Dr. Kaira Wagoner: Hygienic Bee Behavior (S6, E47)

S6, E47 - Dr. Kaira Wagoner: Hygienic Bee Behavior

Fran Miller: Hi. This is Fran Miller from Minooka, Illinois. Welcome to  Beekeeping Today  podcast.

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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. 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'll 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.

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'll 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, a 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 on 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, thanks a lot, Fran, for that fantastic opening from Minooka, Illinois. Have you ever been to Minooka?

Becky: I have not been to Minooka. I've been to Illinois quite a lot. There's a possibility I drove through Minooka, but I'd have to Google it.

Jeff: I have to honestly say, I don't even know where Minooka is. Fran, we hope you're kicking off a great season there in Minooka and it's going to be a good bee season.

Becky: I bet the bees are thinking about swarming in Minooka right now. It's such an early season. I'm assuming you're going through the same thing too, right, Jeff?

Jeff: Yes. Last year we had swarms about two weeks early, so I'm expecting the same. It was just bees in the air, and in the trees, all over the place. What are you going to do this year to prevent that?

Becky: Last year I was lucky because I had colonies swarm into an empty apiary where I had the bear damage. That was exciting. I'm certainly going to do a little bit more of that and have a little empty equipment available in case anybody wants to join my apiaries. I have already been dividing bees. It's very early. Usually, we do it mid-May, but my colonies, they were just really way too big and I needed to do something. Despite the fact that queens aren't readily available yet for us, I am starting to split. What about you?

Jeff: Do you call them splits or divides?

Becky: I like to use both terms. If we want to go retro, it's a fake swarm. A divide is really just you swarming for the colony so that they don't do it themselves. What do you use?

Jeff: Splits.

Becky: Splits?

Jeff: I call it splits. Always have.

Becky: 90% of the time when I talk about it, I call them divides just because I just grew up with the dividing colonies language.

Jeff: Fair enough. Like you said, it's a great way, I won't say great because it's not always 100% effective, but it is a management technique to minimize swarms in the spring and also increase your number of colonies.

Becky: Sometimes colonies brood up so much that taking more than one divide out of a colony doesn't hurt it and it's actually not a bad way to help control mites, thus making the brood nest smaller. There's a better chance that when you intervene, you can knock them down. It is something that is so helpful. You're right, it's not 100% effective, but it is something that can make a big difference. I can say that if you don't divide or split your colonies, you have a really high chance of your foraging force, including your honey surplus for the year, flying out of your colony and going someplace else. [laughs]

Jeff: To the happy beekeeper down the street.

Becky: Hopefully, it's me actually. No, I'm kidding. I would rather that people get to keep their bees. [laughs]

Jeff: Certainly. Question on splits/divides. Do you do walk-away splits or-- I'm going to just stay with splits so I don't keep stepping on myself.

Becky: [laughs] That's fine.

Jeff: When you do splits, do you do walk-away splits and let them requeen themselves or do you buy queens and introduce new bloodlines into your yard?

Becky: I do both. I have one apiary that's just pretty much magical for walk-aways and I have a really high success rate with some great queens. Honestly, if I'm dividing earlier, I don't really have queens available, but I love buying new queens. I love putting new stock into the yard, so I do do both.

Jeff: Do you buy them from out-of-state beekeeper or do you produce them yourself?

Becky: I have reared queens myself. I went to Indiana last year for a talk and they happened to be selling queens where I was giving the talk, so I bought some of their queens. That was fun. We have a great local supplier that I'm able to buy queens from, so many sources. I don't get them through the mail, which you certainly can do. I just haven't had to. How about you?

Jeff: I typically buy them because I just don't have the calendar that makes queen rearing a good thing for me. If you're going to raise queens, you are on their schedule, there's no if, ands, or buts about it. I just have never gotten into it.

Becky: It's fun to raise your own queens, but there's nothing like missing a calendar date and having them all emerge in the finishing colony and all of your work is for nothing.[laughs] It has to happen once to everybody when they raise their own queens.

Jeff: It's a self-correcting mistake I think.

Becky: You get really good at counting days. You got to count the egg stage, hence that 16 is plus or minus a day as far as the day that the queen emerges.

Jeff: We have so much to talk about. Today's guest, Kaira Wagoner, is here from Optera to talk to us about hygienic behavior and a new product they have out to help identify the bees with hygienic behaviors. I hope we'll learn more about that. First, let's hear from our friends. Oh, we have two friends to introduce today. Let's hear from our friends at Bee Smart Designs and Strong Microbials.

