54 Ron Miksha – Crop Pollination: Past, Present and Future (in English)

Speaker 1: From the Oregon State University Extension Service, this is Pollination, a podcast that tells the stories of researchers, land managers, and concerned citizens making bold strides to improve the health of pollinators. I'm your host, Dr. Adoni Melopoulos, assistant professor in pollinator health in the Department of Horticulture. You know, it struck me the other day, this show is called Pollination, and we really haven't had an episode about actual crop pollination for many, many episodes. I'm looking all the way back to episode number five with Dr. Mike Bergett for our last real concerted look at pollination. So this week, I thought we'd remedy that by catching up with writer and beekeeper Ron Mikshaw. For those of you who've read Ron's book, Bad Beekeeping or follow him on his blog, Bad Beekeeping blog.com, you know that he's a bit of a polymath that certainly comes across in this episode where Ron reflects on many, many years of working in pollination, but also thinking about pollination historically, economically, thinking about it from a grand perspective, and some of the big changes that have taken place over the 20th century. And we end the episode by kind of peering into the crystal ball of what might be in store for crop pollination in the future. This is a really great episode. It covers a lot of ground. I hope you enjoy it. Welcome to Pollination, Ron.

Long time coming. I think virtually everybody's heard about, you know, trucks racing around the continent doing pollination. But I don't know if a lot of people know much about how we got here.

First off, tell us about where your perspective is because you've been in the business for a long time and you've sort of seen pollination by honeybees sort of change over time.

Speaker 2: Well, I guess it started at the beginning. I grew up on a farm and it was north of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania and there were 10 kids in the family. I was like a middle child in this group. A big family. A lot of the family became beekeepers too. My parents kept bees when I was a kid and they found that they were keeping bees, but bees don't keep keepers very around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

So migratory beekeeping became part of the family's business pretty early on. But we also had row crops. We had big, huge greenhouses growing lots of plants and and for sale.

And we had orchards. So I got to experience all of this when I was a kid. And I also got to see my father go from an 800 colony beekeeper down to 300 hives mostly because he sold off a lot of the bees to my older brothers as they went into their bee businesses. But by the time I got my driver's license, I found 200 hives of bees and my father was really tied up with and my mother really tied up with the greenhouse work. So my father said, well, you've got a driver's license, then 300 hives of bees, go do it.

So, you know, I made an awful lot of mistakes, but but I learned a lot and I did have the family resources to fall back on. But there's also this was around 1970. So it was before the time of Arora. And I learned I learned how to keep bees. And some of the first money I ever made from beekeeping was the spring after I turned 16, I remember loading 100 hives of bees in the back of a big truck by hand.

Well, first of all, you load them in the evening. And after the sun had been setting and the bees put flying, you load up 100 hives of bees onto a big truck and wake up at about four the next morning. And I would drive for four hours into West Virginia, unload the bees before the sun came up, whereas the sun was coming up and do that three days in a row to get 300 hives of bees moved into apple pollination. And in those days, pollination was was a very small add on for most beekeepers. It wasn't, you know, it wasn't something you depended on, but it was cash.

It was dependable. It didn't matter if it rained for the two weeks of the bees were sitting in the apple orchard. You still got your thousand dollars in those days, about three, four dollars a hive. And that was enough money to kind of get you through the spring season and start doing some, you know, some other beekeeping honey production.

Speaker 1: It sounds like if I kind of like put this together, when you started off, pollination was not a big part of, you know, it wasn't a big part of agriculture. It was sort of a, even for beekeepers, their income was much more diversified. And you, you know, which is very different from today. But you also talked about the ease of beekeeping, that beekeeping was a lot less complicated.

So you're painting a picture of a, of a world that in some ways is very different from ours. And probably reaching back into the early 20th century and backwards, the idea of like a a pollination market of colonies that are brokered is something new.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't want to make it sound too idyllic, but it was, it was, it was really quite a different lifestyle for beekeepers. They tended to be big time beekeepers if they had a thousand hives of bees and 600 colony operations were very, very common for full time family businesses. And the pollination was very secondary to almost every beekeeper's business in the 70s throughout North America. Mostly these beekeepers were honey producers, some specialized in queens and packages, but the pollination was definitely a small sideline.

It paid very little, but it paid something. And it was an insurance for the growers, the orchard growers and, and, and managers. It was an insurance for them in case the weather turned really poorly in the springtime.

