For The Wild - Dr. SAMUEL RAMSEY on Bee Population in Peril ⧸210

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00:00:30.000 Hello, and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today I'm speaking with Dr. Samuel

00:00:38.820 Ramsey, whose enduring interest in insect biology started 23 years ago and shows no signs of waning.

00:00:46.340 We have redeveloped land in so many different ways that just aren't always good for our bees.

00:00:54.380 His award-winning research on Varroa biology has changed the standing paradigm on how this

00:01:00.740 parasite ultimately kills honeybees. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Entomology from

00:01:07.220 Cornell University in 2011, focusing his research on predator parasite behavior. His current work,

00:01:14.380 aptly named the Fight the Mite Initiative, was funded largely by the beekeeping community.

00:01:19.360 It focuses on the poorly understood tropa elapsmite, which is rapidly establishing itself as the next threat to apiculture globally.

00:01:28.780 He is now based in Thailand, studying the biology and behavior of this pest and what it will ultimately take to kill it,

00:01:35.460 ensuring in the event of its arrival in the U.S., we'll have the knowledge and resources to respond effectively.

00:01:41.100 Having earned his doctorate from Dr. Dennis Van Engeldorp's lab at the University of Maryland, Dr. Ramsey maintains a focus on how insect research can benefit the public through the development of IPM strategies and STEM-based outreach initiatives.

00:01:58.700 Well, Dr. Ramsey, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm really looking forward to this conversation.

00:02:05.580 I'm so glad to be here. Any day I get to talk about bees is a good day.

00:02:08.820 Oh, wonderful. Well, to start off, this will be a little challenging question on bees, or I guess

00:02:18.740 challenging in the sense that they're going through a really hard time. And for many years,

00:02:23.800 we've heard about the grave danger presented by colony collapse disorder, and most recently,

00:02:30.000 that of widespread insect extinction. But beyond these headlines, we rarely hear any follow-up,

00:02:36.560 leaving us to assume the worst. So to begin, I wonder if you can give listeners a primer on the

00:02:42.200 status of bees globally and how they're currently faring. Is colony collapse disorder still a main

00:02:48.300 threat to our honeybees or has it become a common misconception? You know, are there species of bees

00:02:54.180 aside from honeybees declining? I think the first thing to consider here is that we have developed

00:03:01.640 focus on bees that I'm really glad to see right now because honeybees are so integral to the

00:03:09.140 ecosystem, to maintaining the health of plant communities that ultimately are very important

00:03:15.580 for maintaining the rest of the organisms that exist in the environment. So honeybees are

00:03:20.480 incredibly important, as are the native bees. And oftentimes we have such a focus on the honeybees

00:03:27.400 themselves that we rarely get around to the native bees. Our bumblebees, our carpenter bees,

00:03:34.200 our sweat bees, all of them are seeing declines in populations. They are dealing with disease,

00:03:41.660 chemical inputs into the environment, a reduction in their natural environmental conditions from

00:03:50.540 individuals encroaching on their territory. And so there's a lot that all goes into this

00:03:56.180 all at once. Now, the thing that really seems to have gotten everyone's attention was the colony

00:04:01.800 collapse disorder that has really become a buzzword as this subject goes forward. Everyone

00:04:08.340 knows colony collapse disorder. CCD is a great acronym and a really frightening subject for a

00:04:18.500 lot of people. But as you mentioned in your introduction to this, there's been a lot of talk

00:04:23.800 about it, but not a lot of follow-up around where things are and what exactly is going on. Colony

00:04:30.280 Collapse Disorder was an issue that kind of showed up around 2006, 2007, and it was rather problematic

00:04:39.820 to see that colonies of honeybees were just kind of dropping off the radar. In order for a honeybee

00:04:47.180 colony to exist in any healthy system. There has to be what we call the superorganism complex

00:04:56.760 present, where there are tons and tons of bees inside of a colony, and they're all working

00:05:01.780 together with different behaviors that keeps the colony healthy. And what we saw in colony

00:05:06.760 collapse disorder is colonies that normally have 30 or 40,000 bees in them all with their own jobs,

00:05:12.740 taking care of the queen and the young and procuring food and defending the colony,

00:05:18.380 one day they would look just fine.

00:05:20.300 And then the next day you'd return.

00:05:21.760 And that colony that used to have 30 or 40,000 bees would just have a few hundred,

00:05:26.580 which is not enough to sustain the entire colony.

00:05:29.440 So there'd just be a queen running around and very few bees there to take care of her or the brood.

00:05:34.580 And this sort of vanishing bee situation that we were seeing there was a huge concern

00:05:40.380 because for most of us alive, we had never seen anything like it, and we didn't know what to do

00:05:45.260 about it. It seemed to be the area in the coal mine in the system. So it attracted a lot of

00:05:50.260 attention, but the fact that colony collapse has not quite been seen in the past more than half a

00:05:57.880 decade really hasn't attracted nearly as much attention. Colony collapse disorder, it turns out,

00:06:03.400 was not the problem. We're still seeing huge losses of bees without that particular terrifying

00:06:09.660 syndrome being the problem. We know that there is a multifaceted issue here that goes beyond

00:06:16.900 colony collapse disorder. It's very possible that colony collapse disorder was just

00:06:21.380 the thing that got our attention, kind of the exclamation point at the end of a very long and

00:06:26.380 very concerning sentence about the state of our ecosystem. It turns out that bees have been dying

00:06:32.500 as a result of pesticides, poor nutrition, and parasites as the primary issues.

00:06:38.960 And it turns out out of all of these issues, parasites have been the key driving factor

00:06:44.720 in the issues that we have been seeing with honeybee health decline.

00:06:49.480 And so as we consider what we are going to do about this, we have to think of this as

00:06:56.700 a multifaceted, multi-pronged approach.

00:06:59.040 Because if we only tackle one of these issues, we really can't get our bee populations back to where they were.

00:07:05.800 And with that in mind, as we focus on the honeybees, because a lot of the focus has been on honeybees because of how intimately connected they are with our food systems, how we are able to sell their honey, how a lot of people keep them intentionally in their backyards or on their farms.

