EFB, Native v. Apis m. and More with Dr. Andony Melathopoulos (S6, E04)

S6, E04 - EFB, Native v. Apis m. and More with Dr. Andony Melathopoulos

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

Kim Flottum: And I'm Kim Flottum.

Global Patties: Hey, Jeff and Kim, today's sponsor is Global Patties. They're a family-operated business that manufactures protein supplement patties for honeybees. It's a good time to think about honeybee nutrition. Feeding your hives protein supplement patties will ensure that they produce strong and healthy colonies by increasing brewed production and overall honey flow.

Now is a great time to consider what type of patty is right for your area and your honeybees. Global offers a variety of standard patties as well as custom patties to meet your needs. No matter where you are, Global is ready to serve you out of their manufacturing plants in Airdrie, Alberta and in Butte, Montana, or from distribution depots across the continent. Visit them today@www.global patties.com.

Jeff: Thank you Sherry and 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 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. Hey everybody, thanks again for joining. Before we get going, I want to ask you to help us open a show by recording an opening greeting just like you've heard on prior episodes. Simply record yourself or your group such as a beekeeping club or even your family. That's great. Welcoming fellow beekeepers to the podcast and email it to us.

It's easy and fun to do. It really is. I do it every week. [laughs] Hey, we have a great show lined up today. Returning is Dr. Andony Melathopoulos, Associate Professor of the Oregon State University Pollinator Health Extension, located in Corvallis, Oregon. There he works with beekeepers and as he will describe the Oregon Master Melotologist protecting the state's pollinators.

One problem he discusses today are that the bees that go into blueberries healthy come out sick with European Foulbrood. The problem is not getting better and no one really knows why. Plus, there are signs that bees don't recover like they used to once they are out of the blueberries and on good forage. EFB is becoming persistent and this is a critical development that potentially impacts us all.

It's approaching the middle of the month and around here we are about to drop into the summer dearth. Most of this year's honey crop is collected. We'll be pulling super soon and then treating the bees for Varroa. This time of year when the bees are at their peak population, the Varroa are ramping up. It is a critical time to get your mic counts done and then hit the Varroa hard.

Check out the Varroa management guide on the Honeybee Health Coalition's website to help you decide the treatment modality best for your operation. Regardless of your approach, you need to knock them down now because from this point on, generally speaking, and depending on your local conditions, you will need to get your bees healthy and into the best shape for the coming fall and winter.

If they're infected and weakened with Varroa and the associated virus complexes that Varroa introduce, you will be dealing with dead-outs next spring. Colonies that are full of honey and a cup full of dead bees in the brood box and thousands dead on the bottom board. Well, sorry folks that went south rather quickly. Sounds like I better go sit outside next to the poultry waters I set up for the bees on my back porch and watch them and just unwind a bit.

I do find it relaxing to watch them fly in, find that perfect spot perhaps where they were the last time were there, I don't know, and shoulders themselves in next to another bee and start drinking. I love the sound of the bees flying in and flying out and watching all the activity. At the water hole, there are no enemies. There's a cordial truce between bees of different colonies and even with the occasional wasp and yellow jackets. Only the birds and the squirrels are put off a bit. Okay, let's get to our talk with Andony, but first a quick word from our sponsor.

StrongMicrobials: Hey, beekeepers. Many times during the year, honeybees encounter scarcity of floral sources. As good beekeepers, we feed our bees artificial diets, a protein, and carbohydrates to keep them going during those stressful times. What is missing though are key components. The good microbes necessary for a bee to digest the food and convert it into metabolic energy.

Only SuperDFM®-HoneyBee by Strong Microbials can provide the necessary microbes to optimally convert the artificial diet into energy necessary for improving longevity, reproduction immunity, and much more. Super DFM Honeybee is an all-natural probiotic supplement for your honeybees. Find it at strongmicrobials.com or at find bee supply stores everywhere.

