The Habitat Crisis #3 - Dr. Diana Cox-Foster (301)

301 - The Habitat Crisis #3 - Dr. Diana Cox-Foster

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

Becky Masterman: I'm Becky Masterman.

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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. Hey everybody. Welcome to this exciting third week of the Habitat Series, brought to you by the Minnesota Honey Producers Association. Thank you, Minnesota Honey Producers Association and Becky.

Becky: Absolutely, I'm wearing two hats still.

Jeff: I like that Sherlock Holmes look with the bill in front and back. I like it a lot. This is an exciting series we have going. The habitat is an important issue.

Becky: It's an important issue. I think it used to be, "What do we plant?" Instead, that's really not the story. It is a complex issue. It ties to biology, land use, bee health. It's something that I love exploring. I'm so glad we have this time to actually put together this series.

Jeff: We started off the series with Gabrielle and talked with her. We talked last week with Andony Melathopoulos. I encourage our listeners to go back and listen to those and get caught up if you haven't yet. The habitat issue is often merged into the issue of native bees versus honey bees. It's more than that. It's morphed to that, but it's so more important than native versus honey bee.

Becky: It's funny that we're at a point that we're pitting bee against bee, when we really need to look at who the major player is, as far as why pollinators are suffering. Unfortunately, that's humans. Hopefully, the more data that are generated, and the more that we understand the big picture, the more that we can understand habitat, not just for honey bees, but for all pollinators.

Jeff: Sitting here towards the end of October, pretty much all the flows are done. You might have a few asters still going wherever you are in different locations. Of course, in southern tier states and southeast you might still have plenty of flows going, so. It is a time of winding down. It's a good time to think about next season. That's why we're doing this series now. Is what can we do about habitat?

Becky: There's a lot you can do also, as far as planting in the fall, or, of course, prepping in the fall for spring planting, or planning on a spring planting. There's just so much to investigate. I think one of the big messages too is that with beekeepers, we used to just put our bees out and hope for the best and hope that they're able to--

Jeff: Wait. What?

[laughter]

Becky: Taking the active step of looking on beescape.net, and looking at what's in the area, and then honestly seeing if you can amend anything. There are a lot of different avenues that you can go down as far as putting seed in the ground, maybe not just in your space, but maybe you've got neighbors, maybe you've got businesses or educational institutions, religious institutions, who are willing to join the effort to get that habitat planted.

Jeff: That's really exciting. Today's guest is Dr. Diana Cox-Foster, who's a Research Leader and entomologist with USDA-ARS pollinating insects research unit out of Logan, Utah. I'm really looking forward to see what she has to say about this topic and what her research-- She's done a lot of research. It's exciting.

Becky: I agree. I can't wait to talk to Dr. Cox-Foster.

Jeff: Let's talk to her right after this quick word from our sponsors.

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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 this big virtual beekeeping today podcast table stretching all the way from, let's see, Minnesota.

Becky: Minnesota.

Jeff: Logan, Utah to Olympia, Washington. Welcome to the show. Today's guest, Dr. Diana Cox-Foster. Diana, welcome to the show.

Dr. Diana Cox-Foster: Thank you for having me. I appreciate being able to speak with you guys today.

Becky: Thank you so much for being here, Diana. I loved meeting you this year in Utah. I'm so excited to continue this conversation.

Jeff: Welcome to our show and our special series on the habitat crisis and pollinators and honey bees and that interaction of those three different things. For our guests who don't know you, and I'm guessing many of them don't unless they've heard you talk, can you give us a little bit of bit about your background and who you are?

Diana: I'm Diana Cox-Foster. I grew up in Colorado as a kid who loved insects, and discovered much later on in my career that I actually came from a beekeeping family, historically. My ancestors were pioneers into Colorado, and my great-great-grandfather and his wife were actually some of the first members of the Colorado Honey Producers, and some of the first ones to bring honey bees into Colorado.

Jeff: Wow.

Becky: Wow.

Diana: My great-grandmother, she actually ran the apiary herself later on. I knew my family liked honey bees, and a lot of my great-uncles worked in that, but I didn't know until much later that maybe this was a genetic trait.

[laughter]

Becky: I love that.

