 Everybody's heard the news about Colony Collapse Disorder and other problems that bees are facing across North America and really the world. And so the Institute has been doing a bee breeding project for three, four years now. And so we're out in our bee yard doing a field recording for this week's podcast. This is the Lotech Podcast. Hello and welcome to podcast number 55 on September 16th, 2022, coming to you out of the Lotech Institute's apiary. That is our bee yard. This will be a little different today. We are out here in the hives. Hopefully you can hear us clearly. For those of you watching on YouTube, you can see this. For those of you listening to the audio only, you can head on over to YouTube if you want to see this one. But today I'll be interviewing my co-conspirator, just kidding, not really conspiracy. My friend Paul Zolinsky, who has been working with me to manage the hives we have here on the Agri-Cole campus. Agri-Cole is a prairie seed company and they pay us to have our bees here to help pollinate their crops. Thanks for listening to our podcast. As you know, many podcast providers put ads on podcasts. If you hear someone else doing the ad, then we're not getting paid for it. So if you want to support the work we do, which we will continue to leave as free and available to the public. But if you want to support what we do, head on over to patreon.com slash lotech institute and feel free to sign up as a supporter for as little as $3 a month. We really do appreciate everyone who joins up and how much help both monetarily and also mentally to have the support out there is a big help. Please head on over to patreon.com slash low tech institute and sign up. And don't forget to follow us on the social medias. Our Twitter is at low underscore Techno. Our Instagram is low tech Institute. We're on Facebook under the same name. We're on YouTube. You can reach us at our website, lowtechinstitute.org. And you can send me an email. I'm Scott at lowtechinstitute.org. Now on with the interview and our discussion about bees and the project that we're doing out here at the in theory. All right. So I am here with Paul Zalinsky, my partner in crime for our bee breeding project out here at agricultural. So how long have you been beekeeping and what got you into it? Probably 10 or a dozen years. And they just seem cool. I guess when I was a kid, my dad had bees for a while before he decided keeping bees and teaching both of the had you busy in the spring and the fall. So it didn't last for too long, but they were always fun. So as soon as we got some space, I decided to get some bees and I had a couple hives and then a couple more. And they just kept living and making more hives until I had a ton of them. Well, briefly, you were almost going to go into the meat business and was. So yeah, I work at the DMV, but I didn't really like working in a cubicle. You didn't like working at the DMV. I know. Weird. Everyone likes working at the DMV. They're go all our DMV listeners. Right. It's already DMV people know, but yeah, cubicles, not much fun. So I was going to open a metery, but the amount of initial investment to open a metery and get licensing and facilities and labeling and all of that in place before you can actually make any money is daunting. And I did not have that much investment. So you can keep the bees without much investment and then just sort of put the money back in every year and kind of grow a little bit at a time. And eventually, you know, you'll have enough honey to make some meat, right? In theory, how much meat have you made so far? I've made a lot of meat. Oh, OK. I haven't sold any meat. I've made a lot of meat selling alcohol in the United States. Tough. Exactly. All right. And so what brings us out here today? What are we doing? Well, kind of just a routine fall checkup. Make sure everybody's looking good, getting ready for winter. Not much time left before winter in Wisconsin. And winter here, for my opinion, starts once the last thing is done blooming, which in Wisconsin is the Astor, pretty much the Golden on the Astor. Both of those are blooming now. So we've probably only got a little bit left before it gets. There's nothing blooming and it gets too cold for the bees to do much of anything. Yep. The other thing is, as everybody's probably heard, mites are the real big problem for bees these days. And this project was trying to breed mite resistant, mite tolerant treatment free bees. And we've been pretty unsuccessful with that. So as sort of a comparison this year, we're going to try to treat some bees and hopefully that'll go a little bit better. So we can back up a little bit and talk. So what's a mite? Well, mites are nasty little, I guess they're not rat nids, but they're yeah, little parasites. And you know, there's plenty of mites, you know, hair mites, skin mites, mites. But these are particularly Varroa mite, Varroa destructor. And they best name of all the mites. Right. It's definitely a good name, bad mite, good name. But they came from the Asian honeybees and they infest the Asian honeybees. But there they live in balance with the bees because the Asian honeybees are smaller and have a shorter brood cycle. So the only bees