Randy Oliver: Researching Better Beekeeping (318)

318 - Randy Oliver:  Researching Better Beekeeping

Jeff Ott: Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast presented by Betterbee, your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment. I'm Jeff Ott.

Becky Masterman: I'm Becky Masterman.

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Hey, everybody. Welcome to the show. Becky, we're sitting here towards the end of January, North American Honeybee Expo is over. That was a great event.

Becky: It really was. All of those beekeepers, all of that beekeeping energy in one place. We could do a lot of good with that enthusiasm.

Jeff: Yes, happy people and happy places, both physically and mentally. A lot of positive energy there. January is the start of the season. Beekeepers are starting to get the itch. We saw it. Getting their yards all mapped out in their heads and their bees all set and they were already bottling honey for August. What are your bees doing there in Minnesota right now, Becky?

Becky: My favorite part of January is that it is so cold, but my bees are beginning to raise spring bees. They literally have a brood nest. It might be tiny, but it's hot and hopefully, they're getting really good nutrition. I've got new bees that are being cooked right now. That's just really not scientific. Anyway, that's what I'm excited about. I'm excited about those brood nest temperatures increasing.

Jeff: When you think about it, though, they are being cooked with some of the new studies that they have out and they're focusing on the heater bees, as they call them, the heater bees getting down inside the cells and heating up right next to the larva. They're basically cooking the larva in the cell next to it.

Becky: [chuckles] I love it. I love it. Yes. We'll just keep running with that and say that our bees are cooking bees right now. It's going to be a great spring.

Jeff: It's like bee cells full of little loaves of bees inside. It's great. Keep the positive energy going because it is the promise of the season to come and the bees are sensing it even on the coldest January days.

Becky: I love that about the bees, is that they're very sensitive to what's going on with the weather and temperature, but at the same time, there's something that's triggering them right now where they know they have to plan ahead, and they know that the days of those winter bees are numbered and they better start getting their replacements ready to keep up the work in the hive.

Jeff: Looking ahead as the bees do, on today's episode, we have Randy Oliver, who is always working with bees, always thinking bees regardless of the season. He is a wealth of information and is dynamic on top of all of that.

Becky: The energy, the enthusiasm, the amazing amount of knowledge in his head. Oh, my gosh, I love a conversation with Randy. I'm never quite prepared for it, and I always learn something, but I'm really excited. I'm glad we've-- Hopefully, he's going to sit down for an hour and talk to us. My guess is we might be in the bee yard with him and he might be opening up colonies as he's talking to us, but we'll see.

Jeff: Or he'll be standing and talking to us. He may not be sitting, but he'll be standing. Let's talk to Randy coming right after these words from our sponsors.

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Jeff: Hey, everybody. Welcome back. Thank you to all of our sponsors for all your support. Sitting across the great big virtual Beekeeping Today Podcast table with Becky and me right now is Randy Oliver. Randy, I don't feel like you need much of an introduction, but I am always excited to introduce you. Welcome to the show.

Randy Oliver: Thank you.

Becky: Thank you so much for being here.

Jeff: Randy, just for the four or five new beekeepers who may not know who you are, would you please tell us a little bit about yourself and your background with bees?

Randy: I've been a beekeeper since I was a young teenager at the hobby level for about 20 years. Then I foolishly decided to try to make a living at it, which I did. I was able to quit my other jobs and then I went through school in biology, entomology, ran an insectary at the university. Then Varroa arrived and wiped us out, and I was really struggling with that. I thought to myself, "Well, I've got degrees in biology and insect culture and all this. Why the heck am I letting a mite kick my ass?"

I decided to start self-educating again and dove back into the books. Then made the mistake of writing an article, Almond Pollination for the Bee Journal, and suddenly there was demand for somebody who could interpret the science, the biology of beekeeping for a path application for beekeepers. It just swallowed me up and became my life and passion. I quit all my other work and just got into bee research. I'm officially retired now, which means I work harder than I ever have just juggling research projects. Right now we have about seven different research projects going on.

Becky: I know varroa showed up around '87, but what year did it impact your operation?