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Jeff: Hey, thanks a lot, Bee Smart Designs and Strong Microbials. Hey, everybody, welcome back. Sitting around the  Beekeeping Today podcast table right now with Becky and me is Dr. Kaira Wagoner of Optera. Kaira, welcome to the show.

Kaira Wagoner: Thanks so much for having me.

Jeff: Thanks for joining us on the show. I will say being a couple of aisles over, an aisle over from your booth at the North American Honey Bee Expo, you were in many ways, much of the talk about the show because they were so inspired by what you were displaying. I wanted to bring you here so you could talk to us about, one, your product, and also the underlying biology, the underlying hygienic behavior, and processes underneath it that make it so valuable for beekeepers. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and then we'll talk about Optera?

Kaira: I am a scientist, a researcher. This whole head of entrepreneur thing is pretty new to me. I started out as a chemistry major actually in college, and then I got scared of P-chem. Physical chemistry is a lot of math and I was like, "Okay, let's go with biology." I always had that chemistry background and interest, and then I pursued biology. I've always really liked ecology and behavioral biology, so studying how things behave and watching things. I've always been a nature lover. I think I really came to this product, this UBeeO naturally based on my interests starting as a kid in peanut butter and honey, of course, but also in nature and biology. I actually did a master's in mosquito ecology. I was looking at chemicals on the surfaces of mosquitoes.

I had a good friend of mine pass away from malaria, and that inspired me to go back to grad school actually and study those mosquitoes. That's how I got into mosquitoes. A professor was coming in right as I came in and had this project idea related to chemicals. I said, "Sure, let's do it. Let's figure it out." That was a great fun master's. I went to the NIH Laboratory over the summer up in DC or outside of DC and studied those mosquitoes. Then I decided for my PhD, I wanted to switch into a beneficial insect. I was really interested in pursuing honey bees. I loved working with mosquitoes, but I didn't want to always try to kill my subject matter.

I was like, "Oh, let me work with honey bees." Of course, now all I'm trying to do is kill varroa. [laughter] We ended up in the same place in some ways. Now, I love working with bees. I got into bees with Olav Rueppell as my PhD advisor. Olav actually asked me a fantastic question in the first meeting I ever had with him. He was like, "Okay, you want to work with bees, that's great." He's like, "Well, tell me, what are your strengths? What are you good at?" Then I was like, "Well, I know how to work this GC-MS machine. That took a while to figure out." He's like, "Great, let's do it." He got me into the idea of looking into chemical signaling of honey bee brood, and that's where it all began.

Jeff: You used an acronym. What is that?

Kaira: Sorry, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. That's a machine that we call it GC-MS for short because that's a mouthful. Basically, what it allows you to do is figure out what chemicals are present and how much of each chemical, at least relative to the other chemicals in your sample is present. It was really beneficial in being able to say, "Well, we want to see what are these hygiene signals?"

We knew a lot about hygienic adult bees being able to detect that something was wrong in the cell. Our question was, what are they detecting? At that time, there were some studies that said it was chemicals. Some people were saying, "Well, it may be movement or the varroa itself." Our goal was really to figure out what it was that those adult bees were detecting. That's the basis of my research.

Jeff: I'm going to ask you to step back real quick. Hygienic behavior, and that's what you're working with. Can you describe what is hygienic behavior in honey bees?

Kaira: Sure. Hygienic behavior is the ability to detect and uncap or remove unhealthy brood from the colony. It's a common behavior in honey bees. My understanding is that every colony does this to some extent. It's just that some colonies are much better at it than others, it's a genetic trait. Because some colonies are better than others and it's genetic, we can select for that trait in our colonies when we breed for a new generation of queens. That's what makes UBeeO useful as a tool, is that we can select future queens to be better and better at carrying out this behavior.

Becky: Hygienic behavior is such an important tool for beekeepers because we know that we have to control mite populations. If you can select for bees that are able to use hygienic behavior as a way to decrease mite populations, then theoretically you have to use less and less chemical control for those mites. In an ideal world, our bees will take care of themselves.

Kaira: It's great for the lazy beekeeper or at least the busy beekeeper.

Jeff: There you go.

Kaira: Because actually, the bee is doing that work for you. Rather than you having to deal with the mites, they can deal with the mites.