Jeff: While you're at the strong microbial site, make sure you click on and subscribe to the Hive, the regular newsletter full of interesting beekeeping facts and product updates. Hey everybody, welcome back. Sitting across the big virtual table right now is Dr. Andony Melathopoulos of Oregon State University Extension Service. Andony, welcome back to the show.

Dr. Andony Melathopoulos: It's so good to be back.

Jeff: Wow, it's good to see you sitting there.

Kim: It's good to see you again, Andony it's been too long and I'm interested in some of the things that you've been working on and I hope you can share a lot of what you're doing with the people who are listening.

Andony: Excellent. I'd love to.

Jeff: Well, you're just right down I-5 from me here in Olympia, but I know the springtime here in Washington and Oregon was really challenging and for California too, but this whole West Coast. How did that affect the bees in Oregon this year?

Andony: I mean, it was tough. Most of our commercial beekeepers go down to California. It was a wet year. Colonies didn't grow. It was a tough winter last year as well, so beekeepers had to make up their losses but when they came back into the state, a time when people want to get in and make splits, it just rained. It rained right up until the first pollination so when beekeepers had to get in and do their blueberry or do the sweet cherry, they really didn't have any time to work their bees.

It really involved doing a lot of work in their colonies after they were dropped. The good thing that's happened subsequently is we've had great weather since, and as you know we're into our main honey flow blackberry and we are not blowing through hot temperatures, this is a nice even 70, I'm expecting beekeepers to have some great crops this year.

Jeff: Yes, you mentioned the blackberries, they just opened up earlier this week and I'm throwing the supers on as fast as I can find them.

Kim: Me too

Jeff: Going to the neighbors asking for old shoe boxes, anything.

Andony: I hear you brother.

Jeff: I know that we had a lot of challenges with Queens this spring. You obviously had the same challenges in Oregon.

Andony: Well, I think everything was delayed. Anybody who wanted packages or wanted nucs I got a nuc order in Salem from Flying JB Ranch. Yes, it was a couple--Everybody was the same way. Nobody could get into their colony, so everything delayed. In some ways, I'm glad. The nice weather came on. I had my nucs installed and I was away off and running.

The colonies at that time of year, especially in Oregon and Washington where we have these intense spring flows, they have a lot of capacity to catch up. I think at the end, everything worked out. I will say though, and I think when we were talking before the podcast, this is still an issue in the Pacific Northwest, beekeepers have come out of blueberry this year.

Again, there's a lot of beekeepers reporting European Foulbrood outbreaks. It's been a perennial problem here and I remember talking to Randy Oliver a couple years ago. He said it happened in California, it came and it went, but it's not going. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we're beset with European Foulbrood and it's gotten worse over the years.

Kim: Well, Andony, when you say it's gotten worse, European Foulbrood in a colony has a path that it follows. Often that path can be interrupted when whatever stress the colony was in is relieved. Sometimes it's hunger, sometimes it's moving, sometimes it's who knows what, but when you relieve that stress. Here in the Midwest, the way that we look at European Foulbrood is they need protein and they need sugar yesterday.

If you can get it on yesterday, you avoid a lot of that downside of European Foulbrood. Do you see that as anything realistic where you are because it sounds like I'm in and out and I don't have time to get a lot of food and take care of a lot of bees right now because it's blooming?

Andony: I had experience being, and I did my masters in Vancouver, British Columbia. I have experience on the West Coast keeping bees and you'd see exactly the way you describe EFB would come, resources would pulse, it would disappear and it's like, okay. This is not what's happening out here now. Right now, the disease comes on and I've been through colonies and graded a number of colonies that break down. They've got frames full of pollen, there's lots of nectar coming into them and they go downhill.

The thing that doesn't happen is they don't recover. Those colonies they get it heavy and I mean they really get it heavy. We're talking about hundreds of disease larvae. Those colonies just drag for the rest of the year. Many people have seen this like Meghan Milbrath. There's some great work at the University of Saskatchewan and University of British Columbia and Agriculture Canada. They're all seeing the same thing where it's just dragging on. There seems to be something different now than what we experienced in the past, that you and I saw in the past that would just recover. It was like a severe Chalkbrood or something.

