bees, breakups, and emergent strategy: one week of bee preservation fieldwork in costa rica
Greetings friends!! I'm here to share a recap of the three weeks I spent in Costa Rica in December of 2021.
Before I begin, here's a poem that I read and enjoyed by Lao Tzu.
Peace in the Heart, By Lao Tzu
If there is to be peace in the world,There must be peace in the nations.
If there is to be peace in the nations,There must be peace in the cities.
If there is to be peace in the cities,There must be peace between neighbors.
If there is to be peace between neighbors,There must be peace in the home.
If there is to be peace in the home,There must be peace in the heart.
My time was divided into three equal parts:
An Earthwatch expedition to conserve wild bees and other pollinators in the Monteverde Cloud Forest (yellow on the map)
Christmas with my family in the jungly Osa Peninsula, the Crown Jewel of Costa Rica (purple on the map)
A yoga retreat with The Sacred Fig, just a hop across the Golfo Dulce from the Osa (pink on the map)
In this post, I'll focus on part one, my week volunteering with Earthwatch.
Context: Why Earthwatch?
I was going through a tough breakup in the fall of 2021. Sobbing for hours every day, leaning on friends for support, unable to take care of myself.
Then my friend Theresa sent me an essay: The Crane Wife. The author calls off her wedding with her fiancé and ten days later goes on an Earthwatch expedition to study the whooping crane on the gulf coast of Texas. I saw myself in the author's story:
"I often cried or yelled or reasoned or pleaded with my fiancé to tell me that he loved me. To be nice to me. To notice things about how I was living."
"Another time he gave me a birthday card with a sticky note inside that said BIRTHDAY. After giving it to me, he explained that because he hadn’t written in it, the card was still in good condition. He took off the sticky and put the unblemished card into our filing cabinet."
"I need you to know: I hated that I needed more than this from him. There is nothing more humiliating to me than my own desires. Nothing that makes me hate myself more than being burdensome and less than self-sufficient. I did not want to feel like the kind of nagging woman who might exist in a sit-com."
"That I wanted someone to articulate that they loved me, that they saw me, was a personal failing and I tried to overcome it."
"What I learned to do, in my relationship with my fiancé, was to survive on less."
"'The Crane Wife' is a story from Japanese folklore. I found a copy in the reserve’s gift shop among the baseball caps and bumper stickers that said GIVE A WHOOP. In the story, there is a crane who tricks a man into thinking she is a woman so she can marry him. She loves him, but knows that he will not love her if she is a crane so she spends every night plucking out all of her feathers with her beak. She hopes that he will not see what she really is: a bird who must be cared for, a bird capable of flight, a creature, with creature needs. Every morning, the crane-wife is exhausted, but she is a woman again. To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work. She never sleeps. She plucks out all her feathers, one by one."
The Crane Wife, by CJ Hauser
Like the author, I realized that I had blamed myself for having needs in a relationship, for wanting to be loved and seen.
Reading this essay shifted something in me. I created a dating checklist, determined to raise my standards. I excavated my deepest desires and turned them into reality: solo travel in Mexico, a cross-country train trip, and planning monthly events for my friends. I would no longer ignore my needs.
When I decided to take a career break months later, I knew that I wanted to honor all the change this essay had inspired in me by going on an Earthwatch expedition of my own.
I chose bee conservation in Costa Rica for simple reasons. It lined up with my travel schedule, and I would get to work with bees. Last summer, I spent two months apprenticing at a natural Spanish perfumery Bravanariz, where we created a bee-inspired solid perfume to fund research into and conservation of endangered meadows that are a haven for pollinators. My early mornings spent with a multi-generational organic bee farmer planted a seed in me to learn more about how I could continue helping the bees.
In the Field
We drove three hours from the airport in San Jose to the Monteverde Cloud Forest, passing the sea before heading up an endless series of twisting, potholed mountain roads. Our group of four would be joining four people from the previous week. We would be staying in the lodge at the cloud forest reserve, with afternoon access to their trail system.
I scarfed down some garlic noodles and hung out with the hummingbirds at the hummingbird cafe next door. The reserve's resident coati, with razor-sharp teeth, made its first appearance of the week.