Jeff: As a beekeeper, can I open a hive and take a look at a frame, or 2, or 3, or 10, and determine whether or not my bees are exhibiting a hygienic behavior? Is it something I can observe on one pass?

Kaira: There are definitely some signs. You can look for things bald brood, you can assume, I think, if you have things like chalkbrood or a lot of foulbrood issues, things like that that you probably don't have very hygienic bees. There have been some ways of testing for hygiene that involve a little bit more than just opening the colony and looking in, but doing some active tests. I think traditionally those methods of measuring hygiene, they've had the problem of having a trade-off between the effectiveness of determining how hygienic your colony is and labor cost involved in performing that test.

Either they were really effective at determining varroa-sensitive hygiene, for example, of the colony, but they took a long time to perform, maybe two or three hours per colony to measure it, or they were pretty quick to do, but less reliable in terms of the results. One thing I've tried to do with UBeeO is eliminate that trade-off, where we have now this method for testing for hygienic behavior that's both very efficient, it's very fast to do this test, but it's also very effective in determining how resistant to mites and other diseases your colony is.

Becky: I think the word you're looking for and you might not use it, but it's elegant. You have a very elegant assay that is easy to use and eliminates a big vat of liquid nitrogen or other tools. We used to have to take a knife to our-- It was old beeswax foundation with wire in the frames and we'd have to have a wire cutter, and we'd cut out squares of brood. We'd put them in the freezer for at least 24 hours, then we'd go back and put the assay in, and then come back and read the assay. I think if you describe what your assay does, people are going to be really impressed. It's very elegant.

Jeff: If I can step through that. If that was, let's say, several years ago, I don't know how long ago.

Becky: Decades. [laughs]

Jeff: Decades ago, when you were cutting out chunks of a brood frame-

Becky: Decades.

Jeff: -and putting it back in 24 hours later. I've seen video and I've talked to others, and you alluded to it, they freeze-dry it, or not freeze-dry, but they-

Becky: Liquid nitrogen.

Jeff: -use liquid nitrogen in a cup of a certain size. They get the circle of a known size, and quantity, and roughly the same number of bees, and then they can measure that square or that circle of bees to know how much taken out, but they were frozen, the bees taken out. It's a little bit easier than the 24-hour turnaround.

Kaira: This test is really rapid. With two people working in a full workday, eight-hour workday, we can probably get through pretty easily 60 colonies. It's pretty quick. That's not accidental, it's by design. One of the things I learned as a PhD student is it's much better to work smart [laughter] if you can. I would just exhaust myself with counting to 160. It was about 160 cells in that freeze-kill brood PVC pipe circle that you're talking about. I can't tell you how many times I counted to 160 to count all the cells in there.

What I wanted to do with this assay, I'm not against working hard, but if you can get the same result from working smart, why not? I just shrunk it down to about a quarter of the area. This assay now has about 45 or 50 cells. We started with the big one, but I thought why not see if it works with a smaller test area? Now the PVC pipe that we use to mark out the test area covers just about 45 or 50 cells. It's just one less step or that much less time spent counting, and we still get a really accurate result.

Jeff: I'm looking forward to hearing more about the UBeeO tool that you have or the process and product. We'll be right back after a quick word from our friends at Betterbee.

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Betterbee: Give your buzzing buddies the ultimate upgrade with BetterComb. Accelerate your bee colonies growth and honey production with our innovative solution. Made from the synthetic wax that mirrors the qualities of natural beeswax, BetterComb offers a clean slate for your bees to thrive without any pesticide or disease residue. Don't compromise on quality, opt for BetterComb and watch your colonies flourish. Learn more at betterbee.com/bettercomb. Kaira, we've been talking about the assay, but let's talk to the backyard beekeeper who's, for example, a member of a beekeeping organization and they want to see if their colonies are hygienic. Can you tell us what steps they would take as far as the UBeeO product?

Kaira: Sure. First, I'll say that if you have not purchased a queen that's labeled as hygienic or VSH, you probably are not going to be very happy with UBeeO tests, if you run those tests, or unless you've done some selection on your own, but this is a tough test to pass. This is your MCAT or something right here. The UBeeO assay is if you score high on the test, if you get 60% cell cap manipulation within two hours, you can feel pretty confident that that colony could survive the winter without any mite treatments. That's just not the majority of colonies. To the backyard beekeeper who wants to test, I would definitely encourage that.

