A fter the thunderstorm, the forest and field glistened with a quiet kind of magic. Droplets clung to blades of grass, tree bark pulsed with life, and the air, rich with the scent of loam and blooming shrubs, hummed with the buzz of bees. As I ambled along the damp path, surrounded by the sweet aftermath of the storm, I noticed a honeybee hovering near a patch of wildflowers reopening in the light.

To the naked eye, the bee’s movements looked like a gentle dance, darting from blossom to blossom with a kind of joyful urgency. But beneath the surface of this ritual was something far more complex, an invisible world of signals and charges. With every beat of its wings against the moist air, the bee accumulated a faint positive electrical charge. It wasn’t much, just enough to tip the scales in nature’s quiet arithmetic. But that charge was its secret weapon.

Flowers, by contrast, held a negative electrical charge. And when the positively charged bee approached, pollen—light, powdery, and equally negative—leapt toward it as if by magic. This attraction was no accident. It was evolution’s invisible handshake, choreographed over millennia, ensuring that life continued to spiral forward. The bee, knowingly or unknowingly, was a living conduit in a vast, interconnected web of electrostatic exchange.

But the story didn’t end there. Honeybees aren’t just passive collectors of pollen. They are sensitive readers of the landscape’s electric whispers. Using tiny hairs on their bodies, bees can detect the weak electrical fields around flowers and respond to the stimuli. If a bloom has already been visited, its charge momentarily neutralized, they can tell. And if a flower is still full of nectar and waiting, its field beckons. With each visit, bees leave behind an altered charge, creating an ever-shifting electrostatic map of the landscape for others to read.

And then there is the swarm—masses of little beings positively charged from their foraging, and the friction against air molecules.

In 2022, a groundbreaking study published in iScience by Ellard R. Hunting and colleagues revealed that when bees gather in large numbers, forming swarms or dense clusters, the aggregate electrical charge of their bodies generates electric fields as strong as those found in thunderstorms. Researchers observed that honeybee swarms could produce atmospheric electric fields ranging from 100 to 1,000 volts per meter. This astonishing effect arises from trillions of tiny, positively charged bodies moving together in the air, enough to influence local atmospheric electricity and affect processes like aerosol behavior and cloud formation as dust, pollen, and water droplets clump together, which is key in the formation of clouds and precipitation.

Additionally, as bees forage, they disturb leaves and flowers, sometimes triggering greater VOC emissions. These VOCs rise into the atmosphere, where they can oxidize and form secondary organic aerosols, cloud condensation nuclei, and even affect radiative balance–how much sunlight is reflected or absorbed.

The implications are profound. This research suggests that animal life, specifically insect activity, may play an unrecognized role in shaping basic weather events. Bees, long known as pollinators, may also be subtle architects of the sky. Their collective charge adds a new dimension to how we understand climate, ecology, and the invisible threads that connect living systems to atmospheric dynamics.

Standing there in the charged atmosphere of the forest edge, I looked up. The clouds had begun to reform in the afternoon light, their edges bright with sun. I could almost imagine the bees’ influence among them, not just as part of the food web below but as engineers of the weather. 

The sweet air after rain carried more than the scent of blossoms and wet earth. It carried the electric breath of life, of countless wings and bodies, of signals exchanged and environments shaped. Nature is not passive. It is alive with energy, coursing through roots and rivers and buzzing through the atmosphere in an evolutionary dance. And somewhere in that living current, the bees are still at work, forming a bridge between ground and sky, both one charged flight at a time and in the thunder in the swarm.

Gayil Nalls, PhD is an interdisciplinary artist and theorist. She is the founder of the World Sensorium Conservancy and the editor of its journal, Plantings.

Reference:

Hunting, E. R., et al. (2022). Observed electric charge of insect swarms and their contribution to atmospheric electricity. iScience, 25(11), 105344

When foraging for flowers, bees search for the familiar scents that blooms puff out into the air to attract them. Scientists call these little fragrant air pockets “odor plumes.” Once bees detect an odor plume, they start following it, flying from side to side to navigate to wherever the odor is strongest—scientists call this “casting”—until they land on a flower.

“If you think of a flower, it’s basically acting as a message beacon,” says Ben Langford, an atmospheric scientist at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, based in the United Kingdom, whose team studies how insects pollinate plants. “It’s sending out a signal to attract these pollinators.”

But human pollution—in particular ground-level ozone—is messing with the odor plumes bees love, new research published in the journal Environmental Pollution shows. Ground-level ozone, which is different from ozone found in the stratosphere, is generally produced by photochemical reactions between two classes of air pollutants: nitrogen oxide gases (emitted by cars, factories, industrial furnaces, and boilers) and volatile organic compounds (released by chemical plants, gasoline pumps, oil-based paints, autobody shops, and print shops).

The intricate relationship between flowering plants and their pollinators, including bees, has evolved over millennia, and is vital not only to all ecosystems, but also to human agriculture and crop production. An estimated 75 percent of the world’s flowering plants and some 35 percent of the food crops humans grow depend on pollinators to produce harvests. Although bees aren’t the only pollinators, more than 3,500 species of bees help ensure humans have food on their plates.

The odor plumes flowers emit are usually strong but short lived—and for a reason. A strong odor, which results from a high concentration of fragrant compounds, sends a powerful message to the bees. But as the plume drifts away from the flower, there’s no reason to send this signal anymore, as it would route the bees into the wrong direction. So the fragrant molecules quickly react with other compounds in the air and fall apart.

“This is why plants generally tend to have more reactive compounds that make up their scent,” Langford says. “If they don’t react away, that background concentration of those chemicals will just build up and then the bees won’t be able to distinguish the plume from the background.” But in the presence of ozone, the plumes degrade much faster than they normally would. Langford’s team wanted to understand how much faster they degrade, and what impact that has on the bees’ ability to follow a scent.

For their study, researchers trained the bees to recognize the odor blend of several aromatic compounds. After being exposed to the smell, the bees received a sugary reward, so they learned to associate that scent with food. Then researchers investigated how the presence of ozone affected their ability to follow that scent.

Because ozone itself is damaging to bees, researchers couldn’t expose the insects to it directly. Instead, they first used a wind tunnel—a tube about 100 feet long—to learn how ozone changed the size and shape of odor plumes; they found that plumes degraded much faster on the edges than in the middle. Then they recreated the plumes in the corresponding concentrations in the lab (but without ozone) and watched how the bees fared following the scent they had memorized.

“We wanted to separate the effect of degradation of the odor plume from any direct toxic effect,” says Langford.

The research showed that ozone pollution makes it much harder for bees to forage. In fact, bees living in highly polluted areas could likely starve, exacerbating their other woes, such as Colony Collapse Disorder. First recognized in the early 2000s, Colony Collapse Disorder is a phenomenon in which the adult honeybees disappear from the hives, almost all at the same time, which leads to a population collapse.

The only way to address the issue of contaminated odor plumes, Langford notes, is to reduce the amount of ozone in the air. It’s not just a matter of helping bees find food. It’s a matter of helping bees make food for us, too.

