234 - Goldstein - Colony strength and blueberry pollination (in English)

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:00:00] At the time of this recording, there's snow on the ground. It seems like spring will never come, but actually many of our beekeepers are hard at work right now. They're in California, pollinating California almonds. But right after that, they're gonna be heading back into the state of Oregon, back into the Pacific Northwest, where they're gonna do an array of pollination.

One of the most important is the pollination of Highbush blueberry. Frequent listeners of the show know that there's a U S D A Specialty Crop Research Initiative project to develop a pollination planner that I'm part of, but also a number of my colleagues at Washington State University, Michigan State University, and the University of Florida, with the goal of a tool that will help.

Blue Bear growers make better decisions on the pollination of their crop. Now we've had a number of guests on the show from that project, Dr. Lisa Devita from Washington State University. Maxine Aras. Stan Chabe, and this week we're welcoming Lauren Goldstein Lauren's master student at Michigan State University and the Department of Ophthalmology.

She's supervised by Dr. Rufuss Isaac, and she's focusing on a long, neglected topic that [00:01:00] blueberry growers are really keen to know. That is, does the strength of honeybee colonies affect pollination? Clearly, a lot of growers know that the number of colonies you put in an area is important to pollination, but what about the strength of the colonies that are delivered?

In this episode, Lauren's gonna talk about some practical ways that growers, some different options they have for evaluating the strength of colonies, and then get into how strength matters when it comes to the pollination of crops. So let's head back to blueberries this week with Lauren Goldstein on pollination.

All right, Lauren, I'm so excited to have you on pollination.

Lauren Goldstein: Thank you so much. And Antonio, I'm so excited to be

Andony Melathopoulos: here. I'm looking behind you and you are we're on Zoom and you've got honeybee visiting blueberry flowers. And I imagine most people know that honeybee callings are used wily for blueberry pollination.

And I wanted you to walk us through some of the decisions that a grower is faced with when looking to rent colonies for blueberry poll.

Lauren Goldstein: Yeah, [00:02:00] you're absolutely right. Honeybee colonies are commonly rented for blueberry pollination, so to reach maximum potential yield of blueberry the blueberry flowers must be visited by bees during bloom for the fertilization of seeds.

And more fertilized seeds leads to larger berries. So usually. A specific stocking rate or a number of hives per acre is recommended for growers to meet their pollination demands. And so a lot of things need to be taken into consideration when renting colonies for blueberry pollination like the acreage of the farm.

Also the bloom timing of the specific cultivars on their farm. They also wanna take into consideration placement of the colonies around their farm. Predicted weather during bloom might impact the number of colonies they decide to place on the farm. . And then of course when we talk about numbers, we have to talk about cost per colony.

. And there's also been some suggestions that perhaps changing the stocking density [00:03:00] for different cultivars might be important. So that is not a comprehensive list of all of the considerations. Just a few to get the mic.

Andony Melathopoulos: It's a lot. And I guess right now, I'm, we were joking before we got on this, it's snowing in both our states.

that growers. But it's not that far away. If you look at, the blueberry plant the sh the shrubs look different than they did in mid-winter. They're changing, they're getting ready. And I imagine growers are trying to do this, cal all these calculations in their head as on what variety do I have and what's my acreage and how many colonies and where are they gonna.

Lauren Goldstein: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. There might be icicles on the shoots , but there's spraying under there somewhere. And yeah, growers are definitely getting ready to make these kinds of decisions.

Andony Melathopoulos: And it's good to know. And I, I do wanna point out for people who didn't listen, we had a episode with Maxine Naz and Stan Cha Chabe down in university of Florida, talking about the, that very thing about the cultivar and, still being worked out if you've got this cultivar, that cultivar, but also the stocking rate and area wide stocking rate.

But I guess this is the thing, the stocking rate is [00:04:00] one of the things that a grower has control over. When they contract a beekeeper, they say, I want. This many colonies or this many colonies per area, that's something that they can adjust. They can go higher or lower. And I guess what is a little bit more difficult for growers in blueberry to assess?

Cuz you got so many colonies that came in, you'll, you. You got this much area, you can calculate colonies per acre. But what's a little more difficult is what's in those colonies, the strength of those colonies. Can you walk us through how a grower traditionally assesses the strength of the colony?

Lauren Goldstein: Yeah, absolutely. So at least here in Michigan, blueberry growers don't often traditionally assess colony strength. They might walk around the farm or drive past with a window rolled down and look at bees flying in and out to roughly gauge strength. But. They're not often opening colonies on their own.

I know that in almonds and some other maybe more high value production systems, growers will contract a third party broker, [00:05:00] say a hive grader to randomly sample a subset of colonies on a farm and perform strength assessments. And this is usually done using the cluster count method. . And in this method, the observer will estimate the number of frames of bees in a colony by identifying full seams of bees between frames,

Andony Melathopoulos: seam.

. Tell us that what

Lauren Goldstein: that is. Yeah. So when we say seam beekeeping speak, we mean like the density of bees between frames, ah, or between the tops of frames. When you are viewing a hive box from. I

Andony Melathopoulos: hope that was clean. Yeah, so I can imagine you, you open up a beep call, you take the lid off and you've got, the frame's running lengthwise, and if you look between that little gap and they're full of bees, that's, that would be like a full scene.

But if they were like only half, then it would be a half seam. That kind of tells you what's inside. Yeah, absolutely. Gotcha. Okay, great. Okay, so that's how it's done. [00:06:00] Traditional. Let's keep, sorry I interrupted you there. I'm not sure if you had, you wanted to expand on this, but this is the way growers traditionally, and you're the thing.

I think we have the same experience here in Oregon, I think in blueberries and also where I've worked in British Columbia and I've worked in lo low bush blueberry and Nova Scotia. People didn't know what was in the callings. They would drive by and say, These look like they have a lot of activity, but they, aren't entirely sure what's inside.

But in almonds, as you point out, the beekeepers that are down there, they'll, they may even get a bonus if they have more of these seams of bees, than others. Okay. Thanks for setting that up. So tell us, you've been interested in this question, the colony strength thing is the focus of your graduate work.

Yeah. Tell us about what you've been doing. Tell. Some of these, you, you've been interested in alternate methods for assessing colonies. , above cluster counts. Tell us, tell what, how are you comparing these different methods?

Lauren Goldstein: Yeah, absolutely. Like you mentioned assessing honeybee colony size is critical to maximizing crop pollination.

And this might lead to maybe [00:07:00] bonuses. In stronger colonies. But like we talked about the cluster count method, it's done by visual observation and this can be biased. It's also somewhat physically taxing and time consuming especially with the density of colonies typically found in a commercial crop.

Production field it would be very difficult to effectively measure the size of all rented hives. And the last thing to point out is that the cluster count method can be somewhat disruptive to the colony. Honeybees are leaving living their lives in the dark. And so anytime you open up the colony to the elements that might be disruptive to them, and there has been a need or a call for the validation of some rapid non-investment, sorry, non-invasive methods of estimating colony size. And so I have investigated my graduate work a couple of different methods. First being the returning forger count method, which I think was first suggested by Ramesh Sgii, and then validated by you and one [00:08:00] of your undergraduates, Kennedy Grant and Lisa Debe.

. . And so this method is performed by counting the number of forager bees that are returning to a colony from the field. So this should be done in optimal weather conditions. And of course that varies by region, but we just don't want there to be any wind. Should be. Somewhat warm, but not too hot.

, we like to say greater than 65 degrees Fahrenheit, but this is not always feasible during bloom in many production regions.

Andony Melathopoulos: Yeah. Blueberry. It can be cold. Yeah, a lot of the time getting that 65 Fahrenheit is hard,

Lauren Goldstein: right? It can be cold. So I would say aim for little to no wind and little to no precipitation.

Andony Melathopoulos: And so what are you doing? You're,

Lauren Goldstein: , you're just in front of the colony and literally counting the number of bees that are entering the hi. I

Andony Melathopoulos: imagine if a colony is not that strong, it's not that hard to do. Cuz the, in, in a minute there's maybe, I don't know, 20 or something, but Right.

