139 Jay Evans - Beeoptimism: Reflections on the advances in bee research (in English)

Transcription: Hailey Wallace
 

[00:00:00] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:00:00] In 2006 and 2007 beekeepers started to notice a very odd thing with their honeybee colonies, Colony Collapse Disorder - where a large portion of the workforce literally disappeared, leaving behind the queen, a diminished workforce and all of the immature stages of the brood. Now, this crisis set in motion one of the most remarkable stages in the history of honeybee science. We've seen a whole lot of new research and immense leaps in our understanding of things like honeybee viruses, honeybee behavior, and reading of honeybees. And to take stock of all this, I've invited Jay Evans onto the show. Now, Dr. Evans is the research leader for the US Department of Agriculture's Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, and he's recently written a book titled, "Bee Optimism: Translational Research Can Rescue Honeybees and Other Pollinators." [00:01:00] Bee researcher, Marla Spivak at the University of Minnesota says, "the title of this book reveals all, Jay Evans approaches science in life with clarity and optimism. Every essay in this book is concise, yet funny and rich and content." She goes on to say, "Jay remains firmly rooted in in the bee optimism movement for his scientific mind the unknown is full of possibilities." I'm going to explore these possibilities with Dr. Evans today on PolliNation.

[00:01:34] So, I remember Colony Collapse Disorder, I remember where I was, and I remember that year, and it's been over a decade since Colony Collapse Disorder. And a lot has happened over the last decade, not only in terms of what we know about honeybees, but practical strategies that beekeepers have adopted. Now your new book "Bee Optimism" is a reflection on this journey. I want to ask you to start, when did you start writing the pieces in this book [00:02:00] and when did you think time had come to sort of take stock of the whole decade and what has happened?

[00:02:07] Jay Evans: [00:02:07] Sure. Yeah. Well, I started writing these essays or short pieces in Bee Culture Magazine at the end of 2016. So you're right, that was almost precisely ten years since the first commercial beekeepers recognized this odd phenomenon that came to be called Colony Collapse Disorder. Two events from 2006 and 2007 I'd reflected on over the time, one was Colony Collapse Disorder- and I'm a believer that it is a thing, an undefined thing perhaps, but it did happen to real beekeepers and was pretty devastating for many of them. 

[00:02:54] And yet, ten years later, we're still kind of, working around the edges of solving [00:03:00] what or what many factors caused that. And so part of it was to reflect on the research since that time, which has been immense. There's been a lot of interest, a lot of efforts by many people, and trying to find out if we had really, you know, declared victory on that- and I concluded that we hadn't. And for the reason that we still see high colony losses and, well not presented quite the same way they're still sudden in some cases and scary and in all cases - so, that was one reason. 

[00:03:35] The other event that in the research world that I think was a sort of seminal event from that year was the Honeybee Genome Project kind of came to fruition. And I was very lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and to get involved with that. So, I think that gave a blueprint, a sort of a map of bees, [00:04:00] but you know, that's about it. It gave this kind of core of what a bee was made of in a sense. But, our hopes at that time, especially those of us in kind of applied sciences, was that, that resource would really help diminish the sorts of losses that were occurring.

[00:04:18] And I'd say over time that you know, we're still having challenges with beekeeping and presses and disease. So, I think that's been a great resource, but I also thought of it as a time to kind of think back of, "how has that been used, what are the successes there"? But also, "how we could use it better." So those two are kind of things in the back of my mind, and then most importantly, you know I felt at that point about almost twenty years in bee research, that it was probably about time to really kind of connect the dots on some research, [00:05:00] not just from our own lab, but from other places. And try to look at the very practical connotations and, you know kind of explain to beekeepers, but also listen to beekeepers on what their needs were and such. 

[00:05:11] And so it was almost out of guilt as it were, over not having all the answers on bee health and, just hoping that, you know, maybe by connecting the gardeners, the beekeepers, those communities to research around the world, not certainly from our group here entirely. In large part, these are projects from really every continent, to try to connect those and maybe tease apart from very recent studies what is coming down the road for bee health. 

[00:05:52] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:05:52] You know, the front cover of the book has a bee that looks like it's doing something like a waggle dance, but the squiggly line is in some [00:06:00] sense meant to be a metaphor I suppose - for these big discoveries and then trying to digest their possibilities.

