Predicting Honey Bee Foraging with AI - Davidson Fellow Vince Wu (325)

325 - Predicting Honey Bee Foraging with AI - Davidson Fellow Vince Wu

Ivan: Hi, I'm Ivan.

Linden: Hi, I'm Linden.

Nina: Hi, I'm Nina. We're flower farmers.

Linden: We're beekeepers.

Ivan: With Bitter Boy Farms in Eastern Nebraska.

Linden: We want to wish you a happy holidays.

Ivan: Welcome to the Beekeeping Today Podcast.

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

Becky Masterman: I'm Becky Masterman.

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Jeff: Hey, a quick shout-out to Betterbee and 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 300 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.beekeepingtoday.com.

Thanks gang for that great opening from Eastern Nebraska. That's a great holiday opening. How did they know?

Becky: I know. How did they know that it was going to be St. Patrick's Day, and we were going to have them open the show and wish everybody a Happy St. Patrick's Day, essentially?

Jeff: That's right. Well, actually, folks, we got that back in December and just couldn't find a use for it, but now with the holiday of St. Patty's Day, here you go. Thanks, kids. Happy St. Patty's Day to you, too. How's your March going, Becky?

Becky: Oh, boy. You know March in Minnesota, it's warm, it's cold, it snows, it rains. It's just about everything going on here.

Jeff: Oh, in the winter, I was deep into trying to downsize, move our house, not the bee operation moving. I think later this year, let's do an episode on moving your bee yard.

Becky: Oh, I love it. I'm wondering if you moved over three miles away, and if not, do you find yourself returning back to your old house?

Jeff: Oh, man, I hadn't thought of that. [laughter] All right. Hey, Becky, we have a great show lined up today. Starting up first is Dr. Dewey Caron with another audio postcard on communication, and then we have-- what did you do when you were 18? Did you study bees when you were 18?

Becky: I did not study bees when I was 18. I did really, really like school, and I was already a college sophomore. It was more because I was just really motivated, not ridiculously intelligent the way I think our guest is today.

Jeff: Oh, man, he puts me to shame. At 18, I was sitting on my front stoop playing a guitar about some lost girlfriend or something, I don't know. Our guest today is this year's Davidson Scholarship Award winner, and he did his experiment on honeybees.

Becky: He might not even be 18 yet, but I think he did this well before he was actually 18. Let's just put on our thinking caps because we're about to talk to a very smart individual. I'm really excited, but we have to be on our best behavior, Jeff.

Jeff: All right, I'll do my best. First, let's hear from Dewey, and then we'll hear from Vince.

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Dr. Dewey Caron: Hi, I am Dr. Dewey Caron. I come to you from Cochabamba, Bolivia, South America, where I overwinter with my wife's family. I present another audio postcard on communication in my continuing series of once monthly Beekeeping Today Podcast. Topic this month centers around winter colony losses. For these audio postcards, I have been discussing communication on three levels. Bee scientist to beekeeper, beekeeper to bee, and bee to bee.

Today's communication of bee scientist to beekeeper is the continuing effort to help our industry define bee loss levels, and how individuals can perform a necropsy. We speak of doing an autopsy on dead humans. On our deceased animals, we do a necropsy. Bee scientist to beekeeper. Virtually, all of our annual comparisons of level of loss of bees overwinter, over the season, annually, come from survey efforts. A number of local beekeeping groups survey their membership about winter loss.

Most membership notes role are just individuals currently overwintering colonies, so losses are collected from those beekeeping active members when they share their overwinter losses. Sometimes, they ask us for overwintering success. Respondents may be biased toward those who are successful or those who aren't as successful. They are almost always backyard beekeepers. We have no idea of how represented these survey results are since they are not random.

I do both Oregon and Washington state electronic surveys of commercial and backyard beekeepers of overwintering losses, not the full season loss. While a number of respondent beekeepers are robust, half of the responding individuals are relatively new, less than five years' experience, and relatively small colony numbers. Four colonies is the medium colony number. My PNW survey again is not randomly collected data. Since I too use dissemination via club memberships, I do not know the percent of return.

