Varroa and Tropilaelaps Updates with Dr. Sammy Ramsey (S6, E23)

S6, E23 - Varroa and Tropilaelaps Updates with Dr. Sammy Ramsey

Sam Stevens: Hi, this is Sam Stevens. Welcome to the  Beekeeping Today  Podcast.

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

Becky Masterman: I'm Becky Masterman.

Kim Flottum: I'm Kim Flottum.

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Jeff: Thank you, Sherry. 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 our website. There you can read up on all our guests, read our blog on the various aspects and observations about beekeeping, search for, download, and listen to over 200 past episodes, read episode transcripts. Leave comments and feedback on each show, and check on podcast specials from our sponsors. You can find it all at www.beekeepingtodaypodcast.com.

Thanks to Sam Stevens for that great opening. Hey, folks, you know you too can have your opening on the beginning of our podcast just by sending it to us at questions@beekeepingtodaypodcast, and we'd be happy to put it on the air, and it's very easy to do. Just simply record yourself on your mobile device, even on your computer, and we'll play it. It's pretty painless. Isn't that so, Becky?

Becky: It is painless, and you know what? It's a lot of fun. It's a bragging point.

Jeff: It is fun to have our listeners open the show for us. That's good.

Becky: Yes, I like to hear where they're from.

Jeff: Becky, we haven't talked about this. Are you big into movies?

Becky: Let's see. I've never actually been in a movie, but that's not your question.

Jeff: No, have you gone to the movies? Oh my goodness.

Becky: I do. I don't go very often, but I do like the movies. It's often something that my husband and I do together is, at least, watch a movie at home on one of the streaming channels.

Jeff: Do you know the actor Jason Statham? You know  The Expendables,  The Transporter series?

Becky: I only know him from his Wikipedia page. He's British, correct?

Jeff: Yes.

Becky: He's quite popular.

Jeff: Quite popular.

Becky: I think I know him because of what you're about to ask me next.

Jeff: [laughs] Did you know-- I can't wait for this. I really can't wait for this. He is releasing a movie in January, it's called [drum roll sound]  The Beekeeper. Can you believe that?

Becky: I just think that our whole industry should buy a ticket and go on the same night just as a sign of unity. It's an action movie too, which I don't know that a lot of our beekeepers could get a part like that in a movie, right? [laughs]

Jeff: Folks, if you want to have some fun, go to YouTube, just do Jason Statham,  Beekeeper, and watch the trailer. You'll know a beekeeper like this guy. Well, maybe not.

[laughter]

Jeff: If you know Jason Statham and his movies, and you know a beekeeper, it's not a likely match, but it is going to be a fun movie. I'm looking forward to seeing it because he says in his cool British low accent, "I'm the beekeeper." It's like, well, it has a cross between Jason Statham and the  Terminator, but there you go, folks.

Becky: Arnold would be okay with it, I think. I think Arnold would be just fine. It looks like a super fun movie, and I think as a beekeeper, it's always fun. Even if they get it wrong, it's always fun to see bees featured in movies or in books. It's a lot of fun.

Jeff: Well, actually, I don't know how much bees are in the movie, but they're at the very beginning, so there you go.

Becky: That's all you need. [laughs]

Jeff: There's opening scenes of the trailer with him out in a field full of bees and hives. Very peaceful, serene. It's like a predictor of things to come.

Becky: Oh, boy. Oh, boy.

Jeff: Hey, I'm looking forward to our guest today. We're welcoming back Dr. Samuel Ramsey. Sammy Ramsey, he's been on our show. Well, we'll talk to him here in just a few moments but he's been on this-- I think this will be his fifth time on the show. He's a regular. He's an annual guest.

Becky: He deserves to be. He deserves to be. I think an hour with Dr. Ramsey is an hour that every beekeeper should have every year if not more. He's got so much great information, and this hour is going to just fly by.

Jeff: I'm looking forward to it. Let's get right to our talk with Samuel Ramsey right after this word from our friends at Strong Microbials.

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Jeff: While you're at the Strong Microbial 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. It is my great pleasure to welcome back our good friend of the show. He's been with us. This is your fifth time, Sammy. Dr. Samuel Ramsey, University of Colorado. He's an assistant professor. I'll let you go through all the other little dots underneath your name.

[laughter]

Jeff: Sammy, welcome back to the show. I'm so happy to have you here.

Dr. Sammy Ramsey: It is wonderful to be back. I can't believe it's been five times already. I must have lost count.

Jeff: No, and that doesn't even include the holiday replays we featured your show. That's technically six or seven or something like that, but anyways, who's counting?

Dr. Sammy: Glad to be here. You guys have a pretty wide reach when it comes to beekeepers and bee enthusiasts, and so it's always great to get to jump out here and talk to everybody.

