Exploring the Native and Non-Native Bee Debate with Ron Miksha (S6, E24)

S6, E24 - Exploring the Native and Non-Native Bee Debate with Ron Miksha

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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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Hey, everybody, welcome to the show. You know, if you're a regular listener, you'll have noticed that we didn't have a listener opener on this episode. Do you know why? We need some. It's really easy to do. You can record an opening using your phone or your laptop or your tablet computer and just say, "Hey, this is Jeff Ott, welcome to  Beekeeping Today Podcast," and send it to us at questions@beekeepingtodaypodcast.com and we'll get it on the air. How's that sound, Becky? Do you think we can get some people to send us some openings?

Becky: I think they should, yes. I think that was a friendly enough introduction to it. Non-threatening, and you'll make them famous overnight, right?

Jeff: Absolutely famous, you know, and the next Bee Club meeting, next time they go to the bee store, people recognize them, and say, "Hey, I heard you on  Beekeeping Today Podcast. You sound better than you look."

Becky: No way. [laughs]

Jeff: No, that's what they tell me. I'm sorry.

Becky: Great. Now you're going to scare them away.

Jeff: TMI, I know. Becky, this is a downtime of the year. It's fall, going into winter, faster for some folks than others, and it's a time when many of us get caught up in our reading. Are you reading anything that catches your fancy?

Becky: I am. I received, from our friends at Northern Bee Books, an excellent book about one of my favorite subjects, which is varroa and  Varroa Management from Dr. Kirsty Stainton. It's called  A Practical Guide on How to Manage Varroa Mites in Honey Bee Colonies. Even just the title, 'How To Manage Varroa Mites', did you know you're a varroa mite manager, Jeff, in your colonies?

Jeff: I am a varroa mite breeder in my colonies, yes.

Becky: Instead of going up like we want with honey production, we want them to go down in population, we want the numbers lower. If you think about how we learn about varroa in science, we'll read a paper and connect it to another paper, and that's how we build our knowledge. As a beekeeper, a lot of times, it's at the meeting, somebody gets up and shows you 35 PowerPoint slides, and you do your best to remember them.

Jeff: In 10 minutes, yes.

Becky: In 10 minutes.

[laughter]

Becky: I love this book because she's a scientist, but she has the gift, kind of like Sammy Ramsay. She's able to translate some pretty complex material and put it into, you read exactly why you need to manage varroa, how to manage varroa. There are four chapters on doing natural management. It's not a treatment-free book, but there are chapters of really good how-to's of not just the chemical management, but also how to take care of your bees and practices you can do that will help you lower your mite loads. Boy, in my favorite chapter, I have to tell you this, do you know what TLDR means?

Jeff: Hyperlink Markup Language.

Becky: Or, it's the last chapter of the book. It's too long, didn't read.

[laughter]

Becky: It's a one-pager on how to manage varroa.

Jeff: I was a little off base.

Becky: It's one or the other. Anyway, it's so clever and it's such good information. There's over 130 citations in here. She's done all the reading of these papers for us. Anyway, I could go on and on, but then I think we wouldn't be able to have as much time to talk to our guest today.

Jeff: Oh, that's right. We have Ron Mik-- Oh, he's going to kill me because I can't-- Ron Miksha, M-I-K-S-H-A. Ron was back on our show back in August. He and Etienne were on the show talking about the Western Apriculture Society meeting in Calgary. When Ron was here, he said that he's done a lot of research on native bees and honeybees and I said, "Hey, you're going to have to come back and talk to us about it." That's why he is here today. This is going to be an interesting conversation.

Becky: I agree. It's kind of a theme that the podcast has been following, this and  Honey Bee  Obscura, so both are touching on it.

Jeff: Funny that that is the case. Yes, it's the argument, I shouldn't say it's an argument, it's the debate that many beekeepers will get pulled into, whether they're at the grocery store, or at the gardening center, or even at a bee club. I think it's an important topic that bee keepers, honey beekeepers should be aware of and be able to speak intelligently to without getting into fisticuffs, without alienating the other person. Yes, I'm looking forward to having Ron, and let's invite him in right now, right after this word from 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. Sitting across the virtual  Beekeeping Today Podcast table right now is Ron Miksha, who is up in Calgary, Alberta. If you recall, he was back on our show on an episode that was released in August, talking about the WAS or Western Apicultural Society meeting in Calgary. We'll get a little bit of an update on how that went. We invited him back to talk about the native versus non-native topic, and Ron's done some research on that. Again, Ron, welcome back to the show.

Ron Miksha: Well, thank you, Jeff. Hi, Becky.

Becky: Hi, Ron. So happy to meet you.

Ron: Yes, thank you. It's nice to meet you too. Yes, I'd like to get caught up a little bit on things. As you know, as you pointed out, we did have the Western Apicultural Society's first meeting in about 20 years inside of Canada, and it was right here in Calgary where I live. The venue was spectacular. It was on the Tsuu T'ina Nation. We were treated so well, everything worked so smoothly. We had roughly 250 people show up and 30 or 40 speakers. Jeff, you didn't make it? You were invited.

Jeff: Next time. I would have loved to be up there in Calgary.

Ron: It went fantastically well, and we'd love to have you up here. It's a beautiful place to be, especially in late fall like it was. We had beautiful weather in the 70s every day, so it was really nice. Today sitting here in Calgary, I've got about half a foot of snow on the ground outside my window, and the temperature is hovering around 20 degrees Fahrenheit right at the moment.

Jeff: Oh boy, and we're recording at the end of October, so that's what we have to look forward to. Thanks, Ron.

Ron: Yes, it's coming your way.

Jeff: Yes, thanks.

Ron: Yes.

[laughter]

Ron: Happy to send it on. [laughs]

Jeff: No. You're too kind. Ron, for our listeners who haven't had a chance to hear you on the August episode, can you just give us a quick, high-level bullet point about who you are and your background in beekeeping? Then let's get into this native versus non-native research you've done.

Ron: Absolutely. I'd love to. I grew up in the United States. I grew up in Pennsylvania. My family had a honey farm as well as greenhouses and row crops. When I was a youngster, the greenhouses started to become a lot more profitable than beekeeping, so my father said, "You take the bees."

[laughter]

Ron: That was about 300 hives of bees. I was about 16 or 17 years old, I had a driver's license. We had about 30 locations for the bees in and around the area north of Pittsburgh and that's how I got my start learning from my father but I also had two older brothers who are also commercial beekeepers. One of them, David is my oldest brother. He's in Florida raising queens along with his sons and daughters. He has an extended family there, that's big, big, big and into queen breeding, and queen rearing.

Anyhow, I met somebody in Florida when I was learning how to raise queens and bringing up packages from Florida to the north of someone who had an outfit for sale in Saskatchewan. The gentleman offered me this business with no money down. Now, whenever anybody offers you something for no running down-

[laughter]

Ron: -you got to wonder, "They're anxious to get rid of it, aren't they?" It worked out really well for me. I did extremely well for several years with absolutely huge honey crops, 300-pound averages, and beautiful water-white honey. That happened year after year until the drought and when the drought hit, my average went down to about 15 pounds for a couple of years.

Luckily, I had everything paid off. I could drift a little while but I was 33 years old and I thought, "Why not go to university? I'd never been to university." I thought that would be fun, something different. I went from being a beekeeper to learning geophysics and becoming a seismologist. I do still dabble as a consultant in geophysics, but mostly, my heart's been in bees all my life. I went from this outfit that I had built up to about 1,000 colonies of bees in Southern Saskatchewan and went to university, got a job in Calgary about 30 years ago, and that's where I am right now.

I backed out of the geophysics business for the most part. I'll just do the few odd jobs when I know that it's my sideline in geophysics is to do something that preserves the environment instead of people going in and shooting up a lot more dynamite and doing a lot of earthshaking, I've got some other tricks that the clients seem to like. When something comes up that agrees with me, I'll take that project. In the meanwhile, a couple of hives of bees in the backyard and I went into, still being overly curious about bees, I started wondering about all those hives I had moved from Florida to Canada around different pollination gigs and just everywhere with bees, honeybees.

Started to wander and think about what impact my commercial beekeeping might've had on the native bees, the wild bees that were wherever I parked 80 hives of bees, what was going on behind the scenes, what was I disrupting. I went to the University of Calgary and introduced myself to a really brilliant researcher who had an eye for what I was interested in doing. That was to research the impact of commercial honeybees, well any honeybees, any western honeybees on the native bees. I worked on a master's for several years, haven't completed it yet, but I've got piles of research and a couple of papers came out of the work and I learned a lot. I'd like to share some of that today.

Jeff: It's a hot topic right now in several areas and if you get into a couple of beekeepers into a meeting or at a garden center, I was actually at a garden center for native plants in Washington. They were downplaying honeybees because honeybees are not native and they're invasive. I just didn't engage them in that conversation. I just decided that was better not to engage at that point. It's a hot topic no matter where you're if they find out you're a beekeeper. We've talked about it on  Honey Bee Obscura with Jim Tew and other guests and now with you, and we want to explore that.