00:07:22.220 That connection with them has brought us into this subject with a focus on the honeybees.

00:07:27.080 But our carpenter bee species, our bumblebees, our sweat bees, our leaf cutter bees, the wool carter bees, there are so many native bees out here that are also suffering and our efforts need to focus on them as well. So that's my deep dive into colony collapse disorder as things currently are.

00:07:48.000 Well, thanks for that. That makes a lot of sense. And now you're most notably known for your work

00:07:54.140 on the varroa mite, which is much less talked about by the general public, but has arguably

00:07:59.440 completely reconfigured beekeeping over the past couple of decades. What does this parasite mite

00:08:05.280 do to the European honeybee population? And what are the impacts worldwide? And will honeybees

00:08:12.080 or beekeepers ever get a handle on varroa? Or is it just a matter of mitigation?

00:08:18.000 Oh, great questions. Varroa destructor is just a crazy parasite. And I mean, even when you hear 1.00

00:08:26.240 the name Varroa destructor, this is what the scientific community decided to call this

00:08:31.680 creature when it was officially named in the year 2000. Because for a while, we were confused about

00:08:38.680 the existence of this organism altogether. We thought that we were looking at a totally different

00:08:42.540 species. We thought that it was Varroa jacobsoni. And when we realized that this was actually a

00:08:47.640 totally different species entirely. We named this one Barroa destructor because it is so much more

00:08:54.900 destructive to honeybees than parasites that we had seen in recent years. It was clear to the

00:09:01.220 beekeeping community, to the scientific community, that this organism was kind of a next level sort

00:09:07.540 of parasite because we've dealt with things like tracheal mites. We've dealt with parasitic

00:09:12.680 organisms like Nosema, which is an intestinal parasite of the bees. And the honeybee tracheal

00:09:19.080 mites are a parasite of the breathing system of the bees. And while both of them cause a number

00:09:24.020 of issues by themselves, they weren't able to destroy the feral colonies of honeybees that

00:09:31.760 existed in the U.S. at that time. The bees had learned somehow to exist in their presence and

00:09:38.520 they weren't driven to the brink of extinction with these parasites alone. But if we look at our

00:09:44.760 bees that are just existing in the environment, what we call feral bees, these are bees that are

00:09:49.700 not being managed by a beekeeper. They're not inside of those boxes that you can see in people's

00:09:54.940 yards or on farms. These are bees that are existing in the knotholes of a tree, in a stump somewhere.

00:10:01.980 And we've had plenty of those for years and years and years and years and years throughout the U.S.

00:10:07.300 But when Varroa destructor arrived, within 10 years of its arrival, it had driven these bees, their populations, down more than 99%.

00:10:16.720 And even now, when we find bees that are inside of a tree hole or something, it's oftentimes a swarm from a beekeeper's colony from that season.

00:10:26.640 They tend not to be able to survive an entire year in the face of this parasite.

00:10:31.160 So we know Varroa destructor is something else entirely.

00:10:36.100 It's a type of brood parasite.

00:10:38.480 And so when we talk about honeybees, they have different stages to their life cycle.

00:10:43.140 They exist originally as an egg.

00:10:45.160 That egg develops into a larva that's sort of this white worm-like thing.

00:10:49.760 No legs, no eyes, no wings.

00:10:51.620 It looks nothing like what we think of as a bee.

00:10:54.500 And in order for the bee colony to get those helpless little worms to be adults, they feed

00:11:01.140 them a lot of food, brewed food, royal jelly, bits of pollen, honey, all of that comes together to

00:11:09.140 form a diet that allows these bees to grow up big and strong. And then right when they're

00:11:15.080 transitioning from being a juvenile into an adult, there's a pupil stage where they don't move at all.

00:11:20.720 They just sit there and over the course of more than a week, they're developing, eventually they

00:11:25.780 They develop eyes, mouth parts, wings, sexual organs, and they start to look like what we think of as bees.

00:11:33.880 But during this period of time, they are totally defenseless.

00:11:38.000 And so the bees themselves, in order to signal to the rest of the colony, we no longer need to feed this bee.

00:11:43.760 It's not going to move or grow any more than it has now.

00:11:46.220 They put a wax covering over the cell that they raised that bee in.

00:11:50.020 And for the next several days, that bee develops under that wax covering where it's protected from all the other inputs that could go into the system.

00:11:59.720 The Varroa mite, Varroa destructor, has figured that out and learned that it can creep into the cell right before the bees seal it.

00:12:08.060 And as it's inside of that cell, over the course of several days, protected from the rest of the colony, protected from prying eyes, sealed in there with a good source of controlled humidity and temperature, it's able to raise its family.

00:12:23.520 That entire family of mites will feed on this bee.

00:12:27.300 The oldest mite will pierce the exoskeleton, the mother of all of these mites, and she'll start laying eggs, and all of the babies will feed through that hole.

00:12:36.520 Unfortunately, in the process, they are harming this bee, so they're causing damage to it.

00:12:42.000 They're also withdrawing tissue from the bee that's very important to the development of that bee into an adult.

00:12:48.600 Now, for years and years, we thought that this mite was just withdrawing a small amount of the bee's blood.

00:12:55.240 And while that seemed problematic, it didn't seem that problematic.

00:12:59.580 It seemed more like a mosquito or a tick, the way that it will draw some blood out of you.

00:13:04.800 and if it doesn't inject some sort of bacterium or virus into your body in the process, you're

00:13:10.400 probably fine, right? Well, with Varroa, we thought something similar, but it was work that I conducted

00:13:16.900 as a graduate student at the University of Maryland College Park, where I found out that

00:13:22.480 this parasite is actually removing a tissue from the bee called the fat body. And this tissue is a

00:13:29.900 lot like the liver of the bee, but it does a lot of other functions as well. It's integral to the

00:13:34.940 metamorphic process of the bee transitioning from being a pupa into an adult. This tissue is

00:13:40.660 actually intimately involved in rearranging all of the tissues that used to exist as the larva's body

00:13:47.340 into the complex organism that is the bee. And as the mites are removing these nutrients, they're

00:13:53.320 removing chunks of this tissue, they are reducing the capacity of the bee to metamorphose into what

00:13:59.780 it needs to be. And they are creating problems in this process that can lead to deformities in

00:14:06.240 these bees that they will have for the rest of their lives. They weaken the bees, they're removing

00:14:09.820 proteins at the same time, introducing bacteria and creating a hole that bacteria and viruses

00:14:16.980 and things can easily enter through. And so they cause a lot, a lot, a lot of problems.