[00:06:10] Jay Evans: [00:06:10] Yeah. So yeah, it was! I have to give a shout out, my mother actually drew the bee. She's a museum worker and scientific illustrator, so she did the bee and I was trying to think of how to piece it on there. And of course, yeah, if that were a waggle dance, it'd be to the next county perhaps. But the idea was that the bees, well, two things: one is that bees like us are on their own journeys to find food in this case, but also that, I mean, they're so fascinating in terms of how they do talk to each other, their ability to do associative learning and landscape learning and all this stuff. So I kind of thought, I mean, to me that story of the waggle dance has always kind of [00:07:00] explained one of the attractions to bees which is that they're just an amazing creature in their sociality and their smarts compared to other insects for example. 

[00:07:12] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:07:12] I want to talk a little bit about the writing because it's not like your scientific writing, your technical writing is a very different tenor. They're very short pieces, each of them, there is many of them - but it really does give you a glimpse of what's going on, but you really have kind of a assumed a different style. Can you talk a little bit about that transition of you know, writing technically? And who did you think the audience was? Who were you pitching your writing style towards?

[00:07:39] Jay Evans: [00:07:39] Right. Yeah. So they're very light, I would say. And, I guess the one thing I wanted is also to put in a personal side, so I try to put the names of the researchers and often the first researchers in a paper will be the students or the early career scientists doing this and, you know, kind of [00:08:00] say, these are real people who are crafting these stories. So, that part is more of like a letter like, "hey, here's something cool that my neighbor just did" or, you know, a "neighbor" broadly speaking in science. 

[00:08:14] And so they are light, I guess for those who are interested, many of these papers can be brought down from the internet. So a lot of them are open access papers, so they're actually not behind a sort of a pay wall or a fee type system. And I had a little bit of a tendency towards those papers thinking that for the really involved, you know, whether it's a master gardener or a beekeeper, folks like that, they can go directly to those papers and read them themselves. So in that sense I didn't want too much [00:09:00] wording around it even, or interpretation and more of a roadmap to those papers themselves. 

[00:09:05] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:09:05] Well, I really thought the writing style is magnificent because it is approachable. You don't have to have the background to access them, but the complexity of the paper is still there in a very short kind of crisp way. I'm looking forward to reading more of these because it's like I really got a sense of what was going on, but also in a way that didn't flatten the research out. I thought the writing is very kind of, you know, leveraging your technical skills and be able to evaluate the work, but being able to put it into a narrative that's approachable.

[00:09:42] Jay Evans: [00:09:42] Oh, well thank you! Yeah, I'm still learning. This is an early gig at least for the authors in the bee world who I read and look up to. So hopefully I'll keep improving as well. 

[00:09:57] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:09:57] Well you've organized the book into [00:10:00] parts, so it's not just a collection of essays, but you've really organized them into parts. Can you tell us about those parts? And how'd you see the work of the last decade really falling into these categories? 

[00:10:12] Jay Evans: [00:10:12] Sure, yeah. Well, I guess I have to say that working for a USDA lab on disease, you know, not that we dwell on the negative, but we also look at you know, really the challenges facing beekeeping and bees themselves and other species besides honeybees for that matter - in terms of disease and nutrition and chemical stress. So I did start with that as it were, and kind of binned together a few stories related to those threats, just thinking that was the topic at hand, and that's really, you know, part of the driving forces to try to find something practical to improve the fates of bees. 

[00:10:50] So the first few essays are our challenges and opportunities. So they're kind of the, you know, the CCD initially, but also mite [00:11:00] threats to bees and chemical stress to bees.  And you know one of the essays in there, also kind of talks about how different communities approach these. And to be honest, I hadn't thought about this - I've been pretty embedded in the research world, and we do things incrementally. We often divide a topic into small parts and try to address them, whereas beekeepers are really more, and maybe other people in industry and certainly other farmers, you know, they're very holistic and they're very much like, "yeah I know something's wrong with my colonies or an entire apiary they're just not thriving, they're not doing that." So in those challenges, to me it was a learning experience to realize how differently we respond to those challenges and try to try to solve them, and I think both directions work.