Lina Zeldovich grew up in a family of Russian scientists, listening to bedtime stories about volcanoes, black holes, and intrepid explorers. She has written for The New York Times, Scientific American, Reader’s Digest, and Audubon Magazine, among other publications, and won four awards for covering the science of poop. Her book, The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste into Wealth, was published in 2021 by Chicago University Press. You can find her at LinaZeldovich.com and @LinaZeldovich.

This article was previously published in Nautilus.

As trees and flowers blossom in spring, bees emerge from their winter nests and burrows. For many species it’s time to mate, and some will start new solitary nests or colonies.

Bees and other pollinators are essential to human society. They provide about one-third of the food we eat, a service with a global value estimated at up to $US577 billion annually.

But bees are interesting in many other ways that are less widely known. In my new book, “What a Bee Knows: Exploring the Thoughts, Memories, and Personalities of Bees,” I draw on my experience studying bees for almost 50 years to explore how these creatures perceive the world and their amazing abilities to navigate, learn, communicate and remember. Here’s some of what I’ve learned.

It’s not all about hives and honey

Because people are widely familiar with honeybees, many assume that all bees are social and live in hives or colonies with a queen. In fact, only about 10% of bees are social, and most types don’t make honey.

Most bees lead solitary lives, digging nests in the ground or finding abandoned beetle burrows in dead wood to call home. Some bees are cleptoparasites, sneaking into unoccupied nests to lay eggs, in the same way that cowbirds lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and let the unknowing foster parents rear their chicks.

A few species of tropical bees, known as vulture bees, survive by eating carrion. Their guts contain acid-loving bacteria that enable the bees to digest rotting meat.

Busy brains

The world looks very different to a bee than it does to a human, but bees’ perceptions are hardly simple. Bees are intelligent animals that likely feel pain, remember patterns and odors and even recognize human faces. They can solve mazes and other problems and use simple tools.

Research shows that bees are self-aware and may even have a primitive form of consciousness. During the six to 10 hours bees spend sleeping daily, memories are consolidated within their amazing brains – organs the size of a poppy seed that contain 1 million nerve cells. There are some indications that bees might even dream. I’d like to think so.

An alien sensory world

Bees’ sensory experience of the world is markedly different from ours. For example, humans see the world through the primary colors of red, green and blue. Primary colors for bees are green, blue and ultraviolet.

Bees’ vision is 60 times less sharp than that of humans: A flying bee can’t see the details of a flower until it is about 10 inches away. However, bees can see hidden ultraviolet floral patterns that are invisible to us, and those patterns lead the bees to flowers’ nectar.

Bees also can spot flowers by detecting color changes at a distance. When humans watch film projected at 24 frames per second, the individual images appear to blur into motion. This phenomenon, which is called the flicker-fusion frequency, indicates how capable our visual systems are at resolving moving images. Bees have a much higher flicker-fusion frequency – you would have to play the film 10 times faster for it to look like a blur to them – so they can fly over a flowering meadow and see bright spots of floral color that wouldn’t stand out to humans.

From a distance, bees detect flowers by scent. A honeybee’s sense of smell is 100 times more sensitive than ours. Scientists have used bees to sniff out chemicals associated with cancer and with diabetes on patients’ breath and to detect the presence of high explosives.

Bees’ sense of touch is also highly developed: They can feel tiny fingerprint-like ridges on the petals of some flowers. Bees are nearly deaf to most airborne sounds, unless they are very close to the source, but are sensitive if they are standing on a vibrating surface.

Problem solvers

Bees can navigate mazes as well as mice can, and studies show that they are self-aware of their body dimensions. For example, when fat bumblebees were trained to fly and then walk through a slit in a board to get to food on the other side, the bees turned their bodies sideways and tucked in their legs.

Experiments by Canadian researcher Peter Kevan and Lars Chittka in England demonstrated remarkable feats of bee learning. Bumblebees were trained to pull a string – in other words, to use a tool – connected to a plastic disk with hidden depressions filled with sugar water. They could see the sugar wells but couldn’t get the reward except by tugging at the string until the disk was uncovered.

Other worker bees were placed nearby in a screen cage where they could see what their trained hive mates did. Once released, this second group also pulled the string for the sweet treats. This study demonstrated what scientists term social learning – acting in ways that reflect the behavior of others.

Pollinating with vibrations

Even pollination, one of bees’ best-known behaviors, can be much more complicated than it seems.

The basic process is similar for all types of bees: Females carry pollen grains, the sex cells of plants, on their bodies from flower to flower as they collect pollen and nectar to feed themselves and their developing grubs. When pollen rubs off onto a flower’s stigma, the result is pollination.

My favorite area of bee research examines a method called buzz pollination. Bees use it on about 10% of the world’s 350,000 kinds of flowering plants that have special anthers – structures that produce pollen.

For example, a tomato blossom’s five anthers are pinched together, like the closed fingers of one hand. Pollen is released through one or two small pores at the end of each anther.

When a female bumblebee lands on a tomato flower, she bites one anther at the middle and contracts her flight muscles from 100 to 400 times per second. These powerful vibrations eject pollen from the anther pores in the form of a cloud that strikes the bee. It all happens in just a few tenths of a second.

The bee hangs by one leg and scrapes the pollen into “baskets” – structures on her hind legs. Then she repeats the buzzing on the remaining anthers before moving to different flowers.

Bees also use buzz pollination on the flowers of blueberries, cranberries, eggplant and kiwi fruits. My colleagues and I are conducting experiments to determine the biomechanics of how bee vibrations eject pollen from anthers.

Planting for bees

Many species of bees are declining worldwide, thanks to stresses including parasites, pesticides and habitat loss.

Whether you have an apartment window box or several acres of land, you can do a few simple things to help bees.

First, plant native wildflowers so that blooms are available in every season. Second, try to avoid using insecticides or herbicides. Third, provide open ground where burrowing bees can nest. With luck, soon you’ll have some buzzing new neighbors.

Stephen Buchmann is Adjunct Professor of Entomology and of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona.

This article previously appeared in The Conversation.

Chelsea Cook grew to love the low hum of the honeybees she studied as a graduate student in Boulder, Colorado. Their characteristic buzz, she learned, was audible cooperation, the result of worker bees fanning their wings at the colony’s entrance to circulate the air and cool the hive. Cook often watched as the insects responded quickly to minute adjustments in temperature: When a cloud drifted over the sun, the fanners disappeared, and when it emerged again, they promptly took up their places.

Fascinated by how strictly the insects were managing their environment, Cook conducted an experiment. “I found an old hot plate and a pickle jar, created mesh cages, put a bee inside, and heated them up,” she says. Previous research had established that honeybees regularly fan to control temperature, humidity, and carbon dioxide. But over and over, the bee on Cook’s hot plate sat still. Confused, she put two bees together. “Sure enough,” with a companion, “they fanned.” Honeybees, she found, use social information—paying attention to each other—to respond to environmental changes.¹

As global temperatures rise, understanding how bees will respond is becoming increasingly important. Back in 2006, beekeepers in Pennsylvania were mystified when their previously healthy hives suddenly emptied, a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder. Beekeepers across the country soon saw similar disappearances: There were no dead bodies inside the barren hives to suggest starvation, and neighboring bees, who often rob hives, seemed to avoid the unprotected honey.