That evening, the head researcher, Dr. Valerie Peters, gave us an overview of her work and our upcoming fieldwork. She has been working in the area since 2012, researching which plant species support more interactions in local pollinator networks. Their past research identified two plants that seem to have an important role. With local farmers, she is planting two plots, one with these verified plants, and one with plants where they have seen many bees in the past.
We would mostly be working with stingless bees, which are only found in the neo-tropics, the Americas. There are 20,000 described species of bees and lots more that aren't yet identified. Because the bees we would be studying are so small, we needed to capture them, kill them (unfortunately), and bring them back to a lab to be identified. She then took us through an overview of all the families of bees, such as squash, orchid, and oil-collecting bees. There's a special bee, the Mariola, that creates medicinal honey that is used to treat cataracts! Many of them had minute differences, and it was even hard to distinguish a fly or a wasp from a bee.
Throughout the week, we would be visiting five farms, a different one each morning, that are used either as pasture or farming for coffee and other crops. In the afternoons, we would help set up a plant nursery, putting dirt in little bags for future seeding.
After Valerie's talk, we heard from her Costa Rican research counterpart about Monteverde Cloud Forest's history of conservation. Only 1% of forests are cloud forests, making them rare. The region's cloud forest is a system of private reserves and biological corridors, an area of habitat connecting wildlife populations separated by human activities or structure. At the preserve, only 2% of the land is opened to tourists via trails, the profits of which sustain 4 reserves and an office in the capital, San Jose. Monteverde is one of the first examples of a sustainable ecotourism model out there!
We got our hands dirty the next day on the first farm. We coated jars with acetone to kill the bees and set out with partners. I learned how to use long nets to reach 40 feet up and catch bees, or to use a jar to nab ones closer to the ground. Whenever we caught a bee, we waited 15 more minutes at the same spot to see if we could catch any more. At some spots, you could catch 10+ bees, and at others, that first bee would be the only one. I accidentally stood on top of a fire ant nest when trying to net some bees and didn't realize until my legs were covered in hundreds of ants. Their stings didn't hurt too badly. That experience, and having to walk through waist-high grasses, made me grateful that I packed snake gaiters.
In the afternoons, I loved sitting for two hours and filling bags with dirt over and over again while talking to my teammates. I learned about Julie's life in Texas, which is a massive bird migration corridor. Niquelle, an activist, gardener, and teacher, convinced me that I need to visit Pittsburgh, and embodied compassionate listening, care, and ambition to heal the world. Kat’s photo-realistic nature portraits inspired me to give nature journaling a go. Watching the rows in the nursery fill up every day, soon to be filled with seeds, and coming home with dirt caked under my fingernails felt so satisfying.
The Activities in Between
One night, we heard from Valerie's husband, who is also a science researcher, about pollinators and pollination services. We learned that the best pollinators are highly mobile; have hair, scales, or feathers; and have specialized mouthparts for collecting nectar. He said that pollinator populations are largely in decline due to habitat loss, pesticide usage, diseases, and climate change. Over 150 US food crops are dependent on pollinators to grow, including almost all fruit and grain crops, so we need to help preserve pollinators! The best ways for us to help? Plant a garden using native flowering plants, provide a habitat for nesting and egg laying, and avoid or limit pesticide use. These guidelines inspired me to create or join a community pollinator conservation project in New York City, which has about 200 native species of bees, when I move there.
On other afternoons, we visited a coffee farm Bella Tica, where I got to taste and pick my first coffee fruits, and a sugarcane farm that is owned by a local research assistant Sergio's aunt. We made sugarcane lime juice by pushing a crank that crushed the sugarcane. I developed a sugar headache after consuming way too much juice and sugar cane brittle.
We went on two guided nature walks with passionate guides, one during the day and one at night. Some highlights:
Witnessing a flying quetzal after searching for one for almost an hour.
Bioluminescent mushrooms, which take two days to produce the ingredients necessary to make light in order to attract creatures, shine brightly on the third day, and then start to die.
An insect killed by the cordyceps fungus (the inspiration behind The Last of Us). It was in the signature "Death Grip," because the fungus controls their movements and gets them to bite onto a leaf until it dies, enabling the fungus to grow.
Frogs here are the earliest sign of climate change in a jungle because they cannot adapt to changing temperatures and only survive in a specific range. They will rise to higher elevations to escape higher temperatures, but there's only so far up they can go. Once they reach their max elevation, there will be a mass extinction.
