 Thank you for being here and for coming to our first presentation of the Farmers Forum. Our first presenter is going to be Stu Jacobson and you can see his presentation. The name is Increasing Production of Locally Adapted Disease and My Resistant Bees. It's a topic that I'm sure that we're all going to enjoy. He comes from Illinois. He represents the Illinois Queen Initiative. I'm going to try to cover basically our organization, the Illinois Queen Initiative. Of course now I have to figure out how to get this thing to work. About three years ago there was only one person raising queens in Illinois for sale. There were probably a few people raising queens for themselves and maybe they gave a few away. There are still some people that do that. Now there's about 15 to 20 and we've trained over 100. A number of those people are still raising queens but they're not selling them. And we're interested in changing. We're interested in a gradual genetic revolution. If you can have a gradual revolution of the gene pool of bees in Illinois and also in Missouri and other Midwestern states. You can't do that unless you provide queens and or small colonies or nukes for sale to people. I mean giving them away is not sustainable. So if you don't have a means of providing those then we're not going to make changes. We're not going to have a gene pool that's more adapted and more disease resistant to our local conditions. So this talk is a mix of what has been successful for us plus a few ideas that I'm going to make suggestions I have about how to go about in your state or perhaps in your region realizing this kind of thing. So I think I already addressed this question but I have an article on the IQI and the Illinois Queen Initiative website. I wrote several years ago. I haven't changed my thinking that much. So I have the it's illinoisqueeninitiative.com and the URL or whatever it is on the last slide. So we needed an organization to train people how to raise queens because obviously you can't produce disease resistant or locally adapted queens unless you can raise some kind of honeybee queens. Right now we're still in that mode where we're trying to train more and more people. In an organization is the means of carrying that out. So in our initial attempt we identified initial goals and objectives. Our goal was basically to make that change of the gene pool in Illinois that I mentioned how we're going to accomplish those goals and objectives mostly through workshops and decide on a structure we decided on a state coordinator that's me for now regional coordinators and a marketing chair which is extremely important. And what we have discovered is the strength of the organization is in the regions. It's in its different regions because that's where the different activities occur and then we come together once a year for an annual meeting. So we need really hardworking initiative taking regional coordinators not just voting directors as occurs in some beekeeping and other organizations that sit back and kind of wait for other things to happen. They have to take initiative setting up workshops coming up with ideas promoting the workshops etc. In my opinion it's probably best if an organization like this in this case our Illinois queen initiative is independent of the state beekeeping association. Ohio did it the other way and a new president came in the state beekeeping association decided that a rearing queen's adaptive Ohio wasn't that important. Pulled the funding. When I applied for my first SAIR grant we didn't even have a president of the state association and I knew the board well enough to know there's no way in heck that I'm going to run I'm going to run the proposal through this board because they were mostly kind of contankerous older folks my age and older which is pretty damn old. Okay and I'm sort of going at 78 rpm because I'm not used to speaking for 20 minutes. Okay the marketing is critical. I've become more and more convinced of this that where we have not met our short term goals of let's say training X number of people per year it's because we haven't gotten the word out. So the marketing chair position is critical and they need to develop a simple marketing plan call a promotion if you will but it is marketing with the regional coordinators. A website's important and ours is not well utilized. The webmaster is asking for content. We're not providing it. Our producer so-called producer page is not viewed by beekeepers as a resource as a place to go to find queens or nukes. I don't think the marketing chair should be the webmaster in part because webmasters in my brief experience tend to love their product or their art as everybody else does and you need someone else to say this needs to be changed. So it needs to be two different people. We need to get more articles out via the state association newsletter and their website. They've been cooperative with us and we recently discovered that we need to do more on the ground to local or regional beekeeping associations give talks promoting our queen initiative and promoting our workshops. So I've got to, well, I think I have about 15 minutes. One thing that I realized when I was sitting down thinking about how to put this talk together is I think what I'm talking about is applicable to groups that might be promoting brood stock or, yeah, brood stock for, let's say, grass fed beef where they're selecting a certain genotype which works better on grass than your average beef cow or pasture raised hogs or pasture raised chickens. So I think we have something in common with those kinds of organizations. I know some exist on the national level. I don't know if any exist on the state level. So we've also learned, and this is kind of obvious, but we had to learn ourselves, that the timing of the workshops and the locations of the workshops are really important. For one thing, if you're going to do a workshop on queen rearing, you have to do it early enough in the season that the folks who take the workshop have an opportunity to practice those methods, but that it's not so early that it's unrealistic that you can't pull Honey