Randy: I found my first mite on a sticky board in 1993. I'll never forget that date because we saw it coming. At that time, I had already successfully bred gentle bees and bees that were completely resistant to American foulbrood and resistant to tracheal mite. I thought, "Oh, no big deal."

Becky: You're ready.

Randy: I'll breed bees resistant to varroa easily. No, that was not the fact. It's been tough. We're now going into, I think, our ninth year of our very strong selective breeding program for resistant bees, breeding each year solely from daughters of the mothers of colonies that have gone for a full year without needing any mite treatment and maintaining mite counts close to zero. It's really difficult, though, to fix those genetic combinations into a maternal bloodline. The feedback I'm getting now is about a third of our colonies headed by our queens show strong resistance. Another third or so show moderate resistance, maybe need a treatment a year, and then the other third show very little resistance and would need normal treatment.

We don't claim that our bees are mite resistant yet, but through our management, it has gotten much easier for us in our operation that we really only have to focus on that third that has higher mite counts. We often just eliminate those queens. We don't want them breeding. Then we choose-- We run about 1,500 hives most of the time. Then we breed from 30. We're breeding from about 2% of our operation each year. That means 98% don't make the grade. That's very strong such a breeding every single year yet even after going on nine years, we have not yet fixed it in the maternal bloodline.

Jeff: Help me understand. Even if you become successful, does that mean ultimately a beekeeper could purchase a queen that's bred, that's resistant, take it back to their bee yard, whatever state they are in, and have that queen remain varroa resistant and her generation, or would that bee need to be repopulated or their yard need to be repopulated?

Randy: There's no such thing as a varroa-resistant queen. It's her offspring, her daughters that have to actually display resistance. They're not solely her daughters because there's a bunch of fathers also. We control our matings, our drone pool, but if that queen is admitted, her daughters are admitted out to the beekeeper's drone pool, trait resistance might very well be lost.

What one would have to do is at least a two-year program or first year, you would propagate a bunch of colonies from that queen, her daughters next year, because the genes for Varroa come from the maternal bloodline, would then provide the drone mothers in the second year. The first year you'd have to replace all of your colonies with daughters from that queen for them to supply the drones in the second year.

Jeff: Not an easy answer to any of this, is it?

Randy: No. Hey, it was easy. I wouldn't be at it for nine years right here. I'll tell you, going out to these colonies that are completely mite resistant that we can get mite wash counts of zero or one for the entire course of a year. I've got 50 of them up here, last year's breeders that are now going on their second year with no treatments whatsoever. It's just like beekeeping in the old days. It's just so easy. They're very productive colonies because they're not sick, they're not fighting viruses all the time. That's what keeps us motivated and just makes it so much easier to keep bees. Eventually, my guess is that another resistant colony will be the rarity, and we won't be dealing with mites that much anymore.

Becky: A mite management strategy, just like strategies for managing disease is that you're going to be ready to requeen your stock with resistant stock.

Randy: That would be an option for somebody to do. Like I said, we don't have resistant stock yet. We have a proportion of resistance.

Becky: That's the future.

Randy: That'd be the future, yes. In my place, my home, 25 years ago I planted 15 or so different cultivar of table grapes. What I found was over the years, some of them just get mildew every year. I could treat the mildew every year, which I generally forget to do or just replace those grape vines with resistant stock. Now I've replaced every single cultivar of grape with resistant cultivar that need no treatment whatsoever, and life is easy. That's ideal. Integrated pest management is what you do for any pest or parasite. You just find stock that is naturally resistant and deal with that.

Becky: I know that this year was the first year I saw your queen with your name on them written very neatly on the thorax. No, I'm kidding. The queens with your name on them, sold by suppliers, and I assume that is continuing and expanding this year.

Randy: We're planning on it. It's not by suppliers. It's one supplier, Ray Olivarez who's a long-time friend of mine, was interested. He brokers our bees. A bunch of them go into almond pollination. He sees the hives and inspects from them and actually shakes bees out of them for packages and saw that our bees do very well, and the thought of having bees that do very well in almonds plus potentially resistance, he said, "Wait, let me try producing some." I told him, "Well, no, you couldn't do that because you don't have the drone pool."

