ve already heard and seen the crisis
around bees in the northern hemisphere
but something you may not know is that
bees honey bees actually originated in
East Africa and just like humans
migrated in waves out of Africa so did
honey bees and the amazing thing with
honey bees in Africa is this a lot of
diversity within African Africa just
like there’s a lot of human diversity in
Africa so the typical honey bee which is
kept by thousands of communities across
Africa is managed in traditional log
hives and this so this elderly gentleman
is a member of them of the Dorobo
community he lives in the maca Gordo
forest in central like like Capilla in
Kenya and all of his income all of his
livelihood paying his children school
fees supporting his family comes from
beekeeping from harvesting and selling
honey and in in East Africa there are
two fantastic varieties of honey bee
that we get to work with the lovely
mountain honey bee Monte Kola which is a
very gentle chocolate-colored species
and produces lots and lots of honey and
then the savanna or dry land honey bee
scoot alotta which is not so gentle and
not so calm but also produces lots of
honey and in addition to honey bees
another social be that gets managed and
that always surprises people to learn
about our sting
space and Maria here is a beekeeper a
stingless bee keeper on the slopes of
Mount Meru in Tanzania and you can see a
view inside the stingless bee hive there
and stingless behind here are two
different species of stingless bee honey
a whale a honey and chicory honey which
come from western Kenya is as valuable
if not more valuable than honey bee
honey which all of these different
communities produce bee diversity is a
really interesting Cline which is a
trend in terms of populations and
diversity in that it is that they aren’t
more diverse in tropical rainforests
they the forests do have a lot of
diversity but interestingly enough it’s
the deserts and the dry lands of the
world where most of the bees are found
and you have every kind of relationship
from highly specialized bees like this
beautiful sister Ophir up here that only
ever visits one kind of flower and just
flies for a few weeks a year all the way
through these lovely leaf cutter bees a
long tongue a megillah’ bee will meet
her again in in a few minutes and then
or something I wanted to point out these
are all solitary bee species and the
females have nests to go back to at
night and you already know that honeybee
is I’m sure most of you do that honey
bees it’s all it’s a it’s a feminine
monarchy it’s all female-driven they’re
all all sisters cooperating and working
together males don’t do anything and
with the solitary bees again males don’t
do anything but they actually have a
little bit of a tough deal because they
don’t have nests to go to at night so
they have to sleep outside on grasses
huddling together for warmth and here
are two different species that are sort
of snuggling up for the night and
they’re very vulnerable
so I told you a little bit about
stingless bees because a lot of the work
I’m trying to develop right now is
managing and protecting stingless bees
and here is Stanley who is a stingless
bee keeper
in western Kenya at the cacao mega
forest and he keeps five different
species of stingless bees those are the
hives over there and he even keeps
species that scientists don’t know about
we don’t know the biology we haven’t
figured out the the nesting
and Stanley learnt this from his
grandmother but sadly he’s not teaching
his children and that’s for several
reasons one the culture is dying is
dying out there’s a lot of change
there’s a lot of habitat destruction the
bees are not as common the market for
stingless bee honey comes and goes but
what I wanted to point out with this
example is that as we lose species
processes and interactions we also stand
to lose a lot of knowledge because the
entire history of our hollis species has
been entwined with those of so many
others and if we lose that knowledge
it’s just as precious as losing the
species or interaction itself now bees
pollinate crops and wild flowers and and
a quick question to you how many of you
like coffee chocolate yeah and those are
just a couple of examples of two crops
that would not exist without the actions
of pollinators so the value of bees and
other insects as pollinators is what I’m
really trying to dissect and communicate
and about two thirds of the flowering
plants on the planet are pollinated by
insects and one in three bites of food
is directly thanks to the actions of an
insect pollinator I’m going to take you
on a little trip and we’re going to
visit some of the field sites I work at
and here you have a map of Kenya oh it’s
been so wonderful is to hear how many
people have worked in or we are working
in and and how how connected they are to
Kenya and Kenya has as you all know this
incredible network of protected areas
national parks and reserves and you can
see them outlined there in green but the
parks in reserves were set up at a time
when the priorities for conservation
were very different 70% of the wildlife
is outside the national parks and
reserves and when we look at the bigger
picture of biodiversity almost 99% of
the endemic species the real real
diversity is outside those protected
areas and right here you can see Tsavo
which is one of the biggest salvo