Jeff: Well, good. Thank you.

Becky: I love it. It's so nice to see you, Sammy. Jeff, you're going to have trouble because you're going to have to fight for questions because I really want to catch up with Sammy.

[laughter]

Dr. Sammy: The feeling is mutual.

Jeff: You've been all over the place. I mean that in a literal sense. You've been doing a lot of research. Last time you were on the show, you had just unpacked your bags in Boulder, Colorado, at the University of Colorado. Give us an update. Well, first for that one beekeeper out there who doesn't know who you are--

Becky: Is that possible? [laughs]

Jeff: I think it's possible.

Becky: They're a new beekeeper then.

Jeff: That's right, but we don't want to exclude anybody. If you can just give us a quick synopsis of who you are, your background, how you got into bees, and then bring us up to date from last November when you were last on the show.

Dr. Sammy: As Jeff has already said, I'm Dr. Sammy. I am a professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder and I'm your friendly neighborhood entomologist. I have a nonprofit called the Ramsey Research Foundation. Partnering with the university, it really forms the international arm of my lab, the Boulder Bee Lab, where I'm able to conduct research on a much broader scale than I have available to me otherwise.

There's only one species of honeybee in the US, but if you really want to understand honeybee biology, honeybee diseases, you've got to go to the cradle of civilization for honeybees. That happens to be Southeast Asia, a region of the world where literally every single species of honeybee is present. I conduct research there. I'm trying to compile the most expansive list of all the different diseases and parasites of honeybees so that we are never surprised by a new organism again as it pertains to honeybees and beekeeping.

Then in the domestic part of my lab, working with my graduate students, my postdocs, my entire lab, we're all involved in trying to better understand how to manage the threats and issues within bee populations here in the US. That's both the native bees, as many native bee species as we can work with, and the honeybees. That has been really, really exciting. I literally got into the subject of studying honeybees from being obsessed with those tiny little Varroa mites you may or may not have heard of them.

They are absolutely fascinating creatures, and they just grabbed my attention, and have consistently kept me wrapped. They're incredibly clever organisms. Now, I know whenever I say things that sound complimentary of things like Varroa mites, people-

Jeff: Little tense.

Dr. Sammy: -get a little anxious, get a little upset with me. I've gotten some comments on my Instagram, so don't add me, back off but-

[laughter]

Dr. Sammy: -they are fascinating, they're clever. When we take the time to actually understand these organisms and recognize how clever they are, that's when we really have the capacity to do something about them.

Becky: You need to know them in order to kill them, is that what you're saying?

Dr. Sammy: Yes, know your enemy.

[laughter]

Jeff: Now you're starting to scare me, Becky. You're showing a side of you that is just frightening.

Becky: As much as I've been battling the Varroa war and talking to beekeepers, almost every talk I've given has mentioned Dr. Ramsey because his work was so fundamental in us understanding the reproductive life of Varroa and literally what they feed on. He will always be known for that. It's so exciting that you are expanding your work and moved on to another mite. Go Dr. Ramsey.

[laughter]

Dr. Sammy: You know what? Rebecca, we do have to credit you in this process. I think you've heard me say this before, but I probably would not be doing this right now if not for the pep talk that you gave me at one of my first presentations in Pennsylvania.

Becky: Over a glass of wine and some cheese, I think, right, post-meeting?

Dr. Sammy: Yes. You were just leaned up against your refrigerator, giving incredible advice, and you've changed the course of Varroa research.

Becky: Wow, that's super exciting. I don't know that I deserve all that credit, but I love that you actually say it. I have been such a fan of yours and just so supportive of the work because it's one thing to be able to do the science, it's a whole nother thing to be able to communicate that science. I think that's a lot of what we talked about that night.

Dr. Sammy: Yes. Thank you.

Becky: Thank you.

Jeff: Now, I'm starting to understand.

Becky: I told you, Jeff.

Jeff: Yes, now I'm starting to understand when I asked you, "Oh, Dr. Samuel Ramsey, right?" You just looked at me and blinked. Now I understand that look in those eyes were like, "You dummy, you really don't know, do you, Jeff?"

Becky: [laughs] Oh boy. It is very exciting. I also have a word of advice for people. Whenever you're at a meeting, it's always talk before him. Don't talk after him. Always give the talk before him. You don't want to follow.

Dr. Sammy: [crosstalk] Do people actually say that?

Becky: That's what I tell people. You do not want to follow Dr. Ramsey. You want to be before him. They're going to compare you to him, which is a good problem to have. Anyway, be before Dr. Ramsey. Anybody out there who's about to give a talk where he's presenting, don't let him go before you.