He goes, "Well, actually I pay to lease rights on a 25,000-acre ranch that we can control all the beehives on that ranch." We moved down 400 grown mother colonies of our own so that we could control the matings down there. The logistics we did not make money doing it this year. I'll tell you for sure. It's almost a four-hour drive each way. My son spent a lot of time just maintaining those drone colonies. If Ray can start supplying the drone mother colonies himself, that would be economically viable.

The big thing is just once somebody has fully resistant stock, that you can count on them being resistant, there will be a demand for that. Initially, the beekeepers will probably-- the consumers will pay a premium for that. Then that will encourage all the producers to get serious about breeding resistant stock. Right now, the queen he produces, they can sell every single queen that they produce because there's a shortage every year of queens. They're not under any pressure to breed for resistance, but as soon as some suppliers start producing resistant queens, then buyers are going to prefer to get queens or colonies that don't need any mite treatments. That will shift the dynamics of the market.

Jeff: I would think the challenge at that point would be able to control the term varroa resistant so that it didn't just become a marketing ploy or a clickbait, if you will, for any queen producer to just add that to their ad.

Randy: A lot of that has been done when they don't necessarily test out. I was adamant with Ray that we would not claim that ours were varroa-resistant. When I get up to 95%, if and when we do, then at that point I could say that, but right now I'm making it very clear. It's a gamble. Interesting, because I get the feedback from beekeepers around the United States who've got some, and in Canada this year, I asked them first thing, what percentage of them are exhibiting resistance? It's about that one-third percent right now of full resistance.

Then the others-- I just got a data set yesterday. The guy bought 13 queens. Small guy, but he bought also queens from a number of other suppliers, and he showed me that he didn't treat them all year long. Out of those, four of them were fully resistant, needed no treatment. Another four of them had a moderate mite level that could have been easily treated with one treatment. Then there's three or four that had higher mite levels and one had a sky-high mite level. We see that. The thing is resistance is not one gene. You have to have a gene that codes for the olfactory receptor to pick up certain odors.

Then that has to be linked to a behavioral cascade that initiates the bee to chew off the capping and then maybe another behavioral cascade and says, now that we just recap or do we remove that pupa, there may also be genes in there for suppression of mite reduction by the pupa. Over in Gotland in Sweden, the pupa have down-regulated certain components of their pheromones that they put out which are read by the nurse bees, but they're also read by the mites. When a pheromone is read by other species, it's referred to as a kairomone.

By the pupa changing their pheromonal output slightly, the mites don't reproduce. They're not cued to lay eggs. That's suppression of mite reduction. That's an entirely different thing. Then there's grooming on top of that. Then they could have molecular biology. In Norway, the bees have downregulated the expression of certain ecdysteroids hormones that are necessary for cuticle and eggshell formation that varroa has given up. They're such a perfect parasite. They actually use honeybee proteins directly rather than digesting them and then reforming them into mite proteins.

They just use the honeybee proteins. They've lost their genes for producing those ecdysteroids. It depends upon the honeybee to produce them. Honeybees in turn downregulate those and varroa can't lay any eggs. Now, who would've thought briefly of that trait? We don't breed for any specific trait at all. We just described the job description, which is don't let mites build up at all in your colony, and we fire all those that don't. Every year we fire 98% of our queens.

Becky: At the same time you're doing this, you're asking them to be nice to produce honey, probably you don't want AFB to pop up either. You're looking for some hygienic behavior.

Randy: We are not looking for hygienic behavior because we haven't seen AFB in my apiary for 20 years. If a colony has chalkbrood or AFB, we would be out of the breeder pool. Number one thing that we breed for, they have to be gentle. If you're not gentle, I don't care anything else. That's the main feedback we get. We've bred very, very gentle bees for 30 years. We like working in shorts and T-shirts. We very rarely put a veil on. Gentleness is a big thing. When somebody actually has to put a veil on, it's like a big thing. You have to run around and find a veil somewhere on the property to put it on.