Is, how do you do it on a real strong colony, like one that's really booming?

Lauren Goldstein: Yeah. So in our work [00:09:00] we use a smartphone camera to record the entrance of the colony and then we watch it back in slow motion in order to be able to count all the individual bees. Okay. I would say that if you can't count the number of be.

The exact number of bees entering the colony. That's a strong colony. . That's a general,

Andony Melathopoulos: that's great. Ok. Nice rule of thumb. I love that. .

Lauren Goldstein: Yeah, it's a very rough rule of thumb, but I think it works. So that's the returning 400 count method, and I think that is very feasible and reliable for a grower to perform.

This method has been validated several times and I have found that it. Always directly proportional with the cluster count colony size. So I think it, and across a lot of different weather conditions too. So I think it be reliable,

Andony Melathopoulos: but the downside is to really do it accurately if you wanted to do it accurately.

It's a lot of, I, I remember you talking about the time taken to open the calling, but I imagine to count those videos of a hundred B's returning is also a lot of

Lauren Goldstein: time, [00:10:00] right? So if you wanted to do it very accurately if you wanted to exactly match up, Let's say a hundred foragers is a 12 frame colony.

If you wanted to exactly gauge the number of frames in your colony, that would take a lot of time. But I'd say if you're just walking around and staring at each colony for one minute, yeah, which one minute is really a lot shorter than the amount of time it might take to perform a cluster count on a colony.

If you're inexperienced and you're just doing a rough gauge, can't count the number of bees going into this hive. I'm gonna call it strong. I'd say that is. Faster method of estimating colony strength than the cluster count

Andony Melathopoulos: method. Okay, super. So we've got this maybe, but but very quick kind of assessment method.

May, may have some limitations. What else have you looked at? Yeah, so

Lauren Goldstein: the fastest method is the infrared image assessment method. So this has been suggested for a while. So in this method, an infrared camera is used to capture a thermal image of the hive. And then the heat signature from the image can be interpreted to understand the size of the adult B [00:11:00] cluster inside.

And so I specifically worked with the B Corp to field test their verify product, which translates this infrared image data into a frame counts. Four by analyzing thermal pixels using their proprietary model and their model's flexible and can be updated as they improve their methods. So as a grower, you might contract verify to perform this service for you.

Or I can see down the line. A situation in which you can rent a thermal camera, image all of your hives, and then send that data back to the B Corp and they can provide individual frame count estimations for you.

Andony Melathopoulos: Okay. This makes sense. So you would take a picture and then it would, I can imagine it glows red where there's a lot of bees and it's, not that, and then you can get a sense of how much.

Box is occupied. Yes,

Lauren Goldstein: that's exactly the sentence. Okay, great. , sorry to interrupt. No, don't be sorry. Thanks for clarifying that. Yeah. So at the moment Verify is only reporting an average frame [00:12:00] strength on a field. So they will go out. Right now this is happening on an almond, so they'll go out into a, an almond production image, all of the hives on a field.

Determine an average frame strength per field and report that back to the grower. So what I was interested in my work was to determine if Verify was able to do this, but on an individual hive basis so that beekeepers or growers can target individual hives for remedial management. Let's say this hive is not strong enough, so we'll pull it out.

And then the beekeep, sorry, the grower might not have to pay for that hive in that instance, or. On the flip side, if a beekeeper wants to use this type of product to image their hives before even bringing them to the, oh, that brings us back to our whole, kind of speculation about getting bonuses for stronger hives.

Maybe a beekeeper could get a bonus if all of the hives were verifiably strong. That was a plan that I not intend,[00:13:00]

Andony Melathopoulos: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. No. Okay. That's great. So that I can see the reason for asking the question for individual colonies because it could, you, the average is good to know, but if you wanted to say, oh, 10% of the colonies were below grade, I need a discount or I. Boy, those, 10% of your colonies are really strong and I like the idea for a beekeeper as well coming in.

They can, they can do their own grading on their end and be able to say, I'm delivering really strong colonies. This should be worth an extra $10 or something.