Easton’s of a West combined protected
area and there’s a gap there and this
that gap that wasn’t included in the
National Park and it’s the tighter hills
and you might think this is a very
distant and obscure place but I’ll show
you a connection to it in a second and
what’s interesting if you look at this
this is below no Hill the single biggest
forested fragment that’s left you see
this mosaic this little blanket all
around each of those dots is a
subsistence farmer and I’m working
primarily with these rural subsistence
farmers but on below no Hill there are
more endemic species and more endangered
species and more vulnerable species than
in the entire 13,000 square miles of
Tsavo and one of those species you know
very well it’s the African violet and
this picture I took in graduate school
just further north of here in the
People’s Republic of Cambridge
Massachusetts
and the florist informed me that she
sells about $10,000 worth of violets II
urn you’ve all seen them in your
grandmother’s window and hotel lobbies
but the African violet comes from one of
the global hot spots which is the
tighter hills and the eastern Arc
forests in Tanzania it was collected by
German nuns in the 1800’s it was taken
to Germany on 2q and the rest is history
it’s a global trade that’s worth a huge
amount of money but until recently we
still knew very little about its biology
in the wild and so some years ago I set
out to understand what pollinated this
flaunt in the wild and it resulted in a
in a small paper and the basic mechanism
is really cool so just to frame this
pollinators enable plants to have sex
and there’s good sex and there’s bad sex
and good sex for a plant just like for a
person is sex with a different flower or
different person and bad sex
bad sex is sex with yourself so
pollinators help prevent a very severe
phenomenon called inbreeding depression
and I’ll talk about made choice and
stigmas in in a minute but the violet to
do to tell you to sum up what was an
amazing experience is pollinated by this
fantastically beautiful a megillah’ bee
and it’s a really kinky pollination
system it’s called buzz pollination
where the bee comes up it sizes the
flowers it understands the hetero
morphic and antio stalee that’s going on
over here I can tell you more about that
later privately if you’re interested and
then it grabs the flower it folds its
wings back and at the Freak buzzes it at
a frequency it vibrates it between 11
and 12 Hertz only then is pollen
released and you have the production of
the seed pod and this simple intimate
fun process is what allows hundreds of
thousands of plant species to persist in
ecosystems and to contribute to
ecosystems throughout the world just a
little aside here nature Kenya the
organization I work for as as I chair
the insect committee celebrated its
centennial a couple of years ago and as
part of that the government honored us
with a set of stamps and one of the
species they asked us to depict was the
bee and the African violet and I
actually did the illustrations for the
stamp so that was also a great honor and
here we are launching the stamps with
one of the longest-serving members of
nature Kenya flown Ueno who has
selflessly led the bird walks for over
40 years and typifies the kind of person
that is part of the society as and the
Acting Postmaster General because the
actual Postmaster General had just been
summoned by the International Criminal
Court in The Hague
so we’re now going to go to where where
I grew up the carrier Valley in western
Kenya and this is this is absolutely one
of my most favorite places in the world
it isn’t very visited by tourists or or
scientists even but it’s this phenomenal
extension of the Great Rift Valley and
extends all the way up into the wilds of
northern Kenya and all the way to Lake
Turkana and South Sudan it is an
incredibly diverse and lovely place to
explore and one of the crops there that
is grown along streams that come off the
mountains is papaya and papaya is a
really interesting example because you
have separate male and female flowers on
separate male and female trees which
means that a pollinator has to come
along go to the male flower take the
pollen over to the female flower
fertilize it and then you get the fruit
and this service is provided by in this
site five different species of
incredibly beautiful Hawk moths who fly
at dusk for 4:30 for 15 minutes and
pollinate those flowers and they lay
their eggs in the in the area
surrounding the farms and without them
we do experiments with the farmers you
have no proper pollination of fruit
another example that is from this area
is mango that is grown and I just wanted
to put this in to show that in some
species it’s a very wide diversity of
pollinators that come and visit the
flowers you’ve got flies you’ve got ants
you’ve got wasps and this is also an
example of the power of communication in
today’s world because I blogged about
this pollination site on Peters farm
where he grows five different varieties
of mango I on my blog on wildlife direct
and within 24 hours I had comments from
India Pakistan Ghana the United States
and Rome and farmers in India were able
to use the blog to compare it to their
pollinators as was the farmer in Ghana
in the US scientists identified the wasp
as a very important parasitic species of