Jeff: Definitely. Amazing. Hey, let's take this quick break for a word from our sponsors, and we'll be right back.

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Becky: Welcome back, everybody. Randy, we just jumped right into varroa, which I'm not surprised about. [laughs] I'm wondering what else are you working on that you're excited about. Then part two, which we'll get to next, what's scaring you these days? Let's start with the exciting stuff that you're working on.

Randy: Right now I'm writing up our current research on robbing screens. Many beekeepers put robbing screens on. I got interested. I didn't have experience with them. I got interested in them because a manufacturer asked me whether he could make the claim that they reduced the mite immigration from bees drifting. I said, "I'll test it." Tested it and couldn't find any effect at all, which surprised me so I ran a second trial, a different kind of trial. No effect, and so I ran a third entirely different trial.

All these trials include doing hundreds and hundreds of sticky board accounts and preparing colonies and swapping the guards around to get good experimental design. By the end of this two years' worth of work where we could not find that they reduced mite immigration coming into hives, I was just still curious about their effect on the hive. One of the things I did is one day I said, "Tell you what. Let's glue steel discs on the backs of 100 guard bees from this hive." Guard bees typically guard for a day or so, and then they shift to forging. I said, "I wonder what happens with the emerging bees or the bees who are taking their first flights."

They may have taken a deidentification flight, but the first forging flight out, if you put a robbing screen on, will they be able to find their way back into the hive? We tagged 100 guard bees. Visa came out in response to us. Again, we have general colonies, so we take the lid off and we just sit there as they look at us. We just pick them up, put them away, and we don't get stung up, put them in the hive, and then put a entrance, a robbing screen, commercial ones, on the front of that hive, and then put magnetic traps on the hive to either side of that.

We had that from some previous work I had done, using neodymium magnets. Any bee with a tag on it that walks in, it pulls the magnet off the bees back, and so we have a record that a bee had walked into that hive. We were astounded the next day when 30% of the tags, those 100 tags, 30 tags were next door. That those bees did not return to their little colony. They drifted. It was too confusing for them to get in and they drifted. I thought, "Wow, this is astounding." We said, "That can't be. Must have been a mistake."

We did four more reps of this in different yards and it got the same result every time. On average, 21% of the tag bees drift within the first day to a hive elsewhere in the yard, usually the closest hives on either side of them.

Becky: Are they closest hives without robbing screens or do they also have robbing screens?

Randy: No. They just have just an entrance magnetic trap, but the bees will walk in right underneath it. Unanswered question now is what the impact is on hives of putting a-- if you have a weak hive and you want to protect it with a robbing screen and you're losing 20% of your workers that take their first flight each day, that could make that hive actually weaker. I have not followed up on that, but that then told me, "Wow, robbing screens really do deter bees from getting back in."

We did a bunch of tests then using scented syrup bait, training bees to scented syrup by open feeding it, and then they then seek out that scent anywhere. We used anise extract, but we could have used another one, and we put robbing screens onto hives with scented syrup in there to see to what extent it kept these investigator bees with-- so we put them onto empty boxes, empty hive bodies with no guard bees or anything inside just to see whether bees would still find their way in. Yes, some of them do find their way in, but not anywhere near as many as the ones that are unguarded, they're sitting right next door. I'm going to be sending that research off to press in a week. That'll all be out there.

Then we did the next step. We said, "How about can they really prevent robbing?" We put then a tray of scented sugar syrup into a group of four hives at a time, and put the robbing screens on them in a control colony and then let the bees come in and then wait until robbing got started going well in those colonies. Once we couldn't count the number of bees, over 20 bees, then we'd stop it, and then we would move all the hives to a new location and replicate the trial again to see whether a robbing screen slowed down the recruitment of additional bees.