Lauren Goldstein: Exactly. Okay. Yeah, it could have a third party provide that information. I think it would be more trustworthy for the grower as well.

Andony Melathopoulos: And, okay, here, I gotta plan. Let's take a quick break. I wanna leave it on a cliffhanger and let's, then we'll come back and find out what you found. So let's take, let's cue the music. Here it comes.[00:14:00]

And we are back. Okay. So we had we were just talking at the break and you were pointing out that, and I remember this, I remember I've seen beekeepers here in Oregon. They go to the hardware, hardware store and they get these thermal imaging things. And in the winter, this time of year, just, as a kind of, hobby beekeeper, somebody with a few colleagues.

This is like a fun thing is you can go out and. Put it put that on your, thermal imaging camera on your. Colony in your cluster and it's oh, they're alive. Tell us. This is a little bit more than

Lauren Goldstein: that. Yeah, exactly. I think what you just described is like the beta version of the Verly product.

It, it is useful though as a hobbyist to just be able to see how the cluster inside your colony is changing throughout the winter and even early spring. And so I think the point of the Verly product is just to. Further expand on that. And they use this algorithm to make more exact predictions, but a [00:15:00] hobbyist beekeepers can do something similar with these, over-the-counter products you can get at the at the hardware store.

Even like their safe phone attachments and just exploring what's going on inside your colonies and watching how it changes, watching how the biology changes throughout the season. They can. Not only really interesting, but useful to help you grow as a hobbyist beekeeper.

Andony Melathopoulos: But these cameras that are being used for the verly are, they're not like they're expensive.

Fancy, yeah. Thermal imaging

Lauren Goldstein: cameras. Exactly. These are the flir. E eight I think is what they use. Thermal cameras. These are several thousand dollars a pop. And so it's not something that a. Beekeeper could usually feasibly go out and get on their own. But there definitely are products that you know what you really can't get is this algorithm.

They have like physicists and biologists and lots of really smart people on their team that are constantly building up this model to make it more the predictive power greater. [00:16:00] And so that's really what you can't get as a hobbyist, but any thermal imaging tool can be used to just observe what's happening inside your.

Andony Melathopoulos: This is great, and I think the, this is the first time I've seen somebody compare these different methodologies. It's gonna be really, I'm really excited to see your data. It's gonna give growers a sense of this costs this much, and it's, this takes this much time and this is the data I get back.

Yeah, absolutely. It's a fantastic study. But I, one thing I do wanna move on to is that you've been there's a question of, so what. It's does colony stalking rate, you know that you have these two factors, colony stalking rate and now this other factor that you may be able to control for or incentivize colony strength.

And how do these things interact? I imagine you might be able to compensate for low colony strength with more there must be some inter, tell us a little bit about what you're finding about these two factors and how they work together.

Lauren Goldstein: Yeah, that's a really good point. So far our research in Highbush blueberry at least indicates that the activity on a farm.

May be [00:17:00] a more significant indicator of fruit yield than the number of hives on a farm. Huh? So the validity of this stocking rate recommendation alone, I think I am calling into question. I don't wanna say is being called into question, but I am calling into question Uhhuh. . As we've discussed, the number of adult foragers available for pollination in a single hive varies widely and.

So to make a blanket statement that three hives per acre will satisfy your pollination demands, I think it's not really fully capturing the actual b activity that you're bringing onto a farm. Of course other things can influence that recommendation. So for example, in Michigan in 2021, we had a somewhat normal, I say with air quotes pollination year, where our phenology was broad and we had flowers opening across cultivars at all different times.

So bees had enough time to get to all the flowers and pollinate them multiple times. In 2022, we had [00:18:00] very truncated bloom period. So our phenology was way off. By phenology, I mean the progression of flower opening. Okay, great. Yeah. That was very truncated. So across cultivars we had lots of flowers open at the same time, but the same number of hives on the field as the previous year.

So the way I think about that is like the same number of bees had to.