I would say, if you're interested in growing hygiene in your apiary and you're not a breeder, I would start by trying to purchase hygienic queens. One problem with hygienic queens right now, the way they're marketed, I think is that they are sold as hygienic, but they are actually not tested. The reality is their mother was hygienic, but they themselves have not been tested. We know that through each generation, on average you're going to lose some of those hygienic genes, those hygienic tendencies. It is really important to test the queens that you get to be able to improve the hygiene level in your apiary.

Now, if you want to understand how hygienic your colonies are, you can get UBeeO and test each colony. You can start, even if you don't have hygienic queens in your colonies, you're going to have some variation probably. You may have no high scores, but you may have some medium scores or some moderate scores. That's useful to know because if you lose a queen and you know the hygienic state of your other colonies, you can then pull eggs from that highest scoring colony that's in your apiary and start already increasing the average score in your apiary.

You can also encourage drone production in those colonies that score higher and try to boost the hygiene level that way. When it comes to beekeeping groups and organizations, if you can decide as an organization that you're interested in hygiene and in developing rural resistance, whether it's grooming, or hygiene, or whatever mechanism you want to encourage within your group, doing something like that as a group has huge benefits because you can do all kinds of really fancy insemination work and breeding.

If your natural mating and your next door neighbor has drones that don't have those traits, you're going to constantly be battling dilution of those genes. If you can get your neighbors to have good drones and other people in your community to have the same goal of working towards high hygienic colonies, then you're going to be more successful yourself.

Becky: I see this as a really fun grant proposal. I know that a lot of department of AG for the different states have grants that beekeepers can apply to, but it seems like just a slam dunk to say, we want to promote integrated pest management. To do this, we'd like to map out our organizations, colonies, test them for hygienic behavior, and try to increase the use of hygienic queens in the apiaries. Then also use this assay so that we can actually see the results.

Kaira: Absolutely. I think there are already some groups doing that through Sarah Grants and others. I really think that's a great way to go because like I said, if you can get the whole community on board, you're going to get where you want to be faster because your neighbor's drones are really important to your queens' success.

Becky: [laughter] That seems like a slogan that you could write down someplace. [laughter] See how important the drones are Jeff, you wanted that in an episode.

Jeff: That's right.

Becky: We're saying they're valuable in this episode.

Kaira: It's true. I think a lot of breeders actually that I've talked to, they give their neighbors free queens because they're like, "Look, I want my genetics in your yard." They'll actually distribute their own queens for free just to make sure that their neighbors have high-quality genetics that their naturally mated queens have access to.

Jeff: Actually, that's a great idea. I've not heard of of anybody really doing that, but for clubs, especially if they have a queen rearing group that they could raise the hygienic queens and then just give them out to the club members who want them, that'd be great.

Kaira: Absolutely. The benefit financially with UBeeO is we give big discounts on bulk orders.

Becky: Speaking of discounts, but actually speaking of queen breeders, this has to be just a game changer for operations that are raising their own queens. Did you have lots of great conversations at the national meetings this year with queen breeders? Are they excited about this?

Kaira: I think the queen breeders are really excited about this. I have recently had a third son and so was not able to be-- Even at NAHBE, my business partner, Phoebe Snyder, was representing our booth there and did a great job. It was essentially the launch of our product and it's something I've been building over 13 years of research. I was sending her off with my science baby, and I wasn't able to go and launch it. Despite not being able to be there in person, I've had a lot of great conversations with breeders and beekeepers. There's a ton of excitement around UBeeO and the potential it has. It's a very young technology.

I've been working on the science behind it for 13 years, figuring out what these chemicals are that are unhealthy brood odors and developing this product, but the product actually being used on the market is very new. Obviously, we just launched in January, but I've been working with breeders and beekeepers for two or three years before that. We do have some very promising data, but it's not like we know what happens five years after you start breeding with UBeeO because we're not there yet. I think there's a lot of enthusiasm about what we've seen in this short time, it's been available, and what's possible moving forward.

That's not only here in the US, honestly, my inbox is slammed. We have interest from across the world. Many listeners may know that Australia saw their first varroa introduced last June, I guess a year and a half ago now or almost two years ago. They've been unsuccessful at stopping the spread, eradicating varroa as they'd hoped. There's a lot of concern there about the spread of varroa and a lot of interest in Australia in UBeeO. There's a movement across Europe to reach varroa resistance by the year 2033, it's a big initiative. There seems to be some interest in multiple countries, both related to that initiative and outside of that initiative in exploring UBeeO.