[laughter]

Dr. Sammy: We got to tell the people who organize these talks then because I have no control over that. I love the fact that my style of communication has really caught on with people. That's not a given. I'm a bit, let's say, odd. I like that that has been resonant and help people remember the information and really kept people awake and engaged with that content. I think that's part of the reason why I have the position that I have now at the University of Colorado Boulder.

I teach insect biology. I teach symbiotic relationships, which includes the parasites and the mutualists and all those fascinating connections between organisms. I also teach science communication. That's probably my most popular course. Jeff asked what's changed since November. Well, I got to teach my SciComm course for the first class, the first time. I got letters, students wrote me letters, handwritten about-

Jeff: Handwritten on paper letters?

Dr. Sammy: -how much-- Yes. Do you know the last time I saw ink on a piece of paper? A student wrote this, who is probably early 20s. The amount of effort that must have gone into remembering how to write--

Becky: To find a pen.

Jeff: To find a pen.

Dr. Sammy: All of that, and then a front and back letter with someone just trying to convey to me just how big an impact this course has had on them, their capacity to communicate, their comfort with it, and their enjoyment of outreach. I'm really seeing that this is making the impact that I was hoping for. I want there to be more communicators that are really excited about the things that they're communicating and feel comfortable with communicating it to the general public. I don't want people to approach me with surprise anymore at meetings when they come up to me and they're like, "I stayed awake through your whole talk. That was amazing."

[laughter]

Dr. Sammy: My goal is for that not to be a surprising thing. We as scientists, we're trained to be good researchers. We're trained to be really good at, well, sometimes teaching, but we don't receive really any training in communication. I think that that is a huge gap that needs to be filled, so I'm jumping in.

Becky: That's just excellent because you only have that one chance, that one time to get in front of people. It can make a difference. It's a matter of, are they going to hear your important message or did you lose them because you went down a hole and you didn't invite them to go down there with you?

Dr. Sammy: Precisely. Well said, Becky.

Becky: Hey, I learned from the best.

[laughter]

Jeff: Let's bring us back. What's new in the land of Varroa?

Dr. Sammy: The land of Varroa has been an exciting place as of late because we've known for a while that Varroa are really problematic for honeybee health. That's the reason why the mite that's crawling around on our bees is named Varroa destructor. That name is very purposeful. The great thing now is, we have more knowledge about what exactly Varroa mites are doing when they attach themselves to bees. It's this set of knowledge that's allowing for people to really dig into this subject in a different way than they did before.

Now there are ways that people are digging into the subject on the basis of the nutrition of these mites. There are people digging into the subject and trying to better understand if we could potentially even disrupt their reproductive system. I have a paper that I've just been digging into the data on this for a while and trying to figure out the best way to present all of this, just looking at the reproductive system of the mites and recognizing their capacity to steal elements of the fat body tissue they're feeding on and incorporate them into their egg yolk.

A colleague really pushed me on this. He's like, "Hey, that's really interesting information that you're presenting there, but we don't really have a why. Why would Varroa mites have this entire convoluted system of siphoning egg yolk from their host instead of just making it themselves? Wouldn't it be way easier to just make it themselves?" That was a good point.

I thought that I had created a nephrological chain for it to be clear that mites that have the schedule that Varroa has to keep, where it has to get all of its reproduction done in the few days that it has available to it before its host chews its way out of the cell and leaves, I thought that was a clear enough logical chain where I didn't need to do any more work on that. I'm glad that colleague pushed me in that direction because now we've done all of these exciting metabolic calculations within the mites to show that within their life cycle, they don't actually have the time to make the level of egg yolk that they would need to make to meet the demand to get their offspring to adulthood before the cell is uncapped.

It took some work. This, I've never-- the metabolic rates of organisms was never really my wheelhouse. I've looked at a lot of papers that incorporate that thing, and I've been really excited in the past. Wow, that's really cool that you can do that, but I wasn't sure what went into it, and started working with my lab here at the university. I have a really great lab. My apiary manager, Chris Borke, is also unofficially our tech manager because he is an engineer. He's worked on stuff that has been shot into space, and also is an incredible beekeeper.

When I was talking about how, "Okay, we're going to need to know the respiration rate of the mites, we're going to need to know how much heat they're producing," he's like, "Oh yes, I can do that. I'm just going to build a little bomb calorimeter for you. It's going to be great." "What? You can do that?" "Oh yes. No problem." While he's working on that, my incredible postdoc, Madison Sankovitz, is doing incredible work on understanding how the mites, they're feeding on the bees, and how much heat they're producing, and how we can actually track their CO2 in this space because we've got a really tiny space, how many mites we're going to need for it.