that they can reproduce on are the drone. And so the drones, if you, you know, harm the drones, it doesn't really harm the hive all that much. And so they live in balance with those bees. These bees, they've also been exposed to them for 100 years. They evolved together to have a balance thing. And then, of course, you know, in all our wisdom, we decided let's take European honeybees to Asia because, you know, they'll make more honey, blah, blah, blah. They got infected with these mites. These bees are bigger, have a longer brood cycle. And so they can infest all of the worker bees. And so they have no real control to their population. And they just get to the point that they will be so numerous that they kill. So we have to treat them with something that kills mites, but not bees, which is hard because, you know, putting insect killer in a box full of insects is a risky proposition. Well, I was saying earlier, it's kind of like a chemotherapy where you're trying to kill bad cells. You incidentally kill other cells or make the host also sick. So this is one of our yards. Our other yard we're not treating. And we have fancy, bought in queens that have the genetics that are supposed to be tolerant of or suppress the mites. And so we are going to let them ride the winter out and those survivors then will be split and we'll take the queens and kill them from here and use these bees as expansions for those other types is the hope, at least. We'll see a plan. That's yeah. So these will be treated, but we won't bring these genetics on. Because basically by treating, we're allowing all genetics through the genetic Olympics. And you only really want to take the metal winners that can do well without treatment. And those are really hard to find. But yeah, you ruin natural selection if you don't let nature select, which is probably why the Asian honey bees at the time a hundred years ago before they could put chemicals on, you know, they probably had a crash before they well, these are adapted, you know, wild honey bees. Oh, the Asians, the Asian honey bees. So they've evolved for who knows how many, you know, centuries together. I see. OK. So we were here a couple of weeks ago and we looked at all the different hives and we made notes on what we need to do to each one. This one's a little bit or it's not that weak, no, but it's weaker than its part than its neighbors. So we may end up giving it some honey, some boxes full of honey, just to give it that much more to eat during the winter. We don't usually have the problem of our bees dying for lack of honey. We usually have bees that die probably because of mites. We've had incredibly bad luck the last three years. Each year we've had pretty much a hundred year 100 percent die off because probably because of the mites, which is insane. It's quite a lot. So there are there are people who keep bees and supposedly try to be treatment free. So we were trying to replicate some of the studies that have been shown where if you have an isolated enough location, Gotland, Sweden is the the most right famous one. You'll lose most of all your bees. So 90 percent of your bees are so the first year. But then over time, the bees will there's a couple of different mechanisms that they can use to keep the mites under control and survive with the mites. And so you select for that. So we were trying to replicate that, but we used American commercial bees and doesn't really seem like our bees have what it takes to live without mites sort of within their genetics. So selecting for something that they don't have can be a difficult proposition. Right. So that's our theory anyway. So hopefully if we, you know, get some of these bees that people have been working with and already starting that journey more specifically rather than through natural selection, we've kind of done it with measuring mites loads, measuring for some of the behavior is some of the bees will actually sense the mites in the cells with with the young bees and they'll pull those out, killing the young bee in the process. But getting rid of the mites so that they can't reproduce. And that's called hygienic behavior. So some people will freeze a patch of brood and watch how quickly the bees clean that out or different things like that so that they're manually selecting for what nature would select for. But in a much more specific approach and they're actually selecting for the mechanism of being mite tolerant rather than the overall outcome of being mite tolerant. So our theory is if we maybe start with some of those queens. So that's where, you know, Scott mentioned we got some some fancy purchased queens. Those have started down that path. So the place we got those treats less than half of his hives here. He measures the mites loads and the ones that are, you know, keeping up with the mites and he doesn't treat the ones that need some treatments. He does. So he's sort of selectively breeding, but much more purposefully. He's artificially inseminating. And he is artificially inseminating. One of the things that differentiates bees from, say, I don't know, cows. We're in Wisconsin. Well, let's use milk cows as an example. You know, if you have three heifers that give milk and one