Then also we've been working with some Canadian beekeepers and breeders over the past several years who have had pretty good success with UBeeO and are excited to move it forward. Lots of interest. It's a really exciting time, honestly. I feel really privileged to be here and to be able to hopefully provide something that really helps the bees and also helps beekeepers, but also to be able to work doing the thing that I love, which is beekeeping and being outside in nature and in my hive.

Jeff: I want to jump to the UBeeO product. I think you touched on it, but I don't know if we spent much time there. The hygienic behavior is based upon the assumption I guess, or the observation that the sick or diseased brood under the capping emits a pheromone. Is that correct? That a passing nurse bee, worker bee says, "Hey, something smells wrong here," and opens the cell and removes the larva underneath it or the pupae, is that correct?

Kaira: Yes. That's where my research started. We wanted to see what's the chemical that's being emitted by these unhealthy brood? We looked at what chemicals were present on healthy larvae or pupae, and we compared that to the chemicals that were present on unhealthy pupae. We used varroa because we know that's important. We found actually the same chemicals are elevated on sick bees that had in our example, high virus levels, even if a varroa was not present.

It seems to be a general signal for unhealthiness. The idea is the brood emits this signal, and then the nurse bee comes along, and there are nurse bees that have the task of hygiene. It's just a few individuals. It's maybe a couple of hundred individuals in the colony. It really doesn't seem to be that many, maybe depending on the disease load, but this hygienic bee comes along. If there's a problem, the nurse bee can detect which cell or approximately which cell the problem is coming from and uncap it. I say approximately because now we know that hygiene tends to occur in little clusters around an infested cell. What we think is happening is these volatile chemicals are coming out of the cell and they're attracting the nurse bee to the general area. Then there are some other chemicals that are a little bit bigger, a little bit bulkier, and are not as volatile. Those help guide the bee more closely to the actual cell that has the problem in it.

Then they can uncap that cell. Some of Marla Spivak's work showed that it's actually a different bee that comes along and makes the decision to either remove that individual because it's unhealthy or to recap that cell. I think the bottleneck in terms of finding the problem is the one that does that uncapping. That's where UBeeO comes in as we've based this test on the ability of the colonies to uncap, to recognize that that first issue is present, and to respond to it with uncapping. Once the cell is uncapped, it's easy for that other bee to come along, throw the antenna down in there, and see what the problem is.

Becky: When you were doing your research, you had to do doses or concentrations. Did you find that a little bit was good, but a lot was too much, it was too confusing, and how do you warn beekeepers as far as using the right amount in the assay?

Kaira: There's definitely a dose response. The more you put on, the more likely they are to respond. What we're looking for is that right sensitivity in the bee's antenna to detect it at a threshold that's relevant to what's actually happening in the colony. The UBeeO assay comes with a spray applicator. You have a certain dosage that you have to apply to run the UBeeO test. It's all very controlled in the test and easy to perform. One thing I'll say about hygiene too that I think is just super fascinating is that it's not just honey bees, there are other species that perform this behavior.

In ants, they found that ant pupae that are unhealthy are actually targeted, they call it unpacking in the ant world, I guess, but it's really the same thing as hygiene. These ant pupae that are sick are targeted for unpacking and removal by worker ants. It turns out that one of the chemicals that these ants release is the same chemical that I found in the sick honey bees. It's really cool that this may go back evolutionarily for a long time as a way for social insects to say, "Hey, there's a problem. I need you to be paying attention here, come check this out. If you need to sacrifice me, that's okay." For a long time we debated, is this a cue?

Is this something that the bee is unhealthy and so it just happens to release this chemical because it's unhealthy, it doesn't mean to, or is the bee being altruistic? Is the bee actually intending to signal, "Hey, come and get me, sacrifice me, I'm not well." We know adult bees can act altruistically. A sick adult bee will leave the colony. If you put her back, she'll leave again. They will remove themselves and they actually can pass more of their own genes on that way. The worker bee can't reproduce herself unless there's an absent queen and she's producing drones, but really the worker bee passes her genes on by helping her sisters survive.