[00:11:58] I think the [00:12:00] scientific method is essential, but I also think, you know, we should maybe listen more to those who are taking this kind of a broader view and maybe just seeing things that are different and solutions that are different. We all know that beekeepers are experimentalists to an extent as well, whether it's for disease treatments or nutritive supplements and things like that. And, you know there's some parallel to that in the same way there's parallel to different scientific methods that could hurt their bees. Of course, they could also see things that are correlated but not related to what they did the last week or the last month. But in the midst of that, they are also making great observations and those deserve a voice, I guess.

[00:12:49] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:12:49] Okay, so the first part deals with these challenges and opportunities, kind of this looking at some of the problems and also the ways in which beekeepers are dealing with [00:13:00] them. What about the other parts? 

[00:13:02] Jay Evans: [00:13:02] Yeah, so the next part was kind of dealing with some of the, you know, why humans and bees are intertwined, and to be honest, as someone who does bee research and actually has bees at home - I hadn't thought a lot about honey and, you know, the nature of it and the storage of it and use of it. So I read a bit about that and sort of the plant side of things and I kind of got into more of the, "what's it like to be a bee" and also to do, you know, these sort of amazing things they're bringing home like propolis and honey. 

[00:13:37] And that sort of merged into the other beauty of bees which is their reproduction and their evolution as Suzanne Bocho would say, a hyper-social organism. I mean they're the Manhattan's or Beijing's of the social insect world. They have bunches of individuals doing their thing, and yet they make it all [00:14:00] work. And I've been reading some by Tom Seeley and Mark Winston actually just this sort of, you know, how do you take the fact that honeybees as practical as they might be for us and for our plants are also this phenomenally social beast - and try to understand how that impacts bee health. And so those sections are more on, meetings with those folks and also reading papers on honeybee evolution and social behaviors especially.

[00:14:37] And then the last bit is on a more kind of seasonal stress. So we here have a maybe not an extreme winter, but we do have four seasons in the Mid-Atlantic of the US. And many of the losses and challenges beekeepers face are season dependent, at one [00:15:00] level overwintering as of course, but also you know, we have challenges late summer - there's not a lot of forage, there's yellow jackets, there's things like that. So I guess the last bit was more looking at, how that seasonality effects bees, maybe what beekeepers could do to mitigate challenges and then also what our climate, now and in the future how that impacts honeybees especially. 

[00:15:25] So I guess that's how they fell out and they were not written in such an orderly form, often we'll just kind of look through the papers coming out in a certain month or a couple of months before and just choose a topic based on what's kind of flowing past from the journals. So I did not set out at all in writing these to write very thematically like that and then just decided at the end that's how they, in my mind had fit together - the motivations to write [00:16:00] about those studies. 

[00:16:01] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:16:01] I also recall that there's a fair amount on some of the things that have been developed for beekeepers. For example, the mite resistance - kind of documenting, which you know with USDA ARS it's been a long-term strategy and really of working on resistance to Varroa mites these parasites of honey bees. 

[00:16:23] Jay Evans: [00:16:23] Yeah. I just think there's so much exciting work, whether it's hygienic behavior or, you know, suppression of mite reproduction - all of these traits, and yet they're hard to get into populations, they are hard to keep in populations. So I still think that's, you know, that's the kernel of research that, you know, boy, if we can't use the genome tools, and the careful breeding and instrumental insemination at this point, to really improve the stock, as well as, small-scale breeders who are [00:17:00] really focused on enhancing those traits - we won't be able to. So I think it's really exciting just that tools that are available, but also the efforts by many conscious breeders to make this happen. And there's some, there's going to be, I think major breakthroughs these sort of on off switches that are discovered by chance, that really stop the Varroa - so I'm hopeful. 

[00:17:25] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:17:25] Now I imagine with some of these essays, you probably hadn't seen them for a while and, having the book laid out and type set you've been able to read through kind of maybe pieces you hadn't looked at for a while. Did anything strike you in sort of reading through, this kind of assessment of the state of bee research on a regular basis that you've been doing for the past few years?

[00:17:50] Jay Evans: [00:17:50] I see different groups and, you know, whether they're working on propolis coming [00:18:00] into the hive or other, you know natural parts of the environment, better pollen nutrition, for example. I saw a real connection there in terms of research and that was neat just to see how you know some people take a genetic approach to see how healthy the bees are, others will look at microbe levels or, just survivorship and such. And so it's sort of fun looking back just to see that you know, the people working at the organism or even the colony level are making some of the same discoveries, I guess, as those who are trapped in the lab.