Lots of rain, lots of cool weather. If they had a lot of rented hives of bees sitting in the orchard, then they were a lot more likely to get a crop than if they depended entirely on feral colonies and on neighborhood bees. And, you know, if we go back far enough, there was a time when the United States, for example, had about 10 million farmers, I would say in the 1930s and 40s. There were roughly 10 million people who had farms. Farms were small, you know, 100 acres, 150 acres was probably the average, including all the wheat farms and cattle wrenches in the West. So you have 150 acre farms in 1940 and maybe seven or eight million of them. And probably half of them had honey bees sitting on them. So, so for a while there, it was enough for most orchard growers to get by with the bees that were in the neighborhood.

And they wouldn't see much economic advantage in hiring hive to bees to come in. So the other thing that that was happening about the same time was on the West Coast. I'm thinking mostly the East Coast because it's where I grew up and it's where I did my pollination work. But on the West Coast, of course, it was almonds.

And for a number of years through the 60s and 70s, it paid more money to keep your bees in the state of Washington or Oregon and get paid for apple pollination and not worry about driving down the roads to Central California for three or four dollars a colony, if that, wow, for almond. That's all it was in those days. And there were a number of really interesting changes to that.

I think we have to make note of at that time. I think one of the biggest things that happened that changed pollination in North America was the advent of the interstate highway. So you could imagine when I was a kid riding with my father, when he was taking his bees from Pennsylvania to Florida, for example, he had to ride, drive an older truck. Maybe it was sort of new for him, like five or 10 years old. But trucks in those days couldn't handle the capacity.

The brakes weren't as reliable as they are. And he's thundering down a road with a flatbed truck. And maybe a hundred colonies, 200 colonies of bees attached to the back of it. Every hive had to be screened in individually so that the bees wouldn't fly out during the three or four days he was on the road. So a lot of labor. Roads were rough. It's a lot of labor. It was really rough on the bees bouncing along the highway like that.

Now you might say, well, why, why bother? But he was north of Pittsburgh. The average honey crop was about 40 pounds a year. And wintering could be pretty hard in the area because of humidity and sometimes a long winter.

So loading the bees up and heading south was was good. But during the sixties, I remember there was one town I like to call it Mayberry, North Carolina, though I doubt that was the name of the town. But as you drove through the town, if you had northern license tags and my apologies to all my relatives that live in the south and friends in the south. But but in those days, you could roll through Mayberry in North Carolina now with an out of state license tag and the green light would turn red without ever going to amber in between. And there would be a cop sitting there. His lights already on because he knew he was going to get. So my father always kept like 10 bucks in his pocket.

So when the cop came up to the door, there's Barney standing there and you give him 10 bucks and you're on your way again. So the interstate highways were remarkable for what they changed because for one thing, the roads were a lot smoother. You bypass these cities and small towns. The trip didn't take three or four days.

It was down to one or two days. You could cover up another innovation among the beekeepers was you could start to cover up the entire load with a single net. And in the case of my own family, my father built these huge vans that were screened in so the bees didn't have to be individually screened. And once, once they're loaded into a truck, a lot of people might not recognize this, but when you load honeybee colonies that are active in the evening, they quit flying, you load them on the back of the truck. As they pile up onto the truck, the vibration from the truck itself calms the bees, almost like a smoker. And when you cover them with a tarp or well, a screen tarp or inside of a van with, with good aeration, there's, there's sort of in the dark and they settle down and, and it's a lot less harsh on the bees.

So they can be loaded and taken for two days on good roads with a good truck and good netting to keep them inside and offloaded a couple of mornings later in a whole different climate. And within hours, you see them bringing pollen in from new flowers that they had never seen in their lives, but they settled relatively quickly. So that was sort of the state of migratory beekeeping. And to me, the big transition was to go from the time when we rode on small roads with smaller trucks and screening in each individual colony to these, you know, good highways, good vehicles. And we were still in our family, we were still moving hives by hand up until about 1980, but around that time, the development of pellets and pelletized hives came along.

Speaker 1: So you can move things, you can really reduce down the labor costs of moving colonies, it becomes a much.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. We used to call our system and people would come and laugh at us and help us load our bees sometimes. We call it the arm strong method. So. So your, your, your arms had to be strong to load, you know, a hundred pound hives and do it hour after hour. And then usually the beekeeper was the truck driver. So palletized systems came and I had the great privilege of working with Earl MD. He was a beekeeper about 40 years older than I. And he and his three sons, I think, are usually credited with having invented the pellet system.

Oh, really? Putting four and forklifts. Now, the timing was right. It was the early seventies and the types of bobcats and pellet forklifts that could go into sand and off road and on gravel and get out of this mint pads. It just kind of come along. So yeah, that was, that was one of the innovations. They created pellets where you could put four hives on each one and use a machine to load them and one or two guys in half an hour and could load 400 colonies of bees where it used to take, you know, hours and a big crew to get the bees up and on. So Earl MD and his sons, I think, get credit for coming up with the idea, which probably would have come about by somebody else eventually because of the timing and because of the need to move those many bees. So then, then, you know, we're kind of, kind of moving along now in history, but we went from a time with smaller loads and smaller numbers of bees and very few migratory beekeepers back in the sixties and seventies. And then it became a business. And for some beekeepers, it was their only source of income.

Speaker 1: Well, and I remember as well, you know, there's a really, I graph, I remember seeing where it looked at the growth of pollinator dependent crops and pollinator independent crops like wheat. And there's a real divergence that takes place in the nineties.

So there's a way in which it seems like a lot of things come together. The rock after the boom of the eighties, honey prices collapse in the, in the eighties. So in the seventies is this price run. And then the eighties, it collapses.

And then you have the growth of, like you say, almonds was a really experienced the growth at a certain point. And I guess all of these things came together in a way.

Speaker 2: Absolutely. You nailed it. You nailed it. That's, that's exactly the way things unfolded. So, you know, we went through that transition of operators getting larger and more mechanized and then suddenly finding that they own these big operations, producing lots of honey, but the honey market fell. Inflation continued really strongly during the nine early 1980s. Inflation was running 10 or 15% a year. So even if honey prices stayed around 50 cents a pound, beekeepers were quickly going broke, unless they could find an alternative use for their bees. And at roughly that same time, the almond industry was beginning to really take off.

So you found, I think, I think I've seen that during the sixties, almost all the almond pollination was done by California beekeepers without the help of any other bees outside the state. Wow. And yes.

Artively. That is hard to believe when we look at things now, but there were, I think, only about a quarter million acres of almonds in, say, 1970. And at that time there were four or 500,000 colonies of bees in California. So not all the California bees went to almonds and almonds can be a bit of a boost for the bees, at least it used to be when they weren't too overstocked with bees. And so beekeepers were making a bit of pollen early nectar February and tending to get paid two or three dollars a hive. Then in the seven, during the seventies, the acreages expanded a lot and bees started coming down from the Northwest, from Oregon and Washington.

And by the eighties, they started to even come in from Texas and from the Dakotas. So beekeepers then were starting to winter their hives with a milder climate in Southern California and getting paid for almond pollination. But all this while, the number of acres of almonds kept growing and growing.

So we went from a quarter million acres in 1970 to a million acres today. And the recommendation is about two colonies of bees per acre. So how many hives of bees are there in the United States right now? You know, I'm thinking it's around two and a half million.

Yeah. Two and a half million, three million, maybe. So the almonds need two million colonies of bees and the country has two and a half million.

So you can see that prices then are going to go up because every almond grower is going to want to be sure that he or she has enough bees coming in.

Speaker 1: Well, the other thing I remember coming into this gig in the nineties, and I remember at that time we were just finishing a point. There was a time when you had to convince, I remember in the lower mainland of British Columbia, blueberry growers to take colonies, that there was a transition going on scientifically.

And I remember just before the interview, I took down two books of the time. They were both published in the 70 J.B. Free's pollination of crops and McGregor's insect pollination of cultivated crop plants. Both of them came out and they were sort of a summary of all this research that happened over the 20th century. And they were used, I remember there was a whole spate of studies that would be do cramp, do bees improve yield and cranberries? Do bees, like there was this real push through extension to really realize that there was a value to be gained at the, so it seemed like that was happening at the same time too.

Speaker 2: It was. And that's a really interesting point. And we didn't really cover this or talk about this yet, but it was quite an awakening for the growers themselves to recognize that they needed bees. And there were a lot of extension agents who went to growers conferences and show them what happens, for instance, going way back, like the early part of the 1900s, they were doing experiments where they were wrapping up branches of apple trees with netting and taking photographs and showing the difference between the pollination and pollination. And a lot of growers just didn't accept that because they had access to the feral bees, the wild bees, native bees, non-honey bees. And also the honeybee colonies that almost every farmer had in those days.

So it took a while before they began to realize that if they are going to grow larger and larger orchards and produce more for their input costs, they were going to need bees. So books. Yeah, you mentioned McGregor's book. I actually have a copy of that. It's sitting on my desk here.

Speaker 1: It's such a great book. The line drawings and the, yeah. You need, I had to buy an extra trailer for my truck just to carry that book around. It's, it weighs about, about 10 kilos and it's some 400 or 500 pages.