Becky: Ron, can I ask a question for a little background? In the United States, our honey production has gone down 50% in the last 30 years, same thing in Canada, or are you seeing something different? Is it being tracked?

Ron: It's being tracked, yes. Becky, our honey production has gone up and up. We, now, have more colonies of bees in Canada than ever and honey production it's cyclical. Depends a lot on how well Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba do because those three western provinces are equivalent to Montana, the Dakotas, Minnesota, that kind of area with similar plants, similar honey production but in dry years, there's very little production, and in wet years, there's an enormous production. It's cycles up and down a bit but in general, our production has been up.

Becky: Total production up. What about yield per colony?

Ron: Yield per colony seems to be relatively stable, but that's such a hard thing to really compare over the years. There just aren't good enough records to know for sure what was being reported at different times. I still see that the official average for Alberta is about 140 pounds per hive. You can go--

Becky: I am moving to Canada. Oh, I'm sorry. [laughs]

Ron: That's right. That's awfully beautiful honey too, by the way. There are anecdotal stories of people producing 300 pounds every year. In fact, I did, at one time, in Southern Saskatchewan when I set up there, I had those sorts of crops for a few years.

Jeff: Is there a primary floral source? Is it clover? Is it canola?

Ron: In Saskatchewan where I was, it was basically it was clovers, wild sweet clover alfalfa that was irrigated by ranchers. It was a very remote badlands country. A lot like what you would see driving around in eastern Montana or in parts of North and South Dakota. Very similar kind of area. In Alberta, most of our production, I would say probably 70 or 80% of what gets barreled up is coming off a canola.

That's a little more consistent because it's not a biannual that depends on the right kind of rains and then two years later, you've got a huge sweet clover crop. It depends on what the farmers are getting for their price for the seed. Whether they're going to plant more canola one year or not. Also, of course, it depends on rain too. If you have a really dry year, you're going to get less canola honey too.

Just to finish off Becky's question, so 140 pounds is a typical average now according to our statistics, but Alberta has about 320,000 colonies of bees and a quarter of them, about 80,000, go into canola seed pollination. Now this is to produce hybrid seed that the farmers are going to plant for their regular canola crops for canola oil seed. To get the hybrid seeds that the seed growers want to produce, they're putting 400 colonies of bees on a quarter section.

In that kind of density, that's California almond kind of density and the bees don't make honey then. We have to average in, among those 320,000 colonies of bees, a quarter of them, 80,000 colonies, that aren't really producing much honey. Then the rest of the colonies are making around 200 pounds per hive or something pretty close to that year after year. How does that compare with the past? That's a really tough one and I would say that we're fairly stable. We haven't seen a huge drop. One thing we did get hit with that we thought we were immune to until about five or six years ago was any drastic die-off of colonies of bees in the winter.

We still don't seem to have too much summer die-off, but our summers only last a couple of weeks, so it'd be hard for, okay, a couple of months, it'd be hard for the bees to suddenly disappear that fast. We have had bigger winter losses as much as 25 and 30% in the last few years where before, we were irritated when we had 10% losses and that was as recent as seven or eight years ago.

Becky: I remember. I've been jealous of Canada for a number of reasons and that's one of them. You had great thresholds early on in this varroa infestation, so you've managed it well

Jeff: If we're running, in the States, around a 30% plus loss and you're not quite that much, are the Canadian beekeeper winter practices different or going into winter, the fall?

Ron: I don't know enough about what's being done in places like Minnesota for wintering other than so many of the hides are hauled into the Southern USA and that's something we're not doing too extensively. We're not migrating to the West Coast. There are a few places in British Columbia that are somewhat mild during the winter, but nothing like California.

I think that the fact that so many, what is it, a million and a half or so, colonies of honeybees are hauled into Southern or Central California, the mixture of viruses and diseases plus the stress of hauling the bees, that's probably taking a bigger toll than our hives, which to the most extent, most commercial beekeepers still keep them in the same location or within just a few kilometers of their summer location, they may have a wintering location. Probably 20% of our big commercial beekeepers move the hives to indoor wintering. Indoor wintering, even though it's easier on the equipment and takes much less honey, still has about the same winter loss.

It's probably attributable to viruses, virus infestations. Why else would they have similar losses inside as they do outside? I think those are some of the reasons that we have had fewer problems with our maintaining our numbers. It hasn't been an easy walk lately. We still import tens of thousands of packages from New Zealand every year. We may be importing them from the USA before we know it. There's still an integral part of commercial beekeeping in Canada is to have access to queens that were reared in March or April somewhere, and packages that came out of colonies in the southern hemisphere or in places like California.

Jeff: This is off-topic, but how much is a package of bees from New Zealand?

Ron: Well, they're not giving them away.

[crosstalk]

[laughter]

Jeff: They're probably not.

Ron: I think we were looking at, now this is Canadian money, I should say mind you, in that part. It's a boot, and it's about $240 or so-

Becky: [laughs]

Ron: -per package. That's putting us around 180, $190 a package with a queen, with a kilo, which is 2.2 pounds. We're paying about 180 bucks US for bees.

Jeff: $30 more, US dollars than we're paying for packages here, roughly. We're paying about roughly $125, $130 for a package, or $125, $130 around here.

Becky: Oh, that's low. Okay. We better get to your master's degree work. [laughs]

Jeff: Before we make that transition, I'll make it easy. Let's take a quick break and hear from Betterbee and we'll be right back.

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Becky: Ron, you have a very popular book published 15 years ago titled  Bad Beekeeping. I've also heard that because of this book, there is a Norwegian heavy metal band named after you. Could you please answer this question for us? [laughs]

Jeff: Remember, you're under oath.

Becky: We want to know. [laughs]

Ron: It's absolutely true. There is a group called Miksha, and they are not just heavy metal, they are machine heavy metal. It's the kind of stuff that if you grew up like I did with a bit of country and folk music in your background, you almost have to cover your ears when they're playing but I developed a taste for them because they named their band after me. Why did they do that? According to their website, somebody read the book and decided that I, Ron Miksha, had been an undercover agent working in Vietnam, and that's the bad beekeeping part, and that I was using bees venom as a war weapon.

They thought, "Now, that's just got to be a person that we can name a heavy metal rock band after," and there you go. Now, I'm happy to say they had one really good release, and you can still find some of their music on YouTube or whereabouts, but I'm happy to say that they disbanded after about three or four years.

Becky: Ah, so no backstage passes in my future for them?

Ron: [laughs] Sorry, Becky.

Becky: Wow. I thought I had an in. I thought I had an in. Ron, we're going to get to the subject at hand, and I, honestly, I'm very impressed that your question was, "What's been the impact of my career on native bees?" One, that's a big question, and two, you could be afraid to find out what the answer is. Could you just walk us through what you've done and some of your results, please?

Ron: Yes, I'd love to. It's an unfinished master's. I'm still doing some work through the university, but I had to take a health leave of absence, so hopefully, I'm going to get back to it again. I do have a lot of information that's been stored up. A lot of really good data to work with and some analysis is already completed. I can talk about that part. What motivated me was exactly what we've been talking about. When you're doing something for a living and you begin to doubt whether it has the most wholesome impact on the environment, you have to wonder about where does that stand? I'm not afraid of the answer, I'd want to be as open-minded as absolutely possible.

Reading the literature as I had to do before embarking on my research itself, I found that roughly, 40% of all research and observations that centered around that question found that there was either no impact or no obvious impact, whereas 60% said there could be an impact. The thing that differentiated most of those studies that I was reviewing seemed to be the location that the work was being done in. Just like all beekeeping is location, location, location, and a lot of people don't know, but that location, location, location was stolen from the beekeepers and used by the real estate industry eventually.

Becky: [laughs]

Ron: I always wondered then, what is our area like in comparison to the others? I was really surprised with the type of results I got. I have no doubt, in my mind at all, that in a lot of locations, maybe not 60%, but that's what the studies showed, in a lot of locations, honeybees do have a detrimental impact on native bees. They could reduce the number of species and the diversity. I'm looking at particularly places like London, England, for example.

England, just like most big developed areas, has seen a huge increase in the number of hobby beekeepers, and the city of London has, likewise, had a huge increase in bees. Now, why a place like England and Germany to another extent, France, they're coming up with study reports that indicate that high densities of honeybees are detrimental? I think part of the reason for that is the fact that honeybees are native to those areas.

Honeybees developed with the flowers that are native to those areas, but so did the other bees in those areas. They have wild bees living in Germany, in France and England, and everywhere else in Europe, there are hundreds of species of wild bees, which over the course of prehistory, those bees all had to create some sort of an ecological balance where the number of wild honeybees living in trees was limited and so was the number of native, or I'll call them wild bees there because they are native bees, but they're different from the honeybees, which are also native in Europe.

They tended to be in conflict forever and when you start increasing the density, then those bees are chasing the same types of flowers that those wild bees in Europe were chasing. Yes, if you have huge numbers of colonies, of bees, particularly in Europe, you probably are impacting the survival and the success of the other species of bees. If we look at North America, particularly, my study area was Calgary. Calgary is on the edge of the rocky mountains. It's mostly prairie-type setting, and it opens up into farmland that's very similar to what you find in North Dakota and Montana.

Here, the main honey crop is from canola, which is from a plant that developed in Poland, Northern Europe, hundreds of years ago, and was genetically modified and not AGMO type modification with genetic inserts, but rather, they radiated the seeds and came up with a type of mustard that became canola and became very, very popular in the early 1980s. That's probably our biggest honey crop, not native to North America.

Our second biggest honey crop would be from clovers and alfalfa. Those are also not native to North America. If you see where this is leading to, we make our honey from things like dandelions, not native to North America. A lot of import, even crocuses, are not native to North America. We have all of these non-native plants that are very attractive to the western honeybee. When the settlers brought over the honeybees, they also brought over all those plants.

Our honeybees, what I found in the city of Calgary, was overwhelmingly convincing that our honeybees are forging off of these imported plants and not off of the native plants. Wherever a farmer has ripped up a field of nice wildflowers and planted canola or hayfield, our honeybees are all over it, but they are not working very much on the flowers that have been here forever and have been feasted on by bumblebees and mason bees, and just all the other native bees that were here before the honeybees arrived.

I see less direct competition between the two. We don't have as much resource or exploitation competition in Western North America. I don't know, it might be a little different in some parts of the East but wherever soybeans are raised, if you're getting a soybean or cotton honey crop, those things are not being worked by native bees very much. instead, the imported honeybees are working them, so I see less conflict.

My evidence was obtained by part of my research which involved putting bumblebee nests in the same urban backyards as honeybee nests, so honeybee hives. Three times during the summer season in late June, mid-July, and early August, I opened up the bumblebee nests and extracted pollen right out of the pods that were inside the bumblebee nest and just a meter or two away, that's like six or eight feet away, there were honeybee hives. I dug into the brood nest and I found unconsolidated, I didn't want bee bread because that could be old, I wanted unconsolidated flaky pollen that was just brought into the hive and I pulled those out.

Ultimately, I had thousands of samples of pollen that was analyzed and it showed unequivocally, that the honeybees were working the plants that were outside of the main part of the city, and the bumblebees were working the backyard gardens. There was almost no overlap whatsoever in what the bees were working during the summer. I had way less qualms about the beekeeping here being a direct detrimental factor against the native bees.

Becky: That was a great journey through your work. I have so many questions. I do this to Jeff all the time.

[laughter]

Ron: Go for it.

Becky: Even how you've explained the non-native plants being so attractive to honeybees which we know, I think it's so interesting because it contradicts some of the conservation programs that our country has because they don't allow non-native plants in their mixes. There's an argument potentially, that if you put them in there, then you're going to be able to make sure that the honeybees are feeding on something that they're going to prefer instead of, "We know from other studies, that if they don't have enough food, they're going to go to flowers that might not be their first, second or third choice. They're going to bring in more diverse types, like too many diverse types of flowers and, sorry, nectar and pollen."

Anyway, I love your very straightforward approach. Do you think that it's an argument to change mixes potentially?

Ron: That's a pretty good question. Again, I think it depends on the location, and in some areas, you'll find a lot of clovers, and alfalfa and sweet clover do not secrete a lot of nectar on acidy soil, it needs alkali soil. If people are throwing in a mix of clover into the seed packages and selling them in the East, they're probably not doing any bee very much good. It's a really deep and complicated question. I'm certainly not the authority to answer that but I do wonder if sometimes, we're attempting to do, trying to mitigate damage that in a direction as we always do in a direction that's not the best for the environment.

I do want to talk a little bit about the fact that honeybees then, are preferentially pollinating these invasive plants and that does give them an opportunity, them, the plants, an opportunity to reproduce their seed and to spread and potentially to take over spots that native plants grew in. That is definitely a risk and we can't totally ignore that that could be happening. That could be a side effect of keeping honeybees. I didn't study that. That wasn't part of what my study entailed because again, it's a very large topic and I'm not a specialist in that particular field.

I also did not study any potential aspect of bee diseases, honeybee diseases, mites, pests, nosema, anything like that spreading from honeybees to native bees or vice versa because it can work both directions. I didn't study that aspect of it. I also didn't really study anything on what's called interference competition. I think just for fun, I'd like to compare two types of competition because I was mostly engaged in looking at competition between the different species of bees.

