Good news: The honey bees are all right. However, bee populations across species are declining in the U.S. and beyond. Marina Caillaud, Ph.D., a senior lecturer in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, discusses the stressors on bee colonies — and how humans can reduce them — with Marc Faris, an instructional designer for eCornell’s Bees and Us course.
Concern about honey bees, and the possibility of human extinction, has swept the nation. Marina Caillaud, Ph.D., a lecturer in the Department of Entomology at Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, shares the facts about the state of bees in the U.S. and around the world in this episode of the Cornell Keynotes podcast from eCornell.
Her conversation with Marc Faris, an instructional designer for eCornell’s Bees and Us course, covers:
Learn more in the Bees and Us online course, co-authored by Caillaud, and in eight other beekeeping programs from eCornell.
Read recent news and research about bees:
Read more about pollinator-friendly native plants in your region of the U.S.
Chris Wofford: Today on Cornell Keynotes, we are looking at the causes and effects of declining bee populations around the world, and what humans can do to reverse these declines. On the bright side, the honey bees are doing fine for the moment, but big challenges lie ahead for tens of thousands of bee species.
Chris Wofford: I invited eCornell's Marc Faris, who is Instructional Designer for the Online Bees and Us course, to interview faculty author and bee expert Dr. Marina Caillaud from Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. As we've learned through the ages, the fate of humans and bees are inextricably bound. And as we learned from Dr. Caillaud, the health and safety of bee pollinators has everything to do with global health and ultimately human survival. So be sure to check out the episode notes for further reading and to learn about the Bees and Us course in addition to other beekeeping courses from eCornell.
Chris Wofford: Here's Mark and Marina on bees and us.
Marc Faris: So, Marina, I think for me and probably a lot of people listening when, we talk about bee decline, this concept of colony collapse disorder is something that might come to mind. It's certainly something that I became aware of a while back. And I wonder if you could sort of help us understand a little bit more about when the conversation around colony collapse disorder became a thing and why.
Marc Faris: What's important about this?
Marina Caillaud: You know, it's true. I mean, often when I meet people and they learn that I teach about bees, the first thing they ask me is well, how is the CCD situation going? And what I explained to them is that CCD is a term coined, CCD for colony collapse disorder is a term that was coined by U.S. beekeepers in 2006, 2007, when, pretty intense case of vanishing of bees. Like, one week they would come to their hives and they were vibrant. The next week they would come and some of them and for some beekeepers, most of them and all of them, the workers that were gone, leaving behind lots of things of value, such as honey, sometimes offspring, and even the queen. And this was observed in many apiaries in different states on a, a very large scale. The U.S. beekeepers coined that term and the media, of course, started being very interested in that.
Marina Caillaud: There were articles everywhere, and so the general public is very acutely aware of that term and associates that with bee decline. The truth is that particular CCD is an event that has not been observed very much ever since. They are sometimes particularly large scale losses of bees in the U.S. or elsewhere. But it's not been observed to the scale it was observed in 2006, 2007.
Marina Caillaud: And so but what keeps happening is bee decline.
Marina Caillaud: So CCD is really a term that refers to that period of time, 2006, 2007, it's important to know about this because it has triggered a lot of interest for the general public, which is great. It motivated citizen science, it motivated government agencies to fund more research into bees, honeybees and the other bees, but it is really not what's happening every year in the US or elsewhere.
Marc Faris: So from what I'm hearing then if even though colony collapse disorder itself may not be as grave of a concern, it has, it did at least spark some interest and some focus on what's going on with honeybee populations in the United States.
Marc Faris: And so I'm wondering if we could dig into the data a little bit that has been gathered and think about what that might tell us about, whether there is still something going on in the decline of honeybee populations in the United States, that should be a matter of concern for folks.
Marina Caillaud: So it's true that the public in 2007 and still to this day, they have the perception that honeybee colonies are declining in the US and that honeybees are in trouble, but the data says otherwise.
Marina Caillaud: So if you look at the number of managed colonies of honeybees in the US over time, and we have pretty good data for about the last 100 years. And let me specify that we know about the managed colonies because honeybees are an agricultural commodity, just the way cows and chickens are.
Marina Caillaud: Therefore, the United States Department of Agriculture is keeping track of their numbers every year. Besides the managed colonies, we do have the colonies that are not kept in man made boxes or hives. They are feral colonies. They live in tree trunks, in maybe a little rock formation, a cavity somewhere.