Orange-kneed Tarantulas: Let me try to impart some of the passion that my guide had for these creatures. The female tarantula lives in a cave for her whole life, while the male tarantula wanders nomadically. When she detects vibrations outside of her cave, she darts out to kill her prey. To mate, the male must enter the cave and immediately begin massaging the female to put her in a trance state. Only then can he deposit his sperm. Then, he must run for his life to escape from the cave before the female comes to and eats him. This depletes almost all his energy, so he has nothing left to do but to mate one last time and get eaten by the second mate. That female uses him for nutrition. She leaves her cave to lay her eggs and guard them for 2-6 months. This process takes more time as the female ages (girls live 26-30 years; guys, 10 years). Another fun fact: the mom will eat her kids if they don't leave her cave soon enough. 🕸️
Lastly, I explored all the trails inside Monteverde with my teammates without a guide. My favorite trail took us to the continental divide, which splits the reserve between the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. Maybe it was my favorite because I rewarded myself with delicious hot chocolate at the hummingbird cafe next door after finishing the hike. :~)
Lessons from Earthwatch
(N.B.: The most surprising thing I learned about Earthwatch is that every expedition is 100% tax deductible since Earthwatch is a nonprofit! They've been around supporting conservation, biodiversity, and climate research projects for over 50 years. In addition, the money you pay for the trip is a 50% grant for the research project you're working on. If you're interested, you can check out all their expeditions here.)
I loved seeing the power of relationships built up over a long time in a community. Dr. Peters has local partners on the ground who are overseeing the planting of the best crops for pollinators in Costa Rica. She has been coming here annually for over a decade. Even though her research area is so hyper-local, "returning fertility to the soil" around her, the team's results could help pollinator populations thrive across the Americas. It's a direct application of Adrienne Maree Brown's Emergent Strategy, which advocates that everything is about relationships and critical connections. In the words of Grace Lee Boggs, it's a shift from "mile wide inch deep" movements to "inch deep mile wide" movements.
“The biggest thing I’ve learned from nature is the importance of relationships. E.g. An ecosystem isn’t just a list of living things (squirrel, tree, bee, flower,): it’s the set of relationships between those living things (the squirrel lives in the tree, the bee pollinates the flower). In terms of organizing, this means that a given social justice movement isn’t a list of organizations, or campaigns, or even individuals; it’s the set of relationships between organizations, campaigns, individuals, etc.”
-Farhad Ebrahimi (quoted inside of Emergent Strategy)
Setting up a nursery for several hours each day, just filling up the dirt without planting the seeds, became a comforting metaphor for me at this stage in my travels. I'd been feeling overwhelmed and scattered because I have picked up so many diverse skills and experiences on my trip that aren't perfectly related. I was putting pressure on myself to turn every seed into actionable change as soon as I settled in New York: become a yoga teacher, start a bee project, get a job, and join an urban garden. Maree Brown's work is teaching me to "accept the inner multitudes" and let the seeds I plant blossom when they are ready. She teaches that "uprisings and resistance and mass movement require a tolerance of messiness, a tolerance of many, many paths being walked on at once."
On my first solo travel experience in Mexico, I spent a beautiful day following events that I found posted up around the city in Oaxaca, leading to a spontaneous dandelion tattoo at a secondhand fair, a women-only New Moon cacao, and an all-night dance performance and party where I made unexpected friends. I chose the dandelion tattoo pretty quickly for a sheet of flash. While receiving the pokes by hand, I ascribed meaning to my choice: when I see a field of dandelions, I imagine a sea of fleeting, magical opportunities, ready for me to pick them up and activate them with a gentle breath.
The seeds of this dandelion tattoo blossomed for me while reading Emergent Strategy, for dandelions are one of Maree Brown's favorite life forms. Why? I'll leave you with these two quotes, which are Maree Brown's answers:
"Dandelions spread not only themselves but their community structure, manifesting their essential qualities (which include healing and detoxifying the human body) to proliferate and thrive in a new environment. [Dandelions] evolve while maintaining core practices that ensure their survival. A dandelion is a community of healers waiting to spread...What are we as humans, what is our function in the universe?"
"Dandelions don’t know whether they are a weed or a brilliance. But each seed can create a field of dandelions. We are invited to be that prolific. And to return fertility to the soil around us."
Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy