71 Courtney MacInnis and Dr. Steve Pernal – Honey Bee Nosema Disease: An Old Disease With New Twists (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. As we heard in a previous episode with Dr. Michelle Flanagan, bees are susceptible to a whole host of diseases. The adult gut parasites in the genus Nazima are particularly pernicious for a whole host of different bee species. In particular, honeybees have not one, but two different species of Nazima. For over 50 years, North American beekeepers have been managing this parasite with an antibiotic known as fumigillum. But earlier this year, the manufacturer of the product announced they were no longer going to be producing it.

This is the time of year that beekeepers traditionally would use fumigillum. I thought it would be a great opportunity to catch up with two researchers who really know a lot about this disease and how to manage it. Courtney McKinnis is no stranger to Nazima disease. She did her master's work at the University of Alberta on the viability and infectivity of Nazima spores on different substrates.

She's going to be talking about that today. She's now PhD candidate and she's supervised by Dr. Steve Pranell, who is also incidentally my former boss. Now, Dr. Pranell leads the National Honey Bee Research Program in Canada in Beaver Lodge, Alberta. His program has done a lot of work around honey bee diseases and actually works very closely with the National Bee Diagnostic Centre, which is also located in Beaver Lodge. But before we get started, I want to invite you to visit the show notes for this week because there is a link to a survey on pollinators and pollinator plants trying to figure out what you know about pollinators and pollinator plants.

And I really encourage you to take that survey. Okay, on with the show. Okay, so I am so thrilled to have on the pollination this week, Courtney McKinnis and Dr. Steve Pranell from the Beaver Lodge Research Farm with Agriculture and Agriculture Canada. Welcome to pollination.

Speaker 2: Hi, Dony. Hey, Dony. Thanks for having us.

Speaker 1: It's really great to have you on the show. I spent a long time up in Beaver Lodge, Alberta. I'm currently a Beaver, Oregon State University Beaver, but it actually comes from being a Beaver Lodge and working under Dr. Pranell for, I think we worked for about 13 years or so, a long time.

Speaker 3: Yeah, it's amazing. Those were good years at Dony. Yeah, I guess the Beaver lineage is just continuing.

Speaker 1: There's not a Beaver in it. I've got to have some kind of Beaver mascot. There's either got to be a big Beaver in the middle of town or there has to be a big Beaver on top of the stadium. I'm not going.

It's my rule. But when I was there, I knew there was work going on on this new disease that we were going to talk about in this episode. Also in Alberta, where the research farm is located, there was a company, Medivet, that this year stopped producing the only product known to work against this disease of honeybee adults, Nazima. Can you explain how this disease impacts honeybee colonies? Why is it a big deal that we've lost this drug recently?

Speaker 2: All right. So, the nozema disease of adult honeybees is caused by two different species of nozema. Nozema apis and nozema serrani.

Speaker 1: Oh, just wait a second. There are two species.

Speaker 2: I mean, technically, there are three. There's also nozema noimani. Whoa.

Speaker 1: Okay. All right. More complicated.

Speaker 2: Colonies typically infected with nozema apis or nozema serrani. They can reduce wintering mortality. They can have a really slow buildup in the spring. And being infected with nozema serrani is often associated with a decrease in honey production. Individual bees infected with the parasite have reduced immunity. They age a little bit faster. Uninfected bees, reduce the cursing ability. Some papers have cited that it's associated with energetic stress or degenerates the mid-gut tissues of the honeybees. So, not having that agility. We don't really have a good solution to the nozema problem.

Speaker 1: And it sounds from what you described, it affects lots of things. It's not just like one, it's really having these broad impacts on the colony. So the colony with the disease might not grow very far or grow or something like that. Yeah.

Speaker 2: So, they can have trouble building up in the spring. They can have a smaller colony size than uninfected colonies, which contributes to having less honey production or not being able to survive the winter as well as uninfected colonies.

Speaker 3: You know, we've seen this increased loss of bees over the winter time over the last 10 to 11 years now, both in the US and Canada. Kind of in a northern cold-tempered climate like we live in, a lot of the effects we're seeing are very consistent with those colony-level impacts.

You know, colonies that are poor to grow, poor to survive the winter. And nozema is also kind of a silent killer. It's not easy to detect in a colony at least when you walk up or look at the bees.

So I think it's fair to say, certainly in our part of the world, we feel nozema has had an impact on wintering survival, particularly with the introduction of nozema serenity in the last 10 to 11 years. Okay.

Speaker 1: Okay. So, I can totally see how these multiple effects are going to have this. Could explain this kind of way in which colonies just don't bounce back or you have these winter losses. How does this work? Like, well, how does this disease cause all these problems? What's the life cycle of nozema?

Speaker 2: So, nozema serenity is like a very specialized or nozema in general, there's a specialized type of fungi. So they're little micro-sporty in parasites and they have like a really hard shell essentially so they can kind of survive for a really long time outside of their host. So, for a honeybee to get infected, it has to ingest some of these spores.

Okay. And then they, get to the mid-gut, they have this really cool organ called a polar filament, which can fire when the conditions are right and it is this super long, huge tube. And if it's really lucky, this polar filament kind of harpoons a honeybee mid-gut cell, and it can infect something called sporoplasm, which is the reproductive material of the spore. So, once that sporoplasm is in a cell, it starts to divide and it does that through binary fission and it goes through several stages of development before the spores are formed. But once production occurs, because the sporoplasm can reproduce so many times within one cell, eventually the mid-gut cells become really densely packed with spores and they can bust open and then that releases spores back into the mid-gut where they can go and infect more mid-gut cells. So, you kind of have the infection starting in a cell and then it propagates between cells.

Speaker 1: Okay. So, this mid-gut, like what does it do? Like I'm not sure listeners understand the insides of bees well. So, what is this mid-gut and what is it like? What's its function? If it gets disrupted, what's the problem?

Speaker 3: Well, I mean, I think the mid-gut is the area where the bee is absorbing a lot of nutrients from its food. And certainly, there's degeneration of some of the lining of the mid-gut. So, it interferes with the ability of bees to utilize food and absorb nutrients, and also the proliferation of the parasite energetically as a drain on the bee.

So, you know, you end up having these young bees, principally nurses that have less ability to absorb nutrients from their food so they can't nurse the brood in the colony as well. Also, with this huge, multiplying number of spores in the gut, they're typically voided, they may be voided in feces. That's classically what we think of in an eczema infection. So, the infection may be propagated through feces and fecal consumption or transmission in the hive. Some people feel it may also be transmitted partially through trophallaxis or food exchange between bees. Okay.

Speaker 1: So, they're producing all these spores in their gut. It's making it difficult for them to absorb nutrients in the way that it's coming all the way around as either they're pooping it out or when the bees share food, the spores get transferred to a new bee.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It could be through trophallaxis, but the only documented road of transmission is fecal-oral transmission.

Speaker 1: Okay. Sounds really devastating. I can just imagine not being able to absorb nutrients and also having to support all of these little spore families in your gut. Let's take a lot over the colony and then disrupt their social organization. Are there vulnerable points in this disease's life cycle? Is there something that beekeepers can do to disrupt this life cycle? Are there points in this cycle that are points of control? Yeah.

Speaker 2: So, the vulnerable stages of eczema would be the reproductive stages before spores are produced. So, when the sporoplasm, that little reproductive agent that comes out of the polar filament is injected into the mid-gut, fumigillin is capable of killing that stage, but once spore formation starts, fumigillin doesn't really act on that. Is that if you catch an infection early, even if you feed fumigillin, you always have a low level of nocema in your colonies.

Speaker 3: Also, looking at the life cycle, I mean, Courtney is bang on, certainly that stage of the organism is quite susceptible to agents like fumigillin that can kill it. The spore is typically more resilient, but we could also look at the spore. So, we know spores form in some bacteria and fungi, and sometimes spores are very environmentally resistant, but sometimes they have little kinks in their armor. Maybe there are temperatures or other conditions that might selectively kill spores. And remember, when you think of a disease like eczema, you have these spores all over the hive environment. You have them on the comb, you have them in the honey, they're within the bees themselves, and the species, they're defecating. So, if you can sort of clean up the spore load, that does a lot to reduce the noctiline in the may, and may reduce that disease pressure inside a hive as well.

Speaker 1: So, how do you do that? That sounds like a really great idea. Is the spore or the spores of these two species vulnerable to the same kind of decorative factors, I guess?

Speaker 3: Well, you know, Courtney worked a lot on the susceptibility of nosema serenius spores to various things. So, I'll just let her pick up the ball here.

Speaker 2: Yeah, so lots of literature indicates that like nozema serenius spores really like the heat, but they don't really like the cold. The interesting thing for us is that we're up in the middle of nowhere in northern Alberta, and if you sample our colonies, we don't really see nozema apis. You might see it really early in the spring, but otherwise, it's a mixed infection or lots of nosema serious. And that was really kind of interesting because, you know if the parasite really likes the heat and doesn't like the cold, why do we see so much of it? What is it doing here?

Speaker 1: That's crazy. Let me just restate that. So, you've got this, the one form likes it, it's like me. It likes it hot, it doesn't like it cold. That's why I moved south. But you find it, it predominates in colder areas of the continent.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Oh, weird. Okay. Part of the enigma here is, you know, sort of the early thinking was that the selenium was more of a warm weather adapted species, whereas APIs is more of a more temperate adapted species. And just as Courtney has indicated, so, you know, we very gradually but relatively quickly have seen a displacement, whereas nozema serenius becoming much more common and nozema apis is going away. We thought that might happen in warmer areas of the world, but it seems to be happening here too, maybe a little more slowly, but certainly very, very common. So now it's actually pretty hard to find nozema apis a former species that was very common. And this nosema serenium has sort of slowly taken over the bee world in terms of being a parasite of honeybees. And yeah, it's kind of weird because it is more warm-adapted. Yeah.