I'm like, "Man, I love having such an excited and invested team." My two grad students have been watching from the sidelines like, "Do we jump into this now?" I'm trying to make sure that they utilize their time efficiently during their first year jumping into their classes, but it seems like every time I talk to them, they've got a new idea of, "Well, what about this?" Or, "Could we do it this way? How about that?" Then my lab manager has just been making space for all of this to occur, streamlining all of these incredible processes. It's been incredible.

I'm so glad to actually have my own lab now and to be able to come up, have an idea like this and have people really jump into it with me. Now, I can't do everything by myself. It's simply not possible. While I'm actually analyzing the molecular contents of the egg and looking at how much protein is in there and how much carbohydrate and how much lipid is in these eggs and actually working on the calculations for how much time it would take for transcription of this much protein, I've got an entire team that I'm working with that's handling many of these other details. It's just the coolest.

[laughter]

Jeff: How is that going to translate into practical use?

Dr. Sammy: I'm very glad you asked because you have just segued right into the reason why I've been so excited about this work. These mites, they are doing some real biochemical witchcraft here in order to create this egg yolk that they're creating. I didn't have all the details when I first started looking at this as a postdoc with the USDA, or when I first got the idea to even peer into this system when I was a graduate student. I just knew that something was really weird. I knew these eggs were a bit too large for an organism to be able to produce an egg this size every day.

The more that I really dug into this, I realized they've got to be able to produce really large, really well-formed, offspring in order to meet the scheduling demand that they have because if the bee choose its way out of the cell before its offspring becomes an adult, it's fitness is rendered zero, it has no fitness. That is the strongest evolutionary pressure that you can have on an organism. Under that set of circumstances, you should expect some biochemical witchcraft to be involved.

The interesting thing is, if we can, in some way, disrupt or even just slow down the deposition of stolen protein and stolen lipid into the eggs, then we can slow the process that really doesn't have a lot of buffer room in it, and we can render their fitness zero again. That is the next step with all of this. First, we've just finished up most of the work on these metabolic calculations. We have one more factor to get here before we're done with the whole thing.

Then I want that work out there to be totally done with that paper because that one's been a long time coming. It's been like three years or something, and then I can finally start the biggest part of this project. A big chunk of the domestic lab's work is going to be figuring out how well we can even disrupt a process of this nature. If we can, instead of pumping tons of broad-spectrum pesticides into the environment, we can target one process that only this organism is conducting in the hive and have a much more targeted system where it's not about poison, it's about simple disruption of a reproductive process

Becky: That is a game changer.

Dr. Sammy: It really would be cool, wouldn't it? It's also really far down the line if it ever would work, so don't get too excited yet, everybody.

[laughter]

Becky: I want a time machine to put you back all the way to 1987 so that we wouldn't have had it gone to go so long fighting these mites without this information because as an entomologist, that's the first thing you do is you figure out the lifecycle of what's threatening the crop or the livestock and so yay to getting it done. Bummer.

Dr. Sammy: Oh yes.

Becky: It took so long. Not you. It hasn't taken you long, but it took so long for us to get you into the pipeline. Where are you finding time to write grants?

Dr. Sammy: That is a great question. Oh, these are the professor questions here.

[laughter]

Dr. Sammy: I cannot just be a researcher now. When I was a postdoc, I could pretty much focus exclusively on research. I spent my time doing research and doing lots of presentations. Now, I have this tripartite system where it's research, and then I'm also a teacher, and then I'm also mentoring my students and doing service to the university, and within those time slots, I also have to find time to apply for grants. Now, when I get into a writing mode, the energy just hits me, and I get really excited and I just go for it. That's the best time for me. If I'm writing, let's say, I'm writing a lecture or I'm writing a paper, that energy can just keep going after that, so then I load up a grant right after it.

I'm like, "Okay, grant time too." I'm someone whose brain functions on the basis of deep work, and so if my day has a lot of meetings interspersed in it, I can't get any writing done in between. My previous executive assistant would always say, "We've got one meeting here, and then there's a 45-minute break in between. There's another meeting here, and you could probably get a bunch of writing done there." "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I need deep work time. From here on out let's put all of my meetings, I don't know, put like two in the morning and one at the very end of the day, but the rest of the day, I want all the time possible to just be able to focus."

When my brain hyper-focuses, I can write a bunch of things at once. I can do a bunch of research, but I can't do the meeting after meeting after meeting and then try to get stuff done in between.

Jeff: It becomes very challenging. Hey, let's take this quick break, and we'll be right back.

[music]

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[music]

Becky: Welcome back. We are here with Dr. Sammy Ramsey, and I think I have a question that every beekeeper wants to know. Teaching apiary your research apiary, is it full of mites or are there no mites at all?