No, McGregor's book, I think it came out in 76 and I like it. And I still look at it from time to time and I kept it. I think I probably got it for free from the USDA back in the day. They were giving them out.

Speaker 2: They were giving them out and it was, it was well worth the price. I mean, even, even worth more than the price. But it's interesting that, you know, we're, we're talking about the transition, how things change. Now I thumb through my McGregor book here not too long ago and it never mentions the word canola. Aha.

Rave seed is given a page or two. Now this book was printed, I think in 76. So canola was invented or created or, or designed sometime in the early 70s. And, you know, today there are 25 million acres of canola. Yeah. Mostly in Canada, but I think, I think you have three or four million acres in, in the States.

You do. So, you know, that and, and also almonds are mentioned, but almonds again, they went from the time that book was, was published, the number of acres of almonds does increase four times. So, so there's, there's, there are changes that have taken place, but, but that kind of brings back to mind, you know, what we've learned since the 70s. And before that, just the education process of convincing growers that, that bringing in bees are really helpful. So the almond growers caught on pretty quickly to the idea that they need adequate pollination. It's, I think back in the 40s or so, maybe even more recently than that, maybe into the 60s, almond growers could expect to get four or 500 pounds of almonds. That would be the nuts, the, the, the, the weight of the meat, 400, 500 pounds per acre. Today it's 2000 pounds per acre.

Right. And almost the entire difference is due to adequate honeybee pollination. So we can kind of lament the, the intensity of the beekeeping that's done these days, bringing in these huge numbers of colonies from all over North America into the groves. And, and there are a lot of reasons, I think you and I will talk about that.

A lot of reasons to lament this, this issue. But on the other hand, I look at it and say, well, if the world still wanted to have two billion pounds of almonds in the pantry, and we did not use this intense pollination, we'd have to have four or five times as many acres, right? Of almonds in California or wherever we could grow them and four or five times as much water. So, you know, the fact is that we can do more with fewer acres by using the honeybees and they're being provided by commercial beekeepers.

Speaker 1: That's a good segue. Let's, let's take a break and let's come back and revisit the world that we live in. We've talked a little bit about the history, but the world that we live in and sort of what might be coming next for pollination. So let's take a quick break. Okay.

Well, welcome back. We were talking before the break about this long duray of beekeeping and pollination and how it really underwent a change at least starting in the eighties, but really accelerating in the 1990s. And I want you to paint a picture of what this change looks like today.

Like what, what are some of the things that you would never have imagined back in the sixties, like that have really sprung up. And you've talked about the scale issue. You know, you had this, you talk, one thing I found interesting, the first part was like how big a deal apples were and how they've really kind of been eclipsed by new things.

Speaker 2: Well, this is, this is true. The big new thing really is the almond pollination in California. That is, has been phenomenal and it really changed commercial beekeeping. I knew beekeepers who, well, this is, this is, this is a bit of a stretch, but there are have been beekeepers who would build up their hives in Florida on like maple and oak early in the spring. This would be in January. Then they would go 2,500 miles with their colonies of bees in February to the almond pollination. Yeah. Were they, were they'd earned 150, 200 bucks a hive somewhere in that range, depending on a lot of things. Wow.

Speaker 1: Not $4. From $4 50 years earlier.

Speaker 2: Yes. That's inflation. Yeah. Well, it's not in place. It's paying for a lot of things, which I think we're going to talk about some of the issues and problems. So these same people from Florida to California for almonds, some of them move their bees north to the apples in Oregon or Washington. Then they went all the way across the continent to blueberries in Maine. Wow. Seriously, some beekeepers are doing this. So this is like doing the, you know, you want to do Europe in seven days? Well, this is doing the United States of America in one summer. From there, they, they could, they could do blueberries. And when they finished, they could load the same hives of bees and take them to cranberries, which bloom around the early part of June in New Jersey. And the same bees could then be carried for a July and August honey crop in the Midwest, which might mean North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, somewhere in those areas where they would maybe if the hives were still alive, they might be able to make some honey and, and, and actually produce some honey for sale. And then they would haul the bees to the East or back to Florida again for fall crops and to winter them. So you can have six different crops in like six different states and put on maybe 10,000 miles on your beehives. And not a lot of beekeepers did that, but there were actually a few who did. It would be more common for, for example, for a North Dakota beekeeper to take their bees to the almonds for the winter, build them up, you know, in the milder climate, but get paid for, for their transportation costs and, and getting them into the, into the almonds.

Now they do get paid a fair amount of money for doing this. but there are beekeepers who have become more and more reluctant to participate in these long-range commercial migratory pollination contracts because it's pretty hard on the bees. The bees tend to recover reasonably quickly from transit.