A single bee is not going to cause robbing. For mass robbing, you got to have other bees recruited. What we've found is, yes, they do slow down recruitment substantially, but none of them, on their own, prevent mass robbing from going eventually. Eventually, the left bees find their way in, but that's only on boxes that had no guard bees in them. These were empty boxes. Now, we are working on looking at the behavior of the guard bees for each of the different kinds of robbing screens. We find out, didn't find out. My opinion or my conclusion is that most robbing screens are not designed based upon bee behavior and physics. They're based upon assumptions that are not founded.

Now we have done a deep dive into bee behavior, into garden behavior and checking the physics of the airflow coming out of hives where the scent action is and have redesigned a new type of robbing screen that we're testing out right now that's looking really good. It just got too cold to finish testing them here, so I just sent a box down in Southern California. I have a close friend who has an intense Africanized bee pressure around him and robbing is insane.

He's going to put them on. Probably Friday he's going to get the box and then I'm going to fly down and then be able to do further research down there under intense robbing pressure to test out this new design, and then I will publish the results and show how we can maybe improve robbing screen design. I had no idea I was going to go this deep into it.

[laughter]

Becky: You went deep, and you're going to have to put a veil on too, right? [laughs]

Randy: Oh yes, down there. Actually, handling the Africanized bees, there's a lot of technique involved.

Becky: Sure.

Randy: If you know how to do it, you can get by with a lot. Now sometimes you should always have a veil because there is the maybe two or three out of 100 that can go thermonuclear with no warning, and you need to be prepared for those.

Becky: Randy, do you get them to release Nasonov? Is that one of your techniques for the Africanized bees?

Randy: No. It's just how you move. You can't do any jerking whatsoever. You got to slow down, do your tai chi movements more carefully, use a little bit more smoke, but you got to know when to stop and give a pause.

Becky: I remember Marla Spivak saying years ago that with her PhD research, she did them on Africanized bees, but they would shift the boxes so that the bees were confused. If you shift boxes and your bees are confused, they're going to just start releasing Nasonov pheromone so that the foragers can make it home. I was wondering if that was one of your secrets.

Randy: No.

Jeff: I find it really fascinating your study was on robbing screens, which is something that most beekeepers keep in their shop or whatever and rarely give much thought to. They find that there's so much behind using them and the proper use of using them. Design of them is fascinating.

Randy: The design is what I see. That people make presumptions which are assumptions-based without any evidence.

Jeff: That's never happened in beekeeping before.

[laughter]

Randy: No. [laughs]

Jeff: What an enlightening episode this has been.

Becky: [unintelligible 00:29:19]

Randy: What I do is I tend to go into the physics, into the chemistry, and then mainly to bee biology and behaviors on any of these things to look at them.

Becky: You said you're writing it up for publication? Is that American Bee Journal?

Randy: Yes. Then it'll be on my website two months-

Becky: On your website.

Randy: -after that. By next spring, all that stuff will be on my website.

Jeff: We will have the links to your website in the show notes so any listeners who want to follow up. You could spend multiple years just going through all the information data that's on your website.

Randy: One of these days I hope to organize it.

Becky: The good news is that if you're looking for a topic, you show up in Google search. A lot of times your work on a specific topic shows up. That's the magic of the Google engine.

Randy: I'm working also right now on testing oxalic acid vaporizers. What's very interesting to me is, again, there's a lot of assumptions made by the manufacturers without adequate confirmation. One of the things is the temperature that the vaporizer is set at, the set point temperature, and the thermal capacity, or the thermal mass, that when you dump in the oxalic acid, the vaporizer, many of them cool very quickly, so they don't have very much thermal mass heated up. When they cool, that's not the set point temperature.

What I've done, I'm doing experiments of-- I have a vaporizer from one of the manufacturers who's done a very good job at this, and he wanted some confirmation on what output he was actually getting. I've got a vaporizer here, and I can collect all the vapor that comes out into a copper tube chocked in ice water, and it immediately condenses inside that tube. Then we can do three rinses and rinse any acid out of that tube, and then do chemical titration with an indicator dye, and determine exactly how much oxalic acid actually came out of that vaporizer.