00:14:23.080 They also reduce the capacity of the bee to deal with xenobiotics and outside chemicals that can

00:14:28.740 come into the bee's body. When that bee emerges as an adult, it's a lot more vulnerable to

00:14:34.320 chemical pesticides. It has less fat storage ability, and so it's a lot more vulnerable to

00:14:40.280 poor nutrition. As researchers have been finding that the bees are dying as a result of what we've

00:14:46.200 been calling the three Ps, parasites, pesticides, and poor nutrition. What they've found is that

00:14:51.300 the parasites are driving the issues with the other two. The vulnerability to pesticides,

00:14:57.460 the vulnerability to poor nutrition are being driven by these parasites that are destroying

00:15:03.260 a tissue that would normally allow the bees to contend more easily with these stress factors.

00:15:08.880 And so Varroa destructor is quite a link in this chain of declining honeybee health issues that

00:15:15.800 we've been seeing over the past couple of decades. Well, thank you for explaining that

00:15:22.640 With such detail, I was with you the whole time hanging on every word, and it's really fascinating and disturbing to understand this better.

00:15:32.140 And I want to talk a little bit more about the use of pesticides, and it's frequently cited as a contributing factor, of course, to insect decline.

00:15:40.860 In fact, authors of a scientific review on insect decline wrote that a comprehensive reduction in pesticide use could prevent the extinction of over 40% of the world's insect population.

00:15:52.940 So I'd like to ask a bit more about pesticides, but perhaps you can speak about it also in

00:15:59.840 context to the Varroa a bit more.

00:16:02.040 You know, you've mentioned that your work has shown that Varroa is so detrimental because

00:16:05.980 it targets the fat bodies of the bees.

00:16:07.980 And it's the same fat body tissue that allows bees to detoxify from pesticides.

00:16:12.920 So what role are pesticides playing in observed bee health decline?

00:16:17.740 And how can we reduce chemicals that are put into colonies, miticides included?

00:16:25.260 Yes, that's a great question because it's not simply the agricultural insecticides that are going into colonies or the insecticides that are being used for home and lawn care.

00:16:35.680 But it's also these pesticides that are being intentionally put into the colony to reduce the parasite itself that's driving this issue.

00:16:43.160 So it almost seems like a situation where it's just impossible to win because if we want to reduce our dependency on pesticides, right now one of the effective means at our disposal to get rid of the organisms that are causing these issues is a chemical that we're putting into the system itself.

00:17:04.180 So it's unfortunately a situation for which there aren't actually super easy answers here.

00:17:15.620 Everything has its unintended consequences.

00:17:19.340 There's a balancing act going on here because within agricultural systems, there are a lot of insects that are feeding on crops.

00:17:29.000 They are integral parts of the environment themselves.

00:17:32.420 They are just doing what it is that evolution over time has trained them to do.

00:17:37.720 They found all of these incredible crops that we've been growing that exist as a source of food for them.

00:17:43.500 And normally they just don't exist in numbers like that.

00:17:46.420 They're not so densely packed in one area.

00:17:49.940 But by creating a system where they're densely packed, they're all typically monocultures.

00:17:55.100 So they're all the same genetically.

00:17:57.500 it allows for these organisms to get into the fields and just kind of run wild. Their populations

00:18:04.180 can grow huge. And unfortunately, the way that we have industrialized this system without the input

00:18:09.920 of chemicals into it, in its current form, it is unsustainable. And so agriculturally,

00:18:18.400 as we use these different sorts of chemicals, they end up in more than just the leaves of the

00:18:24.560 plant that a lot of the insects that we're trying to get rid of are eating. A lot of these chemicals

00:18:29.400 are now systemic. And while that allows for the agricultural system to exist in a way where

00:18:35.100 we're not as frequently needing to fly a plane that just releases this plume of insecticide as

00:18:42.360 it goes, which was just putting so much chemical into the environment. Now, chemicals are typically

00:18:50.240 coated on the seed itself when it's planted into the ground. And there are fungicides here that

00:18:56.660 are keeping the seed from rotting in the ground and being attacked by different fungi. There are

00:19:03.880 pesticides, insecticides that are getting rid of or producing chemicals that will eventually get

00:19:10.120 rid of caterpillars and things that try to eat the leaves. There are herbicides that are killing

00:19:16.780 different weeds that would grow up, compete for nutrients with those plants.

00:19:21.660 And while we have found that the doses that are present in the pollen, in the leaves,

00:19:29.640 the doses that our pollinators are typically exposed to are sublethal levels,

00:19:35.280 one of the issues here is that as these chemicals all come together,

00:19:40.440 We don't have as much data as would allow us to form this cohesive picture of what exactly goes on under those circumstances.

00:19:48.800 Because being able to say, for this particular chemical, in the amounts that are found in pollen, it'll provide a sublethal dose to the bees.

00:20:00.760 And so under these circumstances, the bees won't be exposed to enough to kill them.

00:20:04.660 That's one thing.

00:20:05.380 But how do we know about that chemical in the face of a fungicide, in the face of an herbicide, in the face of a pesticide, all together in that same dose of pollen?

00:20:16.100 We don't know all of the competing and interacting effects of those different chemicals on the brains of the bees, on the digestive systems of the bees, on their immune systems.

00:20:25.920 And we're seeing more and more papers coming out where we're learning more about that.

00:20:31.200 But it's almost impossible to fully account for all of the competing dynamics there.

00:20:36.560 It will be like an individual being on 13 different pharmacological drugs all at the same time in this individual's body.

00:20:44.880 It's very difficult to predict all of the different interactions that those chemicals will have.

00:20:51.160 And so we're kind of in a world now where we're on what's called the pesticide treadmill.