Speaker 2: So you have this like warm adapted parasite in a cold area, some like common beekeeping management strategies, because we think it likes the heat and not the cold is some beekeepers tend to keep their equipment outside over the winter to kind of get rid of the parasite. But we looked at spore viability, like how well the spores survive in different substrates that you would associate with honeybee colonies at a range of different temperatures. And what we found is that nosema selenium spores survive really, really well at cold temperatures in things like honey or fall feed.

Speaker 1: Oh, okay. So when they're in the food, that regular pattern that people observe doesn't occur. The spores get cold, but they're still alive.

Speaker 2: Yes, they actually do quite a bit better at lower temperatures than warmer temperatures.

Speaker 1: But if they're on the surface of the like on the wooden parts of the colony, they would die if it got cold. Yeah.

Speaker 2: So spores kind of like dried onto wax comb don't really have great viability at any of the temperatures. So if it's cold or warm if the spores are dry, they don't do super well, probably because they desiccate pretty quickly. And so then they can't uptake enough water to fire their polar filaments, which means that they can't reproduce.

Speaker 1: Wow, that is fascinating. And really, it seems to explain this pattern, this paradoxical pattern you've observed. If these spores are present in the honey, and they've sort of found their way in there, then the colony can get infected, and even in a cold climate, it can explain these weird patterns that we see. It's really interesting.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So I mean, you could even have, your spores in your fruitness honey or something over the winter time and your bees are consuming that honey. And even though you've treated them nicely with huma Jillian and they had really low spore loads, they can actually be getting an infection from eating the honey or their fall feed.

Speaker 1: Okay. So Dr. Purnell was talking about sort of some of the weak points and it sounds like this cold thing in the war, you know, is maybe not, it seems to not be a consistent way to sort of control or disrupt the disease. Are there other ways to work on these spores or kill these spores?

Speaker 2: I mean, they're pretty tough. You can do a lot of things to spores and they don't seem to die. Like you can sonicate them. They can even talk like they do tolerate heat and they can't breathe any well, like 50 or 60 degrees Celsius. They don't always all die.

Speaker 3: I think a study you're probably familiar with the donating because you certainly, while you were here at Help Run, was a study we looked at when nozema serenia was sort of first found in Canada and we were quite concerned about what we could do with it. So what we had looked at was some treatment method originally designed against nozema apis. So they include acetic acid fumigation. They included heat treatment and they included irradiation, which wasn't previously used against nozema apis. So one interesting thing we discovered was the typical heat treatment for nozema apis, which was I believe 49 degrees Celsius for 24 hours, treating beekeeping equipment at that temperature, didn't kill nozema serenia. So that heat treatment does not work.

And if you start bringing the temperature up much past that, you'll start melting colons. So heat treatment for nozema serenia spores on a comb really isn't a great option. We did find that acetic acid fumigation was largely effective at reducing spore loads on the comb, but not totally effective, but it certainly reduced the viability of most of the spore loads on the comb.

A treatment that we developed in previous years against American fowl brood using irradiation, electron beam irradiation, was very successful at reducing spore loads on the comb. The only caveat there is for electron beam irradiation, normally we can't have too much honey in the comb. So it's a very dry comb or a comb that has small amounts of honey. But if you had a significant amount of honey in the comb, there's just not enough penetrating power at the electron beam to kill nozema spores or spores of other organisms like AFB. So we have some techniques that are largely effective against things that don't contain feed or comb. That can be a management tool, but we don't necessarily have a good solution to disinfecting honey, for example, that's contaminated with nozema spores.

Speaker 1: I guess coming around to it, that was one of the things that Fumagelon could work with. You could put it into the feed and as the bees were eating, you'd have a little bit of that floating around the gut doing what Courtney described, just preventing a lot more spores from being produced. So there's a real problem here. I guess beekeepers really not having this drug is going to make managing this disease a little bit more tricky. Is that right?

Speaker 2: Yeah. So I mean, if you can't use fumagelon, if you can feed in the fall, one of the advantages, like you said, to having fed fumagelon is that they have that little reserve of fumagelon treated sugar syrup for a little, like a little while. But now you don't have to fill in, don't really have anything that you can, anything that's registered that you can be giving to them to treat. Nozema infections.

