The New York Times, October 8, 2025
Kim Ballare: In graduate school, I fell in love with bees and other pollinators. They’re so important to our functioning ecosystem, but they’re really unknown to a lot of people. Most people just think about the European honeybee, which is not a native species in the United States. But there are 4,000 species of bees in the United States, and their diversity and their different functions are fascinating. My main species focus during my Ph.D. was on the Eastern Carpenter bee, which is huge — bigger than a bumblebee — and make their nests by chewing into wood with their little jaws.
In 2023, when I got a job with the Forest Service, I was leading a project in Montana looking at how forest management techniques affect pollinators — specifically, logging and prescribed burning. It was my first major grant. We bought a lot of equipment and planned to support a Ph.D. student. The site is a beautiful forest with mainly lodgepole pine and spruce and Douglas fir, with some open areas that are just full of wildflowers like lupines and geraniums and balsam root, which looks like a big sunflower.
A lot of our knowledge about pollinators is about agriculture. But if we didn’t have a diversity of native insects, native plants might not reproduce effectively, and that would reduce food for tons of other wildlife. Just having these interactions is really important to maintain the life of the ecosystem. There isn’t really a lot of work that’s been done on pollinators in forests. We’re increasingly understanding that it’s an important habitat for pollinators.
We were hoping to use environmental DNA. An insect will land on a flower, deposit DNA, and then later you can extract the DNA off the flower to see what insects are visiting it. Often, when we’re doing a pollinator study, we’ll catch an insect with a net, and we can write down what flower it was visiting. But that’s just a snapshot. With environmental DNA, we can potentially see more of the insects that are visiting.
I got fired, and then I was reinstated after a month based on one of the court decisions. But when I came back, the grant was still frozen. The experience of being a federal employee right now is pretty brutal. You get emails from DOGE encouraging us to leave our low productivity jobs in federal government and get a high productivity job in the private sector. I loved my job before that. It was an exciting opportunity to do applied pollinator research, which is what I want to do for my career. And then that got snatched away. I feel lucky to have my new job, but I’m definitely still in mourning.
Kim Ballare, formerly a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service, is now a data scientist with the World Wildlife Fund.
Copyright 2025 The New York Times Company. Reprinted with permission.