of them gives better milk, you're going to choose to breed that one up to help, you know, be the future of your herd. You're going to pick the bull. That's the nicest and biggest and, you know, all the best things you want in a bowl. And it's really easy to castrate the rest of the bulls and you're all set. And there's going to be one bull responsible for all of the offspring. Bee queens, when they emerge and they're young, queen bees, unmated, they will fly out of the hive and go to what are called drone congregation areas, which we don't quite know how they know where they are. But all the bees in the area know where these drone congregations are. All the drones, the male bees will hang out there in the afternoon and the queens will go out and they will mate with 15 to 20 drones. And that will give her all of the sperm that she needs for her entire life. I mean, hundreds of thousands of bees. And so you can't really control unless you're doing artificial insemination. You can't really control what genetics are there unless you flood the marketplace, which is one of the things we tried to do. We tried to have so many hives with our own genetics that it would just, you know, they'd be mating with our own drones, but we just haven't had anything to start having any survival to encourage. So this year, like I said, we are going to modify that a bit. Yeah. And unfortunately, unlike, say, in Wales, where they've done this, where basically all the beekeepers in an area of Wales have banded together and said, we will not treat, we will not bring in outside bees. And they've created, you know, largely might tolerant bees in a region, but it's taken a coordinated effort of everybody working together. And we just don't have that here because in America, the bees are migratory. Enough bees are migratory. That means they go out to Florida and a big one, California for the almond pollination and things like that. It's basically like STDs. They're going out to clubs and being promiscuous, right? And so they are spreading the commercial beekeepers are not breeding for the same things that the recreational beekeepers. No, they they want their bees to be big and prolific in February when the almonds bloom right in Wisconsin, February's, you know, our coldest month. So yeah, they're just looking for different things. So they're selecting for bees that serve the purpose that they need served, which is producing honey, which is producing honey and or producing bees ready for pollination at a time that we aren't really ready for. And they winter their bees in California, Texas, Florida, Georgia. So they don't need bees that are ready to, you know, tolerate the winters that we need our bees to tolerate. They also treat their bees, you know, six times a year. They're constantly keeping the mites under control through these artificial means, which, you know, works for them. And they're making money and doing things. But, you know, you can buy honey at the grocery store for less than, you know, $20 a pound because this is it's industrial beekeeping. But those same genetics, then, are what the packages that people buy when you're starting bees, what we purchase to try to start this experiment are those bees and those bees, you know, aren't made to do what we're trying to make them do. I think last I heard one of the major package producers in this area is bringing in 80,000 packages a year. That's a lot of bees. Let's try to, you know, breed with our specific genetics that we're looking for. They're going to get drowned out by that, unless you can have a specific location where you are controlling the drone, which is our hope here, is that we would surround the area with hides with the drones that we prefer. Right. And then mate our queens in the center of that so that we could keep that selection going. And like we said, just for those that aren't beekeepers, drones, again, are males. They have no purpose in life other than mating with the queen. And then most of the bees that you'd encounter are worker bees, which are females, but do not mate. Let's not get into too many beekeepers listening. You know that there are laying workers, but we're not going to get into that. This isn't necessarily about how to beekeep. There's lots of great videos and podcasts about that. We're just kind of introducing this project that we're working on. So basically we're trying to do an artificial selection to help with, you know, put a finger on the scale of natural selection. But so far we've had such garbage genetics, excuse my French at the technical term, garbage genetics going in that we just haven't had success isolating anything of any use. And so now we're actually going to be treating the chemical derived from time that helps suppress or kill even the mite. So yeah, so this should be killing the mites. It's thymol, which when mites first showed up, people quickly jumped out and started using a bunch of harsh chemicals, different, you know, poisons, compounds, things like that to treat for the mites. Yeah, good success for quite some time. But in time, the mites became resistant to those in time. Give it time. They also, those chemicals tend to build up in the wax and they can sterilize the