[00:18:37] And I'm largely now an indoor biologist, so I feel like I'm on the constant temperature lab, side of things. And at the same time, I think we are finding results that look at least somewhat like the more difficult [00:19:00] and, very impactful studies - I'm thinking of the studies in the Dakotas. Clint Auto and colleagues at USGS and USDA colleagues and university colleagues, like Matt Smart who is at Nebraska now - those sorts of studies were... 

[00:19:18] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:19:18] Big landscape studies. 

[00:19:21] Jay Evans: [00:19:21] Yeah not just how do you manage land, but yeah what does it all mean for the survivorship and productivity - honey bees and other bees for that matter? And so, yeah, I really enjoyed reading those the first time certainly, I'm not sure I enjoy it because they're more reading my own essay on them because those fields have probably advanced in a couple of years too. So I'm keen to follow those sorts of fields and honestly, I hadn't kept up on them. You know, as I mentioned at the start we get trapped in our own visions of what's going to really be a breakthrough. And not realizing that maybe that's the breakthrough - [00:20:00] I would be toward the second half of the research community to recognize this perhaps, and maybe further back in the bee community. But the breakthrough might be that, you know, boy, bees just need bunches of healthy flowers and we can sit back and they'll be back to their normal good ways. 

[00:20:18] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:20:18] So if I get this straight, the one thing that sort of struck you kind of looking back over this period is the way in which studies that were going from very different directions were converging - it kind of gives you a little confidence that if you're going from the bench top or the landscape level, and you're coming to the same answers. I imagine in science there's always a kind of a nagging doubt, or you wouldn't be a scientist and things aren't quite, you know, reflecting reality. 

[00:20:48] Jay Evans: [00:20:48] Right? Yeah. And I guess the other maybe related to that, if you look at those studies, there might be five or six people involved and one person might be doing the hive [00:21:00] monitor or the RFID tags, and the computer science needed to interpret all this flow of information coming in. And the other, you know, a couple of people might just be really, really insightful in bee behavior or forage. And so, yeah as you've seen too, I'm sure the, research papers and honeybees these days involve, you know, five or six people, and it's really hard to kind of have individual spanning too far beyond their own field of study. But there's been great collaboration and in many of those studies where people have brought what they were trained in to the table, but also their openness to kind of work with someone who's far afield from what they might've started out studying.

[00:21:50] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:21:50] Okay, well let's take a quick break and I want to come back and talk about some, you know, what you think some of the key discoveries were over the last decade. So, we'll be [00:22:00] right back. 

[00:22:01] Jay Evans: [00:22:01] Great.

[00:22:07] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:22:07] Okay, we're back. So, Dr. Evans, tell us a little bit about some of the key discoveries of the past decade that you described in the book. 

[00:22:18] Jay Evans: [00:22:18] Sure, yeah. Well, I think they again fall into both organismal discoveries, mostly with genetics or maybe chemistries and how they affect individual bees. We've learned a lot about pesticide stress on honeybees, and maybe what they can and can't do to counter it. We've learned a lot about immunity, down to the cellular level- so really fine scale stuff. But then we've made huge advances, and this is "we" as in the world of research and beekeepers combined, in colony level, landscape level things.

[00:22:58] So after [00:23:00] CCD, there was a wide interest, both from geneticists, maybe working on fruit flies or mice or some other system, thinking, "wow, I want to help this you know, bee, and it's crisis that's going on", they came into the fold. There were also people doing landscape level work, not just in row crops and tree crops, but in roadways and all of this. And they, and I've tried to highlight it - a few of those studies in these essays, but boy, there's this huge dynamic field of many of the top bee researchers looking at how a simple change in forage availability or seasonality can help local bee health. So all of that you know, those fresh brains, I guess, coming into the mix and the funding to do that, I think really came in strong in the last [00:24:00] ten years. So we're just seeing a lot of new insights into how to study bees for one thing and the tools available, but also just people who had different training who decided they wanted to help out honeybees and other pollinators. 

[00:24:16] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:24:16] Yeah, at the break we were talking about this, that there is a kind of a way in which, you know there was work on bee forage but it was never at the level of landscape. There were all sorts of accounts of bee flowers and their nectar production, but never, the connection between forage and colony health outcomes. Or we were talking about in the field of virology, there was one very well known book that was from the seventies and eighties, but really virology was a very poorly studied area in a honeybee science. 

