232 - Shannon - Do adjuvants influence bee health? (in English)

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:00:00] I always love going to pesticide recertification talks. As many of I give a talk on how to understand the pesticide label to pesticide applicators. And in those talks I realize that there's a whole range of tools that applicators rely on to ensure that the pesticide is used efficiently and effectively, and one area.

That I'm really fascinated with is these products that are known as adjuvant. They're applied in the tank with the pesticide, and they may be used to make sure that the pesticide sticks to the plant or reduces its drift to adjoining areas. There's a whole host of these adjuvants. Until now, the effect of these adjuvants in combination with pesticides on bees has been not really well characterized, and that's where today's guest come comes in.

Brandon Shannon is a master's researcher in the environmental sciences program at the Ohio State University. He's in Dr. Reid Johnson's lab, and he's focusing on the toxicity. These pesticide adjuvant tank [00:01:00] mixtures, mixture, what a, a grower might commonly use to honeybee. So in this episode, we're gonna hear about what these adjuvants are, and we're gonna hear about his great research that's opening this whole area of how these products.

Which products may be problematic, which may not be in some of the trends he's viewing. He also has some great recommendations if you are a pesticide applicator or a beekeeper on how to maybe mitigate this the risk of adjuvants, especially now when this field is just emerging and we don't have a lot of information.

So without further ado, let's head to the other osu this week with Brandon Shannon.

All right. I am so excited to host you today on pollination. Welcome.

Brandon Shannon: Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

Andony Melathopoulos: Brandon let's begin. We're gonna have this big conversation today about these things called adjuvants. What is an adjuvant? Why do pesticides [00:02:00] applicators use? Use them? And these are used in conjunction with pesticides, so it raises the question, how are they regulated?

Brandon Shannon: So an adjuvant is any product that is added to a pesticide mixture. The, these aren't necessarily included with the pesticide, but are separate products that are added okay. To pesticides. And what they do is they can have many different properties. The ones we see most commonly are surfactants penetrants and stickers, which will allow the pesticide to stick onto the leaf better and spread out that pesticide onto the leaf to make it more effective.

But. Can be many other different reasons they're used, such as pH, balance, drift reduction or really any other property that you would want to have in your pesticide tank mixture even to help. Mixing better. When you're adding multiple pesticides

Andony Melathopoulos: together, I saw this recently, it was at a pesticide talk and somebody was working with wettable powders and pointing out with, [00:03:00] the addition of an adjuvant.

It wouldn't cake up. And in some ways it was, it had this beneficial purpose because then you would get the right rate rather than a clump of high. It would just spread it out a little bit.

Brandon Shannon: And they can be really beneficial to a lot of pesticide applicators because of reasons like that.

The part of the problems with adjuvants is they are not really regulated by e p a very much. Most of the ingredients they go into these. Adjuvants are called principle functioning agents. Instead of being called active ingredients they're called principle functioning agents cuz they don't have any pesticidal properties.

But they're considered inert ingredients by e P a and that doesn't mean that they don't do anything that they're inert necessarily, but that's their definition of something that doesn't have pesticidal properties that will bypass a lot of this regulatory testing that's required of pesticide active ingredient.

Andony Melathopoulos: Okay. So it, there are these key ingredients that make it spread or stick or not drift, but these ingredients [00:04:00] are in don't go through the same risk assessment process that a pesticide would. Yeah,

Brandon Shannon: exactly. And often multiple adjuvants are added to the same tank mixture. For example, in California where almonds are grown we can look at the cal PIP database to show us all the pesticide usage through California.

There are just over a million acres of almonds in California, and there are about a million acres of fungicides applied. Between the blooming period so about one, one fungicide application for every a acre, but in almond or in adjuvants, we see that it's about four. Four times that. So you have about four adjuvants applied per acre of almonds.

And so what these pesticide applicators are doing is adding an adjuvant for every property that they want to improve. So they'll add an adjuvant to balance the pH, they'll add another adjuvant to stick better, another adjuvant to penetrate the leaf better. Another adjuvant to reduce drift.

And it's just [00:05:00] making these Pesticide cocktails basically where we don't really know what the interactions are within them.

Andony Melathopoulos: That's fascinating. I, it makes me, are we talking. There must be lots of adjuvants then, because if they've got all of these specific niche, purposes there must be, we're not just talking about four products.