Kim: Well, that leads to the question then. I'm guessing somebody somewhere has taken a look at what you have today and what you had five years ago. Is there A, a difference in the bees, a difference in the disease, or a difference in the environment that's leading to worse now not quite as bad earlier?

Andony: Isn't that the same answer we get to most beekeeping problems? It's some combination of the three, but nobody knows where to put the emphasis. I think that is exactly what people are finding. There are new strains around. Strains that we hadn't seen before. There is new pressures in crop cultivation, but even Gordy Wardell knew back in the '80s as did Shimanuki, there's something with blueberries, but what is it with blueberries? What exactly is going on?

We've been in blueberries for many years. There's some combination of factors that are coming together and it is leading to something that's much worse. That's the way to skirt the question.

Kim: That is a good way to answer that. Well, I got to guess then that the people who have just done something from American Foulbrood have an additional target that they could look at developing something that you could maybe preliminary treat your colonies with before they go into blueberries so that when whatever it is in blueberries begins to erupt the precautionary medication is already there. Am I on the moon on this one or is that something possible?

Andony: No, I think lots of beekeepers have talked about this and maybe, in fact, doing that, but the one thing I will mention, there was a study recently, I think came out last year, that detected oxytetracycline resistance to Melissococcus plutonius, the causative agent of European Foulbrood. That might be another factor in the thick of things where beekeepers, maybe commercial beekeepers, are trying to suppress the disease. Now, a bunch of combinations including oxytet resistance may be twisting things a little bit and it's expressing itself worse.

Kim: What about the vaccine that has been developed for bees for American Foulbrood? Is that A, possible, and B, if it is possible, what do you think?

Andony: I have to admit, I'm pretty agnostic on this and I have not followed it that carefully, but I do wonder if a colony has American Foulbrood, isn't it already getting lots of signal? Wouldn't the queen be getting inoculated by all the spot? Why doesn't a colony spontaneously regenerate when it has AFB? That part I don't quite get. The vaccination goes through the queen and it confers immunity to the larvae but I don't understand why that doesn't just happen regularly because when a colony's infected there's lots of potential for the queen to be exposed. Kim, I haven't quite followed it, but I don't quite get how the whole thing works.

Kim: I think I'm right up there with you. I don't get how the whole thing works, but it'll be interesting to see. Another side of the question is what are the blueberry growers doing about this? Are they lending a hand somewhere or are they maybe offering suggestions on different tech? I don't know, but are blueberry growers involved and helping out on any of this?

Andony: I know here in the Pacific Northwest we've sat down with some of our growers and made these bee protection protocols. We did one with the clover seed industry, we did one with the vegetable seed industry. I know the Oregon State Beekeepers Association wants to get one going with the blueberries. Just sitting down across the table and trying to work out what this issue is.

I will say there are-- if you saw the national survey for honeybee colony rental rates, it is one of the crops where rates are going up and I think beekeepers are turning away from blueberry. I think blueberry growers are starting to recognize this. There is a bit of a crisis and it does require a working through of some of these problems, but like I said, I'm not sure exactly what to suggest.

Clearly, fungicide use, you don't want the fungicide use to occur-- you have a year like we had here. Jeff knows it. It was raining, raining, raining, raining. The first day is available, those growers have to cover a whole lot of acres with fungicide in a short period of time. That invariably is going to put pressure on the bees.

Kim: Amazing. The next part of the equation is if I'm a beekeeper and I know that if I go to blueberries and make this much per colony, but I'm going to pull them out of blueberries and I'm going to lose these many colonies, there's a break-even point that said, okay, I'm not going to lose money on this. I'm not making any, but there's also the next step that says, every time I could see a blueberry field, 20 colonies die.

Andony: I think so. I think that's the point where we're coming to and there's a number of beekeepers who've just stopped going. We're seeing that and probably up in Washington, Jeff, you're seeing something similar where beekeepers have other options and there is a problem here in this industry.