[00:24:57] Jay Evans: [00:24:57] That's right, yeah. And some of that is from [00:25:00] technical breakthroughs like genetics, where we can now measure, you know, to high precision how many copies of a certain viruses in a bee or in a colony. And then on the landscape level, of course, we identify pollens through microscopy or also sometimes through genetics - and so there's tools available. But, I think what we had both come to realize, is also just the talent that maybe the funding for more positions and a lot of, you know, new scientists coming on board who have this passion for bees and they bring their own talents, whether it's computer science or GIS or mapping or toxicology, into the fold bin. 

[00:25:48] And that has given this huge burst to research in terms of tackling these big issues, the other sort of, to me [00:26:00] fascinating breakthrough is in monitoring, and I say this as someone who doesn't do a bit of this in my own research - but the ability to track a bee as she comes in and out of the hive to measure the weight of her as she alights on the front board of a colony and, you know take a snapshot so we know she has pollen or not. Things like that are incredible technologies and they're really driving the knowledge of how to integrate the environment into the hive in some ways. So I just, I find myself drawn to those papers because they're just, you know, I could not have imagined that level of detail, you know, five years ago even - so those have been really neat. 

[00:26:47] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:26:47] Well with all of this kind of culminating and kind of in some sense starting to bear real fruits for beekeeping, you end the book with five things to be optimistic [00:27:00] about looking forward and five initiatives that exemplify how this might come about. Can you talk a little bit more about the title of the book- "Bee Optimistic"? What is there to "bee optimistic" about?

[00:27:15] Jay Evans: [00:27:15] Well two out of the five, I guess I just touched on is just the new interest in the new folks coming into the field, both in research and as beekeepers. So there's a great energy right now and hopefully that can sustain itself, and then these tools for monitoring, that way. What I really like and what's actually in both of those lists is the consortia or government or non-government bodies that are collecting data on bees. And this is a Bee Informed Partnership, and also the USDA has their National Agricultural Statistics Service, [00:28:00] and then just recently is a Beescape, which is initiated from Penn State University, but is aiming to be nationwide. 

[00:28:08] And then many, many states, including your own university, are looking at efforts to integrate, you know, results across their region. I don't remember that happening before, of course, we've had the Colony Count Survey and Honey Production Surveys from USDA for decades and those have been very useful. But doing, you know, everything from disease loads to, surroundings of apiaries in terms of nutrition and stress, that's just, I think going to really help resolve some of the challenges to beekeeping and to the fates of other bees besides honeybees. So that to me is reason to be optimistic. 

[00:28:53] I guess a bandwagon we eagerly leapt upon, is [00:29:00] sort of looking at a range of novel treatments for things like viruses that have not had to date a real you know, therapeutic strategy. We can tell beekeepers, "wow, you have a bunch of viruses" and other than maybe reducing stress and mite loads, we can't do much for them. So there's been a lot of work, from natural, you know, nectar compounds in plants, to possibly probiotics, and such looking at new therapies for bees that are safe and, you know, and often cases are available maybe even in the forage decisions, they're available. I guess the optimism is that, all of these people are, you know, caring about bees and are very vocal about it. So they're doing what they can, both in their own [00:30:00] beekeeping to carefully manage their hives, but also in their environment. 

[00:30:04] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:30:04] You've got some great initiatives at the back of the book, of course the Bee Informed Project, but also there was a example of somebody who had like a GoPro camera on a clover patch and sort of like, it just sprouted out of the ground initiative to monitor bees. 

[00:30:20] Jay Evans: [00:30:20] Yeah, so, and maybe this, I'm sure researchers, we get contacted by many people with sort of ideas in the field for what's hurting their bees, but also solutions. And I was contacted by a gentleman in Indiana who, very cleverly, and he came through it from, you know, again, from outside the fold, ironically he's an bug exterminator and a landscaper. And he too, you know, reads the news, watches the news on TV and saw the bees were in trouble and came to the conclusion that the part of that trouble was driven by his trade, not just the chemicals from exterminating, but also, [00:31:00] relentlessly mowing lawns. And as you know, and its been promoted, there's been uptick in convincing people to not mow their lawns and treat with broadly for herbicides so relentlessly - to let flowers come up. But his hook is that he had observed and swears by it, that bees were just being churned up by all these lawnmowers racing along in fields and you know, not necessarily golf courses, which are trimmed pretty frequently, but you know, the sort of the typical lawn that is cut in frequently. 