We've done dozens of these now, at all different temperatures, the full temperature range, and found out, boy, the first thing, it's really rare to get even 50% of the acid out of a vaporizer that you put in. At certain temperatures, you can get very high degradation of the acid, and may only be getting 25% of what you put in there. This will all be relevant to vaporizer design, and I'll share this information with everybody around the world so that they can improve their design of their vaporizers. That's a bunch of new chemistry for me.

We've already done a lot of titration of individual bees in hives, and I've spoken about this, but I haven't published it yet, where we have tracked the amount of oxalic acid that is on individual bees' bodies after dribble method of application, after the Swedish sponges, after the cardboard strips going into them, after vaporization, and how much is on their bodies immediately, how much is on 10 minutes later, how much is on an hour later, how much is on hour by hour, 24 hours later, and then up to 2 months later.

We've tracked all of this by going into hives, taking out 10 individual bees, and titrating them individually to see-- We can titrate down to the millionth of a gram, the microgram of acid on a bee's body, typically, for a good varroa control, you want about 40 micrograms on the bees. Even with the extended-release of oxalic acid, even just having 3 or 4 micrograms on a bee's body is enough to have a long-term effect on varroa. Over a couple of months, even that very low level can drop the varroa population to zero.

Jeff: Go back to the vaporizers because I've been spending a lot of time getting familiar with my vaporizer. It has the ability to select a temperature that you can set it, and I assume that you're using something similar. Are you finding that the recommended temperature is higher or lower than current belief is, or is it--

Randy: It's not so much the set point, it's how much thermal mass it has, because if you dump in 4 grams of oxalic acid, which is a realistic dose for a double-deep hive, as opposed to 2 grams, some of them cool down substantially when you dump that in. You're actually then hitting it at a lower temperature. At the lower temperature, you get degradation. Surprisingly, when you get to higher temperatures, around 230 C, you actually get less degradation than you do between 190 and 210. I can visualize the amount of degradation. I have a technique so I can see how much degradation is actually occurring.

You don't see any degradation happening as the temperature rises up to 190. Right at 190, you start to see the degradation products being produced, up to about 210 centigrade again, and then there's almost no degradation products produced. If you have a vaporizer that holds to 230 C temperature without dropping down to that 190 range, then you get almost no degradation, then you get a pretty good recovery. Again, you never get 100% coming out. That seems to be a key point, something that has enough thermal mass to not drop the temperature.

Jeff: Below that 230 C.

Randy: Down to that 190 C, that's where the degradation actually starts happening.

Becky: Then can we jump forward to my favorite oxalic application, which is the dribble? You're saying that how long is oxalic going to be able to be detected, even to the 3 to 4 micrograms on the bees?

Randy: It drops off fairly quickly in anything, in any application. On vaporization, it disappears pretty much after three days. Extended release on the pads, it peaks around day five to seven, and then it starts to drop down considerably. With the dribble, peak also peaks after about day two and then drops down. Initially, you have a higher amount on the bees' bodies from the dribble than you do from the vaporization. It's not very evenly distributed on the bees, but that seems to-- Initially, it's a little more even.

With the vaporization, you don't have much on the bees 10 minutes after vaporizing. An hour afterwards, you have more because they've picked up, walking around the hive, they pick it up off the combs and stuff. That's something that surprised me, that they actually initially have a lower amount than they do after they walk around for a while.

Jeff: That's really fascinating.

Becky: It's so fascinating.

Randy: It is. When we titrate, we pick up the 10 bees and we-- I've used also fluorescent tracers where I add it to the acid solution so I can dribble them. You can't do it with a vaporizer, but with the dribble. Then I made a box, a blackout box, I put a comb in, it has black light in there and a viewing window, and I can photograph where on the bees they actually have residues on their bodies after the dribble. It's very, very unevenly distributed initially. It never gets very evenly distributed, but you get a-- Despite that, the mites apparently move around enough that they come in contact with it and it drops off.

Jeff: Do we know the mode of operation or action of the oxalic acid on the varroa yet?