00:20:58.000 When you're running on a treadmill, it's difficult to get off because if you slow down, you'll kind of be swept away and you have to keep up a certain rate of speed to remain on it.

00:21:06.460 And we're kind of on this chemical treadmill where there are all these chemicals that we have developed a reliance on.

00:21:11.820 And even though we're seeing different ways that these chemicals are causing different environmental impacts that are problematic, it's difficult to get off of that treadmill because of our reliance on it.

00:21:23.900 There are foods that we would not be able to grow in the huge volumes that we have been able to if we weren't doing something to reduce the pest pressure that we see in these fields.

00:21:36.520 And so with Varroa brought into this system, as it's reducing the capacity of the bees to deal with these chemicals that they're dealing with on a regular basis, we also have to keep that in account when we are doing our calculations, when the FDA is approving different chemicals that are going to eventually be used in cropping systems.

00:21:58.520 we have to then think about, well, yes, the bees, under normal circumstances, this would be a

00:22:05.180 sublethal dosage. But Varroa is present in nearly 100% of bee colonies, which is a mind-boggling

00:22:12.980 statistic. But this parasite is ubiquitously distributed in honeybee colonies. And so it

00:22:19.520 really doesn't work with things as they are to talk about the sublethal dose to a healthy bee

00:22:28.060 that's never been exposed to varroa when over the course of their lives, most honeybee colonies are

00:22:33.140 going to be exposed to some level of pressure from varroa. And if we don't know what their

00:22:38.300 capacity is to deal with those chemicals in the face of that parasite, then we really don't fully

00:22:44.040 have a solid grasp on what exactly is a sublethal dose for our beets. Yeah, your response is making

00:22:51.540 me think about like neonicotinoids that have been linked to, of course, harmon bees and other

00:22:57.680 pollinators, as well as the developing human nervous system. There was a report on bee

00:23:02.360 mortalities released by Canada's pesticide regulatory body, the Pest Management Regulatory

00:23:07.820 Agency, and it, quote, concluded that current agricultural practices related to the use of

00:23:13.780 neonicotinoid-treated corn and soybean seed are not sustainable. And then I also think about,

00:23:20.000 you know, the awful, just the awful things about human-made pollution always targets the ability

00:23:27.200 to teach future generations of species how to survive like i think about the noise pollution

00:23:32.480 preventing whale calves from learning how to hunt and similarly glyphosate when assimilated by young

00:23:39.120 bees alters their appetite behavior from their ability to detect sucrose to their ability to

00:23:44.600 learn and remember where food sources are located so it's really uh such a bigger domino effect than

00:23:51.220 just the pesticide or insecticide itself, it's potentially going to be assimilated into the

00:24:00.620 evolution of these species. So yeah, I'm just kind of sitting with that a little bit and feeling a

00:24:07.660 little overwhelmed and would love to hear your thoughts on that. I greatly admire ecologists

00:24:12.820 because ecologists have to have a working knowledge of so many different fields in order to fully

00:24:22.080 grasp what's going into an ecosystem. And so as an entomologist, I am really focusing primarily

00:24:29.700 on the insects and how they are a piece of the puzzle of this ecosystem. And I try to learn as

00:24:36.300 much as I can about all the different things that could impact those elements. But as we expand

00:24:42.660 outward more and more and more, the picture gets more and more complicated. Because as we think

00:24:49.420 about, it is easier to simplify the story and just say, the pesticides are the problem, let's move

00:24:57.880 on. And then when we find out, okay, so the pesticides in combination with the parasite

00:25:03.220 are the problem, okay? And then we expand out more and we say, oh no, wait, invasive species are a

00:25:09.360 problem because that parasite is an invasive species from Southeast Asia, which then doubles

00:25:14.280 us back to humanity. Okay. So then human beings are what helped to bring over that invasive species 0.78

00:25:20.740 from Southeast Asia. The human beings are a huge input of these chemicals into the system.

00:25:26.180 But then we think about matters like poor nutrition and how we have kind of reformatted

00:25:32.220 the world around us to make sure that it works best for us. But we don't always have a broad

00:25:37.720 enough view of how that's going to impact the rest of the world. We have redeveloped land in

00:25:44.360 so many different ways that just aren't always good for our bees. I was thinking of what people

00:25:51.780 would probably think of as a fairly innocuous commercial that I saw a lot in the 90s when I

00:25:57.360 was a kid. There was a gentleman sort of looking over the fence and judging his neighbor for not

00:26:05.060 having a pristine green lawn because there was this one yellow dandelion that it cropped up

00:26:10.420 and turns out that it was an advertisement for a weed killer that can be applied to lawns and the

00:26:17.620 crooks of the commercial the idea of the commercial was to emphasize this idea in the minds of

00:26:24.700 specifically men they were trying to to appeal to the masculinity of a gentleman and to have their

00:26:30.660 lawn kind of be an extension of their masculinity. If you can't get rid of these weeds growing in

00:26:36.740 your lawn, how can you truly call yourself a man? And it caught on. And individuals have thought of

00:26:42.540 these pristine green lawns as an extension of their masculinity. They are not taking care of

00:26:48.960 their house. How can they take care of their family if they can't even take care of their

00:26:52.240 lawns. And unfortunately, it's promoted this consistent push for lawn care, insecticides, 0.93

00:27:00.980 lawn care, herbicides to get rid of the weeds and then of course, different kinds of insects, but

00:27:06.740 to get rid of weeds that are growing in people's lawns. But these weeds have turned out to be

00:27:13.260 some really, really important elements of the honeybees diet that have been eliminated.

00:27:20.040 And as a result of this, some of the earliest plants that bees are known to rely on, early

00:27:25.820 season things like dandelions that used to be ubiquitously distributed all around, now

00:27:31.880 have become a lot rarer for the bees.

00:27:34.040 And because when the bees first emerge early in the spring, there aren't a lot of flowers

00:27:39.940 blooming, there are certain ones that they've had to rely on over time.