Likewise complicating data compilation, there are no reliable estimates of numbers of individuals or numbers of bee colonies maintained in the two states. We also do not know how many beekeepers are not members of the local clubs who are missed by the survey. Some think only one-half the actual number of beekeepers in any one area will join that local club. Last year, both Oregon and Washington backyard beekeepers had the lowest level of overwintering loss. 20% for Oregon beekeepers, well below the 14th year average of 38% of overwinter loss.

For the commercial beekeepers, last year's lost levels were higher than backyards 26%, and higher than the average of 21% for the previous years. The two surveys will occur again. I survey from mid-March until the end of April, both electronically and the commercials throughout my paper. Now national law surveys of beekeepers in all 50 states have been conducted by the Bee Informed Partnership, BIP, for 13 consecutive years. Unfortunately, this was discontinued last year.

Fortunately, Auburn University picked up the national survey with support of One Hive Foundation, Project Apis m., National Honeyboard, American Beekeeping Federation, and the American Honey Producers Association. Loss levels of the national survey are of commercial beekeepers. The results from the latest survey are truly alarming. Survey of over 16,000 beekeepers in all 50 states collectively managing a little bit over 33,000 colonies from the year October to October represented 13% of the estimated 2.5 million managed colonies in the country.

The loss was 55.1. Total seasonal loss. That happened to be 14.8% points higher than the 13-year average from that previous BI-informed survey, where the average

loss rate was 40.3. Just 7% of the respondents were commercial beekeepers, but they reported for 97% of the managed colonies in the survey. Backyard beekeepers managed just 3.1% of the colonies. Overwinter backyard losses were 37.3, which was also higher, 8.5 points higher than the running 16-year average of 28.8. Truly alarming numbers.

The national loss survey will be repeated in 2025. I recommend you participate in this or local survey of losses. They are important data while not random serve as a snapshot of our industry. They point to the fact that we are annually having to replace a lot of colonies. As colony numbers overall have stayed about the same for the last few years, beekeepers have to make up those losses.

Onto beekeeper-to-bee communication. Today, I reverse beekeeper-to-bee communication as the bees communicate to us beekeepers in somewhat subtle and sometimes contradictory ways about why they did not survive when we do a necropsy on a dead out. Although colonies may perish for various reasons. The three major reasons for colony loss overwinter are starvation, too small adult population, but primarily due to virus epidemics caused by varroa mites feeding on the bees and bee brood.

Especially those that are leading up to in preparations of the colony for overwintering. In necropsy of dead colony will not bring them back alive, but it can help us change our management plans for the season. I recommend you look at dead outs closely and seek to determine why. Why did that colony or those colonies not survive the winter? We noticed that shortly after the summer solstice of late June, our bees begin to sense decreasing day length and start to prepare for winter. Locally adapted bees and some bee ecotypes Carniolan bee , for example.

Bees further to the north are more adept at beginning these preparations. Things we could do with bees in May or June when our bees are very forgiving of our interferences in their annual life cycle are not as tolerant on our interventions any longer. Think how making nucs and requeening become more difficult in July and into August, September. I recommend you look up a good resource on how to do a bee necropsy. How to distinguish starvation. Larger dead cluster remains. Dead bees piled on the bottom board. No honey immediately available to the dead cluster. Sudden coal snaps that last three or four days.

Starvation is usually a spring event. Bees might be alive in March but dead in April. One confounding factor of a spring necropsy on a colony where starvation is expected is robbing. The unprotected honey stores might have been robbed before you discover the colony is not alive. Colonies with extremely small cluster remains can be detected in some spring dead-outs. We detect this by seeing that brood has been abandoned. Mold is present in the bee-bred cells. There are a few dead bees on the bottom board and the cluster remains are quite tiny.