Marina Caillaud: So if we look at the managed honeybee colonies, there has been a decline since the 1950s. And that decline is not related to CCD per se, it's related to two events.
Marina Caillaud: The first one is that starting in the 1950s honey as a sweetener became less important in the food industry in the U.S. and also imported honey became more readily available. So a lot of beekeepers just stopped being beekeepers because of that. The second event is related to the late 1980s, because that's when very challenging enemy of honeybees in the US was accidentally introduced, and we are talking about Varroa destructor, which is a Latin name for a type of mite that is a parasite of honeybees.
Marina Caillaud: And, when this parasite was introduced accidentally in Florida in 1987, and then spread very rapidly to, well, all the other states the job of being a beekeeper became very challenging. It used to be kind of easy to be a beekeeper before varroa mites arrived. After that, you actually had to put more work, check on your colonies, maybe apply pesticides or the kind of control method.
Marina Caillaud: It became technically challenging and more time consuming. And also with variable outcomes even though you were doing your best, you could actually lose your hives. So between those two events, we went from 5.9 million colonies in 1950 to 2.2 million around 2010. However, since that time, we actually have a stable number of managed colonies in the U.S. Somewhere around 2.7 million bees. And if you run the numbers, knowing that the hive has about 40,000 bees in it, mostly workers, and you have 2.7 million bees, managed colonies or hives in the U.S., that means that we have billions of honeybees. Every year in the US so they are definitely not in trouble.
Marina Caillaud: They're not going to go extinct. And the general public should stop worrying about the fate of of honeybees per se. Yeah.
Marc Faris: Interesting. So that's good news too, because I mean, there's such an essential part of the agricultural economy in the US, right. Like, not just honey, but a lot of other products that we get from honey that or from honeybees, I should say, that folks might not think about, right?
Marina Caillaud: Yes. No, that's true. The main service that they provide to the U.S. is the pollination service.
Marc Faris: Right.
Marina Caillaud: And not only on crops, but also of variety of plants that are part of our ecosystem and are keeping our ecosystem functioning because, you know, the plants that are, you know, in a forest or in a meadow, if they are correctly pollinated, then they are going to become food for other animals, et cetera. So they are vital part of the ecosystem. And then, yes, they are helping the pollination and sometimes they are absolutely essential for the pollination of many of our crops, like blueberries or almonds or apples or we definitely need them. Besides that pollination service, which is again the most important one and the honey that everybody thinking about when they think about honeybees, there is actually a contribution in the form more minor contribution in the form of a beeswax, which gets incorporated in uh, lip balms and uh, hand salves and uh, used for candles et cetera.
Marc Faris: Okay. So we've been thinking so far really about the data we know from the United States. I wonder if we could sort of broaden the view a little bit and look at what's going on globally and how the U.S. compares in terms of bee decline, particularly honeybee populations around the world.
Marina Caillaud: So for the honeybees I just mentioned that in the US there is steady population year after year. If you look worldwide, you actually have a vast increase of the number of managed colonies over time.
Marc Faris: Mm-Hmm.
Marina Caillaud: It keeps increasing. So the organization that keeps track of those managed colonies is not the USDA, is the food and agricultural organization, FAO. And the data shows a constant increase of the number of managed colonies mainly driven by an increase in Asia.
Marina Caillaud: So, in Africa, it's steadily increasing. In, North America, it's pretty stable. In Europe, there was a drop in the early 90s, and now it's increasing steadily. But in Asia, there is a vast increase. So, honestly, over the whole planet they are billions and billions of honeybees, and they are doing well because we are taking care of them.
Marina Caillaud: We need them, we take care of them the way we take care of you know, horses, cows, sheep et cetera. So there is no honeybee decline, either in the U.S. nor worldwide.
Marc Faris: Interesting. So I, hear that. I've also heard though, that there is this phenomenon you know, honeybees every year sort of build up a colony.
Marc Faris: And then there's a period of, I guess, maybe if it's not over time decline at least annually a decline, where some number of those colonies are perishing or dying out every year. And just not making it through to the next year and I wonder what's going on there if that's just a natural phenomenon if there's something that's contributing to that and maybe that's part of this story of bee decline?