queen, sterilize the drone. They have all sorts of poor consequences as well as just, you know, commercial agriculture, huge corporations, dangerous chemicals into the environment, things like that. So we're trying a more natural approach as best we can. So we're using a product called Apagard that has thymol as the main ingredient. Thymol is just an extract from the thyme plant, which we all enjoy eating. It's also the main ingredient, the active ingredient in the listerine mouthwash. So overall, it tends to be a relatively sort of gentle, safe, natural chemical. There's a couple others, formic acid, oxalic acid, things like that. Those are the ones we tend to produce. And then you're a lactic acid. Are they using lactic now? Yeah, lactic acid, I've heard. And so there's basically in treatment, right? Think of the Dow, Dow better living through chemistry. So yeah, they're started out with very harsh chemicals and they still have hard chemicals. They're still available, but they're just nasty. So we're using more soft chemicals. And one nice thing you can do is combine this with behavioral things like perhaps basically the mites don't feast on the bees themselves. They feast on the larvae. And so a mite will more or less. Well, there's still bees. They're just they're still bees. They're baby bees. OK, they so they infest the cell right before it gets capped. So short term be life cycle. The bees have a larvae for it's like a little maggot for, you know, a week. Then they cap it over in the cell of the comb. They put a little wax cover on and it goes through a full metamorphosis, just like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. It turns from this maggot into a bee. And while it's doing that transition as a pupa, the mites then infest those cells. They jump in there right before it's capped. The female might she then lays mags and produces some young and they feast on that bee while it's transforming. So basically they eat bee babies. If you want to really just like this, you might say that they eat bee babies. There you go. But when they when they eat, it's like a tick. And based on the body size, it'd be like having, I don't know, a basketball size tick on the side of a dinner plate. Yeah. On us. Yeah. So it's a big tick and it would eat a significant amount of, you know, I think of a malnourished baby having a big tick, sucking all the juice out of it, which is basically what the mites are doing. And so the the bees that are born are weak. They're smaller. They're more susceptible to diseases that can be spread by the ticks. So during the year, if you look up online, how long is a bee live? Usually on Google, you'll see something like 45 days. But that's not true of a lot of the bees that you're looking at in theory. If you're on YouTube, the bees that you see here, some of these are probably already getting close to winter bees. And winter bees have to survive, what, 120 days? Oh, long. A half a year. So so the bees actually in the fall, they know fall is coming and they produce what Scott said, winter bees. They're specific bees that are fatter, larger and more available to live a longer time through winter. And those bees don't take care of brood themselves. They don't fly out in forage. They just get ready for winter. And then those bees will hunker down the cluster up and they have to live through most of the winter. The bees don't start producing brood until March, February, something like that. So these bees need to live months and months instead of the four to six weeks that a normal bee would live. So if those bees get damaged by the mites, which happens to be when the mites population is peaking as the bee population starts to shrink down before winter, the mite population continues to skyrocket. So those bees get damaged more than any of the other bees and they just simply don't have the strength to live through the entire winter. And that's why people's hives will crash in the fall if the mites levels get too high or often in the early spring, just because those bees are too weak to make it through all the way until spring. Well, and if you think about that, that's another reason that they crash in the fall is you have kind of non complementary population curves. Basically in the spring, the bees are incredibly busy building up the largest population they can possibly do in the spring and early summer. And so their population peaks in the summer when there's lots for them to do. The mites, on the other hand, there's just a few that survive the winter. And so they're building up slowly, thinking, you know, two becomes four becomes eight becomes 16 or so on. But it's really more like one becomes seven becomes 40 and so on. Anyway, so they're building up more on a logarithmic scale. And so as the bees cool down and start producing less brood, the mites have been expanding and continue to expand into the fall. So you get to a point where the mites outpace. So you kind of see, like a lot of people show the graph, there's kind of this like curve, like a bell curve of bee population. But then there's just a line for the mites. So the mites keep going up and up and up and up and they don't want to slow down. But the bees do. And so that's where