110 – International Pollinator Conference – Highlights

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. Doctor Adoni Melitopol, is an assistant professor in pollinator health in the Department of Horticulture. Back in July, pollination headed down the I5 to Davis, CA for the 2019 International Pollinator Conference. This was an amazing conference you could hear talks from people from Japan, Australia, across the United States, and Europe all focusing on these questions of pollinium biology. Health and policy in this episode, you're going to hear from one of the organizers, Doctor Neil Williams, who's at UC Davis. He's a pollination ecologist. Then we go out on the conference floor, we talk to people on their posters or after their talks, give you a little snapshot of the International Pollinator Conference here in pollination this week. OK, I'm here with Doctor Neil Williams at the International Pollinator Conference in Davis, CA. Doctor Williams told us a little bit.

Speaker 2

About this conference. OK, well, thanks and thanks for coming to the conference. This is. 4th International upon Air Conference that's been three times at Penn State and we're lucky that they allowed us to move it to the West Coast, and get a different representation. It was a great conference, a representation. And from almost all continents and several different countries and an amazing amount of research on pollinator health, biology, and policy.

Speaker 1

We've seen some great talks where on the last day I think we're just the sessions just about to end with this today we had urban ecology and bees. A lot of really new research, but also as you mentioned, a real focus on trying to think about policy directions going forward.

Speaker 2

Yeah, that's right. So, we've, we've each year always had slightly different focus on particular topics. So, as you mentioned, we've had urban bees. This time we also had a whole session on climate change and resilience to climate change, things facing bees. But the policy realm has spun through the conference throughout its history. And we've tackled that in different ways this year and particularly worked with different groups who are at the Conference contributing to actually written document. We call them viewpoints documents that summarize our existing knowledge on important pollinator health topics, hopefully be able to recommend some information to help policy decision making.

Speaker 1

Well, fantastic and congratulations on a really successful conference.

Speaker 2

Thanks. Yeah. And because we're sort of focused on posters here, I want to say that that this conference is a bit unique in having only one session of talks at a time. But we have had a tremendous number of people applying and that means the poster session is particularly important. So, we've given a lot of time to those posters. We have people from all parts of their career. And 114 posters. So, record and pollinator research. So, it's been really, really exciting, fantastic stuff to see, so.

Speaker 1

You know, I have to say just in in passing. The one thing I really loved about the poster sessions is because there was a really heavy emphasis on the poster sessions, the quality conversations at the posters as we're about to hear in this episode are and the quality of them. Posters are very, very high.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I completely agree. We tried to make sure there was plenty of time for the posters in the session, and I agree that the quality of the posters sort of rivals that of the of the oral presentations at the conference and that's what we like. That gives more time for discussion and sharing of ideas.

Speaker 1

So great. Well, thank you so much, and congratulations.

Speaker 2

Thank you so much.

Speaker 1

Alright, I'm here with Troy Anderson at the University of Nebraska. Welcome to pollination.

Speaker 3

Hey, hello. Glad to be here.

Speaker 1

Today. Alright. So, we're here at the International Pollinator Conference and there was you had a great paper where you were talking about a new class of compounds that might be useful in managing viral might tell us a little. Bit about them.

Speaker 3

Yeah. So, we've been working on new modes of action for Varroa mite management and we're working with steel beam chemistries. And with these still being chemistries, they have a new mode of action where they target voltage gated chloride channels and so what we have done and shown appreciable toxicity and selectivity in the laboratory for viral might versus honeybee. And then we basically moved these still beans out to field testing what we're showing promising results. The kerosene resistant parole mite populations.

Speaker 1

OK, so still being this is not this is not a chemistry I'm familiar with and the other thing. That I. Recall from your talk, there's a large group of people who are sort of working together, including the honeybee health coalition to try and come up with new products. Why is it important too? Be investigating new active ingredients for managing bromides.

Speaker 3

So right now. Amortize is basically the best-of-care side. We have no confirmed resistance to this, but with consistent selection pressure, it will develop over time. So, we really don't have an alternative for that compound. And so, it's good to find a new mode of action that we can use along with other resistance management practices to be able to. Keep viral mites below a certain threshold so that we can promote healthier colonies. Thank you so much, Troy. Thank you.

Speaker 1

Alright, I'm here with Caitlin Deutsch from the Department of Entomology at Cornell University. Welcome to pollination.

Speaker 4

Hi so happy to.

Speaker 1

Be here. Alright, I'm looking at a poster that has flies on it and also looking at these flies across a bunch of different types of lands used in upstate New York. Tell us a little bit about what?

Speaker 4

Yeah. So, we saw a positive effect of agriculture on our hoverfly pollinators, the bees that we studied did not respond to any of the landscape variables. But in AG, we found higher, abundance and species richness of the hoverflies. And when we broke this up by category, we found really high. Levels of high abundance of toxin Maris hoverflies in suburban habitats and our non-toxic Maris. We found a high abundance in agriculture.

Speaker 1

Landscapes. OK, so there and one group of these hoverflies seem to really prefer certain landscapes. Do you have any but not others? And you also have this effect where these hoverflies seem to respond, sort of, you know, against intuition too. Decreased by percent agricultural land. What do you think is going on? What are?

Speaker 4

Your ideas? Yeah. So, I think in agricultural environments, a lot of the species that we were identifying and collecting our aphid eating as larvae, so the larvae go around, they're not provisioned any resources by them. Results. So, they're kind of left to fend for themselves. And so, a lot of them are predatory, eat aphids, other soft bodied insects, which there probably are a lot of in these agricultural fields as well as other resources that different species utilize as larvae, so they are also saphenous eat decomposing plant material, which you can imagine. Are pretty common on agricultural lands, and it's a surrounding area. And yeah, I think I think they are just utilizing different resources. They're not central place foragers like bees are, so they can just move through kind of landscapes that may not be hostile, may not be hospitable. Rather in that moment. So yeah, they, they their Natural History is totally different. And I'm hoping that that could help. Maybe provide some kind of pollination insurance in the face of ongoing bee declines.