It’s a mystery that’s never been fully solved. But while reports of colony collapse disorder have waned over the last decade, the fate of bees has not improved. Honeybee mortality remains startlingly high, says Nathalie Steinhauer, the research coordinator for the Bee Informed Partnership, a nonprofit organization that started conducting extensive annual bee surveys in response to colony collapse. Steinhauer explains that for the last decade, around 30 to 40 percent of the United States’ honeybees have died every year.² While intensive management has been able to keep honeybee populations roughly stable, that’s much “higher than what beekeepers consider acceptable.” Nor are the 4,000 native bee species in North America doing any better: Nearly 1 in 4 of them is at increasing risk of extinction.³

Scientists have laid the blame for bee declines on a combination of factors, like the proliferation of pesticides, and parasites like the Varroa mite, which can carry deadly pathogens. While those are major stressors on their own, they are now exacerbated by climate change, painting a disquieting future.

“Honeybees are absolutely critical to our agriculture,” says Cook, now a biologist and founder of the Cook Lab at Marquette University in Wisconsin. Three-quarters of food crops rely on honeybees for at least some pollination,⁴ making honeybees more important than fertilizer.⁵ While some plants can self-pollinate, others, like tomatoes and potatoes, don’t release their pollen until bees arrive to vibrate their flowers⁶; others may require bumblebee saliva to encourage them to flower.⁷ Even trees previously thought to self-fertilize likely have pollinators contributing to their seed production. Yet globally, pollinators are now declining so quickly the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations warns their loss may spark a food crisis.⁴

The problem extends far behind the dinner table: Over 80 percent of wild plants also depend on pollination, often from native bee species, which have evolved alongside the plants they serve. But from 2008 to 2013, wild bee populations plummeted by 23 percent.⁸ If these bees disappear, says Diana Cox-Foster, an entomologist and research leader with the United States Department of Agriculture, “the landscape would basically regress back to grassland.” Long before extinction, she worries about the feedback loops losing wild bee populations may spark: Fewer bees may encourage grass growth, for example, leading to worse wildfires. “Having healthy pollinators and pollinator plantings helps you avoid a tinderbox landscape.”

To forestall these crises, it’s critical to find ways to help bees navigate shrinking habitats and a warming world. Cook’s work is now focused on helping beekeepers manage their colonies as the climate shifts. “We’re stewards,” she says, “We have to figure out how to treat them better.”

American agriculture relies on the hard work of both managed hives and wild bees: Native bees can perform much of the pollination farmers need,⁹ and significantly contribute to crop production. But when most people think of bees, they think of the humble Apis mellifera, more commonly known as a European honeybee. They are essentially insect livestock, brought to the United States to pollinate Old World plants also introduced by colonists. They are as closely managed as other domesticated animals. Many commercial beekeepers transport their honeybee hives to multiple locations a year, servicing almond orchards in California in the early spring and returning to the Great Plains for honey production later in the summer. But for the last decade, the same number of bees have been making less and less honey—and, for beekeepers, less and less money. In 2021, because of extensive drought that withered crops across the Midwest, the USDA reported that honey production dropped by a staggering 126 million pounds, or about 14 percent per colony.

Bees’ incredible ability to transform nectar into honey has long made them humanity’s friend. But hives also rely on honey to survive long after summer blooms have faded. If flowers have died off but winter cold doesn’t set in, bees may fruitlessly keep foraging, becoming nutritionally stressed. “If they used too many resources in the fall or emerge before flowers are available to feed on in the spring, there’s phenology mismatches,” a gap in the timing between bees and the flowers they depend on, says Christina Grozinger, the director of the Center for Pollinator Research at Penn State.

In the summer, honeybee workers transition through different states as they age, working as nurse bees when they are young, and foraging when they grow older. Winter bees, conversely, are physiologically different, and can survive for months. But if the colony is actively searching for nectar into the fall, they aren’t producing winter bees, meaning they aren’t as prepared to survive the winter.

“When spring comes, the older bees die at rates that exceed the replacement rate,” says Gloria DeGrandi-Hoffman, research leader at the Carl Hayden Bee Research Center. Thirty years ago, she adds, “If you’d lose 10 percent of your colonies, that was a bad year for you.” That’s in part because, like humans, bees are more likely to get sick when they’re mingling. Longer autumns and warmer winters are also extending bees’ flying time—helping spread Varroa mites and their diseases and causing surging numbers of deaths.

These climate impacts are likely exaggerated by land use changes, which reduce bees’ ability to adapt to new challenges. The increased use of herbicides and insecticides has reduced the diversity of plants bees used to depend on, while increasing their toxic load. Neonicotinoids, a class of insecticides that affect bees’ central nervous system, are particularly harmful. Bees can be exposed simply by visiting a field where they have previously been sprayed, bringing the chemical back to the hive with them. These chemicals are now used on most corn and soybean fields in the U.S., and persist in soil for years, which is why the European Union has banned three of the most common neonics.

In the U.S., a 2020 study by Penn State researchers found that in the last two decades, the toxicity to which bees are exposed rose by 121 times in the Midwest, primarily because of neonicotinoid use.¹⁰ While exposure may not immediately kill bees, even low doses of chemicals can exacerbate other stresses.¹¹ Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, for example, severely impacts bumblebees’ ability to control their temperature.¹²

While it may be hard to parse these various harms, DeGrandi-Hoffman uses a simple metric to understand how the beekeeping industry is doing. “If you look at companies that sell packages of bees or queens, they’re sold out every year. They can’t make enough to replace colonies that are lost.”

Honeybees evolved to survive winter by huddling into a thermoregulated cluster, surrounding their queen. When anthers stop releasing pollen and petals begin to shrivel, worker bees drag the male drones out of the hive into the crisp fall air, a sacrifice completed by chewing off their wings. The test of the hive’s endurance has begun. The bees’ huddle expands and contracts. It is a dying time.

To help slow these crippling winter losses, beekeepers are increasingly turning to cold storage. When honeybees are kept artificially cold, they don’t need to forage, be treated for mites, or be fed by their keepers, cutting down on costs and reducing mortality. As natural winters warm, states like Idaho and the Dakotas have been early adopters in adapting cold vegetable storage facilities for commercial beekeeping operations. Mike Lamoreaux, a business developer at Gellert, a climate control company that started out storing potatoes, says the practice has taken off over the last decade. Lamoreaux started overwintering bees in 2014. “We’d literally go to trade shows and people would stand in line, waiting to sign up,” Lamoreaux says.

Cold storage isn’t a catch-all solution. “It’s not a hospital,” Lamoreaux says. He warns people to make sure their bees are as healthy as possible before bringing them in. Like so much in modern agriculture, there’s also a question of scale: The costs and risks of these facilities work best for large-scale operations, who can afford to lose several hundred hives if something goes wrong.