[laughter]

Dr. Sammy: As you can probably tell by that deep breath that I just let out, that is a bit of a point of contention right now. I never want to have a research apiary that is in any proximity to anyone else's bees because I'm someone who primarily researches symbiotic relationships in honeybees. That means my colonies will have some mites in them, and those mites will probably have some viruses. I don't want my bees becoming the mite bombs for other people's colonies, so I've been trying to find a location within the Boulder City limits where I can put a colony, or put some colonies, where there are no other beekeepers, and I have not been able to find that.

Jeff: Good luck. I used to keep bees just north of Boulder, and there's colonies on every hilltop.

Dr. Sammy: Yes, always, everywhere. I'm realizing I've got to go farther and farther out. We're even trying to get some colonies in rocky flats and any of you who are local to the area would be really rocky flats, the nuclear testing sites.

Jeff: Blowing bees.

Dr. Sammy: That's the only place I could find where nobody's keeping bees but I also don't know if I want two-headed nuclear bees, so it's trade-offs.

Becky: It could help the mite problem.

Dr. Sammy: Or, it could help the mites become radioactive crazy monster mutants. We never know.

Jeff: I don't recall if there's anything by DIA out in all their land, a lot of wind.

Dr. Sammy: We are looking into absolutely every avenue we can. I've got people on it. I've got a lab manager now she's looking into it. The Boulder County Beekeepers Association has been really helpful. We're going to find something, but we weren't able to find anything for this year. This year I haven't had any mitey colonies. I have been relying on the generosity of people who forgot to treat a colony then they email me and let me know if they have some mites and I come and pick them up.

Jeff: Did you just say mitey colonies? Is that a technical because--

Becky: Is that trademarked? I like that.

Jeff: Can I start using that?

Dr. Sammy: [laughs] We've been saying that so frequently now that I keep forgetting that it's not normal parlance until someone new comes into my lab and we say mitey colonies and they start giggling, but yes. M-I-T-E-Y, mitey colonies.

Jeff: All right. I can see all sorts of cartoons on that right now.

Dr. Sammy: It would be a living nightmare.

[laughter]

Dr. Sammy: I'm sorry. That was really bad. I'll see myself out. This will be my last time on the show everybody.

Jeff: Thank you, Sammy, for your last time on the show.

Becky: No, that was pretty good. That was a good one. Couple of good ones there.

Jeff: The Varroa is such a big topic because it's in everyone's backyard. Anybody who's a beekeeper, they can go out and pop the cover and most likely find one mite in their colony, or on the bottom board, wherever. The one mite that you've investigated in Thailand, that's on our horizon and you were talking about it last time you were here, the tropilaelaps mite. Thankfully it's not here today.

There is concern by some beekeepers that'll get to us eventually, ultimately fairly quickly, maybe through importation through Canada. Sometimes it comes up because of the importation laws in Canada are different than the United States, not to cause problems here cross borders. There's enough of that in the world. What is going on with tropilaelaps, and what can you tell us?

Dr. Sammy: Goodness, goodness gracious. Oh me, oh me, oh my.

Jeff: You have five minutes.

Dr. Sammy: Got you.

Becky: To solve the problem too.

Dr. Sammy: I would just like to say as a disclaimer at the very beginning of this, I realize that this information is disturbing and unsettling and will not make people happy to hear as beekeepers, but we really need to be getting prepared for this mite as much as possible. 've been trying to do all that I can. The great part is I'm not doing this stuff alone. There are other labs out there that are really investing in this. The Auburn lab with Geoff Williams and his remarkable PhD student who's been working a lot on this, Rogan. We've got our work that we're doing here. Other researchers in the US, in the UK,

other parts of the world are really investing in this. I think one of the big reasons for that is because the spread has become so clear. The acceleration of its spread has become so clear over the last couple of years, especially during the pandemic, that no one can really deny that it's gunning for us. It's trying to find its way here. We absolutely have to do something about it because we've reached a point now where it could show up at any time. Before, we felt like we would have some buffer or warning, and now we cannot be confident in that because, as you stated earlier, countries on our borders have different importation laws.

This is the disturbing part. I've been working to verify the presence of tropi mites in different regions of the world where it has not been verified that it's present but there have been reports of it. People have started picking up on that, and now I'm getting emails from all over the world, sometimes in different languages, and people have literally said, "Google told me you are the guy." It's from veterinarians, it's from beekeepers, it's from conservationists. They're like, "This mite, is this tropilaelaps?" I'm like, "Yes, my friend, that is definitely tropilaelaps. What country are you in?"