Kim: You're the extension person at Oregon State and extension people have every finger somewhere else doing things. What are some of the projects you got going out there that A, are going to help Oregon beekeepers, B, maybe West Coast, and me out here in Ohio? Anything?

Andony: Yes, we have a bunch of-- Just to be clear, we have an Apiculture extension program really strong, Dr. Ramesh Sagili. I cover a different realm, but I work on pollinator habitat and bee forage and we have a large study with Project Apis m. where we're evaluating I think 100 different forage plants for nectar and pollen production. We've been doing work with white clover seed.

There's a resistance to an insecticide in evaluating some of the replacements because that's an insecticide that's applied at full bloom and our beekeepers are currently in white clover right now doing seed production. We produce most of the nation's seed production.

Kim: I can see the seasonal differences here. I've got a patch of white clover that I actually allow to grow in my driveway. It drives my neighbors crazy, but I don't care. It's now six feet tall and it's just beginning to form buds, so I'm going to keep my eye on it. The nice thing about Wesley Clover is that this year you've got one and next year you've got 10 and the year after that you've got fields of it just because it spreads so rapidly and does so well in my environment.

Andony: Well, Kim, and you can credit Oregon beekeepers because they probably pollinated that original seed before it went into the ground. We are pollinating most of the nation's clover seed. I got to mention, we now have a pollinator plate in Oregon. It's coming out. It supports the horticulture programs at Oregon State. It's great because it features bees in a red clover field, both a bumblebee, a honeybee colony, and then there's some other little Easter egg bees on the plate.

It really exemplifies how in Oregon, two things, our beekeepers are tightly interconnected with agricultural production but also, there's a lot of interest in conservation of wild bees and we have a couple of crops like red clovers seed where you get these immense populations of bumblebees that do a lot of the pollination of that crop. It's cool. I'm really excited about it. It should be out in November.

Kim: First off, thank you Oregon Beekeepers for helping with my white sweet clover out here. I will make sure that they get some of the credit when I'm spreading the honey around. Right now here in Ohio, we have maybe the best yellow sweet clover bloom that I have seen in years and years and years. Of course, that comes a little earlier. White follows it shortly thereafter.

If white does as well as yellow does this year, I don't have enough boxes, which is a problem everybody likes to have. You mentioned also wild bees, and I know that there's something about what you want to study about wild bees that we should probably hear about because it's going to spread from Oregon to Montana to Ohio to New York. I'm going to bet in the next several years. Am I right?

Jeff: Before Andony answers that question, let's take a quick break and let Andony collect his thoughts.

Betterbee: At Betterbee, we know you have many options for where you choose to get your wooden hive boxes and frames. We work closely with our sister company, Humble Abodes in Maine, to bring you high-quality woodenware, featuring tight-fit assembly available in a variety of grade options to meet your needs. Whether you choose select, commercial, or budget-grade boxes or frames, you can count on quality milling of locally-sourced Eastern white pine. Shop all woodenware at betterbee.com.

Andony: The one thing that my program has done and has been a shift, I'm a person who traditionally has worked with honeybees for decades, my program has launched a new program. You know how there's master beekeepers, but we have in Oregon the Master Melittologist. It's a program dedicated to the study of wild bees. Volunteers in this program have scoured the state, creating records of bees and the plants they visit.

It's really great in Oregon because people who work with honeybees, many of our master beekeepers are also master melittologists. You don't have this adversarial attitude that I think Kim you were referring to that's been present in other states where people who are interested in native bee conservation and beekeepers seem to have different interests, which I really think is a problem.

I think where this came up for me, is I was recently reading an article in the Washington Post that was shared around extensively outlining a study of urban beekeeping in Montreal, there were covering that piece, and I heard this phrase, which I've heard over and over again that you would never start keeping chickens to save wild birds so why on earth would you keep honeybees to save wild bees? It sets up this dichotomy.

Then in that same article, another scientist said something like keeping honeybees is like throwing Asian carps into the great lakes to save fish. I thought, this is very over wrot and does it really need to be this and what's the evidence that there is such severe conflict between beekeeping and wild bees? That is something that I've been really interested in and I've been giving it a lot of thought.