Marina Caillaud: That's a good point, actually.
Marina Caillaud: So when I'm saying that there is no decline in the number of population, it's definitely true. What we are seeing in the U.S., though, is that over one year, you actually have many hives that don't make it throughout the year and are lost typically during the winter. And the numbers in the U.S. are pretty worrisome.
Marina Caillaud: It depends on the year, but it's about 35 to 45% on average, and actually for the latest season there is an estimate that just came out from the USEA that between April 1st, 2022 and April 1st, 2023, 48.2% of the honeybee colonies in the US were lost.
Marc Faris: Wow.
Marina Caillaud: Now. It might feel counterintuitive that you can at the same times have such a vast amount of loss every year.
Marina Caillaud: And yet you still keep the same number of managed colonies every year. But that's because the beekeeper is able to rebound from that loss. What they do is that they split the colonies that made it. So they take half of the workers and put them in another box. Here you go out of one hive, you make two hives.
Marina Caillaud: So that's how they can keep the number of colonies stable. However, doing this is much more work on their part and also sometimes much more costly, especially if they have to purchase new queens, which are expensive. So it is not an ideal situation for beekeepers. The honeybees are not declining, but it's harder to keep them over the winter, and it's a lot of work for beekeepers.
Marina Caillaud: It cuts into their their margins, their economical margins, etcetera. So, yeah, that's a good point. And I have to mention that This is an annual loss that is particularly consistent in North America. I looked at other countries where there is really a good record of data like South America or Europe or Australia.
Marina Caillaud: And some countries in Asia have a very good report of the number of colonies that are lost every year. And yeah, every now and then in some countries you get large percentage of loss over the year, meaning something above 15 percent. But it's not consistently like that. Whereas in North America it is, and um, it's still not clear why it is so consistent and so high.
Marc Faris: I mean, are there any theories out there about what might be contributing to that in the United States? As opposed to not seeing quite the same drastic reductions in other parts of the world annually?
Marina Caillaud: So they, I mean, they are, yes, theories. They are stressors that, while not unique to the US, are all present at the same time. And so, the main three stressors that the U.S. bee colonies are experiencing is first of all, the pests and parasites. We talked about the varroa destructor, which is definitely the number one enemy. But they also have to fend off attacks by bacteria, which are old foes.
Marina Caillaud: They have attacks by Nosema which is a microsporidium. It's a microorganism that grows in their gut. They have viruses. Some of them are transmitted by the actual varroa mite. So they have a lot of pests and parasites. Many of them are actually imported from other countries and they did not evolve with the ability to counter those particular attacks.
Marina Caillaud: They are basically discovering a new enemy because we accidentally introduced those enemies and they have a very hard time. So that's one of them. The second one is pesticides. There are lots of pesticides used in the US. We have a system of intensive agriculture and bees are exposed to pesticides in many different ways and they bring that back to the, to their colony and it has all kinds of effects on their immune system learning, ability, et cetera. And the last one is poor nutrition. And that's kind of connected to the the intensive agriculture again, because we have created this system with large fields planted with one, two, three, species.
Marina Caillaud: Therefore bees are exposed to a lot of the same kind of pollen and they are missing on the diversity of the type of pollen and nectar that you would find in a habitat that is not dedicated to one particular crop.
Marc Faris: Right.
Marina Caillaud: So that, that poor nutrition is having an effect on their physiology. It makes also them less able to fend off attacks by enemies, because the immune system is affected by the poor nutrition. And we think that climate change is going to also amplify that because of the weather and predictability. The fact that some plants are going to have a range distribution that is going to change.
Marina Caillaud: And then who knows if the bees are going to follow that. So, poor nutrition, pesticides, pests and parasites, are three factors that are hitting honeybees in the U. S. at the same time. In other parts of the world, you might have, well, pesticides. Okay, Australia has pesticide, but they just got Varroa mites. But it's not everywhere in Australia.
Marina Caillaud: So you don't have too many concerns about the pest and parasites. In other areas, you don't have as much intensive agriculture, so you don't have as much concern about poor nutrition. In South America, they have, Africanized honeybees. So it's the same species Apis mellifera, but they are a bit different because they have genes from another subspecies of Apis mellifera.