The concern now is that it's not just-- before, we would say, "Okay, well, it's just in Southeast Asia," and then it expanded out of Southeast Asia into South Asia and East Asia. Then we would say, "Well, it's still just in Asia," but then it moved into Oceania in the Middle East. We're like, "Okay, it's not just Asia." Now that it's in Central Asia and right on the border with Europe, that's concerning. One region where I've recently received pictures and videos of tropi mites is in Southern Russia. The unfortunate part is that it's right on the border with Ukraine, where I've recently received pictures and videos.

Pictures and videos can be taken anywhere. These kinds of things can be confusing. I am obviously not going to be traveling to Russia anytime soon. I'm doing my best to actually confirm these detections where I can. I'll be doing some work in Central Asia in a few months, actually, and I'm going to work to verify the presence of those organisms there. It would really change things if they are actually confirmed on the border with Ukraine because Ukraine is a country that exports honeybee colonies, and it exports some honeybee colonies to North America.

If they were to end up going from Canada with mites crossing into the US, we could really have a huge quarantine issue on our hands. That is such a headache, and I just want to make sure that we're prepared. During my time in Asia, when I collect tropi mites, I have multiple different things that I'm trying to do with them. Some of it's genetic work, so we can understand what populations are spreading and where are they coming from. Some of it is work to make sure that our apiary inspectors, who are our eyes and ears and our boots on the ground, that they know exactly what a tropi mite looks like, and not just from pictures.

We're actually making tropi materials that people can read and learn about them. I've also brought back some very, very, very dead samples. Listen to me, everyone, you're dead. I'm not bringing anything back alive, very, very, very dead samples in alcohol and allowing the apiary inspectors, sending at least two to each of the states so that apiary inspectors have a sample of tropi mites that they can look at, maybe even in a little necklace, someone has suggested, where they can look at a transparent necklace full of hand sanitizer with a tropi mite stuck in the middle.

Jeff: Do you have an Etsy account?

Dr. Sammy: There it goes. We could get that [crosstalk]

Becky: I see earrings maybe.

Dr. Sammy: Earrings might be a little bit more difficult to see if you're the one trying to look at your own earring, but I don't know how dangly your normal earrings are.

Becky: There you go. Yes, they're not very-- I've got to follow up a couple of things. One, not every state in the US has an apiary inspector. Two, this is simple, but are you suggesting if I'm teaching a new beekeeper class, do we bring up tropi?

Dr. Sammy: I'm very much suggesting that, and thank you so much for asking that question quite directly because I would recommend every new beekeeper class have at least a short lesson on tropi so that people know how to distinguish them from the things in colonies that are typically confused with tropi mites. There's enough agitation about this online now, where people are beginning to send me messages within the US and the top line item, full subject line, all caps, "I have tropi in my colonies. We got to shut everything down." Every single time so far, it has been a male Varroa mite or a pollen mite or a predatory mite.

The predatory mites do look like tropi, something about the way that they move, but they're not. It's also these male Varroa, which people are just not very used to seeing. If you happen to scrape some cappings in your colony, a male Varroa can climb out and just bumble around and it looks really creepy and unsettling, but it looks pretty distinct from a tropi mite if what to look for. If more beekeepers knew what a tropi mite looked like, under circumstances where it's just arrived, we might be able to find it and eradicate that population of mites before they spread everywhere and we have to change things and quarantine stuff and burn colonies and all that kind of thing.

Becky: Did you say Australia?

Dr. Sammy: [laughs] Oh, Becky, you're trying to get me in trouble. I was thinking that, but I did not say it. Australia has been through a lot. They went through so much trying to manage Varroa. One of the reasons is because they have so many unmanaged colonies of bees that are just wild in the natural environment that could be reservoirs for different parasites like Varroa. It wasn't a matter of them simply going to beekeepers and trying to manage their colonies, it was also figuring out what do we do about all the ones that are distributed in tree holes and all kinds of other parts of the environment. It's just not an easy thing to do.

Even here, where we don't have such a robust population of wild bees, it would be really, really, really difficult for us to control a parasite like tropi, something that I've also noticed in my time abroad. I'll finish this quickly so you guys can jump in with a question. I see questions on your faces. The tropi mites leave the colony. I've finally been able to verify, they actually leave the colony during a portion of the year, and we don't know where they're going. Almost four months of the year.

I've conducted my research during multiple times of year, but I've never been able to do it during an entire year because I have other responsibilities in the US that I have to get back for. I try to do my research at different sections of the year so I can compare all of them. In especially temporary regions, it seems like between December and late March, the mites are just gone. They're not inside the colony. I couldn't find them in any part of the colony. Not a single mite. They just leave. Where they're going, what they're doing, how they're overwintering, what the deal is there, we don't know yet. That's the thing that you want to know before an organism like that arrives.

Jeff: This is scary.