To make cold storage more accessible for hobbyists and smaller operations, Cook, along with her business partner Kimberly Drennan, an architect, recently designed a mobile climate-controlled apiary. The size of a horse trailer, it has insulated panels and smart sensors to control temperature, carbon dioxide, and humidity. After winning seed money from the USDA, along with a grant from the Advanced Industries Office of Economic Development in Colorado, their company HiveTech tested a prototype in apiaries this winter. Despite supply chain shortages, early results suggest the unit increased survival three times, compared to colonies that remained outside. Providing cold storage at home cuts down on the need to transport hives, reducing both costs and mortality, and helps beekeepers better manage mite populations and their hives’ nutrition. “It puts the control in the hands of the beekeepers,” Cook says.

These kinds of practical solutions are increasingly urgent. As honey yields drop, financial pressures on beekeepers are increasing. If apiaries can’t stay in business, their efforts to keep bee populations stable will also vanish. “By adapting management—like cold storage—we can help bees make it,” says DeGrandi-Hoffman.

Wild bees, meanwhile, have fewer ways to adapt. Grozinger’s research suggests that across the country, many places that economically depend on wild pollinators will see their populations dwindle. Grozinger and her collaborators tracked wild bee abundance across the U.S., finding many of the places where bees are declining the fastest, like California’s Central Valley, are also places that currently rely on pollinators. “This means growers will be more dependent on purchasing managed pollinators, like honeybees, to produce their crops,” she says. This imbalance is already causing declining production: In another collaborative study, she found that poor seed generation in Pennsylvania black cherry trees may be due to the loss of wild andrenid bees, one of its most important pollinators.¹³

The urgency of understanding these relationships is heightened by how quickly some of these bees are vanishing from the landscape. The first bee added to the endangered species list was the rusty patched bumblebee, a wild bee which historically ranged from the upper Midwest to the East Coast, but others may soon join it. While honeybees are social animals, the majority of the United States’ 4,000 types of native bees are solitary, meaning they don’t have the help of a hive in sharing resources. “You can think about them like a single mom,” Grozinger says, “whereas honeybees are like a village.”

Adding to their vulnerability, many native bees also specialize on a small number of plants with a short blooming season, like the Mojave poppy bee, which U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is currently considering listing as endangered. It is the only pollinator of the bearpoppy, a scrappy yellow flower that thrives in the harsh conditions of the desert, although mining, extreme heat, and drought have recently erased the wildflower from half its range.

The decline of wild bees will affect entire ecosystems, says Ellen Moss, a research associate at Newcastle University. Rising temperatures are increasingly disrupting the plants bees rely on, leading to food shortages. Moss recently conducted a study that simulated an increase in temperature of 1.5 degrees Celsius and a 40 percent increase in rainwater, over two growing seasons.¹⁴ She found that floral abundance was reduced by almost half—causing the hard-working pollinators to visit each flower more frequently to collect the same amount of pollen or nectar, while the wildflowers themselves produced fewer seeds. “I was surprised by how strong the temperature effect on floral abundance was,” Moss says.

Moss is concerned that writ large, each of these problems—climate change, habitat fragmentation, lower flower abundance—may compound. But so far, few researchers have looked outside of agriculture at the impact on non-crop plants, just as few studies have focused on wild bees and other pollinators. “No species exist in isolation,” she says. If climate change tips the balance, “it could permanently change the composition of communities.”

Still, bee experts say it’s not too late to take steps to help wild bee populations. The silver lining is that bees reproduce quickly. “They can rebound from disaster surprisingly well,” Grozinger says. She hopes to find ways to design climate resilient landscapes for bees. “If we provide a diversity of options and identify places that may provide shelter from extreme climate variation, they can find what they need in the environment,” she says. In regions where increased rainfall is predicted, for instance, Grozinger is trying to determine where there might be natural rain shadows, preserving those key islands as habitat for pollinators. A recent study in Science suggests that conserving forage for wild bees could also minimize the toxicity of glyphosate—further highlighting the importance of wildflower plantings and conserving native habitat.¹²

Grozinger’s lab has developed a public tool where you can get a bee’s eye view of the landscape near you, gauging the quality of pollinator habitat across the U.S. and encouraging people to make bee-friendly gardens. Many efforts to increase “bee pasture,” as Cox-Foster calls it, have added rippling benefits. For example, sowing cover crops—plants intended to cover the soil rather than be harvested—under almond trees not only doesn’t compete with almond blossoms, but improves the soil quality. Similarly, adding native plantings to solar and wind farms has been highly effective at alleviating their environmental impacts.¹⁵ Even neighborhood projects to plant flowers for bees along curbs and roadways can help reduce habitat fragmentation.¹⁶ Tucked into the recent infrastructure bill is a five-year program that provides $10 million in grants to replant roadsides for pollinators, and an additional $250 million will be distributed for invasive plant removal along transportation routes.¹⁷

Helping bees navigate a quickly shifting climate is a daunting task. But as a honeybee knows well, even minute actions add up. “The reason I study honeybees is their complex societies,” Cook says. The monarchy metaphor—the queen rules the hive—is misleading. The hive’s elegant division of labor is controlled by its thousands of workers, who make decisions at a local level that, when acted out, affect the entire colony. This wasn’t inevitable; like many social insects, honeybees evolved from a solitary ancestor. To survive, they adapted to persist through difficult conditions communally. “Everyone is working toward the collective good,” Cook says. “The unit of importance for bees is its society, not the individual.” These are choices, she adds, “that change how we view solutions.”

Lois Parshley is a journalist and photographer. Follow her work @loisparshley.

This article previously appeared in Nautilus.

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16. Fitch, G. & Vaidya, C. Roads pose a significant barrier to bee movement, mediated by road size, traffic and bee identity. Journal of Applied Ecology 58, 1177-1186 (2021).⤶

17. Raichel, D. Infrastructure bill boosts bees, butterflies. NRDC.org (2021).⤶

Search for information on ‘self-medication,’ and you’ll likely find descriptions of the myriad ways that we humans use drugs to solve problems. In fact, the consumption of biologically active molecules — many of which come from plants — to change our bodies and minds seems a quintessentially human trait.

But plants feature prominently in the diets of many animals too. A growing body of research suggests some animals may derive medicinal benefit from plant chemistry, and perhaps even seek out these chemicals when sick. Chimpanzees eat certain leaves that have parasite-killing properties. Pregnant elephants have been observed eating plant material from trees that humans use to induce labor. You may have even seen your pet dog or cat eat grass – which provides them no nutrition – in what’s believed to be an effort to self-treat nausea by triggering vomiting.

In my research, I’ve looked at how bumble bees are affected by these kinds of biologically active compounds. With colleagues, I’ve found that certain plant chemicals naturally present in nectar and pollen can benefit bees infected with pathogens. Bees may even change their foraging behavior when infected so as to maximize collection of these chemicals. Could naturally occurring plant chemicals in flowers be part of a solution to the worrying declines of wild and managed bees?

Why do plants make these chemicals?