Bee very young larvae, extraordinarily young larvae, in order to graft. You can't really do it in most of Illinois probably in April. The weather is too iffy. And I would suggest that may be true in much of Missouri except maybe the Butale. It's important to teach practical methods of small scale queen rearing initially. Get people trying it, trying it out. Whatever you can do to get them involved in producing queens or producing nukes, which are small colonies with a queen, is more important than trying to jump them to some sort of semi-commercial level. For example, we're going to start teaching the cell punch method, and I can talk to people about what that is, but it's a lot simpler. It's a lot easier to learn than the traditional grafting method, especially for some of those that are increasingly visually challenged. It's just a lot easier to do, and it's a more natural, less disruptive process. The Miller method is actually a process where you get bees to draw out cells in natural comb. You never even move the larva out until it's actually no longer a larva. It's about ready to emerge as a queen. So those are simple methods that are not used by the big commercial folks, but that work very well for producing several hundred or more queens a year, which is more than most of us are probably going to do. It's important to conduct follow-up or troubleshooting workshops a month or six weeks after the initial one so that people that have gone out and tried can share their successes, or if they've not had success, they can learn from those that have been successful about the techniques and the methods in queen rearing. Queen rearing is not that difficult, but it takes practice, and it does take encouragement or ideally a mentor. Where's Nadia? Oh, how much time do I have? Okay, I'll try to dial back a little bit. One thing we've done is to acquire a number of potentially resistant or promising stocks to evaluate, and I won't mention several of them, not because mostly they just didn't survive that well initially, and I think it wasn't the genetics. It was some combination perhaps of the queen rearing at the time we acquired those queens, or that lot of queens, including we did get Buckfast from Canada, for instance, and perhaps the shipping, we got a lot from Pennsylvania that came through very poorly in June when there was a heat wave, and they didn't last very long at all. Actually half of them arrived dead, but the other half that came to me didn't last very long. So what we're going to focus now is on Varroa sensitive hygienic. I don't know how many of you have read, but unfortunately the source of the Varroa sensitive hygiene line, which was developed by the USDA with our tax dollars, the single source where you can buy these queens has decided to retire. He and his wife are getting up there and they have some, apparently their parents or some of their parents are still alive. There's some family health issues. I haven't seen his article or what he put out. This is a critical issue because the history of developing honeybee lines in this country is not very good once they go from a university or a government agency like the USDA out to the industry. It hasn't worked well. The only person that's been able to have a sustainable system is Sue Kobe, who's now sort of between Washington State and UC Davis. Marla Spivak's line, a great line. The Minnesota hygienic should now be called the East Texas hygienic and you don't want to buy something from Texas. Enough said, as far as I'm concerned. She's gone on to do some other things, but that line is not lost but is imperiled. And in the past there have been other examples. So this could be a real problem. Survivors are critical or not a critical. They're a key resource. Yes, they are critical also. They're extremely important resource. And I'm defining survivals more or less the way Larry Conner does, which is they've gone four years without any treatment and they've survived well. It's not that they've come through weakly in weak form, small population or so-called dinks, that are going to be lucky to survive a wet spring, let's say, a cool wet spring, much less make you any honey. But they're coming through after four or more years without treatment as strong colonies that will make honey for you. Those are survivors. We've got two sources in Illinois that have gone over 10 years. I'm working with one of them. The other one I've had difficulty getting stock from, but I hope to next year. In contrast, commercial sunbelt queens or bees, I mean bees that have descended from queens raising the sunbelt almost always have to be treated every year. But if they're not treated in year one, they're probably going to die by year two. If you look at some of the studies that were done by one of these USDA projects where they set up about eight different apiaries in eight different states, they used commercial stock. The stuff didn't make it very long at all. Genetics, obviously, are really important. To be sustainable, to survive for the long run, queen producer organizations like ours have to promote locally produced queens. They become the focus of the marketing, of the website, of most of the articles that are written. In Illinois, and I would venture to say most likely in Missouri, perhaps to a lesser extent, because of the nature of the landscape, the Ozarks and what have you, the vast majority of honeybee genetics come into Illinois, have come in historically into Illinois, meaning over the past 30 years or more, in the form of packages and the queens that are in the packages. That's what we've got, except for the ferales, which are, which underwent a huge loss, a genetic kind of bottleneck because of varroa, but have come back strong and many of those, of course, are survivors. Oh, and by the way, when we use, many of you know this, but there's a fair amount of evidence, increasing evidence, that when we use chemicals, whether it's Thailand, which is an antibiotic, or trying to figure the two harder chemicals that we used to use a lot for mite control, my mind is having a senior moment. They negatively affect the immune system