Dr. Sammy: I know, I'm sorry.

Jeff: I'm not going to sleep tonight. Thanks a lot, Sammy. I thought I read somewhere that there is the potential of a pesticide or a miticide for the tropilaelaps that you're working on or that you're involved in?

Dr. Sammy: Correct. During my time in Southeast Asia, I've been working on testing what sorts of things can penetrate the cell capping and kill tropi mites. It's not like working on Varroa because Varroa spend sometimes two weeks on the adult bee population when they leave the cell, but typically on average a week. There's plenty of time for them to be exposed to a number of different kinds of treatments. Tropi mites are more difficult. They spend only a matter of hours outside of the cell.

Any chemical that you apply that's supposed to impact the population outside of the cell, they'll be exposed to it but for such a brief amount of time that all they can really do with it is use it as a means of gaining resistance to that chemical. It doesn't typically kill them. It's a sublethal exposure. They've become as resistant to chemicals that they've only been exposed to very briefly because they weren't delivered in an effective means of control. When the bees recognize that a larva is old enough where it no longer needs to be fed and is going to transition to a pupa, they do something that should be considered really clever.

They cover over that larva with a wax capping, and then the larva itself spins a cocoon around itself and starts transitioning into a pupa and then into an adult. The purpose of that wax capping, one of the purposes of it, is to protect that bee from parasites and other things that could potentially harm it. However, the parasites have become smart enough to know what a larva smells like when it needs to be capped, and they've jumped into the cells hours before they're about to be capped. Now the capping that's supposed to protect the bee is now protecting the bee's parasite and sealing it inside of the cell of the bee.

Most chemical pesticides these days that can be applied inside of colonies can't penetrate that capping. It is wax, it is hydrophobic, and because many of them have water as a carrier, they just can't get through. We've been testing formic acid, as well as heat, as a method of treatment. Then we've tested two different ways of applying both of those methods. One that is such a low energy measure for providing heat to the cells that it could even be supplied entirely by solar power. That was really cool. There are heating pads that are commercially available now that we've been testing.

Then also formic acid, both delivered via liquid formic and formic that's aerosolized in these time-released

strips Formic Pro. It's been an entire experience. That paper will hopefully be published next month. We just got the finishing touches on it done. We're working on one more figure and then we're going to send that out. That information will be available soon. Spoiler alert, but Formic really kicked a lot of butt in these mites.

Jeff: Well, that's good news.

Becky: That's good news. Wait, that's good news.

Dr. Sammy: Good news. We were able to get up to 100% kill with certain methods of delivery of Formic.

Becky: Wow, that's excellent.

Jeff: Concentrations that are beekeeper safe?

Dr. Sammy: Yes. We are talking about concentrations that are beekeeper safe, but beekeeper safe under 84 degrees Fahrenheit and beekeeper safe under 70% humidity. If you happen to live in Florida, you may never get a time the entire year where you would be able to achieve beekeeper safe levels for utilization of this particular chemical. That's the other reason why I wanted to have more than one method that we compared there. Heat treatments were actually effective sometimes.

The problem was there was a level of inconsistency that was just too high. Sometimes we would get above 80% kill, and then we would move on to the very next colony right next to it and get less than 40%. There was no way for us to really account for the level of variability with the impact of heat. It just seems like there's a potential that the heat is not as broadly distributed in the colony as it should be.

Becky: I hate to ask this next question. Sorry, Jeff, I'm going to jump in.

Jeff: It's okay.

Becky: Sammy, what about viruses in tropilaelaps?

Dr. Sammy: [laughs] Did everyone hear the tone of Becky's voice in asking that question? It's sort of when you hear someone bracing themselves for something that's going to be bad news. We have verified, and by we I mean the royal we of the scientific community. We have verified that there are at least three viruses that tropi mites are capable of vectoring directly to honeybees. We know deformed wing virus, as well as black queen cell virus. Am I blanking on? No, I'm blanking on the third one.

Becky: That'll be in the show notes. No problem.

Dr. Sammy: Yes, that'll be in the show notes. The problem there being is we have not actually tested the other viruses. It doesn't mean that Varroa can vector upwards of 13 viruses and tropi only has three, it means we just haven't spent a lot of time testing viruses in Varroa to know what others potentially are out there that is capable of vectoring. I'm also collecting tropi mites.

We're preserving them in liquid nitrogen and then bringing them back for viral analysis, looking for viral RNA, looking for DNA, and trying to better understand if there are other viruses out there that haven't even been categorized yet, because so far we've only looked for viruses that we know of from Varroa. What if tropi has its own suite, creating its own viral complex? Oh, no-

Becky: Two levels.

Dr. Sammy: -Jeff just had giggles of sadness over there.