On top of the compounds plants make to carry out the ‘primary’ tasks of photosynthesis, growth and reproduction, plants also synthesize so-called secondary metabolite compounds. These molecules have many purposes, but chief among them is defense. These chemicals render leaves and other tissues unpalatable or toxic to herbivores that would otherwise chomp away.

Many studies of coevolution center on plant-herbivore interactions mediated by plant chemistry. An ‘arms race’ between plants and herbivores has played out over long time scales, with the herbivores adapting to tolerate and even specialize in toxic plants, while plants appear to have evolved novel toxins to stay ahead of their consumers.

Herbivores may experience benefits, costs or a combination of both when they consume plant secondary metabolites. For example, monarch butterfly larvae are specialized herbivores of milkweeds, which contain toxic steroids called cardenolides. While monarchs selectively concentrate cardenolides in their own bodies as defense against predators such as birds, they may also suffer slowed growth rate and increased risk of mortality as a consequence of exposure to these toxic compounds.

Interestingly, secondary metabolites are not only found in leaves. They’re also present in tissues whose apparent function is to attract rather than repel – including fruits and flowers. For example, it has long been known that floral nectar commonly contains secondary metabolites, including non-protein amino acids, alkaloids, phenolics, glycosides and terpenoids. Yet little is known of how or whether these chemicals affect pollinators such as bees.

Could secondary metabolites influence plants’ interactions with pollinators, just as they affect interactions with herbivorous consumers of leaf tissue? Similar to other herbivores, could bees also benefit by consuming these plant compounds? Could secondary metabolite consumption help bees cope with the parasites and pathogens implicated in declines of wild and managed bees?

Plant compounds decrease parasites in bees

With colleagues in the labs of Rebecca Irwin at Dartmouth College and Lynn Adler at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, I investigated these questions in a new study. We found that a structurally diverse array of plant secondary metabolite compounds found in floral nectar can reduce parasite load in bumble bees.

In a lab setting, we infected the common eastern bumble bee (Bombus impatiens) with a protozoan gut parasite, Crithidia bombi, which is known to reduce bumble bee longevity and reproductive success. Then we fed the bees daily either a control sucrose-only nectar diet or one containing one of eight secondary metabolite compounds that naturally occur in the nectar of plants visited by bumble bees in the wild.

After one week, we counted parasite cells in bee guts. Overall, a diet containing secondary metabolites strongly reduced a bee’s disease load. Half the compounds had a statistically significant effect on their own. The compound with the strongest effect was the tobacco alkaloid anabasine, which reduced parasite load by more than 80%; other compounds that protected bees from parasites included another tobacco alkaloid, nicotine, the terpenoid thymol, found in nectar of basswood trees, and catalpol, an iridoid glycoside found in nectar of turtlehead, a wetland plant of eastern North America.

We expected that bees might also incur costs when they consumed these compounds. But we found that none of the chemicals had an effect on bee longevity. Anabasine, the compound with the strongest anti-parasite benefit, imposed a reproductive cost, increasing the number of days necessary for bees to mature and lay eggs. Despite this delay, however, there were no differences in ultimate reproductive output in our experiment.

This research clearly demonstrates that wild bees can benefit when they consume the secondary metabolites naturally present in floral nectar. And bees’ lifetime exposure to these compounds is likely even greater, since they also consume them in pollen and as larva.

In other research, we’ve uncovered evidence that some of the compounds with anti-parasite function are sought after by bees when they have parasites, but not when they are healthy. At least in some contexts – including a field experiment with wild bees naturally infected with Crithidia bombi – bumble bees make foraging choices in response to parasite status, similar to other animals that self-medicate.

Rx for struggling bee populations?

So what about practical applications: could this research be leveraged to help declining bee populations? We don’t know yet. However, our findings suggest some interesting questions about landscape management, pollinator habitat gardening and farm practices.

In future work, we plan to investigate whether planting particular plants around apiaries and farms would result in healthier bee populations. Are native plants important sources of medicinal compounds for bees with which they share long evolutionary histories? Can farms that depend on wild bee pollinators for delivery of the ‘ecosystem service’ of pollination be better managed to support bee health?

Delivery of nectar and pollen secondary metabolites to diseased bees is likely not the only tool necessary to promote long-term sustainability of these ecologically and economically important animals. But it appears that this could be at least part of the solution. Agriculture may come full circle, acknowledging that in order to benefit from an ecosystem service delivered by wild animals, we must consider their habitat requirements.

Leif Richardson is a USDA NIFA Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Vermont.

This article was previously published in The Conversation.

J uly is a month of both beauty and vulnerability. Around the world, wildfires intensify with the heat, driven by rising temperatures, prolonged drought, and expanding human development. Amid this growing crisis, a new dimension of fire ecology is coming into focus: the role of aromatic plants. Long cherished for their cultural, medicinal, and sensory significance, these plants are now being recognized as agents in how ecosystems burn, resist, and recover.

At the heart of this complexity are volatile organic compounds (VOCs), particularly essential oils, which give aromatic plants their distinctive scents. These compounds, composed of terpenes, phenols, and other VOCs, are highly flammable under hot and dry conditions. Plants such as lavender, eucalyptus, sagebrush, and trees like cedar, cypress, fir, juniper, pine, and spruce, which all contain volatile saps and resins, not only perfume the air, but also alter fire behavior in profound ways. 

In fire-prone landscapes like Australia and California, eucalyptus trees have become infamous for accelerating wildfires. Their spicy, resinous oils can volatilize at relatively low temperatures, releasing combustible gases that increase ignition speed and flame intensity (Dimitrakopoulos & Papaioannou, 2001). The widely planted Eucalyptus globulus, originally introduced for timber and oil production, has transformed Mediterranean and Californian landscapes, raising wildfire risks due to its dense, terpene-rich foliage and bark (Bell, 2001; Bradstock & Gill, 2002).

Nowhere is this paradox more evident than in the Mediterranean Basin, home to one of the richest aromatic floras in the world. I recently returned from the region, where the sun-drenched hillsides and herb-scented air evoke both awe and concern. These fire-adapted landscapes, filled with rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis), thyme (Thymus spp.), sage (Salvia spp.), and lavender (Lavandula angustifolia), have evolved to coexist with periodic fires. But under the pressure of climate change, their resilience is being tested.

As summers grow longer and drier, these drought-tolerant but oil-rich species contribute to a combustible landscape. The very adaptations that allow plants like rosemary, sage, and lavender to thrive under arid Mediterranean conditions, such as thick cuticles, resinous leaves, and a high concentration of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), also make them highly flammable. These VOCs can vaporize at relatively low temperatures, saturating the surrounding air with combustible gases that increase the likelihood and intensity of ignition. Dense plantings of such species can act as fuel ladders, carrying fire from the ground into the canopy and across dry terrain with alarming speed.

Yet, fire is not only a destroyer; it is also a natural force of renewal. In many Mediterranean and fire-adapted ecosystems, fire clears out dead biomass, reduces competition, and creates nutrient-rich ash beds, opening the landscape for new growth. Intriguingly, VOCs may play a catalytic role in this regeneration process. Certain aromatic compounds released during combustion can act as chemical signals that break seed dormancy, stimulate germination, or even suppress pathogens that threaten seedlings. This chemical cueing, sometimes referred to as “smoke-induced germination,” has been documented in numerous fire-prone biomes, where species have co-evolved with fire as an ecological necessity.