Speaker 1: Okay. All right. Well, let's take a break. This is sad news, but maybe in the second half, we'll look into some things that are happening on the horizon, some work, and some new horizons. But I also wanted to think for a lot of beekeepers, being able to know, I think Steve talked about it being a kind of hard disease to see. So let's talk a little bit about how you know if you've got Nozema in your colonies. Okay, let's take a break. All right. Well, we're back.

So I want to ask you this question. I'm a beekeeper and I've got this, I can't remember how you said it, but this kind of like silent killer, you can't really see it. But how do you know if you've got Nozema disease or just, you know, your colony's, your colony's just not growing? How do you tell the difference? Yeah.

Speaker 2: So I guess the fundamental difference between Nozema apis and Nozema serrani, is that if a colony is heavily infected with Nozema apis, you'll see a lot of dysentery. So lots of beekeepers refer to Nozema apis as a wet Nozema. You'll see dysentery and thick and crawling bees.

Speaker 1: Wait, wait, wait, where do you, where would you see the poop? Like where, if you're open your colony, where would you see this stuff?

Speaker 2: You can see lots of dysentery on the outside of the box. Okay. You have white boxes. It looks like, could probably pick out a Nozema apis colony, like a sore thumb, and a pretty good bee yard. Okay.

Speaker 1: All right. So Nozema, Nozema apis is known as this wet Nozema because they're pooping and they've got dysentery. What, so what about Nozema serrana?

Speaker 2: So Nozema serrani, we don't really see that symptom. It's like a bit of a dry Nozema. So it's harder for beekeepers to actually figure out if they have Nozema serrani. But the only way to tell for sure, if you have Nozema, if you don't care about the species, that way would be microscopy. But if you're curious about whether you have Nozema APIs or Nozema serrana infections, you have to use molecular techniques to differentiate between the two species.

Speaker 1: What do you mean by that? Like what's, what, what is that involved?

Speaker 2: So that would probably involve beekeepers sending samples into a place like the National Bee Diagnostic Center here in Beaver Lodge. They use a regular PCR to look at genetic differences between the spores. So Nozema apis and Nozema serrana have different DNA. And the only way to kind of detect those differences is to use molecular techniques because if you look under the microscope, Nozema apis spores and Nozema serrana spores look pretty similar.

Speaker 1: Okay. All right. So you got to get these guys who've got the special machines and they'll be able to tell the molecular difference apart. But how do people get spores out of bees and what do the spores even look like?

Speaker 3: Well, I mean, fundamentally at a beekeeper level, I think you're, what you're probably a little more interested in is not, not necessarily the species that may be of some academic interest, but probably nowadays it's going to be primarily Nozema serrana anyways.

And our treatment recommendations are adversely the same. You want to know how heavily infected your colony is. So we normally recommend looking at that to collect adult bees from colonies because the disease cycles and multiplies and there are more spores and older bees. We tend to suggest beekeepers they can collect foraging bees, which would tend to bias the collection to detect the disease a little more. So we suggest beekeepers collect foraging bees. So whether it's colder, you might be able to just collect them off the inner cover. Perhaps some of the older bees tend to congregate in a hive if they're not flying as much. We normally recommend that 60 bees per colony be collected or a composite sample could be collected from an apiary.

Okay. The way we really look for spores, we just, we kind of mash up the bees. So we might cut up the abdomen if you want to make a super clean preparation, you could pull up the digestive tract, but essentially we're early mass rating primarily the abdomen. And then from that soup, we can actually filter it a little bit, but we can create a suspension of spores and sort of relate that to the number of bees that we've crushed. So we actually look for identifying those spores under the microscope and we have special counting chambers called Hemalocytometers because they're often used for counting red blood cells, but they can be used for counting other types of cells or spores.

So we can actually count under a microscope the number of these nozema spores in a given volume of liquid and sort of scale that back to the number of bees collected. Gotcha.

Speaker 1: Okay. What do the spores look like? Are they, are they easy to pick out from all the other gunk that's floating around in there?

Speaker 2: Yeah, the really great thing about having a phase contrast microscope is if you see spores underneath it, usually they kind of Flores, they're really quite bright. They are pretty easy to pick out from all of the other sorts of bee junk. They're kind of, they look like little rice grains or tiny sausages, I guess. They're kind of full of shapes. Yeah. Oval, cylindrical or something. They're like a, yeah, a little rounded rectangle, I guess. I think rice grain is a pretty good description for spores.

Speaker 1: All right, we'll have some pictures on the show notes so people can actually look at the shape. But I've done this myself a few times and you can't, it's just like you described. They like it, they do stick out. There's lots of stuff floating, but there's nothing that quite looks like it. Yeah.

Speaker 2: I mean, unless they're standing on end, but yeah.

Speaker 3: We're typically counting so we can again sort of determine a concentration off the scale it to a per B level. Anomaly threshold which is still used because there's not a better threshold that's been developed is we're looking sort of for concentrations that are above 1 million spores per B.

We'd say 1 million spores per B or more would be a threshold for concern and if you were detecting that level in the fall or outside in the late summer, preceding the fall, that would be an indication based on experience, particularly with nozema apis, many years of nozema apis but also by extension to nozema serenipis, those colonies before going into the winter should be treated if possible.

Speaker 1: Okay, all right and so that's a real good time of year to do it is late in the summer and that can give you a sense. I suppose even if you don't have a treatment option, if you went through the winter and then noticed you had some winter loss it might help you understand what the problem was. It might give you some insight into impending, oh I've got some problems with nozema, I might have some winter problems.

Speaker 2: Or maybe that might be an indication for you to treat in the springtime if you lost colonies over the fall and knew that you had nozema in the fall.

Speaker 1: Right, okay, okay. All right, well I guess with treatment a lot of beekeepers I know were a little bit concerned. They had access to this antibiotic and they don't have access to it right now and I know a lot of this work happened like when people identified this drug in the first place, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada had a part to play in it and there's a long tradition of working with nosema with the agency. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the recent research that's going on? Some of the things for those of us who are concerned about nozema and a post-fumigillan world, what are some of the kinds of things that excite you or some of the work that you are doing at Beaver Lodge itself?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so I guess the really cool thing for me when we found out that nosema serrani survives for a really long time and things like honey and sugar syrup were that it kind of, I don't know, turned the literature on and like that was the first real-time that we had known that nozema serrani could survive for a long time at cold temperatures. Not having fumagillin now probably means that we need to do more work into looking at alternative therapies for nosema apis and nosema serrani.

Speaker 3: Yeah, and having said that and again, I don't think you're quite familiar with this too. Going back to the works, you know, literally since the 1950s with nozema apis, nozemas are kind of a tough nut to crack. There have been many people besides ourselves that have worked on alternative treatments to nozema over the years and have largely proved unsuccessful and, you know, like fumigillan was discovered back in about 1949 and since the 1950s, certainly North America and other parts of the world have been using it as an effective nozema control and nobody's really come up with a better treatment since. So many people including us have trialed other compounds. I think in summary, most of them we trialed were not really effective at all. They include some partial formulations in the marketplace.

We certainly do come across certain compounds, natural-based compounds. FIMO is one of which I'll mention because both our work and other people's research in Europe have shown that some treatments of FIMO are effective at suppressing nozema, but not nearly to the extent fumigillan does. So they might be 50% as effective as something like FIMO.

FIMO is a naturally derived compound. It's used for other B types of treatments. It's also used in sugar syrup to prevent mold growth. So we do, the beekeeping industry has a sort of longer traditional FIMO, not a compound that is extremely dangerous to people to apply, but it's not a registered treatment against FIMO. But it does appear as a natural compound to have some activity.

But again, I would just stress a lot less than FIMO-gillan, which to this day in every single trial we've run and we've run probably hundreds, if not thousands, of cage trials, is always very effective at knocking down nozema, including nozema serene. You know, some of the more recent work is Johann van den Heever, who's a synthetic and analytical chemist. I was a PhD student of mine who had just recently graduated. As a chemist, he took a little bit of a different angle on looking at nozema and particularly FIMO-gillan. And it was interesting the way his project actually went. So part of the project was actually using some of the compounds we thought had some promise against suppressing nozema serene, which confirmed some of our conclusions about FIMO and a couple of other compounds we had sort of ferreted over the years that might have some activity. Again, we really confirmed that FIMO-gillan was by far and away the best compound suppressing nozema serene. But the interesting angle that Johann took, because he was interested in the chemistry, the activity, and the binding of FIMO-Gillan, that's a relatively old drug in beekeeping, used by the beekeeping industry. It's also had some interest in more recent years as an anti-cancer drug because we actually know now better how it works and prevents angiogenesis or the formation of blood vessels, so sometimes around tumors, a drug like FIMO-Gillan can be beneficial. And we know now where it binds in animals, including bees, which is on a certain enzyme. So we kind of understand how it affects animals a little better.

FIMO-gillan is effective. It also has side effects on bees. It also leads to higher mortality. I remember talking to the older researchers and one of their theories was that actually what FIMO-gillan actually did was it tended to kill some of the more highly infected bees.

And that's how you lower your colony numbers. I can't confirm that specifically, but although FIMO-gillan is quite active against nozema species, it is hard on bees, and it does kill a greater proportion of bees than running treatments where it's not present. What you'll have to look at was trying to formulate alternatives that were less toxic. He had some synthetic experimental compounds that showed activities, again, not as much as FIMO-gillan did. But he was sort of playing around with the structural elements of the molecule itself, hoping it would bind the same way but not have the same toxic effects on bees. And what he actually discovered, and I think one of the biggest take-homes of this Ph.D. research is we discovered the actual formulation of FIMO-gillan we use, which is a salt. It's made into salt-so-it-dissolved sugar-server water easily.