you you suddenly get these crashes and people say, oh, the bees crash, why is that? And it's because the mites per bee just skyrocket because the mites continue on their same trajectory they've been on, but the bees start slowing down. Right. So we're lucky we're still able to work without bee suits right now. We are debating whether or not we'd have to put on suits because throughout the summer, the bees don't necessarily mind us mucking around in their hives. But in the fall, it kind of becomes an all out race for resources. The bees are packing in as much honey as they can so that they can live through the winter. But so are other things like you also you also have, you know, during the summer, a bunch of bees are going out and there's just free nectar everywhere you turn flowers everywhere you go. All you can and then suddenly there's nothing to do. So you've got all of these worker bees that had been working hard, collecting stuff. And then they're kind of expend expendable because, as we said, they only live four to six weeks. So they know when fall comes around that they really don't have much use left. Right. So if they find a hive full of honey, they'll try to go steal it. Right. Even if, you know, they might lose their life in the process. They know that the the honey resources that they might be able to bring back are worth more to the hive than their own life. And so they're willing to go rob other hives. And so then the hives obviously need to be defensive to, you know, keep their resources for themselves. And so they get a little more defensive with us as well. Well, it's kind of a selection pressure too. They'll rob out the weak hives, which may not have made it or less likely to make it through the winter anyway, in theory. So they are basically taking the resources of the week to make sure that they're strong enough to make it through the winter, which is a bit of a selection pressure, but it's not just bees. I've seen a dozen yellowjackets so far landing in the open top of the hive because this open top of the hive can't be protected like the mouth. In the mouth of the hive or the main entrance, they have guard bees that will smell each bee coming in. And if it doesn't smell like family member, they will fight it or kill it or try to. But when the top's open, basically like having your back door left open, we just rip the roof off of their house. And they didn't have, you know, a security system in place to protect the roof of their house. So we're going to make some noise. So basically, if you're not watching this, Paul is taking a box full of bees and slamming it onto another empty box to get all the bees out, you know, as one does, as one does. And here we are talking about how lucky we are not to have to wear veils. So one of the things that bees do in the fall, coming back to what I was saying is they get fussy and they get a little say defensive defensive. Yeah, because they're trying to protect all of these calories that they've stored up. And here we are digging through them. We could be a bear for all they know. Luckily, bears don't have smoke. No, bears do not have smokers. Funnily enough, the a camera, like the camera that's shooting this video right now, looks like a bear snout. And if you put a camera, a DSLR right in the in the mouth of a hive, they will go right after it. It's amazing how how imprinted that form is in their subconscious or their garden subconscious. Yeah, oh, yeah, they will go right after that. So yeah, as you can see, if you're on YouTube and I'll describe it to you, if you're not, our hives are a motley crew of donated, built and purchased hive equipment because, you know, the first year we started was the beginning of the pandemic and we didn't know what was happening with funding or anything like that. So we've had a long and strange trip. Luckily, we should say thanks to the Blooming Prairie Foundation for giving us an initial grant to work on this that we were able to stretch out for a couple of years because of the pandemic, not making it possible for us to share what we were doing with people in person. This year, we've been lucky to have volunteers and others come out and help us and we get to teach them a little bit about keeping bees. And also they get to help us with a little bit of elbow grease, which has been part of our our goal is education. And we had talked about a wish that we could have a method that worked well for just, you know, run of the mill kind of mutt bees that you could buy anywhere in the U.S. in the spring and have a method for backyard beekeepers to encourage the selection that we need to have bees become resistant to these or tolerant of these mites. But yeah, as Paul said a little earlier, it seems like the genetic diversity is so muddled in the United States that we don't have what they have in Europe where they have local bees that stay local. As far as I know, they don't have migratory or at least not to the same level, the migratory bees in Europe. But yeah, correct me if I'm wrong, right in. Let me know. But it just seems like they have also saw some study about the genetic diversity of bees over the decades. And it's actually pretty interesting. It's gone down. Our genetic