Davidson Fellow 2023 Scholarship Recipient: Anna Yang - Queen Assessment (S6, E33)

S6, E33 - Davidson Fellow 2023 Scholarship Recipient: Anna Yang - Queen Assessment

Jim Loveland: This is Jim Loveland, a beek from North Central Illinois. Welcome to the  Beekeeping Today Podcast.

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.

Global Patties: Today's episode is brought to you by the bee nutrition superheroes at Global Patties. Family-operated and buzzing with passion, Global Patties crafts protein-packed patties that will turn your hives into powerhouse production. Picture this. Strong colonies, booming brood, and honey flowing like a sweet river. It's super protein for your bees and they love it. Check out their buffet of patties tailor-made for your bees in your specific area. Head over to www.globalpatties.com and give your bees the nutrition they deserve.

Jeff: Hey, quick shout-out to all of our sponsors whose support allows us to bring you this podcast each week without resorting to a fee-based subscription. We don't want that and we know you don't either. Be sure to check out all of our content on the website. There, you can read up on all of our guests, read our blog and the various aspects and observations about beekeeping.

Search for download and listen to over 250 past episodes, read episode transcripts, leave comments and feedback on each episode, and check on podcast specials from our sponsors. You can find it all at www.beekeepingtodaypodcast.com. Hey, Jim Loveland from North Central Illinois. Thank you for that fantastic opening. We love those. Hey, Becky, we have another state to fill in on our map.

Becky: I'm so excited about that map. Thank you so much for putting that together, Jeff. Thank you to the listeners for sending in those recordings.

Jeff: Yes, it's fun to see that map get colored in and it's not just North America. We have around the world too as we've seen in the last couple of weeks. Even Cape Town, South Africa. That's really, really cool. We appreciate our listeners.

Becky: Absolutely. Everybody, I hope you're inspired. Record that opening and email it to us at questions@beekeepingtodaypodcast.com.

Jeff: Becky, a couple of weeks ago, I was at the North American Honey Bee Expo in Louisville. We had a booth set up there. I was really taken aback by the number of people who came up and said, "Can I record my opening?" I said, "Oh, absolutely." We record openings there from the floor. We have a lot more states colored in. Maybe even another province up in Canada or two.

Becky: Ooh, you've got all the details. I just have to wait to see.

Jeff: It's a secret.

Becky: It changed every week.

Jeff: It's a secret, I tell you.

Becky: Anybody from Minnesota yet, though? [chuckles]

Jeff: No.

Becky: My home state? Anybody?

Jeff: No. Send in those openings. Hey, on a more serious note, I did hear from Kathy, Kim's wife, and she said that they are holding a memorial for Kim in Medina, Ohio on April 13th. If anyone is interested, any of our listeners are interested to go into Kim's memorial, you want to circle April 13th on your calendar and keep listening to the podcast and checking  Bee Culture Magazine. I'm sure Jerry's going to have information there for location and time information for Kim's memorial. I'm hoping to be there and it'll be a special time.

Becky: I'm so glad that Kathy is opening that up because so many beekeepers cared for Kim. I'm sure a lot of the listeners are going to want to attend.

Jeff: At the North American Honey Bee Expo, I was having fun with the fact that people were wanting to leave an opening for the show. Just as many, if not more people, came up and expressed their condolences for Kim and missed Kim and stated how important Kim was in their lives and for beekeeping. I can't do anything but agree with them. I'm glad Kathy's holding a memorial on April 13th so we can all be together and remember and celebrate Kim's life.

Becky: Absolutely.

Jeff: How are your bees doing this month? January has been a weird month. It started out warm and it suddenly got cold and it's winter now.

Becky: It is winter. It's officially winter, but my girls have been in the longest fall possible. I did check a few weeks ago and they were nice and low in the colony. Actually, at a 30, 32-degree day, they were hanging outside. They're hanging out in the entrance. We have entrance holes in Minnesota. A lot of us do. I was able to say hi to them and see where they were. Holy cow, it's the first sign of winter. It's been so warm. I always worry that they're going to eat through their stores if it's really warm. I like this cold weather for them because, now, spring's right around the corner for us. How about your bees, Jeff?