Marina Caillaud: And it turns out that those Africanized honeybees are better at fending off attacks by all the parasites and pests that are attacking Apis mellifera. So you see, in different parts of the world, you might have one or two maybe of those three main factors, but in the US, bang, the three of them at the same time.
Marina Caillaud: Too much.
Marc Faris: Wow.
Marina Caillaud: Just too much.
Marc Faris: No wonder they're having troubles like that. So it's interesting. I mean, we've been focusing so far in this conversation around honeybees, which I think is where the vast majority of people immediately turn to when they think of the word "bee" anyway but you have authored a course for eCornell called Bees and Us that and with some other contributors that talks about bees on a much more holistic in a more holistic way.
Marc Faris: And there are over 20,000 species of bees in the world, as you made clear. Are things like this happening with other bees as well? Are they experiencing population declines? How does that compare to what we're seeing with, I mean, you've already talked about how with honeybees, perhaps it's more of a cyclical thing.
Marc Faris: What's happening with the other bee populations?
Marina Caillaud: So it's interesting, you're mentioning Bees and Us and I'm also teaching in person, a course to undergrads at Cornell university. And the first piece of information they learn about that blows their mind is the number of species other than honeybees, 20,000 species in the world.
Marina Caillaud: 4,000 species in the U.S. They are very surprised, and they're also very surprised by the diversity of colors and shapes and sizes and number of hairs on their body of many of those furry creatures. So to get to your question, we do not know the status of bees other than honeybees, as well as we know the status of honeybees because those other bees are usually not agricultural commodities, a few of them are used by farmers, but most of them, the vast majority of them are not monitored because they are not contributing to the pollination services of a particular farm and are not followed, even though they are known to be important pollinators.
Marina Caillaud: And to contribute up to 50% of the pollination services worldwide. I mean, this is an estimate that was published a few years ago. When you look at honeybees versus the other bees in terms of their contribution to pollination services, it is estimated right now that is a 50% distribution. So those bees though, that had very few fans before CCD, they acquired many more fans after CCD because the public and non governmental organization and governmental organization realized that it would be really important to know more about those very other, very important pollinators other than honeybees in case, you know, the honeybees are actually in trouble.
Marc Faris: Right, right.
Marina Caillaud: And they also discovered that they were particularly fascinating. So they've been followed more accurately since 2006, 2007. And what we have are a few global studies that are pretty solid. For instance, there is a 2021 study that analyzed the bee decline between 1900s and 2016 around the world based on this massive data set that they found of about 9 million specimen records.
Marina Caillaud: And those records could be specimen that can be found in entomological collections, but they can also be visual observation like photos that are available on iNaturalist. iNaturalist is a kind of citizen science effort. It's a website where you can upload a photo and a photo of that you saw on your walk to a forest.
Marina Caillaud: And then that photo will be looked at by a community of curators of species name, plants birds insects, et cetera. And then they will try to associate species name to that particular photo. So the, they used a variety of sources to look at those 9 million specimen records.
Marina Caillaud: And they found that although the number of bee observations and records has increased over time in particular, thanks to things like iNaturalist and the citizen science efforts, some bee species have seldom been recorded or not even been recorded at all over the study period. So that means that some bee species are in serious decline and some of them might even have gone extinct.
Marina Caillaud: We actually have evidence that one bee got extinct in the U.S. It's Bambus franklini. It's last confirmed sighting was in 2006, and then we also have evidence that a quarter of all the bumblebees in the U.S., meaning that's about 11 species, we have about 45 species of bumblebees in the U.S., 11 of them are in a threatened or near threatened category. To mitigate a little bit that rapid decline of some population, the US fish and wildlife services actually placed one of those bumblebees that is clearly threatened. It's named is Bambusa affinis on the list of endangered species in 2017.
Marina Caillaud: So, yes, we don't have a huge amount of evidence, but the evidence we have is showing that there is an overall decline of bee species. And in the US where we have, you know, some of the best records we have evidence that bumblebees, which are looked at very carefully because they are big and easy to spot and et cetera, as opposed to many minute other bees that are hard to identify by the public, we have evidence that a quarter of them are threatened or near threatened.
Marc Faris: So it sounds like, Marina, even if perhaps some of the fears about honeybee decline specifically are a little overblown that maybe people don't need to be concerned about the extinction of honeybees specifically. It does sound like there are some real challenges for bees populations in general, and that we should be aware that there is this potential for impact and decline.