Jeff: It's a topic that like you mentioned, can really inflame the right groups, native bees versus honeybees and it can really get the emotions going and you have to approach it carefully because as a honeybee keeper, I think that you want to be smart in how you respond to that just so that you can have the discussion with someone who is anti-honeybee on their property or on federal lands, which is where it has been raised. What are you finding? You're looking at studies of the bees there in Oregon. Are you noting anything special?

Andony: I think maybe one of the first things that come up is people say honeybees are doing fine. They don't actually require attention. I do think this is wrong. It is true that honeybee stocks in the US have been climbing after hitting a low period, but people, I think, don't recognize how hard it is to keep those colonies going.

How much cost is associated with it and how commercial beekeepers aren't making scads of profit. It is a very tenuous situation. I think that's one thing that I hear repeatedly in this conversation is beekeepers don't need your attention. I think that's wrong. It is a key industry for agriculture in the United States. It's not going to be easy to preserve. That's the first thing that I hear in that conversation that my blood starts to boil.

That's not the extent of it though. I got other things I want to say about this. Just leaving you some pause. There is a truth to this. In the study that was done in Montreal, what they did is they looked at honeybees and wild bees and pollen utilization on clover on lawns between 2013 and 2020. They do notice that there's this increase in beekeeping in areas. They weren't sure about the figures but maybe 240 high hives in their study area in 2013 and it ballooned to 10 times that amount, almost 3000 hives in that same area over a period of seven years.

We've seen this, we've seen as we saw in the 1970s, a real explosion in interest in beekeeping. That is a real thing that's occurred, but I think when it comes to-- you asked me what we see in Oregon. Where we find the most precious bee communities in the state are not in downtown Portland. When our volunteers go across the state, they quickly get bored of surveying for bees in Portland because those bees are pretty much cosmopolitan, every western city has them.

They're not in any peril, they're the bees that are around. Where they find the most interesting and weird bees in the state are the deserts, the Steens Mountain Range, the Alvord Desert, the Wallowas, the Cascade Siskiyous. Not places you want to keep honeybees.

They're actually terrible places to keep honeybees. Already you can see there are some hot spots where we need to put energy and resources for bee conservation that don't overlap where honeybees are. The idea that these two things are the same problem comes apart as soon as you look at the bee communities at a state level.

Kim: That's a lot to think about right off the top. I can see why people are throwing things at each other at the worst. If I am a native bee person, every one of your honeybees is eating my wild bee food. If I'm a beekeeper person, your wild bees are in my way even though my honeybees are imported. They're an invasive, so they're in competition with all of the things that are where you are right now and for every wild bee I out there, it's taking money out of my pocket, taking food off my table so that my honeybees can't harvest enough, can't make enough, can't pollinate enough to run a business.

I'm glad I'm not in the middle of that. I don't think we have a lot of that here in the Midwest. We're pretty-- I'm guessing. I don't think we have that much of that problem here. I haven't heard much. Somebody will let me know, I'm sure, which is okay then I'll know a little bit more about it. What's the answer? You've got a group of people who are studying wild bees and are you like other places out there throwing handfuls of seed on roadsides and that sort of thing?

Andony: I think what you're pointing at Kim, is that this is a nuanced problem and it gets treated very flatly. It gets treated in a way that doesn't pick up where we need to focus our attention. I would say that most beekeepers don't treat wild bees as competition. Most beekeepers that I know in the state, George Hansen for example, when George Hansen talks, he always says, "I'm concerned about the wild bees."

Harry Vanderpool beekeeper I know very well in Salem, his favorite bee when he was on my podcast were the swept bees that nest along his driveway. I think most beekeepers are fascinated by wild bees and they don't see them as a fisherman would see a seal. They don't think about it that way. Part of the thing is I think that beekeepers are naturally curious, they love bees, they're really fascinated by the idea that there are all these other bees out there that have similar-ish biology, but are quirky and weird.