Jeff: They're there. [laughs]

Becky: They're there? [laughs]

Jeff: It's such a difficult subject. Sure. Pick at an open wound, Becky. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. It's been a challenging year for many reasons. As many of us know that when life gets challenging, the bees receive less time than they should. I've lost, I know of four colonies. I have seven remaining, I think, at this point. We've had a couple of cold snaps. I haven't been out since.

Fingers crossed that the preparation I was able to get in and done is paying off according to the sensors I have on the hive and that I can monitor. I know that there's a heartbeat in many of my remaining hives. The ones that I have quilted up, I was trying out this year, a duct silver-wrapped bubble wrap for around the hives. The Bluetooth sensor doesn't get through that. I have to go out and stand next to the hive to pick up the sensor.

I can't sit here in my office nice and warm. I have to go out in the yard and get the bees. Anyways, yes, so it's interesting. So far, so good. Long answer to your short question. Yes, I'm looking forward to the bees this summer. I'm already making plans for how many bees am I going to get. Which colonies do I think at this point I might be able to split? Get back up to speed next summer.

Becky: It's such an exciting time of year with the anticipation of spring right around the corner. We haven't made any mistakes yet for 2024. [chuckles] All the mistakes are in 2023. For most of us, not all of us, because some people are actively doing some management now, but for a lot of us, we have a mistake-free beekeeping year so far. All we have in front of us is a lot of hope. Can you see the temperature of the cluster from your sensors?

Jeff: Well, yes and no. If the sensor is in the right position, then I can get a good reading. Going into the end of December, I had one sensor that was reporting in the high 80s.

Becky: Okay. Oh, they got brood.

Jeff: They got brood in there somewhere. The other colonies are hovering around 50, 60. It really depends--

Becky: Where the cluster is-

Jeff: Yes, where the cluster is.

Becky: -and where the sensor is. I think if I had sensors in my hives, boy, I'd be looking at those data all the time. It might make me a lot less productive of a human being because I--

[laughter]

Jeff: I do enjoy it for that fact. It does regular life and you get tied up. You want to know what's going on with the bees, but you can't go out to the bee yard. It is really nice to be able to say, "Well," and call up the dashboard and look at it and say, "Yes, they're doing good. I'm doing really good." During the summer, of course, you can see, "Wow, they've gained 20 pounds this week," or something like that. It's just like, "Yes, go for it." It's kind of an energizer during the middle of a long day. Speaking of sensors, we have a great guest coming up.

Becky: Do we ever? Do we ever? This is really exciting and this is, again, right up your technical alley. Could you read the title of the project we're about to learn about from young Anna Yang?

Jeff: Yes, Anna Yang, she's an 18-year-old from Campbell, California, who won a $10,000 scholarship for her project for the Davidson Fellowship. It's a STEM and humanities-based scholarship program. We'll learn more about it. Bear with me and I'll try to read this right. Her project was titled,  Smart Bee Colony Monitor: Internet of Things Device & Fusion Convolutional Neural Network for Queen Assessment.

Becky: That just says it all. I don't quite know what it says, but I will say, she's got that PhD colon in there where when you title something, you make sure you get all the words possible into the title. This is exciting. I'm really looking forward to talking to Anna and having her decode that title for me.

Jeff: Yes, I'm really intrigued by the fusion convolutional neural network part of that.

Becky: That's great. I'm going to let you take that part of the interview.

[laughter]

Jeff: Well, we'll talk to Anna real quick right after this quick word from Strong Microbials.

[music]

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Jeff: While you're at the Strong Microbials site, make sure you click on and subscribe to  The Hive, their regular newsletter full of interesting beekeeping facts and product updates. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Sitting around this big virtual  Beekeeping Today Podcast table, I am happy to bring you Anna Yang and Tacie Moessner. Welcome, Tacie and Anna, to  Beekeeping Today Podcast.