ants and the FAO the agricultural
organization of the UN in Rome was so
thrilled about all of this they chose
this site as one of their model
pollinator sites
so basically pollination services I
don’t have to convince you I hope by now
are driven by this wonderful diversity
and my work increasingly is
communicating that with farmers and the
next clip I’ll show you very quickly is
a farm in western Kenya where Lucy Maria
can tell you for herself okay so we are
here in the Nandi Hills and we’re at the
farm of Lucy and surrounded by beautiful
bees and all kinds of different crop
means accordion Kikuyu or sabe in
cucumber and committee so this is a crop
that very much depends on pollinators
and up here you can see one of the bees
that’s resting but it has been
pollinating the flowers so without this
pollinator there would be no enjoy I’ve
seen the other bit of my life which
almost the life of my garden which I’ve
never seen and never really got so much
interest on it pollination I never knew
that pollinators are very important
there are so many of them so different
today I’ve learnt that there are so many
types of bees I only thought there’s
only one I don’t miss and to have found
out that there are several kinds of
users it’s so amazing it’s amazing thank
you thank you and we found at least 10
different types of bees just here no
sham
so they’re actually five different kinds
of beasts so far that I’ve seen outside
the National Geographic Society so the
you don’t have to go to remote places to
find this diversity among I’m almost
ending here and I just wanted to show
you a couple more slides and and this is
a community of children so a lot of my
work involves working with children and
schools and I’m really trying to connect
you know being an entomologist and
pinning lots of insects and drawers and
and looking at their genitalia and and
other details closely with actual
livelihood so this is null array which
is in Samburu in northern Kenyan and
when you look at those children and and
many people would say they look you know
they’re in a remote area they’re poor
and disadvantaged but when I look at
these children I see something else
because what we found were 30 different
species of bee on this occasion at biker
tree during their lunch break and I’ve
collected from the totalus trees which
are back here where their classrooms are
400 different species of bee so I look
at these kids and see them as rich
because they are rich in bees and they
are rich in an environment that is that
is full of life and full of amazing
discoveries that they can make and
control and participate in and love and
enjoy and I’m doing that with students
from many different backgrounds both
University students these are Georgetown
students that I taught and I played a
mean trick on that is actually a
crocodile lying down there that they
didn’t notice
and and guides across East Africa these
are two guides from the Serengeti and
students this is a school who rumah
school which is a secondary school on in
a slum in Nairobi and they are next to a
very large diverse forest but they’d
actually never been into it so really
sharing sharing that joy sharing that
Wonder is what I’m trying to do and and
very quickly I have so many people I
need to thank so many friends and family
I won’t even begin to explain who’s who
but particularly this journey hasn’t
been easy to get where I am and to have
gone to Harvard but my foster parents
and here we on Christmas morning woke up
at 6 a.m. to go hiking in the rainforest
in the mud looking for the blue headed
bee-eater and the black and white cast
hornbill I’ve had the mentorship and
guidance of unbelievable heroes and
Friends everyone from dr. Leakey
professor Wilson and to my PhD committee
but most of all I want to thank a friend
who was the most tireless loving
faithful kind and patient companion I’ve
ever had and that was my dog doll and I
have one request to leave you with if
you can spend just five minutes a day in
the company of an insect your life will
never be the same
thank you
Oh
lot of you think that strange but I hope
I’ll convince you by the end of the 15
minutes I’m allotted that insects are
actually the creatures that do run the
world and that are truly truly wonderful
and all of those 7 billion people we
just heard about on this planet their
lives are touched by insects in many
ways but in a very important way through
food because all 7 billion people need
to eat and insects are responsible for a
lot of the pollination of food crops and
I’ll be going through some of these
examples I think the words from Charles
Dickens are as apt today as ever we do
live in the best of times and we’ve seen
some of those best of times in the
technology and the healthcare and the
amazing stuff that we learn and know and
explore about our world but we also live
in the worst of times and we’ve seen
some of that related to destruction of
the natural environment it truly is a
time of light and it is a time of
darkness and I’m sorry to tell you that
for one particular aspect of the
planet’s life of its biodiversity all
the 1.7 million other species who share
our home it really is quite a dark time
and we are we are losing species we’re
losing habitats we’re losing ecosystems
and we’re losing the functions that they
provide and they support it hasn’t