Andony Melathopoulos: Oh, way more flowers at once. Oh, so the flower to bee ratio is like way, there's fewer bees to flowers in a, a bloom period. That's like. All at

Lauren Goldstein: once. Exactly. Gotcha. Because that's why we say B activity might be a more significant indicator than hives per acre because B activity is really a measure of honeybee floral visitation.

So how many bees are actually on flowers? So like I said, colony strength can influence that. A three frame colonies gonna provide far fewer bees to a field than a 14 frame colony. And then, weather and phonology can influence that as well. [00:19:00]

Andony Melathopoulos: Okay, that's great that that is a fascinating finding.

I imagine you were surprised because, you were looking at these other variables, the way in which the bloom comes on right, ends up being like this big driver because no matter how many, if you had. Strong colonies, they're gonna be spread over this bloom and that really can influence.

It's almost like that's a factor. We're talking about factors under a grower's control. And here's a factor not under the grower's control at all.

Lauren Goldstein: Exactly. But I think that if a grower could use some sort of, whether it's a weather prediction tool or a bloom phenology tool to predict what phenology is gonna look like that year with enough time before colony rental happens, they might be able to say, This year I need to rent way more colonies than I did last year because we're gonna have way shorter bloom period.

And so we need to have a lot more bees here to handle all the flowers. This is not official recommendation, this is just, I'm speculating what might be a solution in years when phonology is different. But I think as a. [00:20:00] General recommendation. Stalking strong colonies at a high enough rate to meet your pollination demands is like a general safeguard for growers.

Andony Melathopoulos: That's great. And I guess, I it I'm reticent not to mention this earlier, but we're part of a large team that's taking all of this information that we had Stan on talking about cultivar. We had Maxim talking about landscape level, and this is all, in some level gonna be rendered out in a tool.

A kind of something that a grower can then, you know she or he can plug in all this stuff and then be able to like, Yeah. I know what I need now. I and or this, the weather pheno. The weather I have. I have enough confidence that this is gonna be a short, sharp, I imagine it's gonna be this year, , right?

This is gonna come on as soon as it gets warm. If it gets warm, it's just, you can go,

Lauren Goldstein: Exactly. Yeah. That's the idea. And so you were asking me about how to combine these metrics, right? Like we have stocking rate, which is hives per acre. . And then we have colony strength, which is the number of bees in a hive.[00:21:00]

And so the way that I've been framing this is, by thinking about it as a cluster count per acre.

Andony Melathopoulos: Oh, okay. That makes sense cuz think you're always thinking about, I was thinking about one versus the other, but you can combine them in the one.

Lauren Goldstein: Metric. Exactly. So the way that I have gone about this is to randomly sample 10 hives on a field for cluster count, and then take the average cluster count across those 10 hives to get one average cluster count and multiply that across the number of hives on a field.

That way we can get a cluster count per field and kind of use that to relate to yield outcomes.

Andony Melathopoulos: Oh, that is, that's amazing. So you're you're integrating the two together and that will give you a sense of if you have fewer colonies with you, have you, you have a certain amount of frames, but.

More callings will make up those frames per acre. As, but you could also just have, a really good, strong colony. A, a bunch of really strong callings and that might get you to the same number. Oh, that's a great way of doing it. That makes a lot of [00:22:00] sense. Yeah, absolutely.

I, the one thing I sometimes I think about is, this is a. With colony strength from the beekeeper side. I sometimes think that beekeepers are, on their end, struggling when the colonies are too strong. I know in blueberry is always traditional. I ran into some person who would go to the blueberry fields with boxes in trees just to catch all the swarms.

And I imagine for on a beekeepers then coming in strong has its, has its challenges. If they're a little bit weaker and they can grow through pollination, it's a almost a, it's an easier prospect for.

Lauren Goldstein: . Exactly. Yeah. And that is something that, colony strength in blueberry specifically is a very popular topic.

I think at least in Michigan beekeepers often, complain about weakened colonies coming out of pollination. And. What I have personally seen is an increase in colony size. , throughout the bloom period, at least when performing cluster counts. I've begun to wonder if [00:23:00] that is somewhat of a biased observation.