Tacie Moessner: Thank you.

Becky: We're happy to have you both here.

Jeff: As we mentioned earlier, Tacie's here to talk about the Davidson Fellowship program and Anna is here to talk about her project in 2023. Tacie, why don't you talk to us about the fellowship program and what it is and give us the understanding of the accomplishments that Anna has made?

Tacie: Okay. Well, thank you for having me. We're always excited to talk about the Fellows Program and the students who win scholarships. The Davidson Institute is the umbrella organization. The Davidson Fellows program operates under that umbrella. The Fellows Program offers $50,000, $25,000, and $10,000 college scholarships for students who are 18 and younger who are working on projects that have social relevance.

I wrote about at the college graduate level. We have a variety of categories. We have the STEM categories, the science, technology, engineering, and math, as well as humanities, which is philosophy, music, literature. Then we have an outside-the-box category. Anna applied in science. For science, students submit a bunch of stuff, a formal research paper, and essays and a video.

All of that is part of the whole application process. The Fellows Program has been around for-- this is the 24th year. We've had about 650 winners over the years. It's really exciting. Over $9 million has been awarded from Bob and Jan Davidson. It's a really exciting thing to see young students who are working on projects that are going to make a huge difference in the world now and in the future.

Jeff: For our listeners who've been with us for a couple of years, we've had Regeneron Science Talent Search on before. This is a different program from the Regeneron Science Talent Search as well, correct?

Tacie: Yes, it is. Between STS and the Fellows Program, we are working with a lot of the same students, the same level of work and dedication to these projects. There's a lot of overlap and we are lucky to share a lot of the same students.

Jeff: What would it take to submit a project and get started in an effort such as this?

Tacie: Well, a lot of the students, some of them start with passion projects, which I think Anna did. A lot of students will work in labs and they will have opportunities to work with professors. Typically, students have to submit a pretty good-sized project or portfolio of work. In the STEM categories, they need to submit a formal research paper and a visual model of their work, which can be anything.

I think that Anna submitted some photos and code. She can talk about all of that. Then students also need to discuss the process that they went through to get from the start to the finish of their projects, which is a really interesting say for us to read as far as staff in the judging panel. Then they need a couple of nominators to support their work and then they submit all of that and then they go into the judging process.

Becky: Very rigorous. The project has to be completed in order to apply for the award?

Tacie: There needs to be at least proof of concept. There needs to be some sort of results. They may not have to be totally completed with their project. They may have future work that students are interested in pursuing beyond the deadline of the fellow's deadline, but they need to have some sort of results for the judging panel to be able to assess the proof of concept and whether the project has social relevance.

Jeff: What does that entail?

Tacie: The judges are just looking for high-level work. All of the judges are professors. For the most part, professors. All of the projects are spread out among panels. There's chemistry or physics or bees or music or literature. They're just looking for students who are working on projects that have the potential to benefit society that these projects have legs that future science can be built off of them. That's what they're looking for. We get a lot of really great projects. It's really exciting to see these students who are our future working to make the world a better place. That's what the judges are looking for.

Jeff: Tacie, what is your role at the Davidson Fellows?

Tacie: I am the program manager. I opened the application in November. Right now, the 2024 application is open, so I'm reviewing applications now for next year or, well, I guess this year. I start to finish. I see all the applications come in. I do the entire judging process. Then when the students win, we have a party for them in Washington, DC. I manage all of that too.

Jeff: In short, you're the chief cook and bottle washer then?

Tacie: Yes, I guess so. [chuckles]

Jeff: Hey, let's get ready to talk to Anna. First, let's hear from our friends at Betterbee.

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[music]

Jeff: Thank you, Betterbee. Anna, welcome again to the podcast.

Anna Yang: Thank you.