[00:31:39] And he came up with a sort of a cattle guard for bees that goes on the front of mowers and so to me that was like, so it could only have been invented by someone who wasn't trained in bees per se, or wasn't even fresh out of university or USDA - it was just someone who kind of was like, "wow, I'm part of the problem and this might help me be less [00:32:00] part of the problem." So I thought that was really fun. And I'm sure there are dozens of ideas like that, that people are circulating from inside and outside the bee moment. 

[00:32:10] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:32:10] That is certainly a reason to "bee optimistic".

[00:32:14] Jay Evans: [00:32:14] We hope, yeah. We can't go on without them as they say. So, I am optimistic that these tools and, you know, I'm still, despite, you know the challenges to bees but I'm definitely a believer in science and research. And, yeah, the community's doing this, so I hope it will be a better future for bee health.

[00:32:38] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:32:38] The book is now available, it's now for sale?

[00:32:42]Jay Evans: [00:32:42] It is, yeah! And yeah, I should do a shout out - so this came about, in large part because the International Bee Research Association which is  based in the UK, but has many members throughout the world, they kind of stepped forward and they said, [00:33:00] "hey, well do this." You know, more or less, "compile these and, and we'll put it out under our stamp". And they work with their own bookshop in the UK, but also online through the major vendors, I don't know if I can say brand names, but one of them is quite a large online vendor of stuff, of all sorts. And that made it actually fairly easy and low risk, I guess for them in a sense of taking this on because they could do it through these places. So they were a big driver of this. 

[00:33:42] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:33:42] Well, we'll put a link to how to get the book in the show notes and we have one last segment, we ask all our guests. I hope you're ready because it's challenging. 

[00:33:54] Jay Evans: [00:33:54] I'll rack my brain. 

[00:33:55] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:33:55] Okay, we'll be back in a second.

[00:34:01] [00:34:00] Okay, we are back. I'm so curious as a book author, if you have book recommendations - you must have, like a really wicked honeybee library too. So, is there any book that you sort of, maybe as you were writing were thinking about?

[00:34:20] Jay Evans: [00:34:20] I was! I mean I've thought, again, of course, of the very thoughtful books on science and bees from Mark Winston, Tom Seeley, and Tammy Horn Potter, and just sort of how to connect the fields of these, you know, advances with the realities of being on the ground. And the book that I've gotten in the last year that's really sunk into me, is a Tom Seeley book and it's, "Following the Wild Bees: The Craft and Science of Bee Hunting." And what sort of struck me about it, and again I am not a bee hunter in the [00:35:00] field, per se - I can recognize a swarm. 

[00:35:05] One of the huge attractions to bees is this longstanding connection with humans. Whether we were, you know, pulling honey from logs or tracking, you know, colonies with the help of birds, however we did it. And so he brings that to the fore and this sort of human connection to it in a way that, I think should be a hobby of many people where you can kind of deliberately, you know, find bees in nature. And maybe you'll track yourself to your neighbors Langstroth hive, but maybe you'll find a bee in a hollow tree somewhere - so I really enjoyed that book.

[00:35:46] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:35:46] It does raise one of these other things about honeybees is that, you know, they've also been the object, not only of industry and of hobby, but they have been a object of natural history. All the classic work on the dance language and [00:36:00] people are really fascinated with bees. And something like beelining is something that anybody can do and learn about, not just the bees that are in boxes, but the bees that are living that become feral in your area. 

[00:36:17] Jay Evans: [00:36:17] That's right. Yeah, yeah. 

[00:36:20] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:36:20] Okay. So the next question I have for you is, do you have a go to tool? 

[00:36:26] Jay Evans: [00:36:26] Well, okay, so as a honeybee aficionado I do have to say the hive tool and actually my favorite one is a sort of a hook shape tool, but it's friginite and I tend to be a real klutz, and so I've broken top bars in such - to an embarrassing degree over the years as the other folks in the lab here will attest. So this one has a nice little wood center handle on the metal tube, [00:37:00] it has a nice light feel so I can pry stuff and get between bars, but I can't like crowbar them out. 