She can actually be altruistic and improve her genes passing to the next generation through that altruism. A recent study just came out, it's actually a pre-print. It hasn't been peer-reviewed yet, but they did this amazing study with ants. They showed that the ants are only releasing this chemical, again, that same one that's released with hygiene and honey bees, they're only releasing it in the presence of worker ants. It shows that it's not just the fact that they're sick, but it's actually an intentional signal, an altruistic signal to say, "Hey, something's wrong, remove me." I think it's so fascinating. Sorry, I'm geeking out-- [crosstalk]

Jeff: Thank you.

Becky: I'm right there with you. That is absolutely so interesting because the hygienic behavior was such a honeybee phenomenon years ago. I think it was first described in the '60s, although probably first identified before that, but that is to have it go into the ants and be identified, now you have to look in other places too.

Kaira: If people are interested, the first author on that is Dawson. It popped into my email box this week.

Becky: Oh, that's exciting.

Kaira: I encourage people to check it out. It's really cool.

Jeff: A beekeeper who's raising queens and interested in propagating hygienic behavior would perform a assay on their bees. It used to be done by chunking up pieces of colony and freezing them, bringing them back 24 hours later. Thank you, Becky.

Becky: That was the old days.

Jeff: [laughter] Then later years, using the liquid nitrogen. Now we have UBeeO. Describe the process of applying this if I was to raise queens this summer and I'm going to test my bees.

Kaira: I think if you're breeding queens, the first thing to remember is there's so many other important traits to look for besides hygiene. You do not want a hygienic colony that doesn't produce honey, or that's really small, or that's really mean or defensive. I would say the first thing is to find your best colonies for all the other reasons. Then once you have your best colonies together, take those and you're going to run a UBeeO test on them. You select a frame with capped brood. You use that little piece of PVC pipe that we have in the kit to mark a test area, you spray the compounds on.

Then there's a solvent, kind of a carrier that we have to dilute the pheromones in so we can deliver them to the capped brood. You wait for that solvent to evaporate, takes 20 seconds, it's pretty quick. Throw the frame back into the colony for two hours, and then you pull it back out. Basically, all you're going to do is quantify. You take a picture initially and then you take a picture at the time when you pull it out after two hours. Then you just quantify the number of cap cells that were there in the beginning and the number that are still fully capped at the end. That's going to give you your UBeeO score. The more cells that are manipulated, the higher the score is.

Jeff: A manipulated would be just open, touched, not necessarily the pupa removed.

Kaira: Like I said before, once the cell is uncapped, it's really easy for that other bee to just stick an antenna in. The hard part is detecting the problem and uncapping. We actually count anything from a small pin prick opening to a fully uncapped or even sometimes removed cell as a manipulated cell. One thing that I think we still have a lot of work on is we've noticed or we have data now to show that it's not just mites that high UBeeO colonies are resistant to, they also have lower virus loads, and not just viruses that are spread by mites, but other viruses as well. They have lower Nosema loads, they have lower chalkbrood loads.

One thing we're starting to realize is there's different UBeeO thresholds for different diseases. If your issue is chalkbrood, from the data that we have from Australia, it looks like you really only need to score 20% or higher on the UBeeO assay to be resistant to chalkbrood. If you want to be resistant to varroa, you need to score 60% or higher. One thing we still have to work on is figuring out what are the thresholds for the different diseases.

I think that just has to do with the damage that the disease does to the brood. Chalkbrood, obviously, is like killing the brood. It's much stinkier, I imagine, for the adult bees so it's easier to detect. They don't have to be as sensitive as they do to find a bee that's infested with varroa.

Jeff: Once I know my UBeeO score, then I can go forward with whether I want to carry on genetics of that particular colony or not. That's the ideal here or that's the purpose of the UBeeO.

Kaira: Right. The purpose is to give you that hygienic score. It's not only useful for breeding, we've been talking a lot about breeding, but it's also useful for management. Some people want to reduce their treatments or not treat colonies that don't need it. One thing you can do also is say, "Hey, I want to know which of my colonies are varroa resistant and which aren't. Then I want to be able to treat and maybe monitor more closely the ones that are susceptible to varroa and the ones that are resistant to varroa or have a high UBeeO score. I don't need to check for mites all the time. I may not need to treat them. I can maybe check once and see how they're doing." I think there's a lot of management potential here. It goes all the way up to the commercial size beekeeper. If you, for example, don't want to put those treatments into your breeder queens for breeders or commercial apiaries to avoid-- We know that some of those mite treatments can affect semen quality and other things.