Jeff: That sounds like a lot of hoops you jumped through to get to this point. All that just to be a guest on  Beekeeping Today Podcast. Why don't you give us a little bit of background about yourself?

Anna: I'm from California. How I started with beekeeping was my dad was a beekeeper when I was younger. He was very into the bees, so he wanted to get me involved. When I started off, I was actually scared of bees. He got me accustomed to the process of beekeeping and being close to the bees. Then, eventually, I just started doing it myself with him taking care of the bees. Then I also do some nonprofit work with bees where I'll go out to nearby community farms and gardens to give talks to other people about bees so that they can go through that process as well and then learn how important bees are for the environment and not to be scared of them either.

Jeff: You're 18 now, right?

Anna: Yes, I'm 18.

Jeff: How old were you when you started beekeeping with your dad?

Anna: I would say my dad got his first bees when I was maybe sixth grade and then I started beekeeping with him around a similar time.

Becky: Our listeners don't get to see you, Anna, but I asked you a question earlier. Can you tell everybody where you're recording this interview?

Anna: Yes, I'm in my friend's dorm at Stanford. [chuckles]

Becky: I think I see a bunk bed behind her. [laughs]

Anna: Yes.

Becky: This is the second semester of your first year at Stanford?

Anna: Yes. At Stanford, we go by the quarter system, so it's my second quarter.

Jeff: Are you keeping bees at Stanford?

Anna: Unfortunately not, but I do live 30 minutes away from home, so I can always go back.

Jeff: Oh, there you go. You can go home and visit them, "Hey, girls, I'm home." Tell us about your project. Give us a high-level view and then start to begin how you came up with it.

Anna: On a broader level, my project is trying to address the issue of queen failure, which I discovered was one of the leading causes of bee colony collapse. Then my project also touches on the idea of the queen's acceptance in the hive, where there's the process of introducing a new queen to the hive. I'm trying to find a better way to monitor the hive and the status of the queen, whether she's there or not and then also whether she's accepted or rejected by using machine learning and engineering. I developed the Smart Bee Colony Monitor, which is a system that involves data collection on my own hives and then using that data in machine learning to determine whether the queen is there or not, and then also whether she's accepted or not.

Jeff: See, Becky and I, you wondered why we invited Anna along because I'm the gadget geek. Half of Becky and I. I'm always interested in what's technology in the beehive, so we're going to have some fun now.

Becky: I'll just take a step back because Jeff has all the questions here on forward.

[laughter]

Jeff: No, no, jump in, Becky, because I'm going to lose my voice here shortly. How are you accomplishing that? Are you doing it through sound? Are you doing it through some sort of visual?

Anna: It's mostly through sound. I actually started the project because I'd heard about the idea of a queenless roar, which beekeepers can hear whether or not the queen is in the hive or not just by listening to the sound of the hive. My main goal in developing my project when I started off was to create a system that took advantage of this idea by using machine learning to detect whether or not the queen was in the hive based on the sound. It's mainly sound, but then I also did some research into what projects that other people had been working on.

A lot of what I saw was using solely sound and the accuracy wasn't as high as I expected it to be. I decided to also collect other variables about the hive when I was creating my dataset, so things like the time of the day, the temperature within the hive and the temperature outside, and other factors that I felt could affect the sound of the hive. By taking into account these other things like how there's more bees in the hive at night, but then they're also more lively in the daytime. Things like that that could affect the sound, that would also influence what the machine learning algorithm was doing.

Becky: Is the temperature impacted? Because if there isn't a queen in the hive, you don't have brood. Do you need to get to that point or is it a more subtle detection that you would sense?

Anna: I would say it's more subtle. My main reason for doing other variables was just to take into account, the factors that would influence the sound of the hive like the magnitude of the volume, things like that. In terms of the temperature of the hive itself, I was thinking, if there is more bees in there, the temperature would be more warm.