Usually only the size of a fist and only on a frame or two. Why would such colonies fail? The colony was not able to rear a sufficient number of healthy fat bees, what we call bees with robust fat body reserves in their abdomens that do not work as nurses in the fall of the year. Colonies in the fall may be weak for a variety of reasons and thus entered with two smaller cluster to make contact with honey. They abandoned brood so bees that could become adults died in their cells.

Perhaps the colonies had an early fall cold snap or poor fall forging resources, for example, likely, however, for spring dead outs by the time we discover them in our first spring inspections varroa mites were probably the issue. Varroa mites in fact are directly or indirectly responsible for most of our overwintering losses. High insufficiently controlled mite populations either due to our bee stock or due to our failure to adequately control mite populations.

A task that begins in spring and continues through the season for most of our managed bee stock in the US, since we basically lack bee stock that can adequately by themselves control mites without our interventions are usually our factor. Too many fall bees are compromised. Their adult life shortened by virus is transmitted by the nurse bees, or by the mites directly feeding on them during their pupil stage. They don't live long enough to survive the winter or the colonies lack sufficient forwarders to collect adequate winter stores.

Mites are really the major reason for overwintering losses. I recommend that you look at the dead outs and see if your colonies died from mites or perhaps from starvation, or too small. Then perhaps you can adjust your management accordingly this coming season. Finally, communication bee-to-bee. Can sick bees communicate to their sisters in the hive? In experiments in France, honeybees were infected by nosema and vairimorpha, the new name for the adult gut parasite nosema.

They found these bees leave the hive permanently. Bees sickened with exposure to higher levels of CO2 have also been shown to leave their hive. This altruistic behavior is speculated to apparently help the bees limit the spread of infection within a colony. Certainly has been shown sick bees acquire a different hive odor or body odor different from the other bees in the hive.

Also, honeybees infected with parasites have a change in their brain chemistry. Do healthy high bees treat sickly sisters in a different way? We don't know. More of research is needed, but we do know sick bees leave home and don't return. Whether pushed out by healthy bees like occurs with drones, or they leave voluntarily. Communication. Until next time, be well and best overwintering for your bees.

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Jeff: Hey, everybody. Welcome back. Hey, sitting across this great big virtual Beekeeping Today Podcast table sitting down in Palo Alto, California is Vince Wu. Vince is a high school senior and-- well, I'm going to let you describe all the fantastic research you've done, but first, welcome to the show, Vince.

Vince Wu: Awesome. Thanks for having me, Jeff.

Becky: Nice to have you here, Vince. We're excited to have you tell us how far ahead you are in the honeybee world compared to what we were doing at age 18. Right, Jeff? [laughter]

Jeff: What you're doing is spectacular. For our listeners who aren't familiar with the scholarship program and the contest that you participated in, can you give us a little bit of background on the contest and your project?

Vince: Yes. The competition that I participated in, it's the Davidson fellowship. It's actually more of a scholarship really. What they do is they ask high school students to submit any body of work they have. It's mostly scientific, but it also includes stuff like art, literature, music, and just describe what you've done, what the contribution looks like, that sort of thing.

Then they choose a couple of students from across the nation to provide a college scholarship to and fly them out to DC for this whole ceremony. The project that I did, I focused on basically tracking the foraging activity of honey bees and also concurrent weather conditions. Then predicting their foraging based on whether using deep learning modeling.

Jeff: There's a lot of questions that come flooding to my head. First of all, what's your background in honeybees? Do you keep bees or anybody in your family keep bees?

Vince: Yes. How I got started, as you described it, it started as a family thing. We got our first hive from a former friend in our scouting troop who's a pretty serious beekeeper from one of their swarmed hives, and so it just really grew and took off from there. We've been doing it for years. That's really how my interest in this started. When I was starting to think about trying to conduct research, trying to put my skills to some use as much as I could, my mind really jumped to beekeeping.