Jeff: What strand of DNA does that reside on?

Diana: I don't think ancestry.com is going to pull it out.

Becky: I wish they did.

Diana: I got my degree in entomology and zoology at Colorado State. My Bachelor's, I went off to graduate work at University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and got my master's PhD there, and ended up in Nashville, at Vanderbilt, where I was a postdoc, and got familiar with molecular biology as it was pre-mentioned its infancy at that point.

Then I got hired on by Penn State University as an Assistant Prof and was there for 28 years. It was about 20,000 when started up doing research in honey bees seriously. We were asking at that time, what was the impact of varroa mites on bee immunity? We used viruses as what we were looking at as well. We learned a lot about honey bee viruses or viruses associated with honey bees, including some important things about transmission, but also that they were more broadly associated with pollen, too, that unfortunately, bees defecate on flowers, and that's a major route for pathogens.

Jeff: Well little known fact. What part of Colorado did you grow up in?

Diana: I call the Four Corners area down near Cortez, my home base. My parents moved a great deal so we lived across the state and even in New Mexico and Utah for a little bit.

Jeff: I lived for a long time up in Berthoud, which is just south of the Fort Collins area where CSU is.

Diana: In 2015, I retired from Penn State, and is still a affiliate faculty there, an adjunct, and joined the federal government as the research leader location coordinator here in Logan, Utah for the Pollinating Insect Research Unit and still work in bees, including honey bees and others. That's where I'm at now.

Jeff: That's quite a journey and that provides a great wealth of background and knowledge that you can bring to both the Agricultural Research Service and to the problems you work on. We talked to you about the habitat issues and problems with pollinators and honey bees and insects in general, that loss of habitat. What research have you done in that area?

Diana: We have done an incredibly large research project and are writing it up now. This was brought about through requests from Project Apis m. Danielle Downey reached out and asked if we would tackle this issue. Given that my research unit, we don't only work on honey bees, we work on all the bee species. We're the home of the National Pollinating Insect Collection i.e. the bee collection for the United States. It's one of the largest in the world. We have a lot of expertise here across our scientists. She asked if we would ask the question about what was the impact of a honey bee apiary when put out in the wildlands on native bee populations or non-managed bees that were existing there.

We got clearance to do this and it was funded in part by Costco as well. This is major funding that enabled us to do this project. We would not have been able to do it on just our base funding from ARS alone. This, we did over three years. Of course, COVID came out right smack at the beginning of the project so we navigated COVID, figuring out how to do everything and socially distance. It did slow down the molecular analysis and we're finishing those up.

The way that we tackled this, and we took a different tactic than a lot of other researchers, is that we looked at what people were publishing on and talking about. There were groups in Europe that were saying that honey bees were a negative impact on their native bees. The only problem with that is honey bee is a native bee. It's naturally been found in Europe for many, many, many years. It's been there as long as humans, probably.

We looked at that and it was more so it seemed the data pointing to that you could overload an area with managed bee colonies and exceed how much food you had for the bees, the floral resources. We know in the United States that this is a major issue, what your podcast series here is devoted to, is that, as humans have gone about, we've cleaned up our environment, "cleaned it up" by getting rid of a lot of what we considered weeds, so like roadside floral resources, weeds along our fields, got rid of the hedgerows, et cetera. We're converting a lot of natural lands into cultivated crops for our use.

We're finding that that, on top of climate change, so increased drought and temperatures-- I used to say this is what we saw in the West, but now last few years, I think that we have to extend this out across the entire US. Friends and colleagues down in Baton Rouge or Louisiana, they're telling me about credible drought last year that they had down there. This habitat decline has meant that for managed bees that we really have to scramble to try to find additional places to put them. At the same time, we want to make sure that we don't overload an area with the bees too.

Just to take you back to how we approached it. We wanted to ask was this a question of caring capacity. If you were in my presentations at this point, I would show you this picture because it's not the most understandable picture, but basically it's a platter, like a serving platter with a bunch of flowers on it to indicate that you have a limited amount of those flowers there, and that's dependent upon your weather, where you're at, et cetera.