Jeff: I think I'm going to go into crocheting. I think that's going to be my new.

Becky: We don't have a lot of time left, but, Jeff, I think you're going to agree with me, let's ask him to tell us some good news, something good-

Jeff: Oh, please.

Becky: -maybe about his Foundation, maybe about something. We can go back to that letter we talked about in the very beginning about changing lives.

Jeff: We can talk about bikes. Sammy, we can talk about bikes.

Becky: He's got a sweet bag behind him.

Dr. Sammy: If I could just say the best news that I think I can possibly deliver to you is that we have the most incredible group of scientists, young scientists, a diverse cohort of individuals coming up now that are going to have all kinds of new and fresh ideas. We are about to reap the benefits from people actually investing in contexts like diversity and equity and inclusion. There are people who would have you believe that diversity is just diversity for diversity's sake, and it doesn't really matter, and all of these initiatives are just a waste of time and energy and effort. They're trying to get rid of the white people.

None of those things are true. What's really, really, really important to understand is that because of this diversity, you have quirky human beings like me and like so many others out here who are showing up in this context with ways of looking at this problem that are odd, different, unique, and allow for ways of answering these questions that maybe people haven't thought of before or invested in previously.

That gets me really happy because I see the way that my students are looking at these problems. I see the way that other people's students are looking at these problems. I'm becoming more and more and more optimistic that some of the biggest issues that we are dealing with are not going to be as crazy as some of the issues that we've dealt with in our past because of this new wave of thinking that's coming our way.

Becky: I will take that. That is excellent. Excellent. I think that's a win. That's definitely a win. I also think that listening to you talk to us today, you've shared so much about that journey. You've given beekeepers a little bit of an insight of just everything you're juggling, everything you have to do. I think the beekeeping community has to understand everything you're doing to contribute and to support our honeybee health. With what you just shared and with what you've shared all along in this hour, it's been great information.

Dr. Sammy: Thank you so much. I really appreciate you guys providing me this opportunity to really tell people about the great things that are going on and also some of the things we need to be paying more attention to.

Jeff: Maybe we can have you back before another year passes. You can talk to us a little bit more about the Foundation because I know you're doing a lot of work with the Ramsey Foundation and you can get us up to date. It's just always a super pleasure to have you on the show and really enjoyed your time this afternoon.

Dr. Sammy: Thank you so much. Looking forward to being back.

Becky: Thank you so much, Sammy.

Dr. Sammy: See you.

Jeff: Every time Sammy's on the show, I come away with a mixture of awe, of being inspired, being a little bit depressed, and always tired. It's a great fun mixture, a mixture of life, actually, is really what it is. He always brings great information, and I enjoy it.

Becky: Talking to him and having a conversation, it's just there's so many different levels of what he's doing. The whole time he's doing it, he's explaining it so well, which is just so impressive. I have so much admiration for him. I can't wait to see what he does in the next couple of decades, honestly. We're lucky to have him.

Jeff: Yes. Oh, I'm excited to see what he has next time he's on the show. It's just amazing.

Becky: He already has a great body of work for somebody in his position. It's exciting.

Jeff: There's a lot of things we didn't get a chance to talk to him about. I know we talked to him a little bit about Varroa, but there's more he could talk to us about Varroa. The tropilaelaps, of course, is the scary thing we need to be aware of. The Foundation he's part of is the pollinator pandemic plan that's part of National Geographic and USDA funded about pollinators and the decrease of all. There's a hornet project he's involved in. He was involved in Asian giant hornet stuff that was going on in Washington State and even more. It's just, boy, he's just everywhere. I mean that in a great way and I'm glad he's there and he's working with people who are also that engaged.

Becky: You know what I heard too? I loved hearing that he's got a great relationship with the Boulder beekeepers. I love that they're all trying to solve his mighty problem together. [laughs]

Jeff: I like that. I'm going to have to use that mitey problem. I have a mitey problem in my backyard. Wait, what Jeff?

Becky: Oh, I think listeners are going to have to listen to this episode twice. I can't wait to listen to it.

Jeff: Definitely, and download the transcripts. I encourage our listeners to go back and listen to our prior episodes with Dr. Samuel Ramsey and to do some of your own research online, YouTube, wherever, and listen to him. He is a wealth of information and is your number one source for Varroa information. You really need to delve into that.

Becky: He's made a difference, and obviously with what he has up in the pipeline. He's going to continue to support this industry.

Jeff: That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to 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 along the top of any web page.

We want to thank our regular episode sponsors, Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and especially Betterbee for their longtime support of this podcast. Thanks to 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 or comments at leave a comment section under each episode on the website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

[00:49:28] [END OF AUDIO]