There must be a whole family of them,

Brandon Shannon: right? Looking at the Cal PIP database. So now this is only California for use in almonds. There are hundreds and hundreds of adjuvants that are being used. And that really limits our research because we can't test everything. It's impossible. And so we were able to test 12 adjuvants and the adjuvants, we tested effect about 25% of Amit orchards of the total adjuvant application.

But yeah, there's no way to test these hundreds and hundreds of adjuvants, at least in one single lab like we are doing. You'd need a much bigger much bigger operation to do

Andony Melathopoulos: something like that. [00:06:00] Let's transition to your research in just a second, but I just wanted to clarify. Cal Pip.

What's Cal pip? So

Brandon Shannon: Cal PIP is the California Pesticide Information Portal. And it is a database in California. Basically registers all of the pesticide use in this case for almonds. And it's really useful for us so we can see what these pesticide applicators are actually using.

And beekeepers may be interested if they're in California or take their bees to California to see what pesticides are around them, and they can use this database

Andony Melathopoulos: as. Okay. So it's like a, but it also at the same time, this, and I understand that, this is pretty unique to California, but it also captures the adjuvant data.

Is that correct? That's,

Brandon Shannon: that's correct. Yeah. It ca it has all of the insecticides, fungicides and adjuvants as well. .

Andony Melathopoulos: Okay. Sorry for the sidetrack. Thanks for the clarification. , you became really interested in adjuvants and it's been an area that I've been hearing about both from applicators but also researchers about the potential impacts of adjuvants.[00:07:00]

You were interested in the specific question of tank mixing adjuvants as they are you described in California with a fungicide or with an insecticide, and asking the simple question, are they toxic to bees? Can you describe how you approach this question? What's your kind of methodology for, answering this huge ball of wax?

Brandon Shannon: Yeah, so we hypothesize that adjuvants. To start off, the reason we asked this question is because a lot of beekeepers that are taking their bees to California for almond pollination it's about 85% of the nation's colonies are going to California which is about 2.1 million colonies in 2021.

A lot of them are reporting colony losses and about one in five beekeepers report that they experience colony losses that they believe are due. Pesticide death and their bees. And so the pesticides that are used are during bloom are tested and they're determined to be safe for bees.

So we're [00:08:00] saying, what is it in these pesticide mixtures that's causing this toxicity? So we decided to test these adjuvants. So first we hypothesize that they would be toxic both. And in the combinations with the tank mixes. And now the combinations are really important because adjuvants are never applied on their own because they don't have their own pesticidal properties.

They're always applied in combination with these pesticides. So what we did is we used what's called a potter spray tower, which simulates a. An application of a pesticide tank mix, and it basically takes the same application rate that is being applied to the field level, and it applies it onto a Petri dish of bees.

Now these bees we collect from what's called a frame of brood, where you have Cuating bees. And then when the bees will emerge from their cells we will put them in a cage and h them to three days old so that all of the bees are uniform. This is the same test, same methods that e p A uses to do their toxicity testing on bees.

And we tested the toxicity after [00:09:00] 48 hours after spraying with a simulated spray application onto these bees at different concentration. It was also important that the concentrations that we used are based on not percent concentration or. Grams per liter concentration, but instead it's based on the application rate.

So we wanted to keep it as application focused as possible. So we would we would try to determine mortality using applications at one times the application rate at three times the application rate at 10 times the application rate and so on. So that kept it as application focused as possible so you can.

Kind of the range of where bees will actually be exposed to these adjuvants.

Andony Melathopoulos: So these are worst case scenarios. This is like the one times would be if the bees found themselves under the spray nozzle and this is what they get. And so this is allowing you to really pull apart by taking the dose up to just see, see, look for these effects.

I imagine [00:10:00] that's the kind of rationale for going upwards.

Brandon Shannon: Yeah, exactly. Be because what we really want to do is create a dose response curve. And so at each concentration what is the mortality and then at what concentration do you kill 50% of bees, which is known as your lc 50. This is a.

A measure that's frequently used in toxicology to compare different toxins such as pesticides or the, like a And so we, we had to go above the one times application rate for this reason. A and it was really only to see, how tox how high do you have to go to see toxicity?

In our lab study.

Andony Melathopoulos: Okay, great. Let's bef I wanna give this as a teaser. We're gonna take a quick break now and we're gonna come back and you're gonna reveal all cuz you've really been able to kinda with this methodology go through a lot of combinations and reveal a lot of information. So let's take a quick break.