You can find which are your colonies that you want to breed from, not treat them, maybe even move them to a treatment-free yard, streamline your operation, "Okay, this is my treatment yard, all the mite bombs go over here. We know we're just going to need to go to this yard, and treat all the time, and monitor. In this yard, we know that they're highly resistant. We shouldn't see a lot of mites, but we can still monitor occasionally." I think there's not only breeding potential, but also management potential with UBeeO.

Becky: I need to know, is your apiary full of high scores?

Kaira: One of them. I actually have to keep bringing in low colonies for research purposes. I designed this for an experiment, but I've kept it that way. I have a high UBeeO apiary where I tried to keep only colonies that score 60 or above there, and then a low UBeeO apiary where I keep them all low. Then I have my middles where they don't quite make the cut on the high apiary, but I don't really want them bringing up the low scores either.

Jeff: I have to ask, in your high UBeeO score yard, are they of any particular race of bee or are they all mutts, for lack of a better term?

Kaira: They're primarily Italians. I bring in bees from different breeders that have been doing selection work. This is my university apiary. I have colonies or queens from the Pol-line. 8, 10 years ago, I was bringing in the USDA's VSH line. I have the Minnesota hygienics, I have VSH queens from Cory Stevens. I just tried to collect as many different high UBeeO colonies. I also brought in some Russians, just trying to see where the UBeeO stands in different lines of bees. I think it's never a good idea to just look at one population with research, you have to bring them in from everywhere. Now, it's just a lot of mutts. I keep bringing in new genetics every year.

Jeff: I'm not surprised, but it'd be fun to say, "Oh, yes, they're all from Joe's bees and he--"

Becky: It doesn't work like that.

Jeff: It doesn't, so sorry.

Becky: We don't want it to because we want a lot of diverse genetics in our bee supply. We don't want to just go to one line. I know Marla was worried about that when the Minnesota hygienic line became so popular. There's also the realization that, "Wait, we don't want everybody buying the same kind of bee. We want lots of different great strains of bees."

Kaira: Actually, that's one thing I'm hoping UBeeO will do, is in some ways, democratize the breeding aspect. A lot of people are focusing, I think more and more on locally adapted bees. I spoke with beekeepers up in Vermont who are like, "Hey, we really want to select for hygienic behavior, but we can't keep bringing in these bees from Louisiana and Georgia that don't have any winter tolerance." It was important for them to be able to select for hygiene within their locally adapted bees.

What I'm hoping is that in the long run, UBeeO will actually help improve diversity because we can get a lot of people breeding on a smaller scale instead of having just queen breeders that are producing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of queens and shipping them everywhere. That can be useful and we need queens to be produced, but it's also important to be able to have that ability to select locally for those locally adapted traits.

Jeff: Kaira, it's been a fascinating hour. I can't believe the time has already gone by so fast. The Optera tool, I call them tool, but it's a tool in the tool belt of a beekeeper and it's really cool. Is there anything that we haven't asked you about that you want to tell us and our listeners?

Kaira: What's next I guess is something I can touch on a little bit. One thing we know about UBeeO is that-- I'll broaden that. One thing we know about behavior is it's messy. Anytime you want to measure behavior, there's so many factors, so many environmental factors, and that's especially true with bees, and UBeeO is not an exception. What we know is there are environmental effects on UBeeO scores, and we want to better understand those effects. We've done some tests.

One thought I had was, "Well, it doesn't matter if you have a screen bottom board versus a solid bottom board." That's going to affect the airflow, that could affect their ability to smell, no effect. We found no effect. We have found some other variables that do have an effect. There was a study done that showed that use of a smoker can actually dull the ability of adult bees to smell for about 20 minutes. That's probably why it helps them chill out.

Jeff: You're just exciting Becky because she does not like smokers.

Kaira: I love smokers.

Becky: I encourage the use of smoke, [laughs] but I love that data, sorry.

Kaira: That's probably how it works. It dulls their senses, they're not as receptive to that alarm pheromone. We were like, "Well, that's great if you're just going into your colony to check on things." If you're running a test that's based on their ability to smell that's only two hours, 20 minutes is a huge chunk of that. We ran some tests and we were like, "We found that yes, it does affect UBeeO scores." We were passing smoke right on the test area and doing it pretty intensively just to see if there was an effect and there was. We need to know that sort of thing so we can make recommendations to the users and we can say, "Hey, if you're going to run UBeeO tests, try to avoid using smoke.