It's bound to a molecule called bicycle hexamine, or DCH. And it's really discovered that DCH is far more stable in things like honey, and itself, DCH actually leads to more toxicity of FIMO-Gillan as a treatment than anything else. So perhaps we will go in the future with this, and I know Johan is interested in perhaps developing a formulation of FIMO-Gillan that doesn't incorporate DCH to make it a salt, and it may be formulated differently, and that means lower its toxicity as well and make it perhaps a treatment into the future that's formulated slightly differently. So Johan really has shed some new light on an old drug, and I think that may give us a little hope for developing a new and improved FIMO-Gillan in the future. And currently, our problem with FIMO-Gillan is from a manufacturing point of view where it's being sourced and it's manufacturing, it's more of a marketing problem than a supply chain problem, and it's of beekeepers in Canada that may be rectified before too long. It won't be rectified before this winter, unfortunately, but we're hopeful that moving forward FIMO-Gillan as a bee treatment will still be available years in the future.

Speaker 1: This would be through the industry actually taking on the production of the product, or what are some of the thoughts in Canada about how to deal with the shortage?

Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that remains to be determined. I'm not sure I know exactly. I know, for example, the Alberta beekeepers have looked into the supply chain part of it. Perhaps I think a more probable route is getting another drug manufacturer or distributor involved that could broker the product and guarantee a good supply of raw ingredients to manufacture the actual formulated product, which is what many of those pharmaceuticals did. So, especially having somebody step in, deal with the supply chain problems, and come up with version two of FIMO-Gillan. So, I think it probably takes somebody stepping into that gap and seeing a fairly significant market opportunity. A taking it on.

Speaker 1: Well, I like what you said about Johann's approach though. I mean, it seems oftentimes in apiculture we're looking, we go through existing products trying to find something that works, but the idea of actually customizing the product for really thinking about the disease and the toxicity issue and coming up with something that meets that gap seems like really exciting. There's a lot of promise in that.

Speaker 3: I guess the only other things we've been doing lately haven't quite come to press are we do have much more data now on how residual FIMO-Gillan is when we treat colonies, different doses.

So, I know that data was produced recently and we hope to get it out into the literature. Kind of the short version is FIMO-Gillan is a molecule, that is not particularly residual in honey. It breaks down quickly and to confirm older studies, we know it breaks down very, very quickly in sunlight, but the residual part is the DCH.

So, we actually have some infield, real-world data on treating colonies with different doses of FIMO-gillan looking at the efficacy against Muzima and also pairing that with how residual the product is in beehives over pretty over the fall and winter.

Speaker 1: Oh, exciting. I'm looking forward to seeing that published. That's great. Okay. Well, let's take a break. I've got these questions and I actually, you know, have known you both for a long time. I don't know what your answer is going to be. So, let's take a break and maybe you can surprise me. Okay. All right.

We're back. So, I'm really curious if you guys have a favorite book on Honeybees. Is there a book or a book that you really want our listeners to know about? They really need to pick this book up.

Speaker 2: Yes. My favorite book as of late is the Anatomy and Dissection of the Honeybee by Dade. Huh. Yes. It's way more accessible to younger people or beekeepers, I guess than it is to scientists to understand what's going on the Snodgrass book is. But that's my favorite book for work. But reading-wise, I like the Honeybee Democracy by Ceeley and my dad really liked Be Time by Mark Winston.

Speaker 1: Oh, great. Well, there's, wow, you're so sneaky. Three books just like, and really, I read it on it. That was awesome. We haven't had a Bee Anatomy book recommended, I know the Snodgrass book, I don't know the date book, but you say it's accessible. It's something that, you know, somebody who's curious about Bee Anatomy could pick up and kind of get the, get a handle on.

Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really great. It even has kind of pull-out maps of the muscles of bees or the digestive tract of bees, and how to dissect queens, drones, and workers. It's pretty good.

Speaker 1: Fantastic recommendation. All right, Steve, how about you? Is there, you have a, I know your bookshelf is quite big. You've got lots of stuff on it, but is there anything that you would pull out and recommend?

Speaker 3: Yeah, I was reflecting that I haven't gone through and properly read a real bee book in a little while, but you know, probably one that stands out is one maybe other people have mentioned. I really like Tom Ceeley's book, The Wisdom of the High. Which is, I think, a bit of a classic now in the bee literature and synthesizes a lot of Tom's work on foraging biology, et cetera. But I'm still quite partial to the old Vaughn Fresh books. So, you know, the dance, I'm sticking in two here, but you know, I just looking at the older literature, how pertinent it is and discovering things with the basic biology site, foraging of bees. I always find them a really refreshing read.

