The Brief

I never realized how fuzzy a bumble bee is until I got to hold one between my fingertips. It feels like a furry black and yellow bear, buzzing with its tiny body, wriggling with its legs.

The conservation biologist Leif Richardson, who handed me this bee a moment ago, has some advice for holding it. "You're going to squeeze harder than you think you need to, but not so hard that you hurt him."

And luckily the bee can't hurt me either, because this is a male bee, and males don't have stingers. But they do have a scent, Richardson explains.

"Your fingers are going to smell like a male bee when you're done. It's a little like geraniums, a little bit cheesy, sort of like cheddar cheese in a way."

We are out in the wilds of far western Malibu, in the home range of a native bee called Crotch's Bumble Bee, or Bombus crotchii. That bee is protected by state law, and it's one of the many species under survey for the California Bumble Bee Atlas.

We're in good hands with Leif Richardson.

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Grace Widyatmadja

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The Atlas is a sort of census for the state's bumble bees, and Richardson helps lead the project for the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. Over three years, hundreds of volunteers will fan out across the state to do surveys like this one, with the goal of piecing together a picture of where wild bees live, and which species are in trouble.

"This is real data of the highest quality that's been collected by these trained amateurs," Richardson says, "and it is the best available data we have for making decisions about the conservation and management of these very important animals."

That's our NPR team and Richardson after we happened upon a snake.

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Our journey begins at a mountain trailhead in Leo Carrillo State Park. It's a cloudy morning, and Richardson's dressed in a checkered flannel shirt, black-rimmed glasses, and a "Middlebury" cap. (He moved here recently from Vermont). We set off for a short hike, armed with bee nets, vials and a cooler to chill any bees we catch. It's a harmless way to temporarily sedate the bees, to allow for more careful study and snapshots.

Coastal sage scrub frames the trail, and poison oak is everywhere too, fresh from all the winter rain. Other dangers are harder to see. "I wanted to just say rattlesnakes are a possibility," Richardson warns.

Just a minute later, as he's wading into a meadow bursting with red and yellow deerweed – prime bumble bee habitat – I hear him yell out something unprintable, followed by "rattlesnake!" It's a huge, meaty snake, several inches thick, lying just a yard from his foot, its scales perfectly camouflaged against the brush. He stands there motionless for a moment, before backing away towards the trail, while the snake slithers off.

We're a little more sober about the possibilities now, as we prepare to catch our first bees. They're not hard to spot – I can hear them whizzing everywhere, in surround sound, and soon Richardson says it's time for me to catch one.

Krystle Hickman, a bee photographer and volunteer for the Bumble Bee Atlas Project, carefully places a bee onto a flower.

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Grace Widyatmadja/NPR

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He tells me to pinch the tip of my net and hold it upright – like a witch's hat – while slowly lowering it over a flower where our bumble bee prey is foraging. As soon as the bee realizes what's going on, it buzzes furiously inside my net, and then slowly climbs up the fabric towards the tip – right where my finger is. Richardson tells me to grab the wide part of the net with my other hand, slowly choking my hand up the net until the bee is trapped in the tip.

It all seems like a really good way to get stung. But Richardson assures me I'll be fine – he says the bumble bees aren't likely to sting us, and he's got an EpiPen just in case. He tells me that my obsession with the stinger is not all that unique.

"A lot of people who want to participate in the California Bumble Bee Atlas, their first question is really, will I get stung?" He points out that a lot of people tend to think of bees only in terms of the danger they pose to humans – rather than seeing them as whole animals, with interesting lives and behaviors.

"They have this rich ecological life history. They have interesting mating biology," he says. "Another one is social biology. The biology of the nest is absolutely fascinating and it gives us a model for understanding social behavior in other bees and also other insects and vertebrates like us. There's a ton of interesting things about bees, if you look beyond the hypothetical dangers of being stung by one."

Richardson examines a captured bee in a vial. Once he processes and surveys, the bees are let back to their homes.

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Talking to Richardson, it feels easy to look beyond those hypotheticals. But the next step in this bee-catching process seems far from a hypothetical. Richardson tells me to insert a small plastic vial up into the net with my bare fingers, right where the bee is, and somehow convince it to "fall" inside the vial, before popping a cap on. As my fingertips get closer to the bee, it feels like I can hear it buzzing louder and louder.

Richardson performs this whole process in seconds, by the way, with the confidence of someone juggling blindfolded. For me, on the other hand, it's a grueling act of intense concentration. But it pays off – and soon, I've got my very first bee!

It's that male I mentioned earlier. His yellow hair is the color of a hard-boiled egg yolk, and as we hold him, Richardson points out the bright bushy beard on his face – one of the telltale signs of a male. But he wriggles out of our hands before we can get him back in the vial – perhaps in search of queens.