Becky: When you apply for the fellowship, how much ahead time do you have to do your work, because, as you know, a field season of honeybee work is kind of intense. Did you have a lot of time to prepare?

Vince: Yes. I started this project essentially this summer prior to my sophomore year and then conducted it throughout the year. Then when I submitted to the fellowship, it was actually several months after I concluded the scientific study aspect of it, that's just how the timing fell. I didn't conduct the project with the fellowship in mind originally. At any point, it's just a thing where I found out I had this work completed, and it suited what they were looking for, and I thought it looked like a really cool opportunity to join this Davidson fellowship.

Interviewer: Wait, you were just doing the work for yourself or for another project.

Vince: Yes, [laughs] I was doing it, of course, partially for myself, for the skills, for the exploration. Yes, like you said, it was primarily first I thought of it as a science project and that sort of thing, but it also fits within what Davidson looks for a submission of a high school project.

Jeff: You got the bees originally from somebody who was part of your scout troop? So you're a scout?

Vince: I am.

Jeff: What rank are you?

Vince: I am Eagle.

Jeff: Excellent. I'm an eagle. Here's the virtual fist bump-

Becky: Did you have a salute?

Jeff: -I'm an Eagle Scout buddy. [laughter] That's it.

Becky: Cool.

Jeff: I come from a family of four Eagle Scouts. Actually, there's eight or nine of us. Anyways, fantastic. Congratulations being an Eagle, and I'm glad to see that you're doing something there with the bees. What made you tick on a science project?

Vince: I think like every beekeeper I want to help them. Then more, I guess, deeper into the scientific aspect of it and the specific nature of the project, when I was thinking about ideas, I had a couple of thoughts. I realized that, hey, I'm a high schooler, I don't really know so much. I reached out to just a bunch of people, a bunch of local experts and that sort of thing, to try to get their feedback on just what meaningful ideas would be.

This project is what came out of those discussions, the idea that having a better understanding of how honey bees, how their flights and foraging relate to weather, that would be really important for stuff like managed pollination, managed agriculture. Where honey bees are so prevalent, where they're thinking of pesticide sprays, you're trying to time them to minimize honey bee contact, that sort of thing. That's where the idea really came from.

Becky: Would you go through how you collected data? Was it one hive that you collected data from?

Vince: No, it was actually three experimental hives. The data collection, yes, that was probably the toughest part of it, and the most intensive. The method I used is called radio frequency identification. It's actually the same technology in barcodes. It's just like a micro transponder tag that I would attach to the thorax of a worker and then antennas placed at the hive entrances. Those would allow me to track when bees enter and exit the hives.

Not only that, but it would also allow me to essentially track individual bees over a long period of time, which it might sound sort of innocuous, but it's actually a really important thing for being able to basically see who is a forager and who isn't. Who's in the orientation stage, who's doing the non-foraging flights, that sort of thing, and be able to exclude all of that noisy data to get the most accurate dataset of just foraging.

Jeff: I'm still trying to figure out how you glued all those little RFID tags on the backs of the bees.

Becky: I'm guessing you put them into a chill coma. Did you cool them down?

Vince: Yes, exactly. Exactly. That's very, very insightful.

Becky: You would collect bees that you knew were flying by collecting them on the entrance?

Vince: Yes. It was partially that to get bees who I knew were foragers because they were workers who are going to be flying out. Then also, I combined that with another methodology for this tag attachment, which is taking brood frames and incubating them. Then once the newborns start emerging-- because they're newborns, it's just much faster to tag them.

Then obviously they don't immediately become workers, so that's the disadvantage of that part. By developing some algorithms to filter for that onto genetic shift from orientation to foraging stage, I was able to get pretty accurate readings of when they would start taking lots of foraging flights from those newborn tags as well.

Becky: There's a really good RFID paper on orientation flights. I don't know if you've seen it. It looks at how bees-- how many flights they're taking for orientation, and how far they're going away from the hive. Then it goes up to when bees are ready to go on their foraging flights, how much they explore the area close by before they go out. Have you seen that paper? Does it sound familiar?