of bees. So we're treating against mites at the same time, we may be weakening their capability to fight off viruses and to fight off nozema serana, which is a significant problem in some areas. Another point, I don't have time to belabor, but it's critical, beekeeping organizations, state beekeeping organizations, local ones, beekeepers, organizations like ours, the Queen Initiative, have to address the dangers of Africanized genetics being brought up north. We're bringing them in in packages. I'm gonna say right now, and I don't know how many people I'm gonna offend, anybody who brings in, who buys packages or queens from Texas and increasingly from Florida is doing serious damage to the future of beekeeping in their state, serious damage, because we get a few stinging incidents of dogs or God help us of a child or an older and firm person who can't move out of the way, because they bought a queen from Weaver in Texas, the neighbor did, has colonies, or they bought a package as a guy in St. Louis who buys packages from Weaver, thinks there's no problem with it, right? That will result in restrictive regulations about beekeeping. We've seen a huge popular interest in bees, a lot of support for beekeeping. That's gonna disappear if we have many incidences like that. The three rivers, beekeepers in St. Louis area, they no longer is an example of what we can do, what is capable, or what organizations can do, what we as a group of beekeepers are capable of doing. They no longer buy nukes or small colonies from the south, from Florida, but they're producing these nukes within their club, within their organization, and they prioritize new beekeepers. So they start out with strong stock and they're utilizing locally raised or at least in-state raised queens. And that's part of that gradual genetic revolution about Sun Belt genetics are really not sustainable. Let me just show you one or two slides quickly. This is just an example of selecting stock by testing for hygienic behavior. This is what happens with non-hygienic stock. You free, I'll show you a picture in a moment, but this is a soup can cut out, pour it into here, liquid nitrogen was poured in here, killed all the brood. Non-hygienic bees, they don't respond. This is what a hygienic one does. Is this Mike? All right. Here's a picture of us doing that. Here's the soup can. See, it's silver because it's really cold. Liquid nitrogen is really cold and no, you can't do this with CO2. This is a 64-ounce, I think, two-quart Stanley stainless steel thermos. It is good for carrying liquid in. It doesn't last very long, and you have to put a hole in the top for it to boil out because otherwise you have an unguided missile in your vehicle. But it's kind of a piece of appropriate technology. All right. There's the liquid end boiling off in action. All right. That's it. And there's a website I talked about. Are there any questions? Yes. That's everybody here. Up in this region, is it still advisable to buy from someone down like in the Cape Gerardo area far more preferable than getting a nuke from out of, say, Florida? Okay. Thank you. I would say yes. I would also say the more local, the better. I actually lived a year up in northwest Missouri, wherever the heck that is up there, Tarkio, which is a little tiny bird. The conditions up there are like Iowa and Nebraska. They're somewhat different from, they're rather different probably from the Boothill. But the closer you can get, the better. All things being equal. And he might have better stock than someone local, too, in the sense of the actual rearing of the Queens and other factors. Yes? I'm going to point out that what you're trying to avoid, correct, is Africanized stock. That's why the directive is not to buy from the southern states. It's because of that genetic stock, which we're not experiencing here, right? I don't know if we're experiencing. Yes, that's one piece. That's the sort of negative of buying from the Sun Belt. Increasingly, not all Sun Belt states at the moment. Not even all of Florida, I think, at the moment, but I don't want to gamble on that. But the positive side for purchasing locally produced stock is ideally that locally produced stock has some input from feral colonies. And so those colonies are, those bees are better adapted to the climate, to the winter particularly, or maybe to the spring slow wet springs that we get frequently, at least in central Illinois. And also, even to some of the local pathogens and also to the floral characteristics, the timing of major flows. So there's those two main reasons, apart from the support local and all that kind of thing, those two main reasons why I would try to buy as local as you can. One last question, because we have to move to the next. Thank you. Just a quick question regarding the use of multiple highs from different sources that are all survivors to try and combine gene pools or gene traits from different... Is that something you're looking at doing? You mean multiple colonies or multiple... Yeah, yeah, that's a really good idea, because in theory it's possible that you could draw from a source. I wouldn't say that it's inbred, but where the gene pool has been somewhat restricted again, because of what happened with Varroa twenty-some-odd years ago, or maybe it's pushing thirty, where we have pretty good evidence that the feral populations have shrunk to almost nothing. People weren't getting swarm calls. There just wasn't much going on. And so that's called a genetic bottleneck. So it could be in a given area that the genetic diversity is somewhat restricted. So if I can pull, in my case, there's a guy that lives half an hour, forty minutes from me. If I'm pulling from his stock, it's gone ten years without treatment. And if I can finally get this guy who lives down in Vandalia, which isn't too much farther to... If I can get some stock from him, that's really desirable. Yeah, that's a really good point. I think the concern about lack of diversity is a little bit overplayed, but there's good evidence that diverse colonies, genetically-versed colonies, resist diseases better than ones that aren't.