Everywhere you look there's the pop of color.

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We too are in search of queens, as Richardson reminds me, and still hoping to find that species he mentioned – Crotch's bumble bee – so we head back down the trail to another meadow.

As we head up a hill of dry brush, we pass by big plumes of purple sage, and Richardson suddenly sweeps into action, his net flying through the air with an acrobatic swing and twirl. A second later we hear an enormous buzzing from the net – he's netted something big.

It turns out he's caught not one, but two Bombus crotchii – and one of them's a queen! Then the bee transfer begins. "So this is a way people get stung. I have a bee in the vial and a bee in the net ... so my fingertips are in there with the extra bee." But he's a pro – he does this literally thousands of times a year – so no stings here.

He tucks the queen into a vial with a sprig of sage flowers, and just as we're all admiring this regal bee, I start to feel a tingling sensation in my leg – almost like my skin is crawling. I look down, and realize in horror that there are hundreds of thick black ants streaming up my leg, outside my pants, but inside too. I must have stepped on a nest during the excitement.

Leo Carrillo State Park is home to many kind of plants that support ecosystems for bees to thrive.

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The ants have reached my back and backpack as well, and it feels like they're starting to latch onto my skin. Richardson, ever-mindful of the queen, stashes her in a cooler, as I furiously brush the ants off my pants and skin. It takes about 10 minutes of vigorous brushing to get them off, and I still find a few in my shoe later on down the trail.

Being stung may have been my top concern starting out this morning, but clearly the mountains had other hazards in mind. And the dangers we encountered today on this small sampling expedition are a vivid reminder of the sheer scale and ambition of this project.

Richardson places a bee vial into a cooler so that the bees can be safely sedated.

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Surveys like this are happening in more than 250 parts of California, with the help of twice that many volunteers. And this California project is part of a much larger continent-wide Bumble Bee Atlas, which stretches from Alaska to Maine to Georgia. About a quarter of North America's 50 bumble bee species are at risk, according to the Xerces Society, and Richardson says this huge constellation of surveys is one of the best tools scientists have for guiding the conservation of these charismatic animals.

"There's intrinsic value to these native animals that occur here and have been here co-evolving with these plants for millennia," he says. But beyond that – for those who might need another reason to care about wild bees – he points out their value as pollinators of wild plants and crops.

"These wild bees are tremendously important to maintenance of healthy ecosystems, which human beings depend on, and to the human food supply, which we obviously depend on. So we've got both utilitarian and kind of intrinsic reasons to conserve bees."

The sea of yellow makes for a perfect bee environment.

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The magnificent queen bee is still sitting on ice in the cooler, and as we walk back to the car, it's time to photograph her, and let her go. Richardson gently dumps her into the palm of his hand, along with the worker bee he caught with her. At first they just lie there, groggy, and we slowly pet the hairs on the queen's back.

She's waking up fast though, and pretty soon we hear an energetic fluttering from her wings, before she lifts off into the sky. "They're really good at using landscape features to find their way," Richardson says. She circles a few times, before zooming off towards the sage where we caught her.

And thus, our queen journeyed home unharmed — and thankfully, so did we.

Californians will decide on more than a dozen ballot initiatives this November, covering a wide range of proposals focused on housing, taxes, recall elections, voter identification and more.

One ballot measure would approve an $11.25 billion bond for affordable housing; another would create a new down payment assistance program for homebuyers. Proposition 40 would establish a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of billionaires in California, while two other propositions would limit new taxes and potentially nullify Prop. 40. Other ballot measures, if approved, would change the recall election process in California, require identification to vote and speed up the environmental review process for certain developments.

It’s a lot of information to wade through on your own.

That’s why LAist unveils its Voter Game Plan each election season, with guides to help you cast a ballot that aligns with your values and beliefs. (The one thing we don’t do? Tell you how to vote. That is up to you.) For the Nov. 3 general election, LAist is also hosting a series of ballot cram sessions focused on helping you make informed decisions.

The series kicked off on Wednesday with AirTalk Host Larry Mantle and a panel of experts focused on the long list of statewide propositions in a one-hour cram session.

Michael Alvarez, professor of political and computational social science at CalTech; Sara Sadhwani, associate professor of politics at Pomona College, and Lee E. Ohanian, a professor of economics at UCLA and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, provided an overview of each ballot measure. The trio described the pros, cons and stakes of every decision Californians face this November, including the confusing and conflicting trio of tax measures you’ll see on your ballot as Props. 40, 41 and 42.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty as to how much revenue this might generate. There’s a lot of uncertainty, in particular, if it’s going to generate revenue in sufficient time to help the Californians who are really in need of having healthcare,” said Alvarez on Prop. 40, which would create a one-time tax on billionaires to fund healthcare.