Interference competition, you can think of that as if you were sitting in an old-fashioned '60s decor malt shop and you've got a milkshake in front of you with two straws in it and you reach over, and you squeeze the straw shut on your friend's straw so they can't suck up anything. Now that's interference. That's a type of competition that can be extended by analog into the bee world too.

The other type of competition is what we call resource or exploitation competition. That's whoever sucks the fastest, gets the most. You and your friend could be sitting there and if you've got good power and lungs, you can just suck in all of the milkshake before they get much. That's what I was looking at. I wanted to know, are our honeybees competing against native bees in that aspect?

I didn't really determine the spread of the native plants or any of these other things and there probably are even other things that I haven't thought of but those are all valid concerns in addition to the two types of competition that can occur in the field, and the fact that I was mostly studying for the resource competition, who's getting the most in their mouth, who's exploring the flowers the most, there were a lot of other aspects to my study too that I needed to try to figure out. My main idea was how can I compare the effect that honeybees have on native bees.

If I could find areas where there were no honeybees and lots of native bees, that might say something, not necessarily, but it might say something, it would point in a certain direction. What I did is I looked at the city of Calgary and I mapped out the 280 locations where people kept honeybees, and I looked for the areas that were the most dense and there were some very obvious areas where the density of kept urban honeybees was much higher than other parts of the city.

Then I contacted the beekeepers and I found that their production per hive was basically the same across the board in the city. It wasn't like all the beekeepers had flocked to one area. They didn't go out and buy a half-million dollar house in a certain neighborhood because their bees would do better, instead, they just happened to live in a certain neighborhood, and that neighborhood may be attracted the kind of people that would keep bees as opposed to other areas where beekeeping was less common.

I even studied that, so I went neighborhood by neighborhood and got all the statistics I could find, and looked at things like the average family income, the size of family, the number of years that people have lived in that same location, the type of work people were doing, whether it was professional or blue-collar work or whatever. I had about 14 different attributes for each neighborhood to compare why there were more bees in certain more kept urban honeybee colonies in certain areas than there were in other areas.

It generally shook out that those areas that had just slightly more years of schooling, a somewhat higher income level and who stayed in the same location longer, and who had families as opposed to living alone, those were the places you would be more likely to find honeybees. We have neighborhoods that fit that demographic and those neighborhoods, of course, had the highest numbers of bees.

Then I decided, "Okay, I've got something I can compare. I can compare areas that have lots of honeybees with areas that have few honeybees and I can do that for one year, I don't have to look at year after year and have people remove their hives," because basically, once I took out the effect of the geography and the demographics from the picture and removed those statistics, I could then look at other reasons why the numbers of native bees would vary from place to place so it could be associated with density of bees. What I found was that it wasn't necessarily related to density of bees.

The biodiversity and I put out, I had about 80, what we call pan traps, these are little colorful traps that look like a flower and they attract pollinators. The pollinators fall inside, they die off all in the name of science. Then we had 3 or 4,000 samples and each area had several dozen. I did this at three times during the season, so I could compare the diversity, the variety, the number of different species along with the sheer numbers and their distribution in different parts of the city. I could tell then, that the areas that had more honeybees here in Calgary, didn't necessarily have fewer native bees or less diverse species of native bees.

Now, there are a number of reasons that might point to that, and among those are the fact that the honey bees are not foraging very much locally, but they're flying outside the city and going to farmers' fields. I came to that conclusion because when I pulled pollen out of the honey beehives, I found about 30% of all the pollen came from canola, which doesn't grow in the city. Even those colonies that were 8 or 10 kilometers from the nearest canola field, had lots of canola in their pollen.

They also had lots of alfalfa and sweet clover in the pollen whereas the bumblebee nests that were adjacent to them in the same urban backyard, they had almost, well, they had zero. They absolutely had zero canola. They had a lot more wildflowers, and a lot more native flowers, and a much broader diversity of different kinds of flowers. The fact that one part of our city was more dense with bees than another part didn't mean much because the bees weren't sticking around. They were flying outside the city looking for those cultivated plants where they could get the best crops.

A lot of people don't appreciate the fact that honey bees are not very good at pollinating urban gardens, they just aren't, they don't do that. The reason for that is that the honey bees are the only species of bee that sends scout bees out looking for some huge bounty. The scout bee that comes back from your garden and says, "I found a cucumber."

[laughter]

Ron: She will get laughed out of the hive because nobody wants to go to look at one cucumber. The bee that flew 4 kilometers, that's about two or three miles, and came back with a load of pollen and nectar and said, "There must be a section of this land out there that's covered in these same flowers, and you can all find it easily if you just follow my map," and that's where the bees will go. They won't be working those few flowers in a backyard, it just doesn't make sense for the way their colony is developed.