Marc Faris: I know that in the course Bees and Us, you talk about a few stressors that are linked to not just honeybees, but overall bee declined. And I wonder if you could talk about some of them and their impacts.
Marina Caillaud: So, yeah, as a, with honeybees, one of the very important stressor for all bees on pesticides.
Marina Caillaud: I mentioned earlier that honeybees were exposed in a variety of ways to pesticides. Same thing for the other bees. They, it might be sprayed on them, they might collect it in the nectar and the pollen of plants that were sprayed. They might collect it in water that they aren't drinking because uh, those uh, pesticides can actually end up in that water source, et cetera.
Marina Caillaud: And uh, we have no doubt that many of those pesticides have very detrimental effects on on the bees. And those detrimental effects go beyond just killing them outright. That happens every now and then. There is a yield time application of a pesticide. And you have millions of bees, honeybees or not, that are dying.
Marina Caillaud: But what happens consistently is not a die off like that. What happens are sublethal effects of those pesticides. They may affect the reproduction of the bee, they may affect their ability to learn, which is essential for bees. They need to learn the location of the plant so that they can return to that particular important source of nectar and pollen.
Marina Caillaud: That can affect the functioning of the immune system, therefore making that less, them less able to fend off attacks by pathogen, et cetera. So we know that pesticides can have detrimental effects. One type of pesticides in particular is very harmful to bees and that's the class of insecticide called neonicotinoids.
Marina Caillaud: Sublethal effects have been reported in dozens of studies, whether performed in laboratory settings or in the field. They can induce slower growth and development, reduce danger, aversion, reductions in egg laying, worker production, longevity, increases stability, susceptibility to nocema fungi and varroa, et cetera.
Marina Caillaud: And we also know that the non honeybees are affected by those neonics as well. So that's definitely one of the main stressors for all bees. The other one is affecting honeybees to some extent, but it's mostly affecting the non honeybees, and that's habitat loss, which refers to the loss, conversion, or fragmentation of land.
Marina Caillaud: Think about agriculture or urbanization or logging or fire and all of this is modifying the distribution of floral resources and the availability of nesting substrate because it turns out that the majority of those non honey bee species, they need to find a home and they find typically a home the stem of a plant, in a tree, branch in a pile of leaves in the soil, et cetera.
Marina Caillaud: In 2005 An estimated 40 percent of the land on earth was being used for agriculture up from 11 percent in 1700. So, this redistribution of the land with more intensive agriculture is going to go up. And it is believed to really contribute to poor nutrition on the part of, for the bees, but also the loss of environments that are convenient and favorable to nesting.
Marc Faris: Those are pretty huge challenges that you've just outlined. It sounds like the sort of thing that would take action from a lot of people to deal with, probably governments and starting, but I wonder if there's anything that you or other folks would recommend or have thought about that the general public could do to help mitigate some of those impacts.
Marc Faris: I mean, as well as anything that policy makers. And scientists could be doing to help.
Marina Caillaud: Yeah, definitely. A lot of different people can make a difference to reduce all those stressors on honeybees and on bees. What about the general public? Well, the first thing that you can do that any of us can do is to spread awareness.
Marina Caillaud: Whatever you have learned about honeybees and bees, for instance, in this podcast, or if you're taking the business course at eCornell. Well, inform people around you, your friends, your family, your neighbors about what you have learned. And that can really make a difference over time because you give the information to two people, they give the information to another two and very quickly the whole world is on board and actually knows the facts.
Marina Caillaud: So that's very important. The other thing that you can do is that you actually can plant flowers. You can plant flowers that can provide food to both honeybees and bees. Not only can you plant flowers that give food, nectar and pollen, but you can also create in a whatever space you have, a nesting substrate, a pile of wood, a pile of leaves, a sandy area.
Marina Caillaud: Pieces of food that you put on your fences, if you want, that are untreated so that carpenter bees can make a hole and then grow their their progeny. So you actually can use any kind of land that you have to provide food and nesting substrate for bees. Even if the only thing you have is a little planter, in a large city, something that hangs on out of your balcony.
Marina Caillaud: There is actually a great effort in many places to have pollinator pathways. So, have different gardens that have pollinator gardens and those gardens are themselves connected somehow so that the bees have food and nesting habitats.