Lee and Sadhwani both noted that there's a question of whether the tax would drive billionaires out of the state. “If you think that super high wealthy people should be paying more in taxes, there’s better ways to do this,” said Lee.

As for Prop. 41, which would require audits of new tax programs, and Prop. 42, which would ban new taxes on personal property, the panel agreed the measures are confusing.

Both propositions would nullify Prop. 40 if they receive more votes in support than the billionaire tax measure. That’s the big thing to remember, said Sadhwani: “They’re really the poison pills of Prop. 40, the billionaire’s tax. So a yes on 41 or a yes on 42 is a no essentially for Prop. 40.”

“I’ll be honest, Prop. 41 as well as Prop. 42 kind of makes my eyes glaze over,” said Sadhwani. Alvarez added that the measures make his head spin. Experts — they’re just like us!

LAist’s upcoming voter cram sessions will focus on judicial elections and Orange County.

You can find LAist’s Voter Game Plan and dozens of guides to the Nov. 3 election here at LAist.com/Vote

Elevated sea levels are already rolling into Southern California waters, leading to coastal erosion and other damage. An El Niño-driven Kelvin wave is further exacerbating conditions along the coast. And Tropical Storm Rachel could bring rain across the region this weekend.

But all of this is probably just the beginning of a very wet Southern California rainy season.

Authorities have been sounding the alarm.

“ Residents need to hear this information, and they need to hear it repeatedly, enough times so that they too can act,” L.A. County Supervisor Hilda Solis said during a recent presentation about El Niño preparations.

Heavy rain, flooding and debris flows can pose serious threats to homes and infrastructure. Officials and climate scientists say the best way to protect yourself and your property is to make preparations now, well before peak El Niño conditions arrive.

Here’s what you can do to prepare your home.

Preparing your property

One of the first steps to getting your home ready for El Niño is to understand how vulnerable it is to flooding when heavy rain or surging surf hits your neighborhood.

“It really is incumbent upon people to pause, evaluate where they live, where they travel and to really think about what would happen if those areas were flooded out,” said Kerjon Lee, spokesperson for the L.A. County Department of Public Works. “ Knowing your community, your neighborhood, where mud and debris flow might occur — is really critical.”

You can review your risks using California’s MyHazard tool, which allows you to input your address and cycle through potential risks.

Floodwaters and the landscape

Knowing if your property or neighborhood has flooded in the past can be helpful, and you can learn a lot from simply looking at the landscape in and around your home.

If your house is at the bottom of a hillside, for example, it’s probably more susceptible to debris flows, especially if the slope burned in a wildfire in the last several years. Burn scars are especially vulnerable to landslides and flooding because they lack the established vegetation that helps hold soil in place and absorbs water during heavy rain.

Other landmarks to look out for near your property are creeks, canals, drainage channels, debris basins and even low-lying roadways.

It’s also a good idea to understand how rainwater flows onto your property, where it collects and how it leaves. The goal should be for water to flow through your property safely and efficiently, without causing damage to neighbors.

That means clearing debris and overgrowth from gutters and drains now, before extreme weather hits.

Officials are also urging residents to report clogged or blocked storm drains to their local public works department.

If you live in L.A. County and are concerned about potential mud or debris flows, you can contact the county’s Department of Public Works for free advice.

Sandbags

If your property is at high risk of flooding, consider stockpiling sandbags. Many fire departments and public works departments offer sandbags to their local communities.

You can check sandbag distribution locations and availability here:

• L.A. County
• Orange County 
• Ventura County
• Santa Barbara County
• Riverside County
• San Bernardino County

Be prepared to fill the sandbags yourself, as most places only offer empty ones. Never fill sandbags with beach sand or empty used ones onto the beach.

Once you have sandbags, make sure you know how to use them properly.

Here are a few tips:

• Only fill sandbags half-full, not all the way full.
• Do not place sandbags directly against the outer wall of a building as wet bags can create added pressure on the foundation. 
• Sandbags should be placed parallel to the direction of water flow.
• The open ends of sandbags should be folded underneath and face upstream so they aren’t forced open as water flows around them.
• Sandbags should be used to redirect floodwater rather than create a dam or block its path. 
• Sandbags can be used to protect doorways, but to do so, they should have a waterproof layer like heavy plastic or waterproof canvas placed behind them. 

This diagram shows the proper way to place sandbags so that they are parallel to the flow of water or debris and redirect it away from structures.

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Los Angeles County Department of Public Works

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Local agencies offer thorough instructions on how to use sandbags online. L.A. County Public Works offers a breakdown in its Homeowners Guide.

Sandbags and other materials for protecting your home, including plywood, lumber or plastic sheeting, should be stored in a dry location away from potential flooding.