I think that's one of the parts of it is like beekeepers are often befuddled why there's so much animus directed towards them because they're actually fascinated by wild bees to begin with. It's like a bizarre problem. The nuance is the problem that people are not picking up on the nuance. I think, for me, if I was to think of simple strategy, I've thought about this and I thought what is the solution to this? Why do we get diverted? I think there's four things that ought to be the case.

The first thing is I think most people in most states do not know where their bees are. Most states don't even know the species of bees in their state, especially in the West. I think what we really need is to invest in robust surveys to identify where these bees are and where the hotspots are because it's not like it's spread uniformly across the state. There are certain parts of your state that have these intact plant communities that have high bee biodiversity that are not your garden. I'm sorry to tell you, folks.

Where the crazy bees are are not in your garden. They're in some mountain rock garden on the west and those areas need protection. They really do. They're not going to be places that there are going to be many honeybees in. I think when those areas of high priority are found, restoration needs to go towards them. I do think though that there is some-- we have a lot of bee colonies in Oregon in August. There's not a lot of forage out there.

I think planting honeybee-specific plants in areas where there's high honeybee density is the best investment. Like you said, Kim, if there was sweet clover growing in the Willamette Valley coming into bloom in August, that would take a lot of pressure off our bees and they would not be going into wild areas. They would focus in on those areas where there is a--and they're cheap.

That is cheap seed. That's a very cheap solution. The last thing I would say is there's all sorts of concern about pathogens flowing from honeybees to wild bees. As we started with this conversation, European Foulbrood major disease is not a disease that crosses from Apis. The big issue that we've seen and when it comes to bumblebees, are commercial bumblebees that they have been implicated in disease spread to wild populations.

I think being very careful about bumblebee importations rather than honeybees is a way to get around that disease issue. Those are my four suggestions.

Jeff: When you were talking about hotspots, can you define what is a hotspot?

Andony: You'll know it when you see it, Jeff.

Jeff: When I touch it.

Andony: No, it's an area, like I said there's in Washington state for example, where you are, you get up into the north cascades above the tree line, there's some areas there where there's some very unique bee species that you do not find in the agricultural areas.

Jeff: The hotspot is an area, geographic location where there are specific breed, specific race of bee resides that we want to protect and keep those resources available for that bee.

Andony: Yes. You come to these places and there are not just the common bee genre. There's a lot of very common bees that you can find in Detroit and you can find in Portland. They're everywhere, but it's the bees that are very regional that might have tight associations with certain plants. You may only find them with certain plant families or plant genre. Those bees may have very narrow ranges. You may only find them in a certain area.

Our volunteers have turned up these crazy bees that we only have four specimens of like one that's found in the lava rock in McKenzie Pass, found on Penstemons. It's a very tight little niche. This bee is really closely associated with it and you're never going to find it outside of that habitat. There are those kinds of habitats that just have layer upon layer upon layer of bee biodiversity that are really precious.

Anywhere in the deserts in the west that hasn't been overgrazed and has an intact plant community is likely to have crazy numbers of wild bee species.

Kim: You bring up the exact number I'm going to ask about. You say crazy numbers of wild bees. Looking at the big picture going up 1,000 miles, I'm looking down at the wild bees in Oregon or wherever it is I'm looking at and I see this many species or types of wild bees up there. How does that compare to five and 50 years ago? Is it a downhill slide and they're going to crash soon when they hit the bottom or have they settled in and said, "Okay. Honeybees here and wild bees there." Or are the populations of wild bees changing, A? B, if they are up or down.

Andony: It's hard to say. Here in Oregon, we started off thinking we had 500 species. We have this postcard, the Bees of Oregon. The first edition said 500 and then we had to revise it to 600 and now the current estimate is 780. You can see in just that act we really never had a baseline. It's really hard to know when you only have four specimens in the world of this bee. Is it going up or down? That's a real hard trend line to fit.