The challenge, then, is not to eliminate fire, but to manage it wisely, recognizing its ecological role while mitigating the increasing risks posed by climate change, land-use patterns, and the cultivation of flammable species. Designing fire-resilient landscapes means embracing fire as part of the natural cycle, guided by both ancient practices and modern science.

Across the Mediterranean, conservation efforts are turning toward fire-smart strategies. This can mean promoting drought-tolerant, less flammable aromatics like oregano (Origanum vulgare, O. onites) and myrtle (Myrtus communis), plants that thrive in harsh summer conditions while posing a lower fire risk. Another emerging approach is the use of olive groves as natural firebreaks. With their lower flammability and deep agricultural roots, olive trees can be planted strategically to slow fire spread and protect more vulnerable aromatic zones.

Equally important is the revival of ancient traditional land management practices, such as coppicing and controlled burning, once widely used across southern Europe and North Africa. These low-intensity techniques reduce fuel loads, stimulate biodiversity, and foster the renewal of aromatic understory species. They reflect ecological knowledge shaped over centuries, wisdom we would do well to heed.

To prepare for the future, regional seed banks must also be prioritized. These repositories protect the genetic diversity of local aromatic plants—many of which are endangered or microclimate-specific—ensuring that restoration efforts after fire events remain viable and culturally grounded.

It’s also vital to remember that not all aromatics pose the same fire risk. Some act as biochemical firebreaks. Succulent aromatics, like Aloe vera or moisture-retaining species of Pelargonium, resist combustion due to their thick, fleshy leaves. Others produce allelopathic compounds that suppress the growth of competing vegetation, reducing fuel buildup (Inderjit & Duke, 2003).

Emerging research suggests that some essential oils may even enhance post-fire soil health, thanks to their insecticidal and antimicrobial properties (Isman, 2000). In many Indigenous fire stewardship systems, aromatic smoke has been used to treat seeds, repel pests, and signal ecological cycles, illustrating a deeper, reciprocal understanding of fire’s role in sustaining life (Kimmerer & Lake, 2001).

Yet the global rise in aromatic plant cultivation for essential oil markets, lavender in France, frankincense in the Horn of Africa, sandalwood in India, eucalyptus across continents, calls for urgent reassessment. In fire-prone regions, agroforestry and landscape restoration must now account for plant flammability profiles, ensuring planting choices reduce rather than escalate wildfire risk.

And as climate change alters plant chemistry, the stakes rise higher. Drought stress has been shown to increase VOC concentrations, rendering even traditionally manageable species more flammable (Llusià & Peñuelas, 2000). This underscores the urgent need for adaptive conservation planning, especially in biodiversity hotspots where aromatic plants face pressures from both climate and overharvesting.

Ultimately, the case of aromatic plants at the intersection of fire resilience and risk forces us to think both ecologically and ethically. These plants carry a volatile beauty, one that can nurture or endanger, renew or destroy. They invite us to design fire-smart landscapes that are grounded in traditional wisdom, scientific understanding, and an ethic of reciprocity.

The solution is not to banish fire, but to cultivate with it, planting the right species in the right places, stewarding their renewal, and protecting the invisible threads of scent, memory, and meaning that bind us to the natural world.

Click here to view the latest global fire activity.

Gayil Nalls, PhD is an interdisciplinary artist and theorist, and the founder of the World Sensorium Conservancy.

Top photo: https://pixabay.com, photo by Ylvers

References:

Bell, D. T. (2001). Ecological response syndromes in the flora of southwestern Western Australia: fire resprouters versus reseeders. The Botanical Review, 67(4), 417–440.

Bradstock, R. A., & Gill, A. M. (2002). Fire and biodiversity in semi-arid woodlands and shrublands of south-eastern Australia: functional and structural aspects. Pacific Conservation Biology, 8(2), 91–103.

Dimitrakopoulos, A. P., & Papaioannou, K. K. (2001). Flammability assessment of Mediterranean forest fuels. Fire Technology, 37, 143–152.

Inderjit, & Duke, S. O. (2003). Ecophysiological aspects of allelopathy. Planta, 217(4), 529–539.

Isman, M. B. (2000). Plant essential oils for pest and disease management. Crop Protection, 19(8-10), 603–608.

Kimmerer, R. W., & Lake, F. K. (2001). The role of indigenous burning in land management. Journal of Forestry, 99(11), 36–41.

Llusià, J., & Peñuelas, J. (2000). Seasonal patterns of terpene content and emission from seven Mediterranean woody species in field conditions. American Journal of Botany, 87(1), 133–140.

I

n the heart of Venice, a city suspended between water and time, the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia unfurled a theme both urgent and expansive: “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.” This year’s Biennale invites us to contemplate the overlapping intelligences shaping our world: biological, technological, and social.

Among the most quietly transformative contributions is the Belgian Pavilion, curated by Belgian landscape architect Bas Smets and Italian neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso. The project, titled Building Biospheres, is an unexpected act of cultivation that stands apart from the formal languages of global architecture. Upon entering the pavilion, from the scorching sun and dry heat, one first sees a forest below a large skylight and then experiences the wave of fragrant humidity coming from the plants.

In their hands, design becomes germinal. Soil and roots, sun and leaf take precedence over structure and spectacle. The result is a space that grows rather than asserts, a pavilion that breathes, photosynthesizes, and participates in the shared metabolism of Earth. Smets and Mancuso envision indoor environments as being generated by plants native to the climate zone in a living, self-regulating system.

Bas Smets is known for his visionary rethinking of landscape as infrastructure, designing spaces that do not merely accompany architecture but compose its living context. Stefano Mancuso, a pioneer in plant neurobiology, intelligence, and communication, understands that plants don’t simply adapt to their surroundings; they shape them. With the Belgian Pavilion, they take this insight further, inviting the indoor forest to be both an ecological installation and a philosophical provocation. Small in scale but vast in implication, it challenges how we define architecture and whether it must always be built, or whether it can arise from the innate agency of plants and the relationships between living organisms—a biome.

Building Biospheres does not display architecture; it performs it. It becomes a site of emergence, where carefully selected native and climate-resilient species are allowed to take root, exchange, and adapt. The forest is not static; it is evolving, responsive, and open-ended. Its presence shifts the role of the visitor from viewer to cohabitant, emphasizing sensory engagement, ecological intimacy, and embodied time.

The Biennale’s theme, Intelligens, suggests that intelligence is not confined to the human or the digital. It can be found in fungal networks, in the hydrologic cycle, and in seed dispersal. As a sort of atmospheric intelligence, the forest installation offers a counterpoint to the computational sublime, grounding the conversation in biocentric reality. The canopy and the mycelium, the insects and the air itself, all participate in a choreography of mutualism that outpaces even the most advanced algorithm in complexity and resilience.