Other flood considerations

If valuables could be damaged or destroyed by floodwaters, consider moving them away from the ground or, if possible, to upper floors. Keep important documents in waterproof containers or sealed bags, and make sure to create digital copies.

Another recommendation is to check trees on your property for dead branches, cracks or other issues that might make them unstable, especially those that hang over structures. If you’re unsure or concerned about your trees, you can hire an arborist to inspect them. To trim or remove them, you will likely have to hire a professional. Cities and counties generally do not handle tree maintenance on private property.

Finally, consider purchasing flood insurance if your home is at risk — and do so as early as possible.

Standard homeowners insurance policies typically do not cover flood damage, and new flood insurance plans can take at least 30 days to kick in. If you want to consider signing up for a plan, the National Flood Insurance Program is a good place to start.

If floodwaters do enter your home, public health officials recommend drying wet areas as quickly as possible, as saturation can lead to mold. If mold does take hold, clean the area using a disinfectant. Also, wear gloves and a mask to protect your skin and lungs and throw away moldy items that can’t be cleaned.

Jordan Corral had to do something.

It was late 2024, during a historically dry start to the winter. But the winter before that had been historically wet. This kind of “weather whiplash” is growing more common with a warming climate, research is finding. And it meant the hillsides of the Santa Monica Mountains were overgrown with invasive and highly flammable plants, such as black mustard, castor bean and fennel.

So Corral got to work. Alongside mentor Bill Neill, the president of the Santa Monica Mountains chapter of the California Native Plant Society, Corral pulled together a group of volunteers to pull out invasive plants.

Then came the Palisades Fire. Corral and his wife, Sara Marti, lost their apartment and had to start over. They’ve finally relocated to an apartment that survived the fire. Meanwhile, through their work for the nonprofit Resilient Palisades, Corral has launched a subgroup focused on invasive plant removal.

“The team is working on wildfire recovery while trying to mitigate the next wildfire simultaneously,” Marti said by phone on a day when Corral was out working with volunteers in Temescal Canyon Gateway Park.

Now, Marti said, their effort to heal the land has become a part of their own recovery journey.

“Being a part of the recovery has played an enormous part of personal healing,” she said. “It's meditative while you know that you're also making a huge difference, protecting the nearby neighborhoods.”

A half dozen or so volunteers, including Corral and Marti, have been regularly going to the park to remove invasive species, which choke out native plants and grow into dense, dry vegetation that can make fires more intense. They’ve also worked with local high schools and youth groups.

Now, they’re racing to get as many invasive species removed as possible, while at the same time planting as many native seeds as they can, ahead of a potentially very wet winter driven by El Niño. If the rain is as intense as forecasters are predicting, it could help invasive species flourish further.

Sara G. Marti, left, and Jordan Corral lost their apartment in the Palisades Fire and are leaders in the nonprofit group Resilient Palisades.

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Courtesy Sara G. Marti

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The effort has been boosted by a recent $24,000 grant from UCLA’s Philanthropy as Civic Engagement Course. The money will help hire expert field assistants and buy safety gear, among other things. Corral and Marti hope the effort can become sustained.

“It's not a one-and-done thing,” Marti said. “Invasive plants are going to continue coming back. … So we're really just trying to stay ahead of it as much as we can.”

In some ways, Marti said, the effort reflects their own journey to recover after losing their apartment in the fire.

“ We're probably never going to win, but we can't give up,” she said. “We have to keep trying.”

The city of Los Angeles will establish a fund to clean the 6th Street Bridge, where trash and other waste often pile up on pedestrian walkways. 

In a unanimous vote on Tuesday, the City Council approved the establishment of the fund, which will allow the city to accept and retain donations from private entities “to preserve this iconic landmark,” Councilmember Ysabel Jurado said. “Our commitment to this bridge has to ensure its longevity.”

Funds will go toward trash and bulky item pickup, graffiti abatement and other beautification services for the bridge. 

The dedicated fund follows the city’s hiring of Pasadena-based engineering firm Tetra Tech to restore the lighting of the bridge, which has been plagued by copper wire theft since its opening in 2022. 

The outages have frustrated residents and commuters who use the bridge to walk, run, bike and drive between downtown L.A. and the Eastside. 

This move also comes as residents in Boyle Heights and the Arts District grapple with how the 12-acre park beneath the bridge will be maintained once it opens in 2027. 

Community members have raised concerns about the possibility of homeless encampments forming at the park, as well as graffiti and whether copper wire theft from the bridge could affect the park’s safety.

Meanwhile, groups like the Arts District Little Tokyo Neighborhood Council, Arts District Los Angeles and the Boyle Heights 5K Run/Walk are filling gaps with an upcoming bridge cleanup in collaboration with Jurado’s office. 

The post City of LA will establish a fund to clean the 6th Street Bridge appeared first on LA Local.