00:27:43.480 and we have reduced that dramatically and instead created these spaces that are just

00:27:49.660 jade wastelands where there's nothing for the bees to eat. And it's entirely because this is

00:27:56.120 something that we want to see in this system. I'm hoping that we can reformat the way that

00:28:01.700 people think about this and consider that, honestly, it's a lot more difficult to make

00:28:06.820 flowers grow than it ever will be to maintain these pristine green lawns. Like all you have to

00:28:13.840 do is run a lawnmower over it, but it's actually really involved and really fascinating to create

00:28:20.880 a pollinator garden, to plant certain kinds of seeds that are really good for our bees

00:28:25.360 and putting that kind of focus there, learning how to really decipher what sorts of

00:28:34.340 plants are available there that can be helpful for our bee populations that's actually a lot

00:28:39.440 cooler in my opinion i think that that is a much better connection with the world around us a much

00:28:46.980 better uh connection with uh the the environment in the ecosystem uh and i'm glad that those sorts

00:28:54.160 of things those attitudes are changing now yeah and i hope that they will continue to progress in

00:28:59.020 that direction. Me too. And now before, yeah, please, you go. I just wanted to bring up the

00:29:08.080 other direction that I was going with that is that it's not simply all the things that we have

00:29:12.300 just discussed. One of the things that's turned up in reports by the United States Department of

00:29:20.120 Agriculture and just in general, as we look at beekeeping in the US, we have noticed that there

00:29:27.780 are socioeconomic factors that actually factor into why we are seeing some of the health declines

00:29:35.440 that we've seen in bees and some of the changes in numbers that we've seen with bees. We have

00:29:39.860 so many honeybees that are in the hands of the same groups of people. And while it used to be

00:29:47.220 the case that there was a distribution of honeybees around the U.S. in all kinds of different

00:29:52.460 communities. Now we have honeybees that are primarily in the hands of just certain people.

00:29:59.500 When I go out and I give my presentations about bee health to different beekeeping groups,

00:30:04.560 the primary individuals that are consumers of this knowledge, the primary individuals that

00:30:08.240 are keeping bees are from a particular demographic. They are older Caucasian men.

00:30:17.100 And you'll find that as a result of the introduction of parasites like Nosema, 1.00

00:30:24.720 of Varroa destructor, beekeeping has become more and more expensive because it's required

00:30:30.400 more and more inputs from the beekeeper as a result of the need to reduce the numbers of

00:30:35.640 parasites, the need to get rid of different intestinal issues in bees, the need to constantly

00:30:39.860 be going into these colonies as a requirement of time and the money for these chemicals.

00:30:45.040 And so it has been priced outside of the reach of a lot of people who used to be beekeepers.

00:30:51.520 And so now we're seeing individuals who are more privileged be able to maintain bees.

00:30:56.020 And I'm really happy to see that there are initiatives now to help in areas that have been economically hard hit by issues with the downturn of the economy,

00:31:07.640 issues that are sometimes more focused and localized in particular communities, bringing

00:31:13.860 in bees. Bees fill vacant lots. The ways that this generates larger green spaces and causes 0.93

00:31:21.600 more individuals to be connected with the plight of the honeybee, but also understanding the

00:31:27.460 life cycle and the connections there is actually better, not just for the bees and that they are

00:31:33.360 present in more areas. They're connected with more people. But it's also helpful for the people

00:31:39.460 involved in this situation because they have an opportunity to make money, to learn about these

00:31:46.860 organisms. STEM initiatives can then be brought to bear from the backs of these organisms. And so

00:31:53.400 there's a socioeconomic connection that people oftentimes overlook in favor of just the

00:32:00.620 biological connections there. Well, thank you so much for bringing that up. It's really just

00:32:07.700 adds a whole other layer that is necessary to understand if we're trying to comprehend the

00:32:13.820 complexity of the health of bees and the survival of them.

00:32:30.620 Precipice

00:32:36.740 We find ourselves on the edge

00:32:43.940 There's no going back

00:32:48.380 Though we could be served by discovering how we got here

00:32:55.420 the way forward

00:33:01.360 is powerless

00:33:03.660 and will require

00:33:09.420 a way of being

00:33:12.160 most of us have never known

00:33:25.420 before we move on from varroa mites the mycologist paul stamets has been working

00:33:32.780 on helping support the bees immune system to fight off varroa mite i believe from the exudates

00:33:39.300 of medicinal mushrooms and i'm wondering if you have any thoughts on this if you

00:33:45.420 think this is beneficial or yeah just thoughts critiques um interest that that you think that

00:33:51.480 this potentially could be something that could help boost the bees' immune systems to fight off

00:33:55.980 these parasites. Absolutely. Fungi have been used in medicine since the dawn of humanity. They are

00:34:05.740 fascinating, fascinating things, organisms in general. There are so many chemicals that they

00:34:14.000 manufacture just over the course of being a fungus. There's a lot that they have to interact

00:34:20.440 with as they're breaking down, decomposing things and dealing with all the bacterial

00:34:26.540 communities that are involved within everything else.

00:34:29.140 And so fungi are actually just an untapped world of pharmacological connections that

00:34:35.940 are really fascinating.

00:34:37.040 And so it's not even remotely surprising that considering fungi are consistently, they're

00:34:46.160 consistently interacting with microbial communities because some of the most competitive

00:34:52.540 decomposers are microbes. All sorts of bacteria and other microbes are constantly breaking down

00:34:58.680 the things that the fungus itself wants to be able to break down and eat. And so sometimes

00:35:04.120 those bacteria have to be able to release chemicals that can deal with those microbes,

00:35:09.620 that can reduce the populations of those microbes so that they can then benefit the fungus and

00:35:14.840 allowing it to compete less with other organisms as it's growing. And so the idea that an exudate

00:35:23.420 from a mushroom would have pharmacological benefits that could then be extrapolated and used

00:35:28.480 for bees, for people, it's not even remotely far-fetched. Looking at some of the work that

00:35:37.640 Paul has been able to advance here. It's just really exciting to see that individuals aren't

00:35:45.720 just looking in one area for how we can help our bees, because there are too many different issues

00:35:52.300 for us to only focus on just one or two different things. We have to be able to expand out our

00:35:58.280 thought processes in this. And so I've been really excited by what I've seen from Paul,

00:36:03.300 And I'm looking forward to larger tests that can show the impact of these chemicals from this mushroom on bees more broadly at the colony level and then even farther out to the population level to show just how it helps these bees deal with their own microbial communities.