Now, bumblebees work a lot differently, they don't have scout bees. Every bumble bee, this will be female bees, that are out trying to provision their offspring, are going off on their own. They don't want to go too far, and they are quite happy to pick up more than one floral source on each trip. Honey bees, of course, are not totally 100% collecting pollen from just one type of flower on each trip, but let's say they're about 95 to 99%, that's what they're going to do.

It has to be a vast field of the same kind of flower. If it's not, if it's just somebody's backyard with two or three cucumbers, they're not going to get a lot of other honey bees interested but the bumblebees will be. Bumblebees will collect pollen on a single trip from a dozen different flower sources. The diversity of pollen that I collected from the bumblebee nest was a lot higher than the diversity coming out of the honeybee nest.

The honeybees basically had two types of pollen. They had pollen from Brassica or the canola, and they had it from the lucerne clover alfalfa family. That's where most of the pollen was, and those plants were outside the town. The density of the bees in the city, and I'm speaking strictly for the city of Calgary, this will be different if you're in Paris or somewhere maybe on the East Coast, this could be vastly different. Out here, our honey bees are not foraging and fighting and not doing this resource or exploitation competition as much.

One of the other things I did in order to determine if I was on the right track with this was with the help of my two undergrad students who were fantastic for the summer that we were collecting data, we looked at 1,600 square meter spots that were randomly selected around the city and took photographs of each spot and counted the different types of flowers in each location.

We could see, by extrapolation, how much of our city is covered in clover inside the city, how much of the city is covered with, I'm not going to name the correct native flowers, but we were able to catalog a lot of different types of plants that the bees could be working in those bees, I mean both honey bees and native bees. That was another aspect of the work. I also put up 150 empty bumblebee nests in 80 backyards. Normally, when you put up a bumblebee nest, at least in our part of the world, you have about a one in five-chance that bumblebees will settle in it.

In the spring, the queen bee, she's mated, she's looking for a home to build and she wants the right kind of location, certain height off the ground, certain amount of remotely so it won't be in human traffic, it won't have wind blowing into the entrance, it won't be facing full sun because bumblebees don't like that. I put these nests up and I found the same kind of acceptance or settlement by the female bumblebees was found in all parts of the city. There wasn't one part of the city where there were no honey bees that had a lot more of bumblebees settled. It was just the same across the board for the most part, at least, statistically. That was another aspect to be studied.

Becky: When you did your analysis of the pan traps, can you tell me what the bee diversity you found was and the bee number basically, as far as the number of different species and then how that differs maybe historically, if Calgary has that number?

Ron: We're just starting to build a historical reference right now. I really can't compare things to what it might have been, which is really unfortunate because one of the motivations for doing my study here in Calgary is the fact that about 10 years ago, there were 150 colonies of bees kept in the city of Calgary. Today, they're 1,400. I thought, "Okay, this is pretty fast development. It's 10 times as many in 10 years. A year-by-year increase is about 26% growth every year, compounded year after year after year. That's a huge increase in the number of backyard beekeepers," so that was part of why I was investigating this.

I wish that we had the numbers that went back to the year 2008, and we would know how many species and what to expect. I don't have them on the top of my head. I can't tell you that there were 112 species of different kinds of pollinating insects that found those traps, but it was about that number. By far, the biggest number were bumblebees. In Calgary, we have a huge diversity of bumblebees, partly because we're part prairie and part mountainous, part foothills, we have some riparian, that means river valley kinds of areas. With all those diverse geographical settings, we have 14 different species identified so far of bumblebees in Calgary.

Some of those comprised about 30% of all my samples, just one species. Then the next likely species was again, bumblebees with about 15% and then descending. The honey bees were only about 5% of the samples that I caught. Only about 5%. Then again, I think that beckons back to the idea that these bees are not looking in backyards. Scout bees would be the ones that would have fallen into these traps and not gone home to tell other bees to come follow me into the trap. Anyhow, lots of different aspects to the work, I enjoy it immensely.

The bottom line is that honey bees can have a detrimental effect on native bees, just as honey bees can have a detrimental effect on honey bees. If you have the small-time beekeeper, and I saw this happen in Florida because I was there when beekeeping in Florida really expanded, and you had beekeepers with 100 hives of bees or 60 hives of bees, and all they dreaded to see these semi-loads of bees arriving from the north and being unloaded in the pasture next to their hives because they knew that was going to make a sharp decrease in the amount of honey they were producing. Not every year, but it does enough years.