They can set two or three days in a truck and be offloaded and go to work reasonably quickly. But some of the problems are staging 2 million colonies of bees or a million and a half colonies of bees in the central valley of California. It means that a lot of hives are brought in close proximity to hives from other parts of the country. And you'll have hives from Idaho setting next to hives from New York setting hives next to hives from Florida. And if any of those have some odd bee virus or a high infestation of mites, which tend to be treated and inspected before they arrive, but things do happen from time to time, you're setting there like in this big huge stew with 10,000 colonies of bees within a kilometer or two or three and the bees are all mixing and diseases are spreading. So this is created an issue for a lot of the beekeepers wondering whether it's worth it to subject their bees to that. Even though the money pays for most of these expenses, beekeepers tend to get into bees because they love beekeeping and they love bees. So they don't want to see sick bees, they don't want to see problems with their bees. And it's a dilemma for a number of the beekeepers who are doing this now. I have to admit, and I want to be upfront with this, I don't have personal experience with moving bees into almond pollination. I did a lot of other pollination work and moved thousands of colonies of bees over the years. But this is something that I don't have personal experience, but I do talk to a lot of people, a lot of friends who are involved in it.

And I sense a lot of reluctance. But there's a real dilemma because do you stockpile your bees from the Dakotas in California where they'll dwindle, they'll rob each other, they'll catch mites, or do you leave them at home where they take a huge amount of honey to get through the winter and they may not survive the season. Whereas in California, if they make it through the almond pollination, and I didn't even mention the pesticides and herbicides and chemicals that are generally used by almond growers to keep their crops going. So bees come in contact with these things too. But on the other hand, California does have the climate. And there are queen breeders there, and you can split your hives after almond pollination if they do well through it and bring back twice as many colonies to the Dakotas. Whereas if you stayed home and let them sleep under a snowbank, they may be dead and there may be a lot harder to keep your numbers up.

Speaker 1: So it's interesting because it's a combination, it's not simply the cash. Because I think some people may be under the illusion, or not the illusion, but may mistake and think, oh, it's just a revenue generator. But there is this, and I think on the past episode, Dr. Brigette brought this up, there is a way in which collies going into almonds do grow. And you do have this, it is a difficult decision in some ways, because you do have all of these expenses as well. And all of this work, I remember keeping bees in Canada, you don't really have to do that much till April. It's kind of nice. Well, you got to build stuff, but you're not beekeeping all the time. Whereas in this system, you talk to Oregon beekeepers and they're kind of they have December kind of off. But then all the rest of the year, they're moving and doing stuff. It's really exhausting.

Speaker 2: Okay, well, you know, beekeepers are actually people too. And, you know, we kind of lose sight of that sometimes they have families, they've got they've got busy lives with their kids and their spouses. So it becomes really problematic for a beekeeper who is in Minnesota or the Dakotas or Montana to start children in school in September, and then be gone for the months of December, maybe January, February, March, April, as they're in Southern California, pollinating and dividing up hives. So a lot of these beekeepers actually take their kids out of school for the few months, because most of these operations are family operations. So both partners are working together to take care of the bees so the kids go with the families. That gets to be pretty hard.

So there's that. There are the issues with maintaining two homes. You know, you're going to rent an apartment and put your kids and family in there while your bees are pollinating or live in a hotel. A lot of beekeepers do that. But it becomes a lifestyle issue for the beekeepers who are doing commercial migration, pollination work as well.

So there's that. There is the risk of picking up new diseases with your bees. But at the same time, there are the advantages. Sometimes the money is almost the only thing that the beekeeper makes even if they do produce honey in another part of the country. So they can take their bees to the almond pollination, receive enough money to survive on, keep the bees healthy and strong, recover from issues or problems that they might have encountered during the pollination season.

But it is money that keeps the enterprise going. And if they return to their home base, it could be that that's the one year that there's no honey produced and that happens. In the Dakotas, you tend to expect 100 pounds of honey, but there have been times when 30 or 40 pounds of honey is all they get. So it's a huge trade-off and it's not a simple decision for beekeepers to get in.

Speaker 1: And it reminds me, we had John Grushka on the show and he was talking about in Saskatchewan, how in the past, you'd have not the whole canola crop going in one seeding. And that now you can have bad weather during bloom and there it is. You're done. You know, you're not going to get a crop.