Randy: No one is completely clear. One obvious one that's-- I can't say it's a fact, but it's pretty obvious is when the mites and spiders, many of them have what are called empodia on their feet. They're little soft balloons that with every step they inflate and they're sticky on the outside, they're moist. That's what allows them to walk upside a glass jar. Varroa has very strong empodia in order to hold onto the bees. Oxalic acid's a hard time penetrating the mite's cuticle anywhere unless you mix glycerin with it.

The empodia, it definitely sticks to it, and then immediately that moisture in there will cause the acid to dissociate and become reactive, and acid's not reactive until it's dissociated in water and frees the hydronium ion. That would be my guess, and we don't know whether the mites-- We know it kills the mites. If they come in contact with it much, actually their heartbeat slows down and the mites die. There's a burning, tissue damage on their feet. There's also the systemic thing that can stop their hearts from beating. We really don't know the mode of action, but we can see what the results are.

The other one I'm checking is there's also a olfactory effect that I'm doing bioassays with live mites. I take like 100 live mites, and I put them into a chamber that has a wide tube attached to it. I put two groups of bees into the two arms of the wide tube and put a little vacuum pump on there, and I draw air over those bees. The scent of those bees goes into the chamber with the mites, and the mites have a free chance to choose one chamber or the other to walk towards the bees and climb onto them. If you treat one of those groups of bees with oxalic acid, the mites do not like to go onto them. They must prepare the bees that have not been treated.

Here's the interesting thing. Mites can't smell oxalic acid. They don't avoid it at all. You put out pure oxalic acid in a petri dish, you put mites in there, they walk right over it and never even notice it. They don't even slow down. If it reacts with the bee's cuticle, it must create some odor. I'm currently working with a researcher at UC Irvine with a mass spec to see if we can figure out what odors it actually creates. Whatever it is, it's that odorless repellent to the mites.

There may be a behavioral effect also with the extended-release of oxalic acid in the hive that decreases the mites' reproductive capacity without actually killing them. You never have to kill a single mite to control varroa. If they can't reproduce, they're all going to be dead pretty soon. If you even cut their reproduction rate and success in half, they will pretty much disappear from the hive.

Becky: Can you talk a little bit about the nutrition work you're looking at?

Randy: I did some research a few years ago studying several of the major pollen subs and look at how well they performed. I'm in one of the few areas in the United States where you can really do research on pollen sub-field research, because we have yards that have zero pollen during the summer. Colonies without supplemental feeding, if you don't move them out of there, they just dwindle away and die because there's no pollen coming in at all.

I can do very good field trials by testing pollen and see which ones benefit the hives well. I found that-- Look for a correlation. What was the difference in the pollen subs that allowed some to grow very well? There was a home brew formulation from some beekeepers down in the Bakersfield area, California, that outperformed all the commercial ones. It was a very inexpensive one, without all the whistles and bells and the fancy stuff that we see in the subs.

We found out that there's no evidence that it had anything to do with the specific level of protein, the amount of sugar in it, whether there's a probiotic bacteria. We found also off-the-shelf probiotics in the United States, we don't see any of this that there are many benefit to the colony, likely no benefit in the pollen subs either. It wasn't about the lipids, the amount of fats in them. What was the best correlation was with the balance of the essential amino acids, the 10 essential amino acids.

I'm working now to see if we can come up with some very inexpensive pollen subs because we spend tens of thousands of dollars on pollen subs in our operation. I would see about developing one by simply balancing the amino acids better using inexpensive pollen sub. I've been working on various bag of stimulants, different essential oils and fruits and stuff to see which ones-- For a good sub, not only does it have to be nutritionally complete, but it has to be attractive for the nurse bees to eat it so that's what the bag of stimulants are for.

What we do is I have a bunch of hives outside my bedroom with plexiglass covers over the top and installation on top of that. On the top bars, I put down 10 different pieces of paper with different pollen sub on them, with different things added to them that are lifted up without disturbing the bees, watching them consume them day after day, and figure out which which ones they prefer to eat.

Becky: Does that mean you're actually just doing research outside your bedroom window? You pop up your window, you remove the top, you lean over, you do a quick count, and then you close it?