[00:37:11] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:37:11] Break anything.

[00:37:12] Jay Evans: [00:37:12] So that's the one that I prefer to use. And if I can find it, which it's either in the shed or in the house or in some jacket or, you know, so I have others that stand in for it but it's my favorite. 

[00:37:28] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:37:28] So let me get this straight. It's light and where's the wood? 

[00:37:32] Jay Evans: [00:37:32] The wood is actually on either side. So if you picture the sort of totally forged flat hive tool with a hook on the end, the wood is just the middle four inches between the, you know, the chisel end, and the hook end. And it's just about a quarter inch thick. It's not much, but it's enough to kind of give it a nice feel. 

[00:37:55] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:37:55] That's fancy. Oh, that sounds so great. 

[00:37:58] Jay Evans: [00:37:58] I'll send you a picture. 

[00:38:00] [00:37:59] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:37:59] Absolutely.

[00:38:00]Jay Evans: [00:38:00] I got it at some bee meeting. I wish I knew where, I don't remember. 

[00:38:05] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:38:05] That is one of the things about bee wears is sometimes you find something from Eastern Europe at a bee meeting, like a suit or I have these sheriff gaders that they don't make anymore that are kind of leather with a zipper. And for heaven sakes, I would give my right arm for another pair cause there are starting to fall apart. But you know, it's one of those one offs. It's like, "ah why can't I find that again?" Very cool. Well, the last question we have for you as a head of the unit at Beltsville answer very carefully - do you have a favorite pollinator?

[00:38:42] Jay Evans: [00:38:42] Am I obligated to tell you? But it is the honeybee I will admit. So I am not as, maybe expressed by my naivete on some of those, I was [00:39:00] trained not in honeybees. I actually worked with ants in the sort of ecology and in the midst of that, that was mostly in Colorado, but I was doing a postdoc in Georgia - it was a friend of a friend named Elizabeth Smith was taking Keith Delaplane's you know, initial starting beekeeping class on campus at the University of Georgia at night. I never met Keith then, I met him like five or six years later. So I didn't know who this mysterious person was, but, she took me down to her little established package in a colony, and we opened it up and checked it out. 

[00:39:39] And I just remember thinking, "wow, not only is it so much easier to study an organism that's not buried in the dirt, like an ant, but it is truly beautiful, you know?" And it was, you know, obviously it was May or June, the bees are gentle and small and they're bringing in food. So it was kind of a perfect time to be introduced [00:40:00] to a beehive, but it was very formative. And then about a year later I wrote a grant to do a bee project. So that was the beginning of my sort of trip down the bee road. And it really was, I had the kind of the competence or the drive to do that grant proposal because I had actually seen the inside of one beehive, one bee yard once, and that was it.

[00:40:32] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:40:32] Wow, that's great. So your first bee colony was in Colorado?

[00:40:37] Jay Evans: [00:40:37] No, this was in Athens, Georgia. My ant days were in college in Western Colorado and Utah. So I spent ten years studying ants actually which is beautiful and I loved as well. But bees won at the end of the day.

[00:40:55] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:40:55] And I have to say Dr. Delaplane, cause you can [00:41:00] see the beekeeping courses online - he looks very young, he looks like he's ten or something. But it's really wonderful, it's a great introduction video course to beekeeping, I could understand how the person's hiving that colony felt confident, like "I think I know what I am doing!"

[00:41:24] Jay Evans: [00:41:24] That processes is of course repeated in universities and county bee clubs, and it's a beautiful thing. That turns out to be my only kind of, you know, sort of viewing the group level introduction to beekeeping of that sort where, you know, each student had their own colony and such, but it was, it was really formative. And just thinking, wow, how excited people were at having their colony there and check it out and relentlessly keep an eye on it. So it was really fun and I guess that [00:42:00] planted the seed in my mind. 

[00:42:02] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:42:02] Well, fantastic. Thanks for taking time to talk about your new book. I'm really excited to get my own physical copy and we'll have links in the show notes - so if you're interested in getting a copy, you can pick it up. So thanks so much for your time. 

[00:42:18] Jay Evans: [00:42:18] Thank you so much Andony, and take care out there. Be safe!