Speaker 2: That's absolutely correct. We used to keep bees. I used to be involved with another outfit of keeping bees in northern Saskatchewan. And we used to keep bees in areas where we found a lot of smaller farms and a lot of farms that maybe weren't as well kept as the big commercial operators because we knew that there would be farmers who wouldn't get around to seeding until the end of May and the canola would start to bloom in August. And other farmers who were really on top of things and they got their crop in earlier. Now as farms get bigger and the farms become more efficient, and just as Mr. Grushka says, the crops go in all at the same day with these huge tractors. And you don't have the spacing or this delay in the canola crop. Okay.

Speaker 1: So we've got a number of factors we've laid out in this episode. Some of them are honey prices. So when honey prices are high or when they're low, they affect things. We've new technologies and growth of pollinator dependent crops. We've seen this explosive growth of almonds and blueberries and things like that. But we've also seen pressures on the colonies. There are newer problems that happen when you have to move things together. But also some opportunities you can bring your bees to a warmer area and maybe you could get a little bit more growth. So there's a number of factors. I want you to put your nostradamus hat on and just where do you think we're going?

Speaker 2: I would say that I don't think the current system is sustainable. If the almond production continues at the rate that it has been, there aren't enough bees in North America to fully pollinate what's needed. And certainly not enough bees on wheels, as we would call it, to be able to go into the almond pollination. So we'll focus on almond pollination, but this might generally apply to a lot of other aspects of migratory beekeeping too. So yes, the beekeeper is dependent on the price and I certainly can't predict what the price is going to be a few years or even a few months from now for honey.

So if the honey market continues to slide, which it had been recently, then it's more enticing to take the risk and move the bees in for pollination. But I still don't think it's sustainable. I don't think it's sustainable the way it's being done today. And I think we have to recognize that eventually the migratory commercial pollination system itself will probably break. And as a result, we can kind of see a few things happening around the edges that will probably determine things for the beekeeper without the beekeeper's own impact or own influence on the impact that it's going to be coming. And one of the things I see that I think is going to happen is at some point, some system of robotic drones as pollinators is going to be a reality. In the past, you probably, Anthony, you probably remember that beekeepers had experimented with what they called pollinator inserts, which were like trays.

Speaker 1: People still do that. Yeah. There's still, there is a Washington producer that makes the pollen that you put in so you can get the pollenizer pollen on the bees so you can get more efficient pollination. Yes, it still happens, but it's still marginal.

Speaker 2: Oh, that's fantastic. And it's shown some effect where the honey bees, well, what they do is as they leave the hive, they walk through powdered pollen, which would probably be of the, you know, the opposite, for self-steroidal plants, it would be the hybrid that would be needed to pollinate the plant. So this is, this is, you know, a technical solution. I think it came out actually in the 70s or 80s. So it's been around for a while, but you could imagine robotic drones crawling through this, these little mechanical bees getting dusted in some way. And then they would be flying into areas where the corresponding type of plant that needs fertilized would be.

So they could pollinate like that. Now, Walmart of all companies, I don't know where they come from, from on this, but Walmart has actually patented a prototype of a robotic pollinator drone.

Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I heard this was in the news recently. Yeah.

Speaker 2: It was in the news and they're not the only ones. There are others who are out there who are trying to create some other system. Now, it might not be, you know, a robot like from the Jetsons, where, you know, like, like, you know, with a little broom that goes from flower to flower and sweeps the pollen in. It could be something, you know, a lot different than what we envision.

It could be a combination of pollinator inserts with wind and some larger drone that's flying around the flowers and blowing, blasting pollen in at them. But it's something that probably is coming. The other thing that's definitely coming in this partway here already is that in California, they are engineering self-fruitful breeds of almonds that will replace the self-stereo. So until now, almost all the almonds that were produced in California and around the world are self-stereo. That means that the same tree can't produce pollen that would pollinate the flowers and get a set of almonds. It had to be cross pollinated by another type of tree, which was also an almond, and the best mechanism for carrying the pollen from one type of tree to the other type of almond tree would be a honeybee. But if you can breed an almond that doesn't need to have pollen coming from somewhere else, then you don't need the bees. Now, ominously, I think this is pretty ominous, there's a variety, very popular now in the almond groves, a variety that's called independence. So to me, it looks like the growers want to become independent by using a variety called independence. So who are they becoming independent of? That, of course, would be the beekeepers and the honeybees.

Speaker 1: I suppose this is a catch-22 because you see this in a lot of things. When the prices go up, there is an incentive to invest in innovation. And so there is a way, a system where in some ways the industry as a whole can't, from a beekeeper's perspective, and to maintain this source of revenue, you can't let the cost go up so high that suddenly money starts flowing into figuring out a way out because that is possible.