Then you have your native bees, the ones that live in that environment that are there and you have your insect livestock or honey bees that you're bringing in as well, but also to indicate that you have this limited amount of food. Anytime you exceed your caring capacity, that's when you create competition and can potentially have negative impacts.

Jeff: The discussion should be not so much the impact of honey bee is not native, and let's get rid of all the honey bees. It's really about the carrying capacity of any given location at any given period of time?

Diana: That's what I would argue. Depending on your environmental conditions and what floral resources are there, you're going to have a certain amount of floral resources available to all the bees that are there. The other impact though, there was one other part was people just saying, "Honey bees, you're going to have so many of them. They're going to overload everything and then decrease the reproduction of your other bees." We asked about reproduction of other bees. We also asked about interactions with flowers, because it takes you back that the reason bees and flowers go hand in hand is that they've evolved together.

It's like this contract that's been set up through evolution here that the flower is going to provide extra pollen and nectar. The nectar doesn't benefit the flower per se. It's there to get the bees or the other pollinators to come in and in turn the bee, by taking those resources, its part of the agreement is to take that pollen and distribute it to other flowers for their seed set and for their reproduction. It's a mutual contract here per se.

There are some flowers where single species of flowers may have a single bee that's its pollinator or very limited number. If honey bees come in and take all that pollen but don't actually do the fertilization, that would be a negative impact. We tried to look at that just by looking at what flowers are associated and do we see honey bees displacing other bees like knocking them off or disrupting things.

Then the last part here to the conversation was, and it came from part of my work at Penn State, where we found that these viruses that reported to be honey bee viruses weren't strictly honey bee viruses. That they are more broadly distributed and you could find them in other bee species. The question is, do these viruses that we think have negative impacts on honey bees or are they also causing a negative impact on the other bees or spilling over?

Jeff: I have a bazillion questions, but I think this is a great opportunity-- Bazillion is an exaggeration. This is a great opportunity to take a quick break and we'll be right back.

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Becky: Welcome back, everybody. Diana, I cannot wait to hear you tell us how you answered these questions. Could you tell us about what kind of data and how you collected these data?

Diana: We did two kinds of experiments. One, we wanted to figure out what competition really looked like because unless you can generate it and see it, then you really don't know that you got it. We set up these huge cages, relatively huge cages, so about 20 feet by 20 feet and they're 10 feet tall. We put those over a set amount of floral resources. We tried it the one year with just one plant in there, plant species and the solitary bees that we had, loved it. The bumblebees and honey bees didn't like it. We learned that you need to put multiple floral resources in there, different flower species to help everyone. Honey bees and bumblebees both need this multiple pollens nectars to come in to sustain their colony growth. That's one of the questions, why? Why is there such a difference between them and solitary bees and it'll be a question for my scientists answer after I retire.

We did it in these cages and just to tell you, we're able to take a native bumblebee and get its queens to grow up into colonies. One group of my researchers, and I should give credit here to those people, because they're really important. This was a group effort with an army of people. Dr. Jonathan Koch and Tien Lindsay were the bumblebee wranglers. I call them the bee whisperers. You have to coax this queen to establish your colony. Then I have my solitary bee wranglers, Dr. Lindsie McCabe, Dr. Kelsey Graham and Brian Lovett.

We worked with a native mason bee. It's Osmia bruneri, It's not your blue orchard bee, but this is a bee that loves the midsummer and hotter parts of the months. It's a really beautiful little bee, metallic blue-green. We can put out these nesting blocks that have holes drilled in and we can put straws in there too. The bees will collect plant material and they masticate it to create divisions between different nesting cells. Female create a cell, bring pollen in, nectar in and lay an egg and then seal it off and go on and do the next one.

Within these cages, we could look at how they reproduced. What we found is when you have one species by itself in the cage, they did great. When you have all three together and over this limited amount of flora resources, we saw the competition and all three species, bumblebees, honey bees and solitary bee were impacted. We exceeded carrying capacity.

The other cool thing that we could do in this cage is we could actually follow individual bees. Some of my army went out there and locked in on a single bee and just followed where she went in the cage from flower to flower to flower and recorded whenever she moved and did this. What they observed was that honey bees were not the bully. They didn't go in and bump everybody off the flowers.

Becky: Thank goodness.