We'll be right.[00:11:00] [00:12:00] [00:13:00]

Okay, great. That was a good break. And there was one thing that you wanted to mention Brandon, about your methodology. Why don't you we were talking about the rates that you selected and that. When you get a pesticide, oftentimes it'll, it doesn't give you one rate. It gives [00:14:00] you a high and a low.

So tell us a bit about the selection that you use for the experiment.

Brandon Shannon: Yeah. Adjuvants are very similar in that they give you a range of the application rate. When I'm talking about one times the application rate, I'm talking about the maximum application rate. So though the application rate will be, one to, to four pints per a hundred gallons concentration.

And so we'll be using that four pints not that one pint. Now what we see, looking at the Cal PIP database, the California Pesticide Information Portal we see that most applicators are not really applying at that maximum application rate. Oh, they're applying closer to that 80% range is the median.

Range that's being used in the most common. Fascinating. But what we wanted to do is find that worst case scenario that legally bees could be exposed to based on the

Andony Melathopoulos: label. Okay. That's excellent. Thanks for the clarification and I know everybody is dying to know. What did you find is a mixture of adjuvant and insecticide or fungicide more toxic [00:15:00] than its parts?

Brandon Shannon: Yeah, so it was really interesting. So the address alone, we tested and we found that. Four of the adjuvants had toxicity, an lc 50 of about 10 times the application rate. Now safety factors are usually around a factor of 10 for when that lower limit of effect start showing up. So by definition, those would be toxic at near application rates.

And then we. Three others that were toxic at a kind of a median toxicity of less than 30 times the application rate Now, You might say bees will never be exposed to this in typical field applications but often in aerial applications when they're using a drone or a plane to fly over and spray their crops these are often recommended to be sprayed at a hundred times the concentration of what they are in ground applications.

So it is possible that they could be exposed at those high concentrations.[00:16:00] And then in combination.

Andony Melathopoulos: Insecticides, lemme get this straight. So these adjuvants are toxic, but the rates are, they have to be higher. And there may be some field context where they're at that high level, but alone.

Some, they have some toxicity at, a above, the rates that they're being used. Yeah,

Brandon Shannon: exactly. And that is just applied by themselves. But we never see adjuvants applied by themselves. They're always applied with a pesticide. So we also tested the combination toxicity and we found for three of our adjuvants we showed.

Increased toxicity when combined with one single pesticide. So this is one adjuvant with one single pesticide. And what it did is it basically cut that lc 50 in half or almost doubled that toxicity. And that is just one single pesticide. We don't. We don't know what two pesticides would do what three pesticides would do or what adding extra adjuvants would do.

And it, it's really impossible to test because you have an [00:17:00] infinite number of combinations with adjuvants and pesticides together. So we were limited in testing only one adjuvant in one pesticide. We also saw that some had antagonism we call it, which is where when the pesticide is added to the adjuvant, you actually see decreased toxicity.

This was not as common, but it was still interesting to see and we're not really sure why the antagonism is happening. But it, it was just interesting to note. And it just shows the unpredictability that you can have in these pesticide tank mixed cocktails when you are adding many things all at once into one tank mixture.

Andony Melathopoulos: Just go through this again as well. How many, you tested a number of pesticides, right? With adjuvants, and it was just give us a sense of how were they all, did they all, you said one of them experienced this paradoxical, antagonism were, I think that's the word you used.

Brandon Shannon: Yeah. So the trend was not in the.

In the pesticides, [00:18:00] most of the pesticides behaved similarly within the same adjuvant. Okay, so when we texted one adjuvant, if it was, if it became more toxic with one pesticide, it typically became more toxic with all the pesticides that we tested. And now these were, this was four different fungicides and two different insecticides that are commonly.

In almond orchards and I said before, but I'll repeat it again, that these pesticides show no toxicity on their own to honeybees in EPA testing and in our testing as well. And so they have no be hazard labeling. And they're used at times to when almonds are in bloom and often when bees are.

Andony Melathopoulos: Okay, so these are, sorry I actually missed that part. So these are fungus fungicides in general don't have any, labeling on them hazards. But the, some are these specific fungicides, these ones don't for sure. , and then the fu, the insecticides all are ones that. Have an LD 50 or have been assessed, their risk has been assessed and they're not [00:19:00] risked as being at the rates that they're being prescribed hazardous to bees.