There was an example in the Pacific Northwest here where Washington State University has been getting money to do research with electrostatic sprayers and pollen. And so there is that problem. When prices go up, when rental rates go up, there is a breaking point where money starts to figure out another way to get around the problem.

Speaker 2: That's absolutely correct. And we saw the transitions. The price went up, so bees started coming from as far away as New York State to California because of the incentive, because there was a need and there was an offer for the money, for the colonies of bees, to be loaded on trucks and hauled. Now, if the growers recognize that it's going to be difficult to have enough bees in the future, it's not just a matter of competition or price incentive. It might actually be a matter of necessity for a number of the growers. And this is why almost a quarter of the new acreage of almonds that were planted last year were planted in the Independence Variety. And now, the Independence Variety, as I understand it, requires some pollination by insects, but it's not as dependent.

Speaker 1: All right, Ron. We'll have you again on the show in 10 years, and we're going to look back. I would like that. That would be great. We'll have you on sooner than that. But let's take a break and we're going to come back. We have a couple of questions we ask all our guests.

We want to know what your answers are going to be. Okay, well, we are back and I can see. And I've seen that book.

So Ron is holding up his... So the first question is most influential book you want people to know about, and you are holding up the joys of beekeeping by Richard Taylor. Okay, so tell us about the book.

Speaker 2: This is a fantastic book for anyone who's thinking about doing bees or has been keeping bees for a little while. I love everything about the book, and I'd like to talk a little bit about Richard Taylor, the author a little bit too. But first the book, it's called The Joys of Beekeeping.

It came out probably in the early 70s when there was a bit of a boom in beekeeping and it became popular to be a backyard beekeeper. Oh, kind of like now. And kind of like now.

Yeah. And Richard Taylor was the ideal person to write about the joys of beekeeping. He talks a lot about his own operation, which was only 300 hives of bees in upstate New York. He produced nothing but comb honey. And he really advocated keeping bees as simply and basically as you could. But when you met Richard Taylor, the first thing you saw was his straw hat. Then you might notice that he used baler twine for a belt and he wore hiking boots.

Speaker 1: So 70s.

Speaker 2: Well, you know what? I want to correct that if I could. It's so 1930s, which is when he grew up. He grew up during the Depression. He got his first hives of bee. And he knew the value of a nickel and he refused to spend. And that's one of the things I love about the guy. He looked like a hippie for sure from the 70s.

He absolutely did. But when you discover that his profession was as a philosopher, a university professor, and he literally wrote the book on metaphysics because that was the title of a college textbook that he wrote, Metaphysics. He was a brilliant philosopher, a bit dark. Schopenhauer was his favorite philosopher for himself and as well as I think Nietzsche.

But his attitude was very, very pragmatic. And he really believed that you couldn't be a lazy beekeeper. You had to put the effort in. You had to be a smart beekeeper. You had to work diligently.

Nothing comes easy or free. His book, The Joys of Beekeeping, is sort of like the joys of good, hard work. And I really appreciate that in the story. And I highly recommend the book.

Anyone who's thinking about being a beekeeper and who maybe isn't looking at the huge commercial scale that we've been talking about over the last while, but is thinking like, what would it be like to have 300 or 400 colonies of bees and could I do it? And if you love to organize yourself and work hard, he's got some great advice in the book. And the story unfolds in a really nice way talking about the things you'll see in a bee yard and how all that goes. I highly recommend The Joys of Beekeeping by Dr. Richard Taylor.

Speaker 1: I was actually, we had the great pleasure of seeing Dr. Tom Sealy from Cornell this past weekend. And he said that that was a book that people really had forgotten about and really ought to pick up because I was asking him because the other person at Cornell who was upstate New York was Roger Morris, who also wrote some really, I thought, great books on beekeeping. And I knew that Dr. Sealy had a lot regard for Dr. Morris, but he was like, no, it's the Taylor books are really a treasure that need to be rediscovered.

Speaker 2: They're a great treasure. And I hope people do look for it because it's worth your time. It's a little different kind of book, but it's certainly good practical advice, but also good advice on just how to be a beekeeper. Fantastic.

Speaker 1: Okay. So the next question, I'm sure you have a million different over the years. You've had a million tools, but if you had a go-to tool, your tool that is really essential for beekeeping, what is your tool?

Speaker 2: Well, as far as a tool tool would be concerned, I would have to say a smoker, but I don't want to talk about smokers because I think a lot of people know about that. And I wouldn't open a hive of bees unless I had at least a tiny puff, even if it was from a corn called pipe, like my father.