So they're always pretty cool. So I guess I kind of referenced a couple of old classics, but I think they should be required reading for anybody that's really interested in bees.

Speaker 1: You know, I went looking when I started the job in Oregon, I wanted to stock my bookshelf and I went to find the Vaughn Fresh book and I was surprised it's not in print right now. I had to get a previous edition, which I was really, you know, all this interest in bees. I thought, wow, this is going to be a book that people are going to pick up again. But I'm glad you made the recommendation because it is just the process of discovery.

And in Tom's book as well, there's a kind of ongoing sustained question in both those books that it's kind of rare these days. I like those. These are great recommendations. Okay, so the next question I have for you guys is, do you have a go-to tool for the kind of work that you do? If you were on a desert island and you had to do bee biology, what would you bring with you?

Speaker 2: Well, if I was stuck on a desert island, I think my tools change.

Speaker 1: Okay, all right. Forget this. What's the Courtney McKinnis tool like people know you for?

Speaker 2: I really can't survive without membranes to filter out spores. A good pair of four steps and micros scissors go a long way for harvesting those spores.

Speaker 1: Okay, tell us about all three of those things. So what's the membrane? What are you talking about?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so a membrane is basically a tiny little filter with little pores in it that will allow the spores to pass through the filter, but not of the other bee junk. The micros scissors and four steps are for basically eviscerating the bees so I can pull out their digestive tract and then use a tiny pair of micros scissors to separate the midgut from the crop and the hindgut.

Speaker 1: Oh, so you have like a tiny little butcher shop on the lab bench. Yeah, that's great. Okay, how about you, Steve? What's your favorite tool? Yeah, Steve, I don't know.

Speaker 3: I had a hard time answering this at Donnie because I just thought of a lot of things. So I don't know. I thought one item we picked up while you were here, which you since relived as our philodisiac loader. So for the size of our beekeeping operation, which is around 300 dish colonies, it can be a worksaver, especially if you're working alone. That's maybe kind of a beekeeper-ish answer. But there are lots of neat tools we have in the lab. Michael Pearson, who works for the technician, has used a lot of pieces of software called Honey Bee Complete, which is an auto-recognition program for counting honey bees brewed within colonies after you take pictures. So that's kind of a neat tool we've used in recent years. But there are lots of neat tools we have in the lab and it's hard to pick, but I've always been interested in sort of techy things. So what about the robot?

The robot? Well, that's not what you're thinking. It's not a technician that can work 24 hours a day. Extracting DNA from samples that we thought would be a huge time saver, but it doesn't seem to be the extracted method of preference for everybody in the lab. So sometimes things you think might be super great tools aren't used quite as much as you might think. So anyways, still have used it, but not as much as I thought.

Speaker 1: I guess, you know, just off that, the one thing that is really remarkable about the Beaver Lodge Research Farm is that you guys are undergoing an expansion and you've got co-located with you the National Bee Diagnostic Center. Tell us a little bit about all these new tools that are coming online at the research farm.

Speaker 3: Yeah, it's very much been a year of transition and change. So for any listeners that know a little bit about us, six years ago, through a partnership between the agency I work for, the Federal Department of Agriculture called Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, and our local post-secondary institution, which is Grand Prairie Regional College. Through this partnership, we built a lab, which is a college-owned and operated lab and it was designed as a diagnostic lab. So its focus was on molecular detections of honeybee diseases and parasites or doing other related technical work, particularly those things that are more molecular-based. So the lab was functioning for about five years and then we were successful. The college was successful in applying for federal money to expand the lab.

The expanded lab, the expansion on the lab is about three times larger than the original lab. So we have actually quite a substantially large building now and it was designed to be big enough for all of us to be in one home together. So in the very near future, the building is largely complete now. Our federal lab will move into this building, which is actually operated by the college and we'll move in with our college counterparts.

And the benefit to us besides having a new building, you would appreciate that at Adoni because my current lab is a little long on the tooth but still a nice blue place. It has a very custom-designed molecular suite. So anybody that might be interested in molecular biology may know we have to extract DNA or RNA, we have to amplify and then visualize it. So the new facility has separate rooms for doing this. So it's very much set up as a diagnostic lab but it's a very, you're a scientist doing that kind of work, a very sort of enviable sort of approach. So we're going to be very well appointed building-wise and the beneficial thing is both the college staff and we can strategically buy instruments and work with each other to better complement the lab resources we have. So the new building has a very nice molecular diagnostics suite. We also have a separate lab of our own on the AEST cycle.

We do anything we want to be related and the building is big enough that we have a separate space now for doing things like cell culture and a bigger microbiology room. So we have got a pretty good thing going there, we feel. And you know, over time sort of our staff has grown as well. So Dr. Martha Guarnah has come on in the last couple of years as a second scientist here in our federal B program.