My sense is that, yes, invariably we've seen some deep-range rejections, so the western bumblebee is one example. Rusty patch was another example where bees had wider ranges and we see them suddenly contract over a period of 10 or 15 years. That has gone on. I would say for the majority of the bees we're so data-deficient we have no idea. You could speculate, but if you are a responsible scientist you would really throw caution at the speculation because of the lack of data surrounding a lot of those estimates.

Jeff: It doesn't seem like there's really a win or loser in this debate. To get into an argument of native versus non-native is really an academic challenge. Shouldn't we really be looking at answers more along the lines of finding a collaborative effort to increase habitat to keep from the habitat destruction?

Andony: I think so. I think it needs to be a little more nuanced. I think it does require maybe two solutions. I will say that the amount of unified support we had in the 2010s with the beekeeping industry, wild bee people were seemingly together going to Congress and exerting pressure has fragmented. To think that we're going to get anything done by fragmenting ourselves is a pipe dream.

If we don't get on the same page on some of our priorities, we're going to lose it all. That's where I get worried because I think it does require us to sit down, figure out-- because I don't think they're the same solution. I think they have different solutions. The beekeepers, I think, are utterly sympathetic to the plight of wild bees. I think conservationists would be surprised to see the extent that they're actually invested in that problem and sit down and figure out what we want because right now I think when lawmakers hear what honeybees aren't, but wild bee--

It can just fracture the message up and the public as well. The public hears us and they're like, "I thought this was this and now it's this. Make up your minds?" I think we have to be very mindful of that, how this sounds coming out.

Kim: Well, part of that also is I've been keeping bees. My father kept bees, my grandfather kept bees and every spring we put our bees next to this national forest, state park, whatever you want to call it. Now there's a group of people telling me that my bees are doing damage. Suddenly, I go back to what I said before, wild bees are taking food off my table.

What you suggest is working in unison as opposed to banging heads on the park border. How do you get that to work so that beekeepers and wild bee enthusiasts will talk to each other?

Andony: That's the big question and you guys are maybe better situated in some ways. My sense is that beekeepers are very interested and they've got baked in interest in wild bees. If you're the wild bee enthusiast out there and have predetermined that beekeepers are not responsive to the-- you're missing an opportunity. You should reach out to the beekeepers. They'll be very interested to know a lot more about what you do, but you also need to be responsive because you don't really understand beekeeping in return.

There has to be a kind of like, "Let's have a conversation here. Let's start this rolling." Because I think you're right, Kim. There have been people who've been in federal lands keeping bees at a certain scale and really there's no measurable impact of doing this. Oftentimes, we're not talking about moving bees up into the wilderness area. We're talking about maybe some BLM land that has been heavily grazed and I don't think that's the prime concern.

That's a great place to keep honeybees. There's a lot of forage around there, but it might not be the prime place. I think, again, making your priority lists. There's certain areas that are of high value to wild bees, the rich diversity areas. Beekeepers should go to bat for the wild bee people when they say, "Here's a national monument where there's a lot of wild bees and it has no interest to me as a beekeeper because I'd never want to keep bees there, but I'm going to go to bat for that national monument because I understand the value of that."

That has to go two ways. At the same time, when the beekeepers need support for Forge or NRCS or farm bill programs, the wild bee people have to get their back. If that's not going to happen, if people are unwilling to back each other up like that, we're going to get nothing.

Jeff: Are there any groups that are actually working across that bridge or creating that bridge between the native beekeepers and native bee enthusiasts and honey beekeepers?

Andony: I think so. I would say here in Oregon it's nice. We have three bee programs in horticulture. One is wild bees in urban areas, Gail Langellotto's lab. Ramesh Sagili is down the hallway doing apiculture and I do the wild bee work predominantly. We talk often and we have volunteers. We have Oregon Master Beekeepers and Oregon Master Melittologists who share membership, who share a coordinator, Dan Larson coordinates both groups.

We've integrated both of them deeply together and we try to bridge that across. At the national level, I think there are attempts to do this. Maybe I'm on the podcast today to give emphasis and give license to those groups to keep doing it because without that, we are going to be in trouble.