Then also the temperature outside if it was raining or if it was very cold, then the bees would all be inside, so then the sound would be louder. Then I also kept track of the time of the year, so seasons. Depending on the season, there might be more bees or less bees inside as well. Me personally, I don't always know exactly how these factors are going to influence the sound, but the machine learning algorithm was able to detect patterns like that.

Becky: I think we have to tell the listeners. Your accuracy is pretty incredible. Can you talk about that?

Anna: Yes, so I ran a ton of different machine learning algorithms, but my best one was able to do 91.8% accuracy on unseen data for detecting the presence of the queen within the hive.

Jeff: Can it do a health of the queen?

Anna: My project is just focused on whether or not the queen is there, yes.

Becky: Were you going into the hive, taking the queen out, and then starting the process, listening to the data? Then if yes, what was your time period where it started to make that detection that they were queenless?

Anna: In the process of collecting the data, there was a lot of trial and error. I wanted to make sure that the queen was safe when I took her out. Then I also wanted to keep my hives healthy, so I had to put her back within a certain time. Basically, what happened with my data collection was I recorded a couple of days with the original hive, and then I took the queen out. Then I recorded 48 hours max of that time and then I would put her back.

When I put the queen back, I was also trying to collect data on the queen's acceptance in the hive. I would switch the queens of two different hives, so then it would be a rejected queen. Then I would record that and then keep checking every day to check if she had been accepted or not. Then I would change the label on my data once she had become accepted.

Becky: That's really interesting. I think we all want to see those data. It sounds fascinating that you're able to track that. Are you putting the queen back in a queen cage?

Anna: Yes, I put her in a queen cage.

Jeff: How quickly do the bees notice when the queen is gone?

Anna: I actually am not very sure about that. When I was collecting my data, it was 48 hours maximum of the queen being gone. Since my machine learning results were so high, I would assume that they noticed pretty quickly because all of the data I was using was between immediately after I'd taken her out and then 48 hours after. The machine learning algorithm, it was able to detect that the queen was gone just from the sound of 48 hours.

Jeff: I could use that in my hives. I would know pretty quickly if I rolled a queen or not when checking-

Becky: Got to go back, yes.

Jeff: -while pulling frames.

Becky: The data showed very quickly after. It wasn't the 48 hours. It was shortly after she was removed?

Anna: Yes, so the way that I ran the data into the machine learning was that I had put all of my data into a clump and then I set it into the algorithm. It was pretty equally able to detect from the beginning part of that 48 hours and then the end of the 48 hours.

Becky: That's interesting because at the University of Minnesota, the beekeeping instruction, it used to be that you'd say before you place a new queen into a recently queenless colony, you give them 24 hours to adjust to being queenless. The new manual now says give them 30 minutes. If you give them 30 minutes, you put them in a queen cage, but you still get great acceptance. That matches your dataset really well.

Anna: Yes, that sounds really cool. I actually didn't know that, yes.

Jeff: That is interesting. Here we are, the gadgets thing. Were your sensors off-the-shelf sensors? How did you build your sensors?

Anna: All of my sensors, I built myself because everything that I looked online was very expensive, or it wasn't well-developed, or it wasn't what I wanted for my project. Since I wanted to collect different variables along with the sound, I put a microphone along with a temperature, humidity, air pressure sensor. Then I also pulled weather data from online weather API. Then I was able to get the live feedback of what the weather was, what the sound was in the hive, and then also temperature, humidity, and air pressure within the hive.

Jeff: Are these big sensors or are they small?

Anna: They're very small.

Jeff: Wow, that's amazing. Do you have the electrical engineering background or anybody help you with that? A student there help you with the building of the sensors?

Anna: I personally don't have an electrical engineering background. Honestly, everything is online nowadays. I would search on little engineering forums. If I had a problem with my code, I'd be debugging. I was googling, "What's the best microphone?" I was looking at other research papers of what microphones they used and issues they encountered. I was able to figure that out after a whole summer of tinkering.