always been this way and here is an
example from East Africa that I love to
share because it shows you how
intricately involved we have been as a
species with the world around us now as
a scientist I basically study
cooperation and mutualism and love and
this is one of the most interesting
examples of that you have here a sketch
based on an old cave painting from South
Central Africa of early humans
collecting wild honey now a lot of the
early humans in Africa as well
as some tribes currently were led to
these wild colonies which can be very
well hidden in trees or in rocks by a
bird called the honeyguide and that’s
the honey guide this is a honey guy that
was soliciting me to follow it in
Tanzania a few weeks ago and for a long
time we thought this relationship or
following the honey guide first evolved
between the bird and a and a lovely
animal called a honey badger but it
turns out that the relationship actually
first evolved between bird and human and
this has been worked out by scientists
studying the burana people in Kenya and
the Badger is a parasite of the
mutualism that first came around between
the two of us and bees are incredibly
important I don’t have to convince you I
don’t even have to tell you this because
you’ve already heard and seen the crisis
around bees in the northern hemisphere
but something you may not know is that
bees honey bees actually originated in
East Africa and just like humans
migrated in waves out of Africa so did
honey bees and the amazing thing with
honey bees in Africa is this a lot of
diversity within African Africa just
like there’s a lot of human diversity in
Africa so the typical honey bee which is
kept by thousands of communities across
Africa is managed in traditional log
hives and this so this elderly gentleman
is a member of them of the Dorobo
community he lives in the maca Gordo
forest in central like like Capilla in
Kenya and all of his income all of his
livelihood paying his children school
fees supporting his family comes from
beekeeping from harvesting and selling
honey and in in East Africa there are
two fantastic varieties of honey bee
that we get to work with the lovely
mountain honey bee Monte Kola which is a
very gentle chocolate-colored species
and produces lots and lots of honey and
then the savanna or dry land honey bee
scoot alotta which is not so gentle and
not so calm but also produces lots of
honey and in addition to honey bees
another social be that gets managed and
that always surprises people to learn
about our sting
space and Maria here is a beekeeper a
stingless bee keeper on the slopes of
Mount Meru in Tanzania and you can see a
view inside the stingless bee hive there
and stingless behind here are two
different species of stingless bee honey
a whale a honey and chicory honey which
come from western Kenya is as valuable
if not more valuable than honey bee
honey which all of these different
communities produce bee diversity is a
really interesting Cline which is a
trend in terms of populations and
diversity in that it is that they aren’t
more diverse in tropical rainforests
they the forests do have a lot of
diversity but interestingly enough it’s
the deserts and the dry lands of the
world where most of the bees are found
and you have every kind of relationship
from highly specialized bees like this
beautiful sister Ophir up here that only
ever visits one kind of flower and just
flies for a few weeks a year all the way
through these lovely leaf cutter bees a
long tongue a megillah’ bee will meet
her again in in a few minutes and then
or something I wanted to point out these
are all solitary bee species and the
females have nests to go back to at
night and you already know that honeybee
is I’m sure most of you do that honey
bees it’s all it’s a it’s a feminine
monarchy it’s all female-driven they’re
all all sisters cooperating and working
together males don’t do anything and
with the solitary bees again males don’t
do anything but they actually have a
little bit of a tough deal because they
don’t have nests to go to at night so
they have to sleep outside on grasses
huddling together for warmth and here
are two different species that are sort
of snuggling up for the night and
they’re very vulnerable
so I told you a little bit about
stingless bees because a lot of the work
I’m trying to develop right now is
managing and protecting stingless bees
and here is Stanley who is a stingless
bee keeper
in western Kenya at the cacao mega
forest and he keeps five different
species of stingless bees those are the
hives over there and he even keeps
species that scientists don’t know about
we don’t know the biology we haven’t
figured out the the nesting
and Stanley learnt this from his
grandmother but sadly he’s not teaching
his children and that’s for several
reasons one the culture is dying is
dying out there’s a lot of change
there’s a lot of habitat destruction the
bees are not as common the market for
stingless bee honey comes and goes but
what I wanted to point out with this
example is that as we lose species
processes and interactions we also stand
to lose a lot of knowledge because the
entire history of our hollis species has
been entwined with those of so many
others and if we lose that knowledge
it’s just as precious as losing the
species or interaction itself now bees
pollinate crops and wild flowers and and