00:36:23.280 Because one of the issues that we see with Varroa destructor is that it introduces a number of different viruses into the bee's body.

00:36:32.280 And because the breakdown of the fat body tissue that the mites are consuming also impacts the immune system of the bees, these viruses proliferate out of control.

00:36:43.680 You get huge titers of virus in the bee's body.

00:36:47.520 And while the exudate from the mushroom doesn't kill the mites directly, it seems to be able to boost the immune capacity of the bees to be able to deal with primarily the deformed wing virus, which is one of the worst viruses that the bees deal with in this process and one of the most widespread.

00:37:05.800 And so I'm looking forward to seeing exactly the impact that this has brought out to broader levels.

00:37:13.420 Yeah, it's something that seems really fascinating, and I hope to learn more about that in the

00:37:19.900 coming years.

00:37:21.440 But now I would like to move on to your current work focus on the tropolapse mites, which

00:37:28.960 are not in North America yet, but it's widely accepted that because of globalization and

00:37:34.400 our somewhat poor track record when it comes to dealing with invasive species, it's just

00:37:38.900 a matter of time before they're widely present in honeybee colonies.

00:37:42.500 So in comparison to Varroa, what are the new threats posed by tropolapse?

00:37:48.880 So this parasite is just a weird one.

00:37:53.240 It's not strange, Justin.

00:37:55.400 It's behavior, it's life cycle, it's weird mouth parts, it's strange body structuring,

00:38:00.120 it's connections to other organisms.

00:38:02.120 But its name is difficult for everybody to get with.

00:38:06.100 And it took me a while just saying it over and over.

00:38:08.640 And in Thailand, because the name tropolalapse is structured in a way where it puts together a bunch of letters that typically are not brought together in Thai, we've just been referring to it as tropi.

00:38:23.340 Okay, tropi. That's easier for me too.

00:38:26.440 I think it's easier for everybody because tropolalapse is a mouthful.

00:38:30.480 But something really important to consider about the tropolalapse mite is that it's actually a really odd system that we're seeing here, because we are watching evolution in play in the moment.

00:38:44.300 When we look at Varroa destructor, we see a parasite that's actually pretty well structured over time to be a parasite.

00:38:53.540 Elements of the shape of its body, the refining of its life cycle to be connected with the bee's life cycle.

00:38:59.520 You see all of those things after tons and tons and tons of evolutionary time have been able to work things out.

00:39:07.200 And so Varroa used to be a parasite of Asian honeybees, and then it transitioned over to the European honeybee.

00:39:15.400 And that's now why we're seeing it become a lot more damaging to the bees themselves.

00:39:20.560 But that connection has been going for some time.

00:39:24.660 Tropolalabs has actually had a more brief connection with the bees, and as a result, we see an even more heightened imbalance there of the detriment that it brings to its host.

00:39:39.720 That may seem weird for me to say. I'm talking about parasites like they're not supposed to be detrimental to their hosts, but in some ways, they're not.

00:39:49.840 Parasites, for the same reason that you don't want to burn down your house, a parasite doesn't want to kill its host because that host is its source of food, that host is its home.

00:39:59.460 Oftentimes that host is its incubator for its children.

00:40:02.040 And so over evolutionary time, parasites typically become less and less detrimental to their host and eventually achieve a level of balance where the two of them are able to live in some strange set of harmony, if that can be said.

00:40:18.300 while, the parasite is learning to siphon fewer nutrients from the host. It only needs to siphon

00:40:25.560 as much as it needs to live so that it doesn't cause all of these negative health impacts that

00:40:29.880 will eventually result in the host dying. And if the parasite doesn't have the ability to find a

00:40:34.580 new host, then the parasite itself dies. Now, in the wild, of course, you can see evolutionarily

00:40:40.640 how that would be an immediate problem for the parasite. But we have a system set up with our

00:40:47.800 bees, where unfortunately, we are not developing that balance in the ways that you would think

00:40:55.760 that it would show up. You would think that if we just leave the system to itself, eventually

00:41:01.500 we'll have either a balanced situation emerge, or the parasite will go away entirely. If it kills

00:41:08.240 enough honeybee colonies, it'll eventually just kind of work itself out. But unfortunately,

00:41:14.140 that doesn't seem like the direction that things are going in. And the reason is because the way

00:41:20.880 that it works in the wild, parasites like Varroa destructor and tropolalapse, if they were to kill

00:41:27.680 their bee colony, they would die too as a result of that because they don't have wings. They don't

00:41:33.120 have the ability to move themselves to a new colony for the most part because colonies are

00:41:38.720 distributed much farther away from each other than we typically show in our systems. In our systems,

00:41:47.180 in our apiaries, we put colonies right next to each other. And so we have removed that negative

00:41:52.980 impact of killing the colony and replaced it with sort of a reward. If you kill this colony, 0.90

00:41:59.400 this allows you to have as many babies as you want to, cause as much damage to your host as 0.63

00:42:05.380 you want to, because there is no drawback here. Now, you actually have the benefit of being able

00:42:09.520 to move right next door to the next colony and cause all the same damage to that extent. And so

00:42:15.180 you see that with tropolalapse, an organism that used to be distributed in just Southeast Asia,

00:42:20.860 just on Asian honeybees, the giant honeybees, it's now moved to this honeybee, the European

00:42:27.860 honeybee that we have distributed all around the world. And it's allowed for this parasite to go 0.83

00:42:32.060 from colony to colony, country to country, region, and now it's distributed out throughout much more 0.91

00:42:38.760 of Asia. We're also finding it in regions of Asia where we never thought that it would be able to

00:42:44.940 live. The coldest reaches of China, the coldest areas of Korea, where we expected that the 0.88

00:42:51.380 populations of this organism would not be able to survive outside of the typical tropical environment

00:42:55.960 that allows for honeybee brood to be reared year-round,

00:43:00.260 we've found that this organism is a lot more resilient than we thought

00:43:03.360 and that there are elements of its genome that have allowed it to be able to deal with those cold temperatures,

00:43:08.840 that have allowed it to be able to deal with the typical lack of brood that's present in these colonies.