In doing so, the work resonates with deep-time ecological thinking. The architecture here is the system, a biome. It asks us to think not in decades or design cycles, but in seasons, successions, and symbioses.

In a world facing compounding environmental crises, the Belgian Pavilion proposes conservation as an act of imagination and agency. Planting a forest in a cultural institution is both literal and symbolic: it models rewilding not as retreat but as reorientation, a way of seeing the land not as a resource, but as a relation, as the interconnection of living systems.

This living installation, composed of more than 200 plants, engages in conservation through cultivation, creating an infrastructure for the agency and intelligence of plants. It embodies a practice of care, attentiveness, and reciprocity, aligning with a growing global movement toward ecological restoration. The exhibition explores architecture as life-supporting microclimates through the creation of biospheres. It also functions as a seedbank of ideas, calling for multispecies design, for co-authored futures shaped not just by human needs but by the needs of the more-than-human world.

In Venice, a city itself endangered by rising seas, the gesture of replanting is profound. It asks: What if our cities could grow forests instead of burying them? What if design could protect what shelters us all?

For visitors, the forest offers more than a conceptual provocation. It is a sensory refuge, a quieting space of shadow and filtered light, and scent—mostly magnolia, which was blooming while I was there. It reminds us that our connection to the land is not only intellectual but deeply bodily. The soft, humid air, the subtle vegetal perfumes, and the gentle movement of leaves all speak to the shared atmospheric consciousness I explore along with our ongoing inquiry into olfactory and sensory heritage.

This is a pavilion that does not ask to be looked at. It asks to be withstood, to be breathed with. It insists that the future must be felt, and that its shape may be leafy, irregular, and porous.
The 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale situates us at the intersection of disciplines, timelines, and species. In Smets and Mancuso’s forest, we find a space that is a new form of architecture, one that turns inward to its most ancient impulse: to shelter, to regenerate, to participate in life’s self-sufficient cycles rather than suspend them. The forest in the Belgian Pavilion is not a metaphor. It is an active collaborator in the natural intelligence design of a livable world.

In Plantings, we have long explored how art, aromatic plants, and landscape can recover and reimagine ecological memory. This work at the Biennale expands the conversation, not with declarations, but with roots. It advances the proposition that conservation and creativity are not at odds, but are, in fact, the same generative force.

Gayil Nalls, PhD, is an interdisciplinary artist and theorist. She is the founder of the World Sensorium Conservancy and the editor of its journal, Plantings.

A t this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, architect and climate technologist Sebastian Clark Koch moderated a timely and urgent session: “Designing for Thermal Equity in the Age of Extremes.” Bringing together leading voices in architecture, environmental science, and policy, the session explored how climate-adaptive design can bridge the growing gap between those with and without access to safe, sustainable cooling, drawing on lessons learned from and for the Global South and highlighting how local innovations can inform and shape a more resilient global future.

It’s a subject that lies at the core of Koch’s work. As climate change intensifies and summers become hotter worldwide, the demand for air conditioning is skyrocketing. Yet, traditional air conditioning systems are a double-edged sword. While they provide life-saving comfort, they are also among the most energy-intensive and environmentally damaging technologies in widespread use. Koch is reimagining the very idea of cooling, designing systems that keep people comfortable without heating the planet.

Rethinking comfort in the Anthropocene, Koch, known for his radical design work at the intersection of climate and architecture, believes that the future of cooling must align with planetary boundaries. In his research and consulting, he examines how we can move away from fossil-fueled cooling systems toward regenerative, low-energy, and passive solutions that not only reduce energy demand but also transform how we think about indoor space, comfort, and air itself. “The standard AC is a 20th-century solution to a 21st-century crisis,” Koch explains. “We need to design cooling systems that are adaptive, decentralized, and symbiotic with their environments.”

Today, over 2 billion air conditioning units are in use globally, and that number is expected to triple by 2050. This surge is not only straining electricity grids, often powered by fossil fuels, but is also accelerating global warming through the release of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), potent greenhouse gases used as refrigerants.

Koch argues that we are caught in a vicious cycle: hotter temperatures increase the need for cooling, which in turn contributes to climate change. “It’s one of the clearest feedback loops we’ve created,” he says. His approach favors passive cooling, design strategies that reduce the need for mechanical cooling in the first place. These include:

Thermal mass and natural ventilation: Using thick walls, earth materials, and smart window placement to regulate temperature without electricity.

Green facades and roofs: Vegetation not only insulates buildings but also cools through evapotranspiration.

Shading and reflective surfaces: Overhangs, louvers, and light-colored roofs significantly reduce solar heat gain.

Night flushing and phase change materials: These techniques release stored heat during cooler nights or absorb heat during the day through innovative materials.

His most recent designs combine these strategies with small, energy-efficient cooling units that use natural refrigerants, such as CO₂ or ammonia, avoiding the HFC problem entirely.

Koch is particularly focused on solutions for the Global South, where the need for cooling is critical but access to energy is limited and the effects of climate change are most acutely felt. He collaborates with local architects, engineers, and communities to develop cooling strategies that are low-tech, affordable, and culturally adapted, such as cool roofs made from recycled materials or modular shading systems that can be deployed in informal settlements. “Cooling justice,” he notes, “is as important as climate justice.”

While Koch’s work is grounded in design, he also emphasizes the need for policy shifts, such as building codes that mandate passive cooling, incentives for green roofs, or bans on harmful refrigerants. He also sees promise in emerging technologies like solar-powered AC, thermal batteries, and AI-optimized climate control systems.

Yet for Koch, the greatest transformation may be cultural. “We’ve been sold a narrow idea of comfort,” he says. “We need to reconnect with older, wiser ways of staying cool, like the shaded courtyards of North Africa or the wind towers of Iran, and combine them with modern science.”

Sebastian Clark Koch’s work is part of a growing movement that not only sees indoor climate control as a sealed-off, energy-hungry process but also as an opportunity to engage more deeply with our environments, designing buildings that breathe, adapt, and harmonize with the seasons.

Gayil Nalls, PhD is an interdisciplinary artist and theorist. She is the founder of the World Sensorium Conservancy and the editor of its journal, Plantings.

For a cooler, more resilient future, you can explore Dr. Sebastian Clark Koch’s research here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sebastian-Clark-Koth. I especially recommend his paper, “Dynamic Cooling – Mitigating Climate Change through Temporal Discomfort,” which proposes adjusting indoor cooling temperature profiles to align with the human circadian rhythm, reducing heat stress during periods of heightened thermal sensitivity.

Let’s be honest – it’s easy to see summer grilling as a meat-eater’s paradise, leaving vegans and vegetarians standing awkwardly over the potato salad and corn while everyone else gets their grill on. Enter the portobello mushroom – nature’s response to “what can I actually throw on this grill?”

These marinated mushroom tacos are meaty, satisfying, and incredibly customizable, proving that plant-based does not mean flavor-free!