Diana: They were very gracious and socialized with everyone on the flowers.

Becky: Had manners.

Diana: We did see that the solitary bee increased visits to one flower species and decreased it to another when the bumblebees and honey bees were around. It didn't really seem to impact its behavior per se otherwise.

Becky: How did you determine carrying capacity for honey bees? You said it was impacted. What was that measurement?

Diana: When we had them just in the cage by themselves with the 10 floral species, we saw colony growth. That was an indication that they were fine with what we gave them. Probably, if we'd given them 10 times the amount of floral resources, we might have even better colony growth.

Becky: You just looked at actual number of frames of bees?

Diana: Number of frames of bees. These were full-size packages that we put in there. We weren't dumbing it down for this. We put them into a modified Langstroth box. There was company called Eco Bee Boxes, Albert Chubak, he used to be in Salt Lake City. He's the one who we were able to purchase these from. It's like a mini Langstroth and everything. You can hook them all together, which is very convenient when you have high winds in an area like we are.

We learned from that about these interactions. We also took it out into the wildlands, into the forest service land and private ranches where we have permission to be on. Darren Cox of Cox Honey Limited was our cooperate collaborator. He was the one putting the hives out. He had permits to go on the forest service land, which is important. You can't just put anything out there without permission. The apiary size were 48 colonies. These were colonies that he was managing as he would. The bees had come from almonds and then he had split them and it would re-clean them. They went out as two boxes size. I would show you now a map. We had three different sets of areas, and then to the east of Logan up in the mountains and the apiary, the honey bee apiaries in dead center of our sites.

Then you could draw concentric circles going out from it. We put bumblebees where the honey bees were and then 5 kilometers we put bumblebees just by themselves. This was an area where we knew honey bees had never been before. We put solitary bees at both of those sites, where the honey bee and bumblebees were and the bumblebees alone and then at five additional sites in between. We seeded our nesting boxes with the cocoons of the solitary bees, about 15 females in each of those. We can recognize them and those solitary bees made use of that nesting box so we could monitor them. Then we also, at each of those sites set up a grid where we sample flowers and also put out multiple bowl traps.

For beekeepers who have never seen this, because this is more of a native bee thing, you can take a little tiny dixie cup and we paint them in white, yellow or blue, and you can put soapy water in there and bees and other insects are attracted to it, like you would see at flower species. We set those out and you could collect them. Then we also netted bees off of flowers. All of those that we collected ended up being eventually pinned and classified identified. That's the kind of data we figured out how to look inside the bumblebee colonies, monitor them over time.

We had a little shelf that we could slide in and out and put a plastic on there as acetate sheet and collect fecal material from the bumblebees. That was important. We did that over time. Then we looked at the solitary bees over time. Collecting all this data across the season, we did it for three years, for three slides.

Becky: That's a lot of data.

Diana: A lot of data, yes. What we learned from that is we looked at the bumblebee reproduction and there was no impact of the honey bees apiary. Colonies that were near the honey bees had as much chance to go on to form queens or produce queens as those that were further away. The sizes were not different. We did have much greater than anticipated loss of bumblebee colonies. Nobody's ever monitored how bumblebee colonies survive in the wild before.

This is brand new data that maybe they aren't as accessible as we think they should be. For the solitary bees, we did not see any impacts of their distance away from the honey bees. They all did equally well in terms of reproduction. Out in the wild, we are not seeing this competition going on. We're not seeing a decrease in reproduction by having honey bees next to the bumblebees or next to the solitary bees.

Jeff: The net result of your research was that regardless of distance or regardless of the bumblebee or solitary bee, there is no negative impact of the honey bee on the populations of those other bees.

Diana: Yes. For sentinel bumblebees or sentinel solitary bees.

Jeff: That's a lot different than what we were hearing in the last four years, five years, maybe.

Diana: This is with 40 colony size apiary. There's other papers out there reporting a negative impact, and you go read their methods and materials and they have 300 colony apiaries, which is much greater. I think in that case they did exceed carrying capacity.

Becky: That's like your cage study to determine carrying capacity. It makes sense. If you put enough of anything there, you're going to stress other species.