Speaker 1

Fantastic work. We look forward to catching up with you in the future as you continue this research.

Speaker 4

Awesome. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1

Right, I am here now with James Weaver, who's at the University of Florida. He's in Rachel Mallinger's lab, who we can remember from a previous episode. Welcome to pollination. Hey. Alright, I'm. I'm sitting by this really beautiful poster you've got this. It looks like an experiment between honeybees and native bees, and it is a competition. A really hot topic. Tell us a little bit about your experimental design and or wait to start with why. Why study this question in the first place?

Speaker 5

Well, I actually worked with the USGS as a tech on a project up in North Dakota, working on a honeybee, kind of a health assessment based on the landscape. You know, it's pretty. It's a pretty heavy aggro ecosystem. There and you know, as I'm doing kind of a similar study that I did in this project, I notice when I'm out in these really, really great robust ecosystems in these grasslands during the summer, I notice a lot of times I would, I would just primarily see honey bees and it made me wonder, you know, are these high density deployment deployment of honeybee. Melanies having something to do with me? The changing wild bee communities, some of these. So, this is a. This is a really good idea for me to come out here and kind of determine whether I can see a response by deploying honeybees out and maybe natural landscapes that that wouldn't typically have honeybees too.

Speaker 1

Begin with. Alright, so tell us how you address it. This question experimentally.

Speaker 5

Well, so what I did is I had to find sites that don't have honeybees. On the. And they have to be sufficiently far enough away from residential areas because they might be backyard beekeepers. I don't want a lot of noise, maybe from seeing honeybees in the landscape that might not be mine. So, I had to find sites that are somewhat natural. These are natural ecosystems in Florida. They're slash pine or long leaf pine kind of scrub. Ecosystems. Some of them are. It's quite a bit of light penetration to the ground, quite a bit of floral, you know, floral diversity is pretty high at these sites, so. What I did was is I went and studied about 12 plots in a 1.25-kilometer radius, and I do walk transects and count flowers and I count bees and I determine what plant insect interactions are occurring in those sites and I do that for a few days and then I take honeybee colonies in this case for honeybee colonies. And I deploy them on the sites and then I give it about 48 hours for the honeybees to acclimate to their landscape. And then I go out and continue those observations. And I do that for six days. And then I remove the honeybees and then I observe for another three days.

Speaker 1

All right. So, I imagine what you would expect is when the honeybees are moved in the occurrence of honeybees on these flowers goes up. And I guess the question is whether the native bees go down in response. What did you see?

Speaker 5

Well across my sites I have one site. That has a history of a kind of apiary present commercial apiary presence at a state forest. Overall, across both sites there wasn't a significant reduction in the amount of there was there was there were fewer mean was fewer but there wasn't a significant reduction in the amount of foraging wild bees. When I deployed the honeybees. However, when you compare what the effect is. That the natural site, the effect that the natural site was much greater. So, there was a much greater reduction in the foraging wild bee community than at the site that has a history of honeybee colonies.

Speaker 1

Another thing that you noticed is you went out and created. You really kind of tracked which flowers, you know, maybe to explain this phenomenon, which flowers and honey bees were going to and which honey bees, you know the, you know, the broad spectrum of native species were going to, what did you find in places where there were honey bees and where there weren't honey bees?

Speaker 5

Across both sites, you can pretty much determine I mean at any given time. When I go out in the field, I pretty much know what species I will find those honeybees on in the spring. It's in Florida, at least it's wild blueberry. It's vaccinium. There's a lot of wild blue. There are about four or five different wild blueberry species. Across both of my sites, the honeybees love that stuff. So those wild blueberry plants exist in high enough abundance where it's energetically efficient for those bees to go and focus on those high abundance patches in the fall, you're going to see more pity opsis you're going to see more liatris. Of course, solidago. And these are, of course, if the plants exist in high enough density or abundance. I'm sorry if the abundance is sufficiently high enough, then you'll see the bees if you just see a small patch of maybe Leatrice. The honeybees are likely not going to be there, they're. Not going to. Focus on those.

Speaker 1

All right, so the bees are partitioning themselves under different flowers, and there is a kind of in way which the honeybees. Really when they get a big patch, they're likely to be there. Thanks so much. We're looking forward to catching up and getting an update on your research as you go along.

Speaker 5

Great. I love to talk. To you.

Speaker 1

All right, I'm here with Mary Kate Williams. Who's that Ph.D. student at Utah State Univer? city. Welcome to pollination.

Speaker 6

Hi, what's going on?

Speaker 1

Well, I got you have this great poster here. I'm seeing these trap nests, these blocks that a lot of gardeners are used to with various hole sizes, and I see them deployed across. Uh, sites? I guess that they were sampled in the 1980s. Tell me a little bit about what that tells me about the original study.

Speaker 6

So, the original. The study was done by Frank Parker and then again by Vince Tepedino and some other peking. And so, what they were looking at were native solitary bee populations within Logan Canyon and other sites around Logan Canyon to see what is naturally occurring in North America. As far as solitary bee pollinators. So, what I'm doing is that. I'm taking 12 of the sites and I'm redoing this project so at these 12 sites I have 10 block traps. Each again with those varying cool sizes from 10/8, six, and four millimeters, because depending on the species, they'll, you know, colonize