Walter "Wally" Thurman

speaker

115 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 10 Apr

Walter "Wally" Thurman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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Freakonomics Radio · 670. Beeconomics 101 · 10 Apr 2026 podcast

And what is happening with the bees?

The adult bees actually disappeared.

There weren't dead bees lying around the hive, and nobody knew what happened to them.

Yeah, Wally Thurman is how I go.

Walter Thurman appears on my articles, but call me Wally.

I'm a professor emeritus of agricultural economics at North Carolina State University.

And you were trained at the University of Chicago.

I'd agree totally with that.

The biology of honeybees are fascinating to a lot of people, and the markets are even more fascinating because they depend on the biology.

And I would say that there's very little economic analysis of how pollination and honey get provided.

I'm an agricultural economist, and a continuing theme of my research has been on the effects of farm subsidies, a wide variety of U.S.

government subsidies to agriculture of all sorts.

And I became intrigued in the early 2000s by the Honey Price Support Program.

This seemed to me sort of a garden variety example of an agricultural commodity being subsidized.

There were interest groups, farmers who gained a lot from the activity, and consumers didn't cost them very much.

And in the process of studying that...

I started to learn about pollination and the economics of bees.

What bees do is as much provide pollination services as provide honey, at least in terms of the economic value of what they do.

So I started a multi-year project of...

getting to know entomologists and bee specialists, and just became fascinated by the movement of beekeepers while they're moving their bees around.

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