So oftentimes beekeepers will come in the middle bloom and add a su a honey souper onto all of their colonies. Expecting them to grow. And so I'm now wondering if we come in as hive graders and see an extra hive box and think that it's a larger colony and then add frames to our estimate.

And so that's why maybe some of these returning forger counts or infrared image analysis might be more useful. Measures of estimating colony strength, we might be able to validate this concern of beekeepers of what's happening to my colonies. Why are. Weekend after blueberry pollination,

Andony Melathopoulos: We see the same thing in Oregon.

I think when Kennedy had done her work, she found that the, the grading before and after, and there's a lot of data from this study from before and after grading that the callings do generally grow. And, if I often hear from beekeepers, it's what happens afterwards, after they.

Pollination. There seems to be some kind of an issue, but it is a whole, I, it's a whole, other episode just, the kind of challenges that beekeepers have [00:24:00] with blueberry pollination. But I really do think this tool brings some solid science to something that I think people have known was an issue.

And known was important, but not exactly sure how to think about. It's, I'm really excited to see as your work comes into publication, I think all of us are really excited. Growers and beekeepers here in Oregon are excited to see how this all turns out.

Lauren Goldstein: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be doing the work and of course, ultimately I just hope that it can, help beekeepers and growers make management decisions.

So we'll keep you posted.

Andony Melathopoulos: Okay. Let's take a quick another break. We have a set of questions we ask all our guests. I'm excited to ask them to you. Great, thanks.

Okay, we are back. So this is the segment where we get to learn a little bit about you about outside your research. And I guess the first question we [00:25:00] have is, do you have a book recommendation for our listeners?

Lauren Goldstein: I do, yes. So I have two book recommendations for listeners. For anybody who's interested in a B themed read, I highly recommend B Time by Mark l Winston.

That was gifted to me by my advisor, Rufus Isaacs. And it just made me very excited to pursue my graduate work working with Honeybees. It has a very. I don't know the right word, but spiritual is definitely not the right word, but it's a less like scientific look at working with honeybees and more of a just personal take.

Andony Melathopoulos: The thing I was book mark's students. Oh wow. Wow. And yeah, no, it was great. He was wonderful to work with. But I do remember one of the chapters on Cam J and it. No joke. I have, I cam j's in my mind, manitoba's in my mind because their provincial APR Agriculturalist, reala Forne just retired.

But I remember the story of Cam J going to flying his plane around and delivering. We had an empty pizza box in his backseat. And whenever you laying at a, like somebody [00:26:00] doing ice fishing, he'd say, P, anybody order pizza? It's so great. I love that there's a lot of personalities that, and it's a great book for getting at the deeper motivations for people.

Eva Crane awesome. And all those people. Amazing people. Great recommendation. I don't know if it's been recommended before, so I'm really glad that you recommended it.

Lauren Goldstein: Awesome, great. I'm glad to hear it. And that's also cool to learn that you were one of Mark's students. I had no idea, so that's awesome.

Okay. My second recommendation for people who don't care about reading about bees, if you work with bees and you just need a break, bees is the anthrop scene reviewed by John Green. I know John Green is like a very basic author and everybody reads John Green, but it's a great book. Just about like humanity and experiencing life as a person.

So I think we can learn a lot about actually our work, working with insects and biology by taking a deeper look at ourselves.

Andony Melathopoulos: Fantastic. What a great recommendation. That's awesome. And I can see a, I can see a connection between the two of the books. I think

Lauren Goldstein: there is certainly a connection. Yeah.

Yeah.

Andony Melathopoulos: Oh, great. Okay. That [00:27:00] moves us onto what is your indispensable tool for the kind of work that you do?

Lauren Goldstein: Yeah. I know I should probably say a b soup , but I'm not going to, I'm gonna say my cell phone, my smartphone. So like I mentioned with the returning forger count method to do it as accurately as possible, you definitely wanna record it to count every individual B, so I took hundreds of hours of video footage on my phone over the past two pollination seasons.

So I couldn't do it without my phone. I also just love taking picture. Of hives keep track. Oh, tell

Andony Melathopoulos: us. This is a great opportunity for us to tell. How do you video tape of returning forger? Tell us what do

Lauren Goldstein: you do? Yeah, I should have mentioned that before. Our first year of the study, I would just put on my B suit and stand in front of the hive, but off to the side.