Randy: No, I have to go through one door first. [laughs]

Becky: Oh, you do. Okay.

Randy: It's right there. It's right next to my bedroom.

Jeff: I do want to ask, we can't spend much time on it because we're really coming up the end of time. Is a pollen patty because the bees are attracted to it doesn't necessarily it's nutritionally better for the bee?

Randy: Yes, just straight sugar, they love it, but there's no nutritional value other than calories.

Jeff: You're also tracking the nutritional--

Becky: Those 10 amino acids.

Randy: I developed a calculator. It's being used worldwide. It's a freebie on my website, that you can see what kind of materials-- If you lived in Asia, you may not have soy flower or brewer's yeast available. You may have coconut protein or you may have palm seed, or something like that, or date seeds or whatever. You can put in whatever source of food you have there, and it immediately calculates what the amino acid ratio is there. It shows you where you're deficient. Then you can buy it off the shelf. Go to Amazon and buy amino acid concentrates, add a tiny bit, and bring it into perfect balance, very inexpensively. I have beekeepers corresponding with me from around the world, who are using this to develop their own pollen subs.

Jeff: We're sitting here at the beginning of 2025, what storm clouds do you see on the horizon that give you concern? In five minutes or less.

Randy: Very quickly. Climate change is a monster one. The last administration was actually taking steps as a world leader to really start to address climate change. Here in California, also doing a very good job with the electrical system and all that. Now, with the change in administration, that may be set back a lot. For my kids and grandkids, that's a tough one to look at. Beekeeping, as it gets hotter and more extreme weathers, is very tough for all of agriculture.

The other thing is, the EPA, it's unfunded. The FDA also may get unfunded if some of the promises being made-- That could have huge implications for beekeepers, as far as what pesticides are being used, what things we have available for us to use.

Jeff: 2025 will definitely be exciting, that's for sure. Randy, it's been extremely wonderful. Was there a right way? Randy, it's been great having you on the show. It's been wonderful having you on the show.

Becky: Extremely wonderful. I think that's okay. [laughs]

Jeff: You have your finger in every pie possible, and probably your toes too. It's great having you on the show, and the information you provide the beekeeping industry and all beekeepers around the world is invaluable. Thank you for all the work that you're doing.

Randy: Oh, you bet. It's that kind of appreciation that keeps me going.

Becky: Oh, do we appreciate you. Thank you for sharing your time and everything, not everything that's in your head because I know there's more there.

Randy: Oh, no. There's a lot-

Becky: There's a lot more.

Randy: -a lot going on, yes.

Becky: It's amazing how much is in there, Randy. All it just shows us is that you have dedicated your life to these bees and beekeepers and supporting them. We see it, and we thank you.

Randy: Thank you.

[music]

Jeff: I need a couple of these Advil because every time we talk to Randy, my head hurts. He is just full of great information.

Becky: I don't know about you, but I feel like I get a lot done in a day. I feel like I've accomplished a lot in my life. I talk to Randy, and I'm like, "How am I wasting so much of my time?" Then another part of me feels like I want to go into my basement and figure out where my PhD diploma is, cross out my name, and write his in and just give it to him because the amount he knows is just amazing. Just amazing.

Jeff: We're really fortunate to have Randy exploring all these questions and searching for answers, and providing some more data points for everybody to use and manage the bees by.

Becky: He's figuring out which questions to ask, and that's the hard part, figuring out, "Okay, wait. Is there a question here?" It was a nice time spent with him. I hope beekeepers appreciate everything he's doing for them.

Jeff: I encourage all of our listeners to get out to his website, explore what he's doing, read his articles in ABJ, American Beekeeping Journal, and value the work that Randy's been doing. That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to follow us and rate us five stars on Apple Podcasts or wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you like.

You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the Reviews tab along the top of any webpage. We want to thank Betterbee, and our regular, long-time sponsors Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and Northern Bee Books for their generous support. Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank you, the BeekeepingToday Podcast listener for joining us on this show. Feel free to leave us questions and comments on our website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

[00:47:46] [END OF AUDIO]