Ingredients

• 4 Large Portobello Mushroom Caps
• 2.5 tsp of Chipotle sauce, canned or homemade (Note: this can vary in spice level). Taste test yours first and tweak accordingly.
• 4 cloves of Minced Garlic (Or 2 tsp pre-chopped garlic)
• 1 ½ tsp Honey
• Juice of 2 Small Limes
• 2 tbsp Olive Oil
• 2 tsp Cumin
• 1 tsp Coriander
• ½ tsp Chili Powder
• ½ tsp Paprika
• Salt to taste
• Preferred Tortillas
• Preferred Taco Fixings

Method

1. Rinse and dry your mushroom caps.
2. In a separate bowl, combine all remaining ingredients until combined into a marinade.
3. Pour the marinade over the mushrooms. 
4. Cover with a lid or shut the bag and release excess air. 
5. Place in the fridge to marinate for 30 minutes to an hour. Mushrooms will get soggy if over-saturated.
6. When time to cook, scrape your grill and apply a neutral oil using a paper towel. Turn the grill onto medium heat.
7. Once the grill is hot, begin laying your mushrooms on. 
8. Cook until desired texture (I like a little char, but some people like a quicker, more tender filling). 
9. Remove from the grill and slice your caps into long, fajita-like strips.
10. Serve with your preferred tortilla and desired taco fixings.

These tacos are endlessly customizable – pile on whatever toppings make your heart happy. Your grilling season is about to get a serious upgrade!

Ian Sleat is a freelance music, food, and culture writer. You can subscribe to his SubStack “To Be Frank” here.

G rowing up is something we all experience, yet it is hard to define what it really means. Some say that it’s about learning what’s wrong so you can discover what is right —a process of rejection that leads to wisdom. Others say that it is measured in inches: how your eyes once barely reached the table that your knees now bump into.

As someone who moved several times throughout childhood, my growth was not anchored in physical spaces. My attempts to track my height with a pencil on the walls or the sides of white closet doors were largely unsuccessful, as each house was emptied before I could outgrow the line that I had freshly marked. Most things throughout my childhood felt like they came with an expiration date, all but one. What traveled with me, clinging to the edges of overstuffed boxes in the moving truck, were my memories of scent.

The aroma of crushed rose petals reminds me of the long afternoons spent with my sisters, Anna and Margherita. We would gather around a lopsided plastic table in the garden, rhythmically mashing petals and leaves between stones. We called them potions, some more herby, some floral, some simply gross, all of which we compared proudly. Around us, the musky air would rise from the lake, its surface covered by a thick green film. That smell deepened over the years as the buildup of nutrients led to excessive algae growth in a process which I learned later is called eutrophication.

As my sisters’ and my interests shifted from potion-making to playdates and sleepovers, our parents, perhaps tired of the countless chauffeuring requests, moved us closer to the city center. The garden shrank with the move, as gardens often do as you move from rural to urban, but nature is not afraid of small spaces. Our backyard was lined with a long bay shrub, Laurus nobilis. I loved picking a single leaf, snapping it in half, and burying my nose in the sweet woody fragrance. My mother would send me out to gather herbs for dinner: bay leaves for the ragù, rosemary for roasted potatoes, sage for the ricotta and spinach ravioli. Their scent would rise with the steam from the stove and mix with the warmth of the kitchen, blanketing me in solace. These moments were already taking shape somewhere quiet, becoming part of a sensory archive I did not know I was building.

Outside of my home, other scents shaped the rhythm of daily life. On my way to school, I would chase bus number 16 down Via dei Cappuccini, lungs full of the honeyed, resinous air of Tuscan cypress trees. I never paused to appreciate the way that smell steadied me amongst the rush. I am certain that my breath would have slowed down if I had known that those trees would not be present during my mornings for much longer.

At age eleven, my parents announced that we were moving to Abu Dhabi, trading the soft green air of Tuscany for something hotter and unfamiliar. I imagined sand, skyscrapers, and heat, but could not yet picture what that air would carry. When we arrived, the sun was sharper than I could have imagined, with light reflecting off glass and pavement in ways that made it hard to look straight ahead. I often closed my eyes just to break up the glare, breathing deep through my nose and feeling the heavy air rush into my lungs, focusing on what it held. That is how the edges of this unfamiliar place began to soften: not in sight or language, but in scent.

Abu Dhabi’s thick, humid air carried smells intensely. On the High Line promenade where we lived, the soil gave off a faint, slightly sweet smell, which I later came to suspect was from fertilizer. While it was not exactly pleasant, it quickly grew familiar, becoming a reassuring scent to walk past. In the malls, beneath the marble and glass, synthetic oud clung to the air, dense, sweet, and inescapable. I was so distracted by the novelty and luxury that I did not realize how my brain was cataloguing everything, storing scent as a way of making sense.

But Abu Dhabi offered more than synthetic fragrances and fertilized earth. In this multicultural crossroads, scents became my teacher in cultural fluency. After cold afternoons at the beach, we would drive into the city and warm ourselves with karak chai served in plastic-lined cups, the cardamom, ginger, cloves, and cinnamon creating a spiced symphony that spoke of South Asian culture. During National Day at my school, the air would fill with the festive aromas of Emirati hospitality: banquets of biryani and broad beans covering long tables, with saffron and cumin dispersing across the field. In Lebanese restaurants, the sweet and fruity smell of shisha would drift through the evening air, creating pockets of social warmth.

Eventually, those markers began to add up. As the city grew more familiar, I felt taller, but there was nothing to measure against. No marked wall, no table to tell me where I started. I stopped looking for signs and let the city keep unfolding beneath me: the salty breeze of Saadiyat Beach, the powdery floral notes of plumeria blossoms, growing thick on the trees. 

The scent of Arabian jasmine, Jasminum sambac, carried on a nighttime breeze. Even the heat had a smell: sun on stone, hot metal, sunscreen, and dust. What I did not understand then was how these scents were traveling directly to my limbic system, where memory and emotion live side by side, bypassing rational thought and embedding themselves as pure feeling. Before I had the words to describe Abu Dhabi, its smells had rooted themselves in me as surely as the cypress had in Florence.

Since then, I have moved again, one in a long line of moves still to come. Boxes will be packed and the closets emptied. But over the years, I have come to understand that I have grown, not just in inches or milestones, but through a quieter accumulation happening in the background. The kind stored in scent, in texture, in atmosphere. A trace of oud on the street, the sharp split of a bay leaf, and suddenly I am somewhere I did not know that I still carried. But unlike before, I now notice these moments. I pause, I inhale with attention, no longer receiving the sensory world passively, but responding to it with curiosity and care.

Growing up is not about gaining height or knowledge or even staying in one place long enough to mark it. Perhaps, it is about the accumulation of sensations carried forward without meaning to, that jolt you with memories when you do not expect it, without asking for permission. To grow up, I have learned, is to become more porous to the air and to recognize the language of scent as something worth listening to. Now, I find myself transported to places long after I have left them, not because I marked them, but because, slowly and quietly, they marked me—and I have let those sensory memories shape me.

Caterina Gandolfi holds a degree in Biology and Environmental Studies. She is passionate about using science communication to make environmental knowledge more accessible and to support meaningful change.

Top photo: https://www.flickr.com, photo by Zachi Evenor