Vince: It sounds familiar, I'm not sure, because they all start blending together at some point when you're coming through so many.

Becky: Anyways, it's such a cool way to ask questions, because Jeff and I are stuck looking at the bees at the entrance. Right, Jeff? [laughter] [unintelligible 00:27:03], where are you going?

Jeff: They don't talk to us. They don't talk to us.

Becky: Anyway, that is a lot of work. How many data points did you collect?

Vince: I don't know the exact number off the top of my head, but I think it ended up being somewhere around over 50,000 total flights.

Becky: Oh my Gosh.

Vince: Yes, a lot of data, which is obviously super important for this type of modeling study.

Jeff: No, it wasn't 50,000 bees you tagged, you just had 50.

Vince: No, no.

Jeff: No, all right. You still had a large number of bees that you had tagged, and some were on the brood frames that hatched out, and the RFI receivers they were at the front of the colony. You had to filter out those that were still inside the colony and not flying yet. You had to be able to identify those. Tell me how the RFI tag and receiver worked. They had to pass underneath it or was it nearness?

Vince: Yes, that's a great question. It's just, as you said, it is proximity to the antenna. The way they're designed, it's only when they pass within a very narrow margin of it, essentially. I basically had to modify the entrances to make them a little bit narrower, and then have two antennas placed in sequence in there. Basically, there was a lot of noise, certainly, of just bees floating around inside and that sort of thing. More or less, if you saw antenna one, then antenna two, you would know pretty assuredly that it was a bee exiting the hive, and then vice versa for the antenna two then antenna one.

Jeff: You could almost put a tube and just make a tube or a tunnel [unintelligible 00:28:42].

Vince: Yes, a wooden square tube.

Jeff: All right. Now it's all coming into focus for me. [laughs] Were these full-size colonies you were working with or were you working with nucs? Were you working with observation hives?

Vince: Yes, they were full-size.

Jeff: Full-size colonies, fantastic. Over how long of a period of time?

Vince: I conducted it across-- basically one full year, but it's summer, fall, and then spring because winter obviously not super feasible or productive to get a lot of data.

Jeff: How often did you have to tag bees, because summer bees only live so long, and winter bees, of course, live a little bit longer? I'm not sure in Palo Alto, where you have that big variation as we do in the northern climates.

Vince: Yes, I know. I'm very blessed with beekeeping weather here.

Jeff: Sure, rub it in. Rub it in. [laughter]

Vince: We have winters the same as everyone else. Well, not quite the same, but in principle.

Becky: You can't [unintelligible 00:29:43].

Vince: Yes, it was-- [laughter] I mean, it wasn't exact, but roughly every two weeks or so, I would have a new tagging session basically.

Jeff: What was the main question you were trying to ask or you're trying to answer?

Vince: I think the main question itself or the research hypothesis was how can we predict honeybee foraging based on weather just broadly, and that was the research goal, and that was what my overarching aim was with the entire project. Within that, a couple of micro research questions emerged in a sense of there's this really interesting thing of what weather metrics are most strongly correlated with honeybee foraging.

What I ended up finding was that solar irradiance or just sunlight ended up being the strongest factor which was closely followed by temperature. Then things like gust speed and rainfall, and then barometric pressure and stuff like that was much lower correlated.

Jeff: You had a weather station there in your bee yard also, so that you monitor the level of light and all the other variables.

Vince: Yes, yes, exactly.

Becky: Is wind the same as gust speed?

Vince: Gust speed is the max speed within the interval of time while wind speed is taken more as an aggregate measure of just the average speed of the wind. They ended up being just very, very similar overall. It might be a factor of the area that I'm in where we don't really get super crazy gusts for a tiny bit of time or anything like that.

Jeff: Let's talk about what did you find out?