Marc Faris: Hm.
Marina Caillaud: So that's really, really important. And of course, it's not always intuitive to create a pollinator garden that is suitable for both honeybees and bees. But you can look at the website of the Xerces Society. They have very comprehensive resources in terms of a list of plants for different areas of the U.S., for instance, and advice on how to buy your plants. One thing that a lot of people forget is that the bees that are around you are native bees, and therefore giving them ornamental plants that look very good from your garden center might not be the best thing for them. They actually might not even visit them because many of the native bees around you are probably pretty specialized.
Marina Caillaud: So the best thing if you want to have a pollinator garden that is really favorable to the the highest number of bees is to plant native plant species and make sure that they are not treated with pesticides. So grow them from seeds, for instance, or make sure that you go to a garden center that does not apply pesticides to their plants before you actually put them in your garden.
Marc Faris: Great, those are great tips. I think most of us could pick up on those. Speaking of facts and, you know, different perceptions of facts and also kind of around this concept of inviting cohabiting with bees, cohabitating, I should say. In the last couple of months, it seems like, really recently, at least there we've seen a number of stories in the New York Times and other outlets around honeybees taking up residence in people's houses.
Marc Faris: Oftentimes in a, you know, as any story like this is, it's sometimes dramatized. It's made to seem quite scary. Maybe it is really scary for people. And in some of those situations, at least one that I was reading about, the homeowners had some difficulty finding resources to help remove the bees.
Marc Faris: And it seemed like in at least one of those cases, part of it had to do with sort of an, a principled opposition to harming the honeybee populations, which I think is a natural instinct and a good instinct on the part of most humans. Is that something that people should be concerned about?
Marc Faris: Is it going too far? What would you recommend in a case like that? If you needed to get the honeybees out of your house.
Marina Caillaud: Yeah. Cohabiting with a stinging insect is not always easy and they seem to like our houses, right? Carpenter bees like them. There are many wasps that are starting colonies in the ground or you know, above a wall.
Marina Caillaud: And yes, there are honey bees that sometimes really like the cavities that we provide in our houses, like in our chimneys or in the walls off our houses or in a barn. So well, killing them should not be the first option, especially for honeybees, because actually they can be used by a beekeeper.
Marina Caillaud: I think the first thing to do would be to find a beekeeper. The beekeeper is not going to kill them. The beekeeper is going to try to get those bees, as many bees as possible, and if possible, the queen and then put them into, relocate them into manmade boxes, hives. So I remember the story of, a recent story, of a colony of about, oh my God, a hundred and twenty five thousand bees.
Marina Caillaud: That's a very large honeybee colony found somewhere in the northeast on the siding of a, of a house. And what they did was to remove the wall. I mean, of course the wall was shot. Okay. They had to remove the wall, therefore exposing the home of the honeybees, meaning all kinds of combs, vertical combs, full of offspring and honey, and then pollen full of bees as well. And then beekeepers there were a few of them involved in that. Well, try to get as many bees as possible. I don't know if they found the queen, but they tried to get as many bees as possible and then relocated them to the hive. And, uh, honestly, without the queen, the bees eventually left that whole location and the homeowners could clean out their wall and then rebuild it.
Marina Caillaud: So I think that you can find a beekeeper. There are many counties in the U.S. that have a beekeeping association, and you can find that online. If you don't know, you can contact a university that has a department of agriculture, or that has a biological department, or there are many resources to find beekeepers.
Marina Caillaud: Or go to your market. And uh, look for honey on sale and then talk to a beekeeper directly. So yes, the first reaction should not be to fumigate them, kill them, because they are a useful resource for humans, definitely.
Marc Faris: Marina, thank you. Do you have any last words before we wrap up?
Marc Faris: Anything you haven't said that you'd like to make sure you say
Marina Caillaud: I think I uh, said all the things I think are important to know. I hope our listeners will watch the videos we recorded on Bees and Us and learn more about all of this.
Marc Faris: Marina, thank you so much for coming in today.
Marina Caillaud: Well, thank you for inviting me. It was a pleasure.
Chris Wofford: Thank you for listening to Cornell Keynotes. Check out the episode notes for information on the Bees and Us course and other beekeeping courses from eCornell. Thanks again, friends, and subscribe to stay in touch.