But then when they're combined with the adjuvant, then suddenly a product that, an applicator reading the label thinks this is a product that can be applied even at full bloom. Suddenly, you know it, it's becoming toxic.

Brandon Shannon: Exactly. And I. We, we think that it's not necessarily the pesticides becoming toxic, but in instead, the adjuvants becoming toxic.

Now we haven't done anything to prove that yet. That's just my hypothesis and opinion on that. And the reason we came to that conclusion is because these adjuvants are showing toxicity at near application rates, and the adjuvants are increasing or decreasing in toxicity. The same for every PE stic.

And the pesticides are not showing any toxicity at the rates we tested, which is up to a hundred times the application rate. That's out outlandish. Huh?

Andony Melathopoulos: Concentrations. The kind of, the, your hunch is based on the fact that if it was [00:20:00] a synergism it would, for one pesticide it would be high, another one it would be low, but the fact that it's right across the board makes you suspect that there's something about mixing it with some other product that makes the interesting hypothe.

Brandon Shannon: Yeah. And it's also, we don't know for sure if it's the pesticide active ingredient or the the pesticide also has its own inert ingredients present in it. It has the active ingredient plus the its own kind of almost adjuvant in of itself.

That, that are. Added to the pesticide active ingredient to make it, dissolve better or penetrate the leaf better. And so we don't know if it, the adjuvant is interacting with the pesticide active ingredient or if the adjuvant is interacting with the inert ingredients that are present in the pesticide formulation.

Andony Melathopoulos: All right. Cuz the pesticide is not merely the active ingredient. There's other things that are form. It could be, it's hard to parse out causation, but there's, yeah, exactly. Clearly you can. These patterns. And the patterns are, some [00:21:00] adjuvants don't seem to have an effect. Some seem to have an effect, but the effect is right across vastly different pesticide chemistries.

And it's which sort of opens up this, but the reason that's happening, what's the mechanism is now I guess for the, for yourself or others to explore and discover .

Brandon Shannon: Exactly. Yeah. And Got as many questions on this research topic as we got answers.

It's gonna be really interesting to see what we find out find out next. So

Andony Melathopoulos: I love that actually. I think good research is like that. I'm always, I always think I can s I can sense a really carefully done project when the results don't meet your expectations, and it generates so many much, so many more questions.

But it does come back to the field now. Now research like this comes out and pesticide applicators who wanna do a good job, are now confronted with this Pandora's box of knowing that sometimes it's a problem. Sometimes it's not [00:22:00] a problem. What are they to do? Are it sounds like. A lot more of this kind of grinding through spraying combinations is needed to be able to see if there's any predictable pattern between related adjuvants or what's going on.

What's your advice? What, when you give this, I imagine you talk to pesticide applicators and you, what do you tell them? Yeah.

Brandon Shannon: So I'll start with in 2017, the Almond Board of California who advises a lot of these almond farmers and growers that are applying the pesticides. They advised against the use of adjuvants entirely.

And so they said, don't use adjuvants at all. Now, I understand that some pesticide applicators feel the need to use adjuvants and. They're really limited on the rates of pesticide they're allowed to use and they really wanna protect their crop. And that makes sense. So what I would say would be a good, I dunno, meeting in the middle would be, instead of using these adjuvants at the maximum application [00:23:00] rate or even the 80% application rate, that's That is typically used, use it at the lowest concentration that's listed on the label.

Okay. We say in toxicology, often the dose makes the poison. So the more adjuvant you're adding into this tank mixture the more possibility for toxicity that you would see. So I would say use lower application rates when possible and maybe limit the number of adjuvants or number of Constituents and your pesticide tank mixture cocktail that you're adding in.

And then secondly, I would say it is probably best to apply in the evenings when bees and most other pollinators are not active. And in almonds it's almost entirely honey bees because it's so early in the season. But this could apply for other crops as well when the, when other pollinators are also.

And so applying in the evenings would prevent this worst case scenario of a bead being directly sprayed with a pesticide application. And instead only the residues would be left over, which would be at a lower [00:24:00] concentration and are typically not as toxic as a direct spray would be.

Andony Melathopoulos: And I imagine some of them, I can imagine, I've seen some of these adjuvants, it's just foamy bubbly stuff. And by the next morning it's just it dries down and it's maybe not. It's not in the modality where it, who knows, but this is the thing in, in, in light of just some emerging research and just taking caution, just spraying in the evenings and using those lower rates of the adjuvants could be good.