Diana: Yes. It's like if you have a room full of people, if you have 10 people in the room with 10, 11 sandwiches, you're hunky-dory, you bring them 50 people for that 10 or 11 sandwiches, you may not be very hunky-dory, but you keep them there very long.

Jeff: That just makes sense. Why is it so surprising to everybody?

Diana: I think people thought it was going to be an all or none because knowing that Europeans brought honey bees to the Americas initially and that we do move them about. If you go to almonds, it looks like there's a ton of honey bees and there is a ton of honey bees, but if you look there and you look at the environment, what I was struck by, especially going out to some of the larger growers is, there's no flowers besides almonds.

Now they're trying to get them to incorporate other seeds and other plants to help sustain honey bees, but there's no other place for a native bee to exist unless they have a very short window of time and there's not even nesting areas for those beast to go to. Agriculture as we have done it, as it's evolved, it's not very conducive for bees as a whole. I'd say it's probably not conducive for honey bees as a whole either. The third part of our research was looking at the diseases. The beekeepers have said that getting out away from agriculture they think would benefit the health of their bees.

As your beekeepers listening to this know, is we've been seeing an average loss of 40% annual loss of colonies per year. We think that this is a very complex reasoning why that losses occur. I still go back to our initial four Ps that we described as colony collapse disorder. The parasite, the varroa mite, pathogens, pesticide exposure as a whole, and then the other P, poor nutrition. I need not enough flowers out there. It's a very complex issue.

Our beekeeper, we sampled these colonies when we first brought them out into the mountains, and then we did sampling at the end and asked about what viruses we could detect in the colonies. We just did this for the six marks common viruses that we have worked with. We saw that in that case, both the prevalence, i.e. what percentage of the bees had the viruses, and also the titers, how much of the virus they have went down during that time. It basically did support that, getting away from agriculture out into an area where you don't have pesticides, hopefully you have more healthy flowers, you're getting healthier bees.

Jeff: It's fun to see that the science backs up common sense, but that's a statement that really did need to be made, but I'm good at making those.

Becky: I think it was an excellent statement. I'll give you that.

Diana: We also asked about the spillover. These viruses I told you, we could find in other bees. In the bumblebees, the way that we've looked at the viruses over time was we went back to those plastic sheets, those acetate sheets we stuck under the colonies, where the fecal material was dropping down on it. We do know that for honey bees and for these other bees, that when they get infected, they shed viruses into their fecal material.

We were able to get the viruses off of those acetate sheets at different times across the season and ask about what happened and correlate it back to the success of the colonies too. We did see the evidence of some potential pathogen spillover from honey bees, but there's somebody else out there, so even the bumblebees that weren't next to honey bees got a lot of these viruses too. They came in with viruses but they got a lot more.

Jeff: Just to be clear, I'm not real familiar with bumblebees, but they were defecating in their nest because they were ill, or do they typically do that.

Diana: I think they typically do this.

Becky: Bumblebee nests smell like they do that.

Jeff: Why?

Becky: They do.

Diana: There was a screen in there and they I think tend to go to the corners, in their colonies. They're not doing dead center where the babies are being produced.

Jeff: They're like cats. They find a corner wherever the box is. Good. Hey, you learn all sorts of things on Beekeeping Today Podcast, even where bumblebees poop.

Becky: Where honey bees poop on the flowers.

Diana: We did see this, but the critical thing was when we looked at these viruses over time, some of them went away and others disappeared, but those colonies that had the high number of virus, the high prevalence and finding a lot of it in the fecal material, they're the ones that lived and they're the ones that make queens, and there was no impact on the number of queens.

Becky: The presence of the virus doesn't necessarily mean infection.

Diana: Or it doesn't mean a negative impact.

Becky: Or negative impact.

Diana: Historically the same thing holds for honey bees, because a lot of these viruses were described from colonies that had major, major incidences, but we know that we can detect them in most colonies, like blackened queen cell virus, 90% of all the colonies in America have it, but you're not seeing the impact or deformed wing virus, you're not seeing an impact unless you bring in other factors like varroa, like pesticides or other stressors to cause these viruses to create an issue.

Jeff: Was there a predominance of any one virus over the other or was it pretty much scattered throughout the-- Would you say six or eight that you scanned for?