If you need to use smoke, that's fine, try not to smoke the test area. If you want to be able to compare 10 colonies, 20 colonies, you should probably try to give them each a couple puffs of smoke, and not just some of them smoke, because otherwise it could skew your results." We're trying to understand those environmental impacts. We know also from even previous work talking with Marla Spivak that nectar flow can have an impact on hygiene. We recommend that always we have a lot more work to do on that, but we recommend using UBeeO in the spring and through mid-summer during a nectar flow because we see that the scores really drop off after that.

I think part of it is the nectar flow and part of it is with changes in seasons, the priorities of the colony change. They're not as concerned about a mite in August because that mite is probably not going to make it or not going to cause much problem over the winter as they are about a mite in spring. A mite in spring is going to be 15 or 20 mites at the end of the summer, or I don't know, maybe 10, 12 mites at the end of the summer.

That mite in spring is a much bigger problem for the colony than the mite at the end of the summer. Their priorities change. Hygiene in the spring is not as important as hygiene in the fall. There's all these environmental impacts that we're trying to get a handle on just so that we can tell people that are using UBeeO how to best use the tool, how to get the most accurate results.

Becky: I think you can mark it as a defensive behavior now, I'll say it if you tell them not to use smoke. Tell them to note the number of stings they get and then write that down.

Kaira: Right. There you go. We'll just include-

Jeff: Secondary cut.

Kaira: -a little black cloth that you can pin on your bee suit -

Becky: Oh, no.

Kaira: -while you're doing UBeeO assay and then you can count the stingers in the black square or black cloth.

Jeff: You can call it your oh my oh score, oh my oh. Kaira, it's been so great having you on the show. It sounds like there's a lot of work to be done yet that we can have you back at the future and learn lots more. I look forward to doing that.

Becky: It sounds like we're not going to lose you to the mosquitoes. It sounds like you're not going to go back, are you?

Kaira: I'm not going back to the mosquitoes, although I would love to find a solution to that problem. [laughter] My focus is the bees. I really appreciate the opportunity to come in and talk with you guys and share what I'm doing. I love my work, I love my job. It's always a pleasure to talk about it and just share my experiences in what I'm doing with folks.

[music]

Becky: Thank you. We'll include links both to your company and your lab if you'd like us to.

Kaira: Absolutely. Thank you.

Jeff: Hygiene behavior is so important, but it's one of those things that was often overlooked up until the varroa really arrived on the shores and people started taking note of these things. This is an interesting, we called it an assay, and I call it a test. This is an interesting test for that, I believe.

Becky: It's actually really powerful. I remember when I was running the Bee Squad at the University of Minnesota, we were running hundreds of colonies, the Bee Lab and the Bee Squad together, a lot of colonies. I remember the graduate students, there'd be a callout. They were like, "Does anybody know where there's a colony that has chalkbrood? We need chalkbrood, we need it to study. We've got a test that we have to do, we need chalkbrood," and nobody had it.

That is an actual sign of how powerful this assay can be because if you use the information and you still use the genetics that promote hygienic behavior, you can have a lot of your issues with disease really almost eliminated. Same thing with American foulbrood. This is a very, very powerful tool to fight American foulbrood and not even be able to detect it in your colonies because your bees take care of it. There's a lot to be said about these good genetics.

Jeff: I was going to back that up. Basically, with the work that they're doing, I don't want to say it's a vaccine, but it follows the vaccine parallel, where if you use the UBeeO score in apiary's case, UBeeO score and breed highly hygienic bees along with the other characteristics that we may want honey production, blah, blah, blah, then eventually, over the years, you could possibly be a way or speed up the process of the honey bee be in naturally resistant to the varroa mite.

What might have taken generations, and generations, and generations, a 100 of years as the Asian honeybee has evolved. We can promote that through this. It's like a vaccine like smallpox. There's only just a few pockets around the world where that's exists now because we've basically done away with it. I guess it's not really parallel, so scratch that. [laughs]

Becky: I think genetics can protect the herd, and that's what we're looking for is if you have genes that are making it so that it's very difficult to have the problem, you're protecting the bee supply. I think you're right.

[music]

Jeff: I like it. I look forward to having Dr. Kaira Wagoner back and learning more about how they're using the Optera and UBeeO score and how they're making our bees healthier and cleaner, more hygienic.

Becky: It's exciting, more hygienic.

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 webpage.

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.

[00:53:48] [END OF AUDIO]