Kim: Well, it sounds like you've got your work cut out for you, Andony. [chuckles] I'm going to skip ahead a little bit. When it comes to doing podcasts, you have a podcast and you've been doing it for, I want to say more than six years, seven years, something. I think you interviewed me a while back and that was quite a--

Andony: In a hotel room.

[laughter]

Kim: Exactly right. Quite a few years ago. How long is your podcast and how can I find it and what sorts of things do you cover?

Andony: The name is PolliNation which came from Danielle Downey of Project Apus m. I was kicking names around and she was the one who named it. Thank you. Danielle. It's on iTunes and all the podcasting suites. It's not as polished as Beekeeping Today, which is the finest beekeeping podcast out there. As I think I mentioned, I try to discipline myself to have a conversation with somebody new every time and so oftentimes I have growers on the show, I have regulators, I've had lawmakers, I've had beekeepers, obviously, conservationists. It's my way to broaden my network and I'm glad the listeners are interested in coming along, but really that is the focus of it.

Jeff: That's a really good podcast and thank you for those nice words. I'll check your Venmo account here in a little bit.

[laughter]

Jeff: Well, Andony, it's been a pleasure having you back. This is your third time on our show. I appreciate you taking the time. I look forward to having you back and we can catch up sometime if I get back down to, Corvallis. That would be great.

Andony: That would be wonderful. I guess for the Western listeners, the one thing I did want to put a plug out to is the Western Apicultural Society's meeting is going to be in Calgary, Alberta this September. There's going to be a lot of good speakers there and I think they're just starting to announce the program. If you are in the West, check out WAS.

Jeff: It'll be a really good show.

Kim: I think Jeff probably will have that on our webpage. When they go looking for your podcast, along with all of the other things that you do there. I'll just very quickly say we've talked about 100 things. What did we miss that we shouldn't miss, Andony?

Andony: I think we covered a lot. I guess the one thing is, I would like to consolidate this message. I've thought about writing an article for Bee Culture along the lines of this, so stay tuned. Some time in the next year I'm going to pull this all together. I do think this is a real passion of mine to try and figure this out as best I can and I hope others are interested in doing the same so thanks for having me on the show, you guys. I really appreciate you having me.

Jeff: Absolutely. We look forward to having you back.

Kim: We do. I'll just quickly add, what you've talked about isn't an article in Bee Culture. It's a book with a lot of pages in it because you got a lot of topics to cover and then you have to blend them in so that everybody ends up getting at least enough. Good luck with that, but I'll look for the article. Again, thank you for being here today.

Andony: Thank you.

Jeff: Yes, that's a real sensitive subject in some circles when you go into your local native plant and native bee group and say, "Yes, I keep honeybees." Doesn't always go over as you might want it to

Kim: Duck and cover in some places. Absolutely. The thing on blueberries interests me with European Foulbrood, and I got to believe, I'm shouting out to the people who are doing the virus work that there is a way that a virus could be developed that would protect a colony before they move into blueberries from European Foulbrood. They would be protected. The queen would be laying eggs that had the resistance to the virus and the eggs.

The colony would move into blueberries and all of the adults would be, were just very happy. Thank you. I got to believe that that's got to be possible and I'm hoping that it is because I really like blueberries.

Jeff: [laughs] They're good on oatmeal, they're good in cookies. It seems to me, and I must be getting mixed up with American Foulbrood, but it seemed to me someone just recently announced in the last couple weeks and we're in the middle of June at this recording, that someone announced a European Foulbrood vaccine or treatment. I want to say vaccine, maybe I'm mixing my news alerts. I wonder what it is. We'll find out one day, I'm sure.

Kim: If it's out there, people need to let the world know so that they can use it. Or if it's not out there, then somebody needs to get on the wagon and get it going. It was good that he brought this to the point and how significantly, A, it's affecting the beekeeping industry and B, that it's getting worse. It's a one-way trip here. Pretty soon you are into blueberries, you don't come out.

Jeff: That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to rate us 5 stars on Apple Podcast 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 webpage.

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.