diversity has shrunk dramatically. Well, that's a shame because genetic diversity is kind of like the Darwinian way that we have a better chance of surviving. Right? Every population, every trade of every population exists on a bell curve or some sort of curve that's similar to a bell curve or maybe a little different, but mostly a bell curve, let's say. And, you know, most of the animals exist in the fat part of the bell curve because that's what works well in that environment. When that environment changes, the bees at the edge of that bell curve that are more diverse and maybe unusual today, but they'll actually be important for us tomorrow because we'll need some weird trait that they have. And with the bees, if they're all the same, if they all share this genetic material because they're going to California and breeding over and over amongst one another and being promiscuous, it's really makes it difficult. So for those who are watching, this is kind of a way to like do cheater quick inspections. If you just kind of tip up the boxes instead of lifting them off, you can see. And during the spring, summer stuff, you can check for queen cells on the bottom. Sure. You can from the bottom, you can kind of see up along the frames to see what kind of brood that you have and things like that too. So it's not a good thorough inspection, but it gives you kind of a quick idea. Didn't need any. All right. Yeah. I need our veils after all. That's sting number two. Oh, that's sting number one. Sting number one, well, that's good. But it's on my face. So this is why you should always wear veils. Do not follow our. Yeah. Exactly. I have no actual pharmacological knowledge to take this for what it's worth. But for me, I know when I take a Zirtec, I barely react to a bee sting. But when I don't, I swell a bit. Again, that you use that at your own risk. God's prescribing medication. We are not funded by Zirtec, although if someone from Zirtec's listening and you want to fund us, let me know back to why you're here. So if if you want to learn more about what we're doing, you can go to our website, lowtechinstitute.org, slash research. And there you will find one of our research projects. I think it's number two or three is called the brood project. Something like that on that page. Have a read there of all the different posts and publications that we've had about this. You can get some of the see some of the data that we're dealing with if you're interested. We'll also have other videos on our YouTube page showing you how to install, for example, a package of bees, which is a screened in box full of three pounds of bees and a queen. So that's kind of fun. We'll probably have some videos about splitting and other things at some point, but not right now. So yeah, definitely have a look around our website and our YouTube page to find out more about our bee work. Also says thanks to Paul for letting me bother him as he's trying to work here in the hives, asking him questions about what we've been doing. And hopefully we'll have more updates next year where we can talk about the survival of some of our bees here and how we're trying to split them out and make them more tolerant to Varroa mites, which again, it's one of the leading causes of much more fun to talk about the survival of your bees than the death. Well, it really is just an indictment of industrial beekeeping. The fact that we can't get any survivors. I mean, that's that or your beekeeping. But that can't I mean, you'd still have if you have 60 hives in theory, barring anything else, even a poor beekeeper should keep a couple of them alive. I've had just a couple of hives that I've been able to keep alive for years. So it's frustrating. I say if we couldn't keep any hives alive, then that would be telling. But since both of us seem to be successful keeping other bees alive, right? So it's got to be less likely that that's the cause. The one variable was treatment. So that's got that's got to be the driving factor here. So anyway, thanks for joining us on this slightly unusual podcast episode where we are out in the field. If this is popular thing, maybe we'll do more because we have lots of interesting projects going on around the Institute. We can talk about those. Maybe we'll do more field reporting if that's interesting. The Logitech podcast is currently put out, produced and hosted by me, Scott Johnson, our editor who's had to do extra work this week for the random footage that I brought in is Hina Suzuki. Our music is not yet determined, so that'll be in the show notes. Check that out for hearing about with the music that you're hearing now, probably in the background is. Again, don't forget to check us out and support us patreon.com slash logitech Institute or you can visit our website and find other ways to support us, become a member, things like that. Thanks to our Forrester and Land Steward level patrons and supporters, we hope to have a couple member events coming up. Actually, in two weeks we'll be out at the Apple Orchard with our members, picking apples and then making cider. If you're interested in joining us for that member event, now is the time to sign up. So thanks again for watching, until next time.