Diana: The prevalence in the bumblebees pretty much matched that. We saw on the honey bees with blackened queen cell virus being one of the major ones, lower amounts of the other viruses. We found five or six of them persisting. There was one other virus that we also went and looked at. It's important to tell you about it because it is virus that was discovered by ARS in 1970s. Just total of nine papers out there, more papers showing up recently last year. It's a DNA virus and it's actually almost big enough, you can see it with a light microscope. These RNA viruses are itsy, weensy, teeny, that you have to use electron microscope to see.

This is called Apis mellifera proliferative filamentous virus, but I'm going to just call it AMFV because we think it's much more broadly infecting all the bees. For the honey bees that came in there and it stayed at higher levels and we know that we are seeing even higher levels of bees and colonies collapsing in almonds. We do think that it could be a negative factor. We are doing experiments right now to ask about impacts of other stressors like pesticides on the infections.

The critical thing was in bumblebees, in those colonies that died, we found this virus in 80% to 90% of them, so we think in bumblebees is maybe more of a concern. Why that is important is, a lot of the species being added to the endangered species list for bees are bumblebees. Hopefully we'll be able to ask more about what the impact is and is it associated with these declines. That's where coming back to ask about other factor stressors will be important.

Becky: Was filamentous looked for in the national honey bee survey? Do you know? Should it be?

Diana: No, it hasn't been. It probably would be a good idea to include it. When people do these assays for the viruses, you can get DNA out and RNA. It'd be additional steps, but it'd be a way to also monitor other like Nosema, Sarani or Nosema Apis as well without doing the spore counts.

Jeff: That's found in the gut of the bee?

Diana: The filamentous virus, there's evidence that probably can, if they eat the virus in the pollen, that they can get the virus, but it spreads throughout the whole body. One of the astounding things when it was discovered in 1976 was that the bees, the haemolymph looked white, which normally haemolymph in bees is colorless, so finding a white color that meant there was so much of this virus that it looked milky or white.

Becky: That's a really high titer, right?

Diana: Yes. It just fallen off the radar. It is now being found worldwide. It is being found in other bee species as well.

Jeff: You shorten it to AMFI?

Diana: FD. I don't want to call it Apis mellifera because it's not just strictly Apis mellifera. It's the filamentous virus. The viral particles look like filaments, but the virus genome is one huge circle that it's just crammed in there.

Jeff: That's interesting. You said there's only nine papers out there, so this might be a finding that's have a significant impact on the health of honey bees overall.

Becky: And bumblebees.

Jeff: And bumblebees.

Diana: Potentially, we do find in solitary bees, and that's why we started looking for it. My graduate student, we were looking at wild osmia lignaria, the blue orchard bee, which live in the canyons around here. We went to an area where there are no known honey bees, haven't been, and we cut females out of their cocoons, so adult females, and sequenced them and we found the virus in them. Also looked at dead larvae that came out of the same nest and found the virus in them in that sample as well.

Jeff: Is there any sense of where that virus is native? Is that a valid question?

Diana: That's a valid question. We don't have enough molecular samples yet to backtrack it, but it's a closely related group of viruses. There's work done by Scott Corman, where he went through genomes that had been sequenced for different strains of honey bees, and he found the virus in all three of them. There are two European strains and one Africanized bee strain, or African strain, I think it was scutellata itself, and found this virus in there. They seem to be very distinct between the two like markers. We need more samples to really build upon that, to say, historically, we're associated. A lot of these viruses, we don't know their history. The only one that might be a little bit different is Israeli acute bee paralysis virus, which we know that the Australian packages that were brought in for almond pollination back in 2006, 2007, that they carried the virus in them. That was a unique genotype that had never been found in the US before. It was one of the ones that we found in samples from colony collapse disorder.

Jeff: There's been several discussions that crop up every once in a while whether whatever happened to colony collapse disorder always leads off into the weeds and down a rabbit hole or two, as everyone speculates, whatever became of it? Back to the topic of the month. There's a lot of things that can come up within a honey bee if it's really stressed. Since we're looking at habitat and loss of habitat, all of these different maladies can rear up depending on so many different factors, but if the bee is healthy, in a healthy environment, everyone's happy. The native bees, the honey bees.