Becky: That's impressive because I'm pretty sure if you put the same problem before me and I was able to google it as much as possible, I wouldn't come up with the same answer. Mine would be wrong, [laughs] so I like that.

Jeff: What are the next steps for your research?

Anna: For my results, I was thinking about this because it was actually a question on the application for Davidson Fellows. There's just so many directions that I feel this can go, so I put my dataset online for everyone to access. I hope that other scientists or beekeepers can use that to their advantage and build their own projects. Me personally, the way I see things going, I want to really improve my dataset for the queen acceptance variables because my model didn't perform as well on that.

I want to know exactly why whether the sound is just not correlated with acceptance or if I recorded something wrong. I want to collect more data on that. Then something else that I was considering was monitoring other variables like CO2 levels since CO2 levels can also tell you the activity of the hive and how productive the bees are. Then that can also indicate whether or not the queen is there.

Jeff: What race of bees did you use?

Anna: All of the bees that I have are just the classic European honeybees. Those were the ones that I used, but that would also be a really interesting thing to be able to collect data about different species or races of the bees and then see if there's a difference with the sound as well, yes.

Becky: You did the project and then you applied for the award. Did you have support when you were doing the project? Did you have a relationship with a lab or something like that?

Anna: Yes, I did have support. I reached out to a professor that I think is pretty big in the beekeeping community, Zachary Huang.

Becky: Oh, Zach. [laughs]

Anna: Yes, everyone I talk to about bees knows him.

Becky: Yes. [chuckles]

Anna: He really helped me out with this project. He gave me the idea to actually monitor the acceptance of the queen because he said that was a topic that he was interested in and there wasn't any research done about sound and acceptance correlation. He was able to assist my project in that way. Then in my process of data collection, I actually would inspect the hive every time, every day to check if the queen was accepted. I would take a video of the queen cage and the bee behavior and then send it over to Zach. Then he would tell me whether or not the queen was accepted. I think that was pretty incredible as well.

Becky: That's great. He's at MSU, so Michigan State University. You didn't get a chance to travel to Michigan State, did you?

Anna: No, I didn't.

Becky: Okay, you should put that on your list because that's where Dr. Meghan Milbrath is. On a heck of an extension, that'd be a good week for you.

Jeff: What's next for you in your studies? Are you going to continue anything else with the honeybees?

Anna: Yes, I think I will. I'm definitely going to go back to the community farms and check on the beehives that I started there and then go back to my home. At Stanford, I'm planning on studying computer science. That makes some sense with the machine learning of the project. Then I also want to work on machine learning in other fields alongside beekeeping. I'm definitely going to keep up with the advancements of monitoring beehive technology.

Jeff: There is a lot of work being done right now around the world on beehive or honeybee monitoring. Dr. Kirsten Traynor is doing a work with optical sensing of pollinators in a field and being able to distinguish one pollinator from another just by the, what did she say, the color differences in the field of flowers. It's pretty amazing. The research, you can pretty much choose whatever interests your way in that field.

Becky: Yes, I love the idea that you might go on to graduate work and bring computer science to the beekeeping world. That's much needed.

Jeff: I know that with you there working on the datasets and everything, I can go to ChatGPT and ask it how to keep my bees alive through the winter. I'll have a good answer come up and say, "Anna says to--"

[laughter]

Becky: You can influence the engines. [laughs]

Jeff: That's right.

Becky: Anna, you mentioned it earlier, but I was on your website for your-- is it an official nonprofit, your organization? Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Anna: The nonprofit that I started, the main goal was to get more youth involved in the process of beekeeping while spreading awareness to the community about the importance of bees because I feel like a lot of people just in urban life don't really think about bees, don't think about the way that our living has impacted both wild bees and bees in our backyards. Basically, me and another small team of high school students, we go out to different community farms and locations like elementary schools.