Vince: The thing that I just mentioned about the relationship between weather and foraging activity, that was part of it. Then within that, actually, I found that because I used this radio frequency data collection method, I was able to calculate a bunch of different ways of representing foraging activity. I found that the time that workers and foragers spent outside was much more strongly correlated with whether overall as compared to how many times they entered and exited the hive or ingress and egresses.

Once again, sounds like a very granular specific thing. Previous studies that were in this field, they all essentially used that ingress and egress metric as a way to measure foraging or flight activity. This is just a helpful indication that like, hey, if you can, and if it's at all possible tracking the time that be spend outside is probably going to be just more precise and more accurate.

Becky: I'm going to try to understand that a little bit more. Are we talking about better weather for foraging?

Vince: What I was saying before was weather overall, no matter what the weather conditions are. That weather's it's more strongly tied to how much time foragers spend outside basically as compared to how many trips they're taking, if that makes sense.

Becky: Could that be the distance that they're going?

Vince: Longer trips you would assume are related to distance. I wasn't able to actually track the distance that they were flying, but yes, that's what you would assume, yes.

Jeff: What was the average length of time the bees would stay out?

Vince: Actually, it varied very heavily from bee to bee. I think there is actually some other research on the fact some hives will have super foragers or something like that, which some foragers will be doing a ton, and then the rest will be doing just much less. Then if the super forager passes away, I think one of the other foragers will step up to become a super forager. I seem to remember I came across something like that, that's something that I sort of saw.

Becky: Speaking of passing away, what was the percentage or number approximately of foragers who didn't return?

Vince: Yes. It's a grin topic.

Becky: Oh, no, really.

Vince: [chuckles] No, no, no, no.

Becky: What? [laughs] If it's too sad, we're just going to edit it out. Pretend like everybody comes back home. [laughs] Everybody makes it home.

Vince: It's not something I looked at explicitly of like which trips didn't come back in that sense partially because it's not something I wanted to explore. Also partially because there is a lot of noise with the RFID reading. If I saw a trip that exited but never came back, it's reasonable to assume that is indeed what happened. It's also reasonable to assume that it just was the reader either getting a faulty signal or not reading them as they returned.

Jeff: Or went into the hive next door.

Becky: Oh, that was my next question. Did you see any robbing ?

Vince: Oh, that's very interesting. Actually, I didn't think about that so much at all. I never saw anyone-- any substantial-

Becky: You have a treasure trove of data.

Vince: -like signal of that. Yes, I should definitely look into that.

Becky: You have so many questions that you weren't trying to answer that you can probably answer just because of the sheer number of data points you have. That's interesting. Did you write up and publish your work anywhere?

Vince: Yes. I wrote it up and then presented it at a conference called the-- I think the International Conference on Agro-Geoinformatics. I just basically attended that virtually and spoke to other scientists about my work. Yes, that was a very cool experience.

Jeff: That's fantastic. Were you able to distinguish between the bees that were nectar foragers or pollen foragers or even water foragers?

Vince: Yes. A short answer, no, unfortunately. [laughter]

Jeff: I can deal with short answers.

Vince: Actually, that's a super big and important and interesting question to look at. There is a lot of other research and literature mostly focused on computer vision that tries to identify if you have a viewing underneath the entrance when bees are coming back. If you can see what they're carrying basically. It's pretty accurate from what I understand for a lot of pollen because it's so bright and distinct from the background. Then nectar becomes a much more challenging thing because it's obviously much less visually appealing. I wasn't using any visuals.

Jeff: What was your conclusion of your research?

Vince: The primary conclusions first of all was the fact that I was able to develop accurate models with this methodology. Then what I think is the most interesting finding to come out of it all was this behavioral element where there were a bunch of days where there was basically very prohibitive climate conditions, like very low temperatures. For California, almond farmers are conventionally considered to essentially mean very little or no foraging.