And I would zoom in on my camera to ensure that I was only taping the hive entrance or any other possible holes on the hive. Sometimes there's auger holes or maybe there's just holes in the equipment. So you wanna make sure you're getting all of the entrances.

Andony Melathopoulos: Oh, and I imagine the off to the [00:28:00] side is so that you're not in the direct path of the bees flying, so they don't all pile up like at O'Hare airport or something.

Yes,

Lauren Goldstein: exactly. You don't want them all piling up on you. And it also is disruptive to the flight path, so you won't get an accurate, view of actually what's going on. That's a gotcha. First year. And then the second year we realized we could just hook up our phones to a smartphone tripod, place that in front of the hive and then walk away for a minute.

Oh. What a good idea. Yeah. So that ended up working really nice. We just got really short tripods and they just stood right in front of the hive entrance. The bees didn't care about them at all. They went right through the legs of the tripod into their hive. , it was pretty good. .

Andony Melathopoulos: I remember I we're all working together on a video to show people how to do this hive entrance can, and I did just get a comment from Dr.

Lisa Detter at Washington State University and she said, remember to tell people to cut the grass in front of company.

Lauren Goldstein: Yes, absolutely. And I do wanna make one comment about that. If you're a grower and you wanna do this observation, if you're gonna cut the grass or mat it down, I would recommend walking away for 10 minutes and then coming back, because I do think that activity [00:29:00] in front of the hive entrance does have a disruptive effect.

And I think oftentimes the bees will try to find another entrance to enter or just leave and come back.

Andony Melathopoulos: Oh yeah, my place had grass out front. This is in my place, . Yeah,

Lauren Goldstein: exactly. Yep. I'd recommend taking a break and coming back after doing.

Andony Melathopoulos: And the importance of doing this, I think yeah. Why cut?

Why do you need to cut the grass in the first place? Is the first question.

Lauren Goldstein: Yeah. I think the obvious reason is so that it's not obstructive to your view. If there's grass in front of the high entrance, it's harder to see every single individual be going inside. You also, yeah, I, that's the simple answer.

Andony Melathopoulos: Oh no. What was, what's the more complicated answer?

Lauren Goldstein: I would say that Grass could be considered somewhat of an entrance Reduc. If it's thick grass and if you have an entrance reducer, you're gonna have far fewer bees going in per minute than oh hive entrance. That's totally unobstructed.

So in order to just keep your observations consistent across hives, you don't wanna have any sort of entrance reducers on.

Andony Melathopoulos: Okay, fantastic. The phone, okay, so that last question that we ask is, do [00:30:00] you have a favorite pollinator species? And I, there's a honeybee right on your shoulder right now. But

Lauren Goldstein: I really should say honeybees and I love honeybees and just their biology and, sociality so cool, but I think I'm gonna have to give it to the Monarch butterfly.

I grew up in Coral Springs, Florida, which is right next door to Coconut Creek, Florida, which has been lovingly named as the butterfly capital of the world. And so I. Just developed a very deep love for Monarch butterflies as a child living so close to Coconut Creek. And I used to like purchase Monarch caterpillar chrysalis's and rear and cups and then release 'em into my backyard.

Don't do that. I don't think that's good to do biologically, but as a kid I would do it and it really just instilled a deep love of biology and insect specifically at a young age.

Andony Melathopoulos: There's something about, yeah, I, my favorite, one of my favorite authors is Gerald Dorell, my family and other animals. And just, there's something about [00:31:00] handling li, you I sometimes think entomology education often is just pictures these days, but there's something about handling, live creatures and having them go through their life cycles that just, it just makes your imagination go wild.

Lauren Goldstein: Yeah, it really does. I couldn't agree.

Andony Melathopoulos: It's been a delight to have you on the show. I'm really excited to see how your research develops. And thank you so much for sharing sharing your perspectives on us today. Yeah,

Lauren Goldstein: thank you so much for having me. It was a joy.