We've been to the local farmer's market in my town. We just spread awareness on the impact of bees on our ecosystem and try to make it more accessible for people to start backyard beekeeping because that's the main place where bees are in these urban environments. Then we also started a hive at Taylor Street Farm, which is a community education garden in downtown San Jose. We keep bees there and then the bees are very happy in the farm with the garden and all the vegetables and fruits.

Becky: What's the name of your organization?

Anna: The name is The Bee Initiative.

Becky: I will include a link to it in the show notes, but there's a lovely YouTube presentation that you and I believe the other co-founder of the organization give a very impressive presentation with graphics that are amazing. Your website's amazing. It's really impressive. I loved the fact that you've targeted your audience that you cap off at 19. I assume you'll let people learn if they're older, but I love that you are really focused and you have a good goal, a good achievable goal.

Anna: Yes, thank you.

Jeff: Is there anything we haven't asked you about that you want to make sure that our listeners know?

Anna: I guess just that anyone can start doing research in bees. If there's any issue that you're interested in, there's so many resources online now that it's so accessible to get involved. I feel like just like as the bee monitoring technology is developing so quickly, I encourage everyone to just go look online. See if anything available applies to you or your bees or any issues that you're having. It's so easy to take a look at it and get involved in this sort of technology application on beekeeping.

Jeff: Did you have a one go-to source online other than the Google search bar?

Anna: Honestly, no. Everything's just so spread out across the internet. There's just resources everywhere, yes.

Jeff: Absolutely.

Becky: I don't know if you've thought about presenting at any of your local bee conferences, but I bet they would love to hear about your project. I equally bet that it would be fun for you to meet some of the scientists and beekeepers and there may be some great connections there.

Anna: Thank you. Yes, I'll definitely look into that.

Jeff: Well, Anna, it's been a pleasure having you on the show today, learning about your research. You've inspired me to go out and dust off the sensors that are in my garage, get them ready for the spring. I suppose I'm too old to enter in the next year's science-- Is Tacie still here? Maybe I'm too old for that, but I can still dream. I can still dream.

Becky: I think Anna's got this covered. Sorry to interrupt. I just want to interrupt. Anna's got this covered, Jeff. [laughs]

Jeff: All right, all right.

Becky: I bet you could send her an email and ask her some questions.

Jeff: Yes, that's right. That's right. How do I plug this in? [laughs] Tacie, appreciate you being here and telling us about the fellowship program and welcome either of you back at any time in the future to talk about anything honeybees. We're here.

Tacie: Great. Thank you so much.

Becky: Yes, thanks to both of you.

Anna: Thank you for having me.

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Jeff: I don't know what you were doing when you were 18, Becky, but I know I wasn't sitting around searching on the internet and trying to figure out how to wire things together and come up with a project called "Internet of Things Device Infusion Convolutional Neural Network for Queen Assessment." It was not on the top of my mind.

Becky: I was pretty motivated, but I wasn't there either. When Tacie said that it was a college-level project, I heard it and I said, "Okay. Obviously, the title matches that." When Anna was talking about how she actually-- She put this together. She didn't walk into somebody's lab and say, "Hey, what can I do?" She literally put the idea together, went and found an expert in Zach Huang, and literally just put it all together. I don't know. She deserved every penny of that scholarship money. We're lucky as an industry that she's on our side.

Jeff: It's simply amazing. I like the fact that it all started out with helping her dad in the bee yard as a young child. I think all of us can take some bit of joy with that. Whether it's our own children or other children, we get help and get started with bees. They can lead to great things.

Becky: Absolutely. So many of the beekeeping clubs out there have youth scholarship programs and youth mentoring opportunities. Anna's the reason why you want to get the youth involved into being curious and helpful about solutions to honeybee health problems.

Jeff: 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, 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 along the top of any web page.

We want to thank our regular episode sponsors, Betterbee, Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and Northern Bee Books for their generous support. Finally and most importantly, we want to thank you, the  Beekeeping Today Podcast listener, for joining us on this show. Feel free to leave us questions and comments at the Leave a Comment section under each episode on the website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

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