We have a new technician that's been hired, Amanda. Gregorius is working with Marta and on the college side, their program will grow a little bit as well. So I think what we're kind of working into is an integrated kind of the research unit and we haven't moved in yet. So we still have to do that and that process that always takes a little bit of time. So I'm hoping sort of towards spring and summer next year we'll be fully moved in and operated and integrated and be able to better use the resources that are very near at hand now.

Speaker 1: It's great news for all North American beekeepers just having the National Canadian Bee Lab really be retooled like this. That's awesome. Okay, so last question. Oh yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 3: Listeners that maybe don't know and maybe I didn't explain this well previously but the National Bee Diagnostic Center which is separate from my federal research program is also set up to be a fee-for-service lab. So if you're a beekeeper, if you're a multinational company, if you're a researcher and you want to have an analysis done that the NVBC National Bee Diagnostic Center can do, it'll operate as a fee-for-service facility for doing those things. So, there you go. Somebody's going to count your scores. Somebody's going to really mandate the NVBC was designed for and above and beyond that they also collaborate with our federal program directly to work on research projects and one notable one that has just finished up is you know we work together to do a four-year national survey across Canada of honeybee pests and diseases. So the NVBC was the agent that actually conducted that survey and ran all those analyses. That was a very big project to get underneath their belt in their first several years of the group.

Speaker 1: Okay, well that's great and we will have the links for listeners on the show notes. So if you're interested in getting some of those services this will be easy for you to do. Okay, the last question I have, I guess the question is do you have a favorite pollinator? But obviously, you guys have worked so long with honeybees. The obvious question is is your favorite pollinator species a honeybee and if it's not, who is? And if it is honeybees, why are you so, why do you love honeybees so much?

Speaker 2: Me first. Okay, okay, so the honeybee is my favorite pollinator species. I don't know just like they're so the way that they're socially interactive, really fascinating to me. My favorite bee to look at though is not the honeybee. Like Egopostemon splendens. Okay. Which I think has been mentioned on the podcast before but you can find it in southern Ontario.

Speaker 1: Okay, do they fly, do you have Egopostemon species and way up there in northern Alberta?

Speaker 2: Not that I know of.

Speaker 3: You know, it's part of my favorite bee so she likes it. But I don't know, I have to check that one out. Yeah, so yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm a little more partial to honeybees mainly because it's what I do for my job and I do feel a great deal of affinity to commercial beekeepers in Canada and North America and all over. Mainly because we work on problems that affect the beekeeping industry. And over the years I've always known so but sort of have become even more familiar with how important these are particularly for agricultural production and the livelihood of so many people. So yeah, certainly near and dear to my heart and there's such a legacy going back to some of the yearly researchers I mentioned, Juan Frisch and others in Europe, and such a legacy of that real discovery with bees, that early biology that's been done and as Courtney has mentioned just that social biology aspect of honeybees is always such a big pull. So yeah, I think our best-managed pollinators in the world are important to agriculture and the reason that I can have a job as a scientist. So I'm certainly very partial to them.

Speaker 1: Well as a Canadian and also a honeybee lover it is worth mentioning that next year in Montreal the global honeybee conference, Apamandia is going to be held. What are the dates against Steve?

Speaker 3: The dates are in September 2019. The meeting in Juvenile Adoni is in Montreal. The meeting starts on the 10th of September and continues right through I guess we're going out four days here so we'll be going to, sorry we started on the 9th, you know I've got to get the dates here you really caught me off guard a little bit.

Sunday the 8th is the first day and we go right through until Thursday the 12th and then the following day the 13th of September is the technical tour day. So sorry that was a convoluted explanation. Thank you for the question that was a great plug. So for those beekeepers listening all over the world, I know this podcast is hugely successful. Amanda is the world's largest gathering of beekeepers and bee scientists. People interested in apaculture and for those of us living in North America, particularly in Canada and the US that's much more on our doorstep. Amanda is a very worldwide meeting. Recent meetings have been in Korea, Ukraine, etc. But this is right here in Canada probably cheaper for you to go to and it's going to be a great meeting with the scientific program director so I'm trying to get a great scientific program together and if you're a bee scientist listening I encourage you to come and submit an abstract and we'll have a great agenda.

The main building blocks of the actual congress are online right now on the Apamandia 2019 website so you can see sort of the structure of the program and I think they're a very very large number of topical issues that beekeepers and researchers would be interested in.

Speaker 2: You know anything related to Montreal which is a great great city to visit no matter what.

Speaker 1: Oh the bagels. Sorry New York your bagels are not that good. Montreal bagels are the best. Okay great well I'll hopefully see you before Montreal but thank you for filling us all in on Nazima today. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 3: Okay thank you now. Thanks so much, Adonis.

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 are 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 could 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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