00:43:14.780 And so as it's been moving to more and more of the world,

00:43:18.240 it's been killing colonies, destroying them with a level of impunity

00:43:22.200 that you typically only see when a natural system has in some way been undermined.

00:43:28.100 And so because our system of dealing with the bees allows for this parasite to spread

00:43:34.020 far and wide, we need to do everything that we can to make sure that we don't end up with this

00:43:41.560 parasite in our area. So right now in North America, South America, and most of the world,

00:43:47.940 this parasite does not exist but if it were to arrive it could create a system that our bees

00:43:55.960 it would create a system that our bees have never really seen before where they have to deal with

00:43:59.980 varroa and tropolalaps all in the same system and all of the damage that the tropolalaps might

00:44:06.500 causes along with all the damage that the varroa might causes is just issues stacked on top of

00:44:12.240 issue that would make it so much more expensive and difficult to be able to keep our bees healthy

00:44:17.740 And it's the same concern that we are worried about with these Asian giant hornets, because the period of time that is the most important when an invasive species arrives is the period right after its arrival, because you have the opportunity in that time to eradicate this organism.

00:44:37.400 If you miss that window and the organism then becomes established in the ecosystem, unfortunately, after that, your chances of eradicating that organism drop so low that they're pretty close to impossible.

00:44:51.900 And we don't want that to happen with the Asian giant hornet because then you have another organism here that is a threat to our bees, is a threat to human beings, is creating all kinds of issues in its wake that we don't even know all the details of just yet.

00:45:07.400 And then we had that same set of concerns for the tropolalapse mite when it first arrives.

00:45:14.260 The worst time to be trying to develop an emergency response plan.

00:45:18.900 So the worst time to be trying to figure out what your plan is for an emergency is when your house is on fire.

00:45:24.940 You should already have a plan in place.

00:45:26.800 And so my goal was to go over to Asia to learn about this parasite, to know everything that we would need to know about it in the event of its arrival in the U.S. 0.90

00:45:35.820 So we'd understand what sorts of things we could use to kill the parasite.

00:45:39.960 We could learn how the parasite moves from colony to colony. 0.95

00:45:43.480 And it's this set of knowledge that could then be utilized to get rid of this parasite.

00:46:05.820 Something there waiting for you until dark 0.72

00:46:14.300 Come outside with me, I'll hold this window

00:46:21.260 Let's go to the sea

00:46:24.440 I don't wanna be scared, trying

00:46:35.820 doing like

00:46:38.140 wow that makes a lot of sense and i just have two more questions for you although i probably have

00:46:57.160 many more but you've given us so much time and and it's i'm just sitting with it all but in

00:47:03.480 preparing for this interview, I learned that studies are now showing how rising carbon dioxide

00:47:08.900 levels lower the nutritional quality of our foods. And when it comes to bees, we're specifically

00:47:14.920 seeing that the protein content in pollen is declining. And bees, unlike other insects who

00:47:20.320 will eat more to compensate a decline in protein, only eat a certain quantity of pollen, regardless

00:47:26.380 of its protein content. So I'm curious how you think global wild and native bee populations

00:47:32.800 will fare under changing climate regimes?

00:47:36.060 Are the impacts of stressors like parasitic mites and pesticides

00:47:39.720 going to just grow stronger because bee food sources

00:47:43.140 are losing nutritional value?

00:47:45.280 And is it possible in the future we will cease to see bees

00:47:48.120 in hotter climates?

00:47:52.720 So I don't want to paint too much of an apocalyptic picture,

00:47:59.020 but unfortunately we have not been making that easy for scientists we have made it very difficult

00:48:06.840 to talk about the science as it is without painting an apocalyptic picture of where where

00:48:12.680 things are going in a lot of ways climate change is problematic climate change is problematic in

00:48:20.860 more ways than we originally were able to determine because there are so many elements

00:48:27.100 This is what I was talking about earlier with ecology and why ecology is such a fascinating science, because it takes into account chemical inputs.

00:48:34.600 It takes into account the organisms and how they interact with each other and the organisms, how they interact with their environment, the environment, how the environment interacts with the organisms.

00:48:43.800 Changing weather patterns have so much to do with the nutritional content of plants that we consume.

00:48:49.640 With the proteins, with the different chemicals that are present in the leaves of the plant, in the pollen of the plant, in the roots of the plants, and for bees, with the ways that they get their nutrition and the fact that those proteins are integral to developing the next generation of bees.

00:49:08.060 Because the adult bees primarily are consuming carbohydrates. They need a lot of energy from the sugar water that they consume, or I shouldn't say the sugar water, from the nectar that they consume, which is a lot of sugar, and it's really the pollen that's brought back as food for the brood that is concerning here.

00:49:29.800 Because as they are feeding this pollen to the developing bees, that next generation, if it doesn't get that full complement of proteins that it needs, is going to be a bit weaker than the generation before it.

00:49:42.040 And eventually, we end up with concerns for what populations several generations in the future will look like.

00:49:50.900 Because the next population isn't really going to show that much of a difference, but it's then the next one, the next one, the next one, the next one.

00:49:58.400 And the problem there is that it's very similar to the frog in the pot kind of analogy that people have discussed. And it's that organisms, if you expose them to the same set of stimuli for a long enough period of time, even if that stimulus is detrimental in one way or another, if you continuously expose them to it, they eventually will get used to it.

00:50:24.080 because the human brain has to be able to take in new stimuli. Organisms have to be able to

00:50:29.840 take in new stimuli. And so they will eventually set a new ground state that is that level of

00:50:36.660 stimulus into the system. And as the ground state goes up more and more and more, eventually you do

00:50:43.420 reach a point where all of those negative stimuli coming together can cause problems for creatures.