a quick question to you how many of you
like coffee chocolate yeah and those are
just a couple of examples of two crops
that would not exist without the actions
of pollinators so the value of bees and
other insects as pollinators is what I’m
really trying to dissect and communicate
and about two thirds of the flowering
plants on the planet are pollinated by
insects and one in three bites of food
is directly thanks to the actions of an
insect pollinator I’m going to take you
on a little trip and we’re going to
visit some of the field sites I work at
and here you have a map of Kenya oh it’s
been so wonderful is to hear how many
people have worked in or we are working
in and and how how connected they are to
Kenya and Kenya has as you all know this
incredible network of protected areas
national parks and reserves and you can
see them outlined there in green but the
parks in reserves were set up at a time
when the priorities for conservation
were very different 70% of the wildlife
is outside the national parks and
reserves and when we look at the bigger
picture of biodiversity almost 99% of
the endemic species the real real
diversity is outside those protected
areas and right here you can see Tsavo
which is one of the biggest salvo
Easton’s of a West combined protected
area and there’s a gap there and this
that gap that wasn’t included in the
National Park and it’s the tighter hills
and you might think this is a very
distant and obscure place but I’ll show
you a connection to it in a second and
what’s interesting if you look at this
this is below no Hill the single biggest
forested fragment that’s left you see
this mosaic this little blanket all
around each of those dots is a
subsistence farmer and I’m working
primarily with these rural subsistence
farmers but on below no Hill there are
more endemic species and more endangered
species and more vulnerable species than
in the entire 13,000 square miles of
Tsavo and one of those species you know
very well it’s the African violet and
this picture I took in graduate school
just further north of here in the
People’s Republic of Cambridge
Massachusetts
and the florist informed me that she
sells about $10,000 worth of violets II
urn you’ve all seen them in your
grandmother’s window and hotel lobbies
but the African violet comes from one of
the global hot spots which is the
tighter hills and the eastern Arc
forests in Tanzania it was collected by
German nuns in the 1800’s it was taken
to Germany on 2q and the rest is history
it’s a global trade that’s worth a huge
amount of money but until recently we
still knew very little about its biology
in the wild and so some years ago I set
out to understand what pollinated this
flaunt in the wild and it resulted in a
in a small paper and the basic mechanism
is really cool so just to frame this
pollinators enable plants to have sex
and there’s good sex and there’s bad sex
and good sex for a plant just like for a
person is sex with a different flower or
different person and bad sex
bad sex is sex with yourself so
pollinators help prevent a very severe
phenomenon called inbreeding depression
and I’ll talk about made choice and
stigmas in in a minute but the violet to
do to tell you to sum up what was an
amazing experience is pollinated by this
fantastically beautiful a megillah’ bee
and it’s a really kinky pollination
system it’s called buzz pollination
where the bee comes up it sizes the
flowers it understands the hetero
morphic and antio stalee that’s going on
over here I can tell you more about that
later privately if you’re interested and
then it grabs the flower it folds its
wings back and at the Freak buzzes it at
a frequency it vibrates it between 11
and 12 Hertz only then is pollen
released and you have the production of
the seed pod and this simple intimate
fun process is what allows hundreds of
thousands of plant species to persist in
ecosystems and to contribute to
ecosystems throughout the world just a
little aside here nature Kenya the
organization I work for as as I chair
the insect committee celebrated its
centennial a couple of years ago and as
part of that the government honored us
with a set of stamps and one of the
species they asked us to depict was the
bee and the African violet and I
actually did the illustrations for the
stamp so that was also a great honor and
here we are launching the stamps with
one of the longest-serving members of
nature Kenya flown Ueno who has
selflessly led the bird walks for over
40 years and typifies the kind of person
that is part of the society as and the
Acting Postmaster General because the
actual Postmaster General had just been
summoned by the International Criminal
Court in The Hague
so we’re now going to go to where where
I grew up the carrier Valley in western
Kenya and this is this is absolutely one
of my most favorite places in the world
it isn’t very visited by tourists or or
scientists even but it’s this phenomenal
extension of the Great Rift Valley and
extends all the way up into the wilds of
northern Kenya and all the way to Lake
Turkana and South Sudan it is an
incredibly diverse and lovely place to
explore and one of the crops there that
is grown along streams that come off the
mountains is papaya and papaya is a
really interesting example because you
have separate male and female flowers on