Two good mitigation strategies, I imagine. The other one is that the highest risk of doing this is. It's a be attractive plant in bloom that once it's out of bloom, that perhaps, the expo, the bees won't be in the crop as much as

Brandon Shannon: yeah, exactly. The problem with almonds is that they are blooming at the same time when that fungus that is being targeted by the pesticide is really taking off.

So they really need to spray during bloom in order to protect their crop. But, so if you were going to, it would be best [00:25:00] to not spray during bloom, but if you had to spray during Bloom, it's best to do it in the evenings.

Andony Melathopoulos: Well, Brandon, your research has opened many cans of worms. What do you think are the kind of pressing, I didn't ask this, we said I sent some questions in advance, but I'm really curious when you're right in the thick of it and probably analyzing data and, work, doing a lot of writing and you're thinking deeply about this problem.

What do you think the next steps are? What is the kind of research that needs to be done now to provide applicators and beekeepers with clear directions on what to do?

Brandon Shannon: Yeah, so we've shifted in a couple different directions. The one is we've shifted away from testing these formulated adjuvants because like I said, there's hundreds of them and they keep producing more.

So we're never gonna, we're never gonna get that never ending goose chase and never test them all. So what we're instead doing is testing the principal functioning agents that are the ingredients that are making the adjuvants act the way they're supposed, they're intended to. And so a lot of these principle functioning agents are [00:26:00] used in many of the same, many different adjuvants as well as in pesticides as well.

For example the alcohol oxidates or the organic silicone surfactants, a lot of people have been doing studies on those particular chemical groups of principal functioning agent and. Determining toxicities of these specific compounds, we can make better recommendations to these adjuvant and pesticide manufacturers to say, this is the safe thing to put in your product.

And if you don't put this in your, or if you put the safe thing and not the dangerous thing in your product, you can market it. It's safer to, to pollinators and it will really benefit everyone. The second thing that we're trying to do is Forming a risk communication strategy to determine where pesticide applicators are.

Have a knowledge gap with adjuvants with this new adjuvant research that's been done. And, where is the toxicity testing needed and how can we better inform these pesticide [00:27:00] applicators to make safer. Pesticide tank mix choices for our bees and other pollinators.

Andony Melathopoulos: Those sound like both really fundamental, getting down to what those principle functioning agents. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. What, how they're related and what's going on to very practical work in terms of if you did up with patterns, how do you, cuz you know, pesticide applicators, there's so many.

Licenses. There's, ranges from agriculture to forestry. It's a big group of people. And just figuring out how to communicate to this, to them, or the extent that they're aware of these issues, I think that's a, those are great two two suggestions for future research. It's it's very exciting.

Yeah. Thank you. Okay, let's take a quick break. We have these questions that we ask our our guests. So we'll be right back in just a.[00:28:00]

Okay, we are back. So Brandon do you have a book recommendation for our listen?

Brandon Shannon: Yeah. My book recommendation is the same that every beekeeper will give you if you ask them. And that's Honeybee Democracy by Tom Sealy. I read that book a few years ago when I first got into beekeeping, and it was just really interesting to see how, it's not the queen bee who makes the decisions in the hive, and it's the worker bees that make the decisions through pheromones.

And the Queen Bee responds, and it also makes a lot of connections between how. We as humans can take the decision making strategies that honeybees use to make better decisions ourselves. And so I thought that was really interesting. [00:29:00]

Andony Melathopoulos: It does remind me we had a, it's a very well recommended book on this podcast, but we had a podcast on the the seventh, no 18th century book, fable of the Bees and the, we had a historian on the podcast and he pointed out that the Shakespearean.

In Shakespeare, it's the Monarch is at the center of, it's mirroring the monarchy of, European kingdoms. . And that, that's, people always thought, they thought, oh, the queen, she's royalty. She must run the place. And so this book cast, brings the wealth of research that Tom has been doing on over the decades.

And tipping that perception over it's. Yeah. The next question we have is do you have a go-to tool for the work that you do?

Brandon Shannon: So yeah, I thought about this one for a while when you first brought it up to me and I think my go-to tool would be the Potter spray tower.

A lot of toxicology assessments and honeybees are done with micro applicators which is when you take just a little droplet of pesticide and [00:30:00] put it on the back of the thorax,

Andony Melathopoulos: of a honeybee, like a little syringe with a fine needle. You're just putting like this tiniest drop on a bee's.