You need that bit of smoke. That's something I think beekeepers are aware of. Something that I think a lot of people don't think about is as simple as a good map. A map.

Huh. A map. Now, we're talking a lot today about pollinating and moving bees and migratory beekeeping, but even if you're stationary, if you're working bees and even if it's not honey bees that are your keen interest, if you haven't looked at an aerial photograph of your neighborhood or a good terrain map that shows elevations and streams, you're really missing a big part of what you should know about your area. You could overlook things like hidden streams, meadows, a hillside, which direction is it really facing? You always thought it was facing more or less south. Well, you can kind of see that there are other hill sides nearby that maybe are even better for your bees. So yeah, a compass because I always got lost whenever I was driving.

I'd end up in the wrong bee yard from time to time. Compasses are good. Aerial maps are great.

And then some of the new, like I do a bit of GIS work in some of my stuff and GIS being a geographical integrated systems where you're using geography in computers and Google Earth. If you haven't gone to Google Earth and gone up and viewed your immediate area and drawn a circle of about five or six kilometers, two or three miles around your hives to try to get a good sense for what's there, you might be in for a really big surprise. We bought a farm a few years ago to put some bees on and to run our comb honey operation.

And I was actually out of the country when the purchase was made. I hadn't seen it, but I looked it up on a map and I saw where the reservoir was, where the valley was, and also some streams nearby. And even though it's in an area that's somewhat arid out to the east of Calgary, which is a dry part of the world, I could see all of this water and saw that the property was high above the water.

But the water told me that there's going to be willow, there's going to be probably sheltered areas where crocuses and so on would be for the spring. And then I could also measure out how many alfalfa fields were in the area. So a map. A map was some sort and people learned to use it and look at it. Perfect.

Speaker 1: Okay. A map. And the last thing is, is there, do you have a favorite pollinator? Let me ask everybody this. And I imagine honeybees are going to be hard for you to, but maybe you have a specific honeybee.

Speaker 2: I do have a specific honeybee.

Speaker 1: Oh, cool. Okay, great. It is honeybees, but I have to tell you a little bit of a story. And when I was like about 20 years old, I was hauling a truckload of bees from Florida, which I had loaded by hand in the back of a truck and then climbed in in the evening and started heading north for apple pollination in the central Appalachians in Pennsylvania. So there's, there's the scene, a kid in a truck, a bunch of bees and I get in and here's this bee sitting on the steering wheel.

Speaker 2: So she stayed there all the way through Georgia and North Carolina and up through Virginia. She's still there. Like this is like a couple of days. I slept on the seat of the truck. I wake up and there, and so I named her Henrietta. And it really made me think a lot about what we were doing, what I was doing. I was, I was alone. I was in the truck. This little bee was alone.

I guess the only one I had to talk to for a while. And, and it just made, it just brought home to me the fact that we were moving real creatures. We call it livestock. We call them hives of bees, but they're made of individual honey bees. And, you know, we're doing it for the, for our own good, for the little bit of money it puts in our pocket, but also because we're producing food to feed a lot of people around the world.

I don't feel guilty about it, but it made me ponder or think about the fact that these are real creatures or individuals. So, Henrietta was my favorite bee and I, and I've never had one travel that far with me ever again.

Speaker 1: And did, what, what did Henrietta fly out when she got to Florida?

Speaker 2: Oh, you want to hear a good happy ending to the story so I can. I do. I really do. I really need one. It's all good. It's all good. I pulled into the, into the orchard a day and a half later and offloaded all these bees and the hives in the back of the truck. And I, and you can, I don't know, you've done, I know that you have done this, but maybe some of the listeners don't realize you can delicately pick up a honey bee by its wings and carry it and it won't sting you. And Henrietta got transferred from the steering wheel to, I didn't drop her in the hive.

I put her like in the grass in front of the hive and I watched her for a bit and I hope that she's, you know, like she joined her sisters and, and they got happy pollinating apples after that.

Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much for giving us this ride through history and into the future. Thank you so much, Ron.

Speaker 2: It's been a great pleasure. I really appreciated the opportunity. Thank you.

Speaker 1: Thanks so much for listening. Show notes with information discussed in each episode can be found at pollinationpodcast.oregonstate.edu. We'd also love to hear from you and there's several ways to connect. For one, you can visit our website to post an episode specific comment, suggest a future guest or topic, or ask a question that can be featured in a future episode. You can also email us at [email protected]. Finally, you can tweet questions or comments or join our Facebook or Instagram communities. Just look us up at OSU Pollinator Health. If you like the show, consider letting iTunes know by leaving us a review or rating.

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