separate male and female trees which
means that a pollinator has to come
along go to the male flower take the
pollen over to the female flower
fertilize it and then you get the fruit
and this service is provided by in this
site five different species of
incredibly beautiful Hawk moths who fly
at dusk for 4:30 for 15 minutes and
pollinate those flowers and they lay
their eggs in the in the area
surrounding the farms and without them
we do experiments with the farmers you
have no proper pollination of fruit
another example that is from this area
is mango that is grown and I just wanted
to put this in to show that in some
species it’s a very wide diversity of
pollinators that come and visit the
flowers you’ve got flies you’ve got ants
you’ve got wasps and this is also an
example of the power of communication in
today’s world because I blogged about
this pollination site on Peters farm
where he grows five different varieties
of mango I on my blog on wildlife direct
and within 24 hours I had comments from
India Pakistan Ghana the United States
and Rome and farmers in India were able
to use the blog to compare it to their
pollinators as was the farmer in Ghana
in the US scientists identified the wasp
as a very important parasitic species of
ants and the FAO the agricultural
organization of the UN in Rome was so
thrilled about all of this they chose
this site as one of their model
pollinator sites
so basically pollination services I
don’t have to convince you I hope by now
are driven by this wonderful diversity
and my work increasingly is
communicating that with farmers and the
next clip I’ll show you very quickly is
a farm in western Kenya where Lucy Maria
can tell you for herself okay so we are
here in the Nandi Hills and we’re at the
farm of Lucy and surrounded by beautiful
bees and all kinds of different crop
means accordion Kikuyu or sabe in
cucumber and committee so this is a crop
that very much depends on pollinators
and up here you can see one of the bees
that’s resting but it has been
pollinating the flowers so without this
pollinator there would be no enjoy I’ve
seen the other bit of my life which
almost the life of my garden which I’ve
never seen and never really got so much
interest on it pollination I never knew
that pollinators are very important
there are so many of them so different
today I’ve learnt that there are so many
types of bees I only thought there’s
only one I don’t miss and to have found
out that there are several kinds of
users it’s so amazing it’s amazing thank
you thank you and we found at least 10
different types of bees just here no
sham
so they’re actually five different kinds
of beasts so far that I’ve seen outside
the National Geographic Society so the
you don’t have to go to remote places to
find this diversity among I’m almost
ending here and I just wanted to show
you a couple more slides and and this is
a community of children so a lot of my
work involves working with children and
schools and I’m really trying to connect
you know being an entomologist and
pinning lots of insects and drawers and
and looking at their genitalia and and
other details closely with actual
livelihood so this is null array which
is in Samburu in northern Kenyan and
when you look at those children and and
many people would say they look you know
they’re in a remote area they’re poor
and disadvantaged but when I look at
these children I see something else
because what we found were 30 different
species of bee on this occasion at biker
tree during their lunch break and I’ve
collected from the totalus trees which
are back here where their classrooms are
400 different species of bee so I look
at these kids and see them as rich
because they are rich in bees and they
are rich in an environment that is that
is full of life and full of amazing
discoveries that they can make and
control and participate in and love and
enjoy and I’m doing that with students
from many different backgrounds both
University students these are Georgetown
students that I taught and I played a
mean trick on that is actually a
crocodile lying down there that they
didn’t notice
and and guides across East Africa these
are two guides from the Serengeti and
students this is a school who rumah
school which is a secondary school on in
a slum in Nairobi and they are next to a
very large diverse forest but they’d
actually never been into it so really
sharing sharing that joy sharing that
Wonder is what I’m trying to do and and
very quickly I have so many people I
need to thank so many friends and family
I won’t even begin to explain who’s who
but particularly this journey hasn’t
been easy to get where I am and to have
gone to Harvard but my foster parents
and here we on Christmas morning woke up
at 6 a.m. to go hiking in the rainforest
in the mud looking for the blue headed
bee-eater and the black and white cast
hornbill I’ve had the mentorship and
guidance of unbelievable heroes and
Friends everyone from dr. Leakey
professor Wilson and to my PhD committee
but most of all I want to thank a friend
who was the most tireless loving
faithful kind and patient companion I’ve
ever had and that was my dog doll and I
have one request to leave you with if
you can spend just five minutes a day in
the company of an insect your life will
never be the same
thank you
Oh
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