00:50:49.980 but those creatures can sometimes be unaware of just how much of a problem it's caused because

00:50:55.880 it's been this slow burn. I think it's been a slow enough burn for human beings that we haven't

00:51:01.780 even really taken the time to notice what has been happening here. I was recently on a road trip

00:51:09.360 to Wisconsin. And as we are driving up, it was remarkable to me just how few insects ended up

00:51:18.420 on the windshield. While we hit a few, we never really had to stop and clean off the windshield

00:51:24.220 in order to keep going. And when I was a kid, when my dad was driving us down to Alabama to

00:51:29.060 see our family, I remember there being so many bugs on the windshield that my dad had to stop

00:51:34.960 several times over the course of the trip just to clean all of them off. We are potentially

00:51:40.540 in the middle of an extinction event for a number of different kinds of insects. The data

00:51:48.200 data from Europe, data from a number of different sources has shown that populations of so many

00:51:54.780 different insects have dropped. And as we continue to see things like this, we have to be aware that

00:52:03.240 this didn't just happen a few years ago. This has been a protracted situation that we've been seeing

00:52:09.940 for a long time, and now it is a pronounced thing that we can perceive. And so right now,

00:52:14.600 we have a responsibility in all the ways that we can be effective at changing the inputs into the

00:52:21.720 system to better understand what can we do to not just slow down this process, but reverse things

00:52:30.540 so that these organisms can exist in a set of circumstances that are healthier for them and

00:52:37.380 allow for them to repopulate and allow for our ecosystem to exist in a way where they can live

00:52:44.860 in it. Yeah, I really can relate to just seeing how fewer insects there are. And I think, of course,

00:52:58.760 land degradation and land use change is a huge contributor to that. And, you know, of course,

00:53:05.480 I think about the monarch butterflies who have lost 167 million acres of their habitat since the 90s.

00:53:11.920 And of course, bees, you know, they've lost so much of their habitat and are in these monocropped, heavily poisoned lands, which we've been talking about earlier in this conversation.

00:53:22.880 so even though we've gone through and talked a lot about the threats to these incredible insects

00:53:30.680 these bees i think ending on a note of potentially explaining to us how we can or what we can do to

00:53:39.920 foster the interactions and relationships necessary to help bees as individuals and community members

00:53:46.600 what are things that you feel like just the everyday person the folks who are listening right

00:53:52.300 now who are really dedicated to this planet can do to support their survival and their

00:53:58.760 health into a future that's very uncertain and full of a ton of threats coming at them.

00:54:05.760 So I love to end on that sort of note, the what can we do sort of thing, because when

00:54:13.020 you look at the problems themselves, they can seem so huge, so multifaceted that it

00:54:19.300 can feel like we can't do anything. It can feel like we are totally helpless to just deal with

00:54:25.060 the world as it is. But there's actually a lot that we can do from the small to the large.

00:54:30.340 Planting a pollinator garden is a wonderful thing. It benefits, there are like no drawbacks

00:54:36.200 to this. It benefits everybody. It looks wonderful. Planting all of these different forms of plants

00:54:42.260 are really great for all kinds of insects. They're great for the honeybees. They're great for native

00:54:47.340 bees. They're great for all sorts of bugs running around. They allow for the typical green space

00:54:54.400 that we have in our yards that's just grass, which supports very little diversity in insect life and

00:55:00.780 animal life in general, to this blossoming of ecosystem diversity in having these flowers

00:55:07.780 present. So if you want to do something right now, if you have a desire to go out there and

00:55:14.320 make a difference in the lives of your local bee populations, you can do so by planting a

00:55:19.960 pollinator garden. In addition to that, if you want to join the ranks of the beekeepers,

00:55:25.440 you can do so. But if you're going to do so, please, please, please, please be an informed

00:55:33.440 beekeeper. Learning from the different researchers out there to veteran beekeepers out there,

00:55:39.960 Making sure that you are separating the misinformation and disinformation from actual, helpful, factual information is really important in this process because there is a lot of info out there that is not accurate and is not helpful.

00:55:55.900 I've been asked multiple times about the usage of crystals to get rid of varroa mites and whether putting crystals on top of your colony can create an electromagnetic field that can keep the varroa mites out of the colony.

00:56:09.920 I've been asked about sound therapy and whether applying really low-level sound to different parts of the colony can get rid of the varroa mites.

00:56:19.900 and none of these things have been shown to actually get rid of mites, throwing cornstarch

00:56:26.400 into your colony is not going to help, it will be detrimental to the bees. It's these sorts of

00:56:29.960 things out there that unfortunately can make it worse for some people to be beekeepers because

00:56:34.720 if their colonies are overwhelmed by disease, because beekeeping is a team sport, because it

00:56:41.120 is a community that tons of different people are connected to, those dying bees with all of their

00:56:46.400 diseases can then move those diseases through the rest of the population of bees. So it's

00:56:51.340 actually better in a lot of ways to not be a beekeeper at all if you're going to be an

00:56:57.020 uninformed beekeeper who lets disease overrun his or her colonies. So being an informed beekeeper

00:57:03.640 can be very helpful. In addition to all of that, supporting honeybee research is huge.

00:57:10.500 Making sure that the individuals that you vote for have an interest in seeing honeybee research move forward and seeing environmental research move forward is very important to the development of research that allows us to better understand what's going on and what can be done about it.

00:57:30.880 supporting and just being aware of the different initiatives out there by different groups and

00:57:37.860 groups like Project APIS-M that supported my honeybee project when I was a graduate student.

00:57:44.900 And it's those sorts of things that are really helpful. And so going online,

00:57:50.940 finding ways that you can support these different groups can help our bees quite directly.

00:57:56.480 Well, thank you for ending on that note.

00:57:58.760 Thanks so much for having me. I love having the opportunity to just talk science, to talk about bees, and to get these sorts of messages out to as many people as possible.

00:58:09.340 Thank you for listening to another episode of For the Wild podcast. The music you heard today was by Jeff Parker, The Mysterious They, and Gabriela DiCapua. For the Wild is created by Ayanna Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Melanie Younger.

00:58:28.760 Thank you.

For The Wild - November 25, 2020

Dr. SAMUEL RAMSEY on Bee Population in Peril ⧸210

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