On some of those days with those conditions, I actually saw these pretty significant levels of foraging from the data. Those are also captured by my model because of basically some of the architecture of it that captures holistic patterns. All of those days the commonality between them where they had foraging, but weather it was pretty bad was that they were all proceeded by a day that had similarly prohibitive conditions where the honeybees actually didn't forage very much at all.

Basically, what it indicates and shows is that honeybees they were displaying this adaptive response to weather, and also their stores of forage materials. When there was a day when normally they wouldn't forage but they hadn't been foraging in the previous time period, then they would essentially tough it out and go out and still forage regardless. That's something that hadn't been reported before and it was pretty cool to see.

Becky: Interesting information. It goes to their resilience and their success.

Vince: Yes, and their intelligence as well.

Jeff: This is fantastic, Vince. One, that you even thought of doing and followed through and did such a fabulous job. You submitted your research to the Davidson Foundation, what was the net result of the competition or the scholarship? What did you win is what I'm trying to ask. [laughter]

Vince: The big question.

Becky: That was a fancy way of asking that. [laughs]

Vince: Yes, four-way.

Becky: Vince, what'd you get? [laughs]

Vince: The main thing was I won the $25,000 college scholarship. It's just something that goes directly towards my future education, which is obviously just really, really nice. Then also another part of it, depending on how you look at it, more or less significant was the ceremony of it. Being able to go to DC, meet Bob Davidson and some other prominent people in the field. Have a reception ceremony in one of the Smithsonian museums, and just getting to meet a bunch of other young scientists and musicians, and writers from across the country, and hear about what they've done.

Jeff: That's fabulous. What are you going to do after high school?

Vince: Yes, that's what I've been asking myself.

Jeff: Yes. I'm sorry to ask you the same question your parents are probably asking you.

Becky: Don't you have to know or have you formally?

Vince: Yes. I'm planning to pursue college education. Essentially it's either an environmental science or engineering major. I don't know where I'll be going yet, hopefully somewhere. [laughter]

Becky: You haven't received the acceptance letters yet?

Vince: No. They come out anywhere from mid-March to early April.

Becky: Oh my gosh, that's so exciting.

Jeff: Pins and needles.

Becky: Oh, you get an email these days, don't you?

Vince: An email and maybe a package

Becky: Okay. Our fingers are crossed for you.

Vince: Yes. A package usually.

Becky: I'm sure you applied for University of Minnesota, right?

Jeff: No? [laughter]

Becky: Okay. Darn. We have a really good bee lab here. You could have done that alongside with your programs. It's too late to recruit him.

Vince: Maybe if the [unintelligible 00:40:22]. [laughter]

Jeff: Good answer. Well, Vince, this is really fabulous. The Davidson Foundation, we've had several winners on the show over the years. It's so much fun to see young researchers work with honey bees and do such fabulous work such as you've done so. Please provide us the links to your research. We'll provide them in our show notes.

Boy, if you could send us a picture, too, of your research set up with the hives, with the antennas, and how you did that. We'll put them in the show notes and our listeners can look at the work that you did. It's fabulous. Thanks so much, Vince.

Vince: Thanks very much for having me.

Becky: Yes. Thanks, Vince. Good luck in the future.

Jeff: Absolutely. You were right at the beginning, Vince was spot on. His research at high school level, my gosh.

Becky: It sounds like a PhD project, so extremely impressive. You know what was most impressive? It was the way he was able to explain it to us. That's such a skill because you can be the smartest person in the world, but if you cannot communicate your thoughts, your ideas, your research, your work to a big group of people then it's kind of wasted. Wow, he's going to do great things.

Jeff: He was absolutely wonderful. The fact that he was fixing the RFDI tags on the back of honey bees and thought of that and took the time to do that, I'm impressed. Vince, kudos to you buddy.

Becky: Exactly.

Jeff: Well, that about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to follow us and rate us five stars on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you'd like. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the reviews tab along the top of any web page.

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

[00:42:55] [END OF AUDIO]