Of course, if you put enough bees into the wrong location, it's going to affect the native bees, certainly, absolutely. There's no question about that. What I'd like to look at instead is how can the beekeepers and the native bee enthusiasts find some common ground. I think there's a lot to be found there. We, both sets of people, and I'm striding the two worlds myself because I've really found a fascination and a love for native bees, I'm learning so much more about them, I'm actually a director of the Alberta Native Bee Council because we want to see what variety of native bees do we have and what things are hurting them.

I think by being an ally on both sides, then we can share resources and we have similar goals of fewer pesticides and herbicides, more green space, more opportunities for the bees to develop. Even things like beekeepers in the city have been trained to save some rough spot in their backyard where the native bees can nest. It's amazing how much the honey beekeeper loves the native bees. Some of them got into it because they just had a fascination of watching bees. It wasn't until they got honey bees that they realized that, "Oh, those bees have been watching are different from my honeybees."

A lot of people don't know there's more than one species of bee in the world. Anyhow, I think there's a lot of common ground to be found, and I think that by having allies on both sides, we can do a lot of good for the native bees. It's a matter of educating everybody, a matter of doing similar research projects in different areas to try to see if there's a limiting factor. Here in Calgary, our most dense areas with honeybees may be approaching a too-dense point where they will start having an impact, they will be that semi-load of honeybees being unloaded in somebody's backyard because we've got places that have a high density of honeybees and we need to know more about what that limiting factor is.

Jeff: Time to start planning more green space then.

Ron: We need more green space to help those native bees and native bees certainly do a pollination job, particularly in people's backyards. Urban gardeners have to recognize that and instead of saying, "I'd like to have a hive of bees in my backyard for pollination," you might want a hive of bees in your backyard because they're fun, because they're interesting, because you'll get a little bit of honey. All those are valid reasons, but if you're doing it to pollinate your backyard, you're better off doing things to encourage the native bees in your backyard.

Jeff: By green space, I meant open space as opposed to a green lawn.

Ron: I took it as meaning that Jeff, because yes, our manicured yards are not good for anybody but golfers.

Jeff: Oh, the homeowners associations too but that's a different issue. [laughs] Ron, it's a great pleasure having you on the podcast and you brought to light, some great aspects of this debate that are very useful and meaningful and I appreciate it. I'm glad to have you on the show and look forward to having you back as you continue your research and look at other aspects of the data that you've collected.

Ron: I appreciate it very much.

Becky: It's great information and so important for beekeepers to hear your message, so, and to hear about your data. Thank you.

Ron: Thank you. I appreciate being able to talk about it and it's ongoing, so I want people to come away with a clear idea that I don't have definitive answers. My answers might be applicable to one area and it's an ongoing subject of debate and of research.

Jeff: Do you have a website or any place where your information is available for our listeners to read and get caught up on? They can listen to this podcast again, and I welcome that.

Ron: No, I actually don't. I don't have all this information, partly because some of it's not published yet and the research still needs to be some of it, what I've talked about today has been reviewed and is open and I think it's clearly valid, but there are parts of my work that I can't divulge yet to, but it's all pointing in the same way.

Jeff: Fantastic.

[music]

Jeff: I look forward to having you back to talk about it when you can. Ron, keep warm this winter. Look forward to having you back.

Ron: Thank you so much.

Becky: Thanks, Ron.

[music]

Jeff: That is such an interesting discussion. Obviously, it's a fascinating point for me this year is the native versus non-native, and I like Ron's perspective on the interaction between the honeybee and "native bees" and their floral preferences.

Becky: He explained it so effortlessly, but that was a lot of work that went into those experiments and a lot of knowledge behind designing those experiments. I just love that he was a commercial beekeeper who jumped into ecology and asked those questions. It was such a fun conversation.

Jeff: Yes, it was. I think he probably also absurd my brothers and me in, I don't know, say McDonald's some point talking in the way we used to fight each other over our milkshakes and holding each other's straws and came up with that visual. That rang true so many different ways for me.

Becky: Brought you right back [laughs] to a McDonald's.

Jeff: That's right. That's right, with a straw - pinching it .

Becky: Oh, but don't ruin that, that '60s soda fountain, that was just lovely. [laughs]

Jeff: Yes.

Becky: Now you got Playland in there, a little chaotic.

Jeff: [chuckles] That's true.

[music]

Becky: No, he's just a born instructor teacher and he did that all just, he was just able to so seamlessly explain those topics to us. That was a lot of fun. That was a treat.

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 this 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.

[00:55:27] [END OF AUDIO]