Brandon Shannon: Exactly, and I think we should move away from that personally, because it, it's not necessarily indicative of what is happening in fields. I think simulating a spray application using a potter spray tower as a much more application focused toxicology study, which I think a lot of times we really.

Try to make science more application focused and less laboratory focused. And another positive is it also lets you test thousands and thousands of bees. In the summer when a micro applicator, you can only test one at a time. At a potter spray tower, you test 20 at a time. So you can really expand your testing parameters.

Andony Melathopoulos: Describe what this looks like. What is a potter spray tower look like?

Brandon Shannon: Okay, so it's got So it's about three feet tall. It has at the top a little test tube that you would put your pesticide tank mix in, and then it's got a little straw that sucks out of that test tube [00:31:00] and then sprays it out of a nozzle and sprays it as an aerosol down this vertical column, vertical cylindrical column.

And then at the bottom of that vertical cylindrical column, which is about three feet tall you have the spraying. Which is just a flat plate, and you'll have a Petri dish with bees on it. The bees will be knocked out with carbon dioxide, but you can do this with any other kind of insect or small organism you want it to.

Andony Melathopoulos: Okay. So they're gonna get this fine. So this kind of simulating what might come out of a sprayer nozzle. And it's and the other advantage is you can like, go through a lot, you can dose a lot of more bees and get that replication up where if you're sitting there with your little syringe, you would be.

There forever.

Brandon Shannon: Yeah, exactly. The one disadvantage is with the syringe, you know exactly the dosage each bee is getting. And with the potter spray tower, you can only average the doses that the bees are getting. So it's not quite as scientifically sound, but I think the trade off of being more application focused is worthwhile.

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:32:00] Wonderful. The last question I have for you is, do you have a favorite pollinator and tell us.

Brandon Shannon: So I'll give you two favorite pollinators, of course. The first one is the honeybee, because I work with honeybees. I just honeybees are what got me into this research. And, the first time I went beekeeping I just fell in love with, how the colony operated, just watching the bees crawl around.

But.

Andony Melathopoulos: And just before you go on to your second one, and this is a good segue just to mention the Reid Johnson's lab, the Johnson lab at Ohio State University has an aary and it's a big beekeeping state, and it, you're in, the hallowed grounds of Dante. And tell us a little bit about the lab.

Brandon Shannon: Okay. Yeah, so we have two campuses. We have the Columbus campus, which is Maine, Ohio State, and then we have the Worcester campus, which is our agricultural campus where I'm located. And we have apiaries that's B yards at both campuses. And probably at. At peak summer, manage about 40 colonies each per campus.

Wow. And a lot of these colonies die because we're taking bees out and we're [00:33:00] very mean to them because we're doing research with them. It's unfortunate. But but yeah, that, that's what Typically happens. We have had observation hives in the past for studies that study waggle dances and things like that as well, which are really fun to watch if you anyone wants to look up a YouTube video of waggle dances.

But this is

Andony Melathopoulos: great through your master's program in addition to becoming like a top-notch toxicologist, you also are learning beekeeping

Brandon Shannon: e Exactly, yeah. And I'm the teaching assistant for the beekeeping class this semester as well. Oh, you are? Which is really fun to teach.

Andony Melathopoulos: Okay. Thank you so much.

Sorry. Thanks for indulging me in a sidetrack, but you said you had two bees? Yeah, so my

Brandon Shannon: second favorite one is the alfalfa leaf cutter bee. I've never, I don't think I've ever seen this one in person in action, but just watching YouTube videos of this bee is just, they're just so cute the way they cut little little pieces off of leaves to take back to their little homes and.

Cap their, they're brooded that way. Just watching 'em fly with little pieces of leaf, just fascinating

Andony Melathopoulos: to me. And I will redirect listeners if you're interested in knowing more [00:34:00] about alfalfa leaf cutting bees. We do have both Dr. Jim Kane, who's retired from U S D A. And who is that? We have that wonderful podcast.

Oh, it's slipping my mind. But we have a one of the biggest leaf cutter bee producers in southern Alberta who's been working with them forever. I agree with you. They're a fascinating bee and just the culture of them, the way in which people are able to have figured out how to manage them, it's just remarkable.

. Yeah, I agree. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us and good luck with your research. We're really excited to hear more results.

Brandon Shannon: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me on. It was really great to share our research with everyone.