Diana: It's very clear, even for beekeepers, that diet is important. As long as you have a nutritionally rich diet, honey bees, with a lot of different floral resources to make use of, you can overcome a lot of these other stressors, you can withstand the pesticides, you could withstand the pathogens, and you could withstand probably lower numbers of varroa, too.

Having that habitat support your bee health for all the bee species, I think is really absolutely critical. The way that I've been terming it or having people think about it is we need to create more bee pasture. We need to think about planting more flowers out there for all the bees and even for places where honey bee keepers could bring colonies. We do have another research project that's also funded by Project Apis m. and Costco. Utah, southern Utah in particular, it's never really a lush place to be.

Jeff: But it is very beautiful.

Diana: It is very beautiful, yes, but we do have some very dry areas, that are known for decreased rainfall, but especially now having extreme drought. One of our fellow research units here, Forage and Range with a previous research leader scientist, had created these plantings. It was part of an experiment to test different pollinator mixes, and he threw in his own mix, and it put it in 2017 2018, down south of Nephi, which is dead center in Utah, an area that has gone from severe to extreme exceptional drought. These plantings he put in without irrigation.

Put them in the fall, and they are still existing. The reason why he got my attention is he shows his picture when he was on Zoom calls with all this lush pink flowers in the background. It was a plant called Sanfoin, S-A-N-F-O-I-N. It's a legume, and it can be used to make hay, but it turns out it's the most delicious flower for honey bees and other bees, and also ungulates like elk and deer.

They walk across an alfalfa field to get over to eat this. We went down and sampled his little plot, and we found over 50 species of bees out there, including honey bees, but also these queen bumblebees, which we did this in '22, and they were put in 2017, 2018. There's nothing else around. Those bumblebees had to be surviving in that area where these plantings were. We're trying to expand it out, but also add plants in there that will increase the floral resources across the season too.

Becky: The magic plant is always something that beekeepers want to hear more about. It takes a few magic plants to make a good honey crop or to make a honey bee colony healthy. I've heard of the Sanfoin, and I know a beekeeper who winters in Texas brought some back up to Minnesota. I think it's planted pretty widely across the US, even in conditions that aren't extreme, it can be.

Jeff: We'll put reference points to that in the show notes. I can see everybody going out and googling that, and saying, where can I get my supply of seeds?

Diana: It's a crop that hasn't been highly selected on. There were alfalfa in the plant mix too, but it was clear the sanfoin was the one taking over as opposed to the alfalfa. We're also in the West here, I am trying to promote rabbit brush. If you come to the West in the fall, it's this bright yellow bush, a little shrub, and it's a native plant. There's over 20 different species. Darren Cox told me there were actually beekeepers that brought their colonies in to make a honey crop off of it late in the fall. It's a bee magnet again for all the different bee species. It lives in these most desolate, drought-stricken, driest places naturally.

Jeff: Diana, I would love to keep talking to you, because I know you have much more you can tell us about your research and what you're working on now, but we're coming up at the end of our time. Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you want to tell our listeners?

Diana: I thank your listeners for listening in and encourage them to think about feed pastures and planning.

Jeff: Absolutely. Thank you for being here today.

Diana: Thank you, guys.

Becky: Thank you so much.

[music]

Jeff: It was refreshing to hear that she was finding that the issue is not honey bees. Her research shows that the issue is lack of habitat.

Becky: Right. I think the problem with some of these questions that researchers are asking, and this has come out in the research world, is that the studies aren't long enough or the way they're set up. For example, if you put 300 honey bee colonies in one place without enough food and ask the question, "Do they impact it?" Guess what? The answer is yes. I think that her study really did put it all into perspective, and it was so detailed and honestly, project Apis m. they thought that the results might be good. Dr. Cox-Foster with the USDA, and so regardless of the data, they were going to get what they got. This was an independent study led by the government. The news is good for honey bees.

Jeff: Good for honey bees, all bees. The message is still, we need more habitat.

Becky: Right. Exactly. There are data behind that now.

Jeff: That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to follow us and rate us five stars on Apple 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 tab along the top of any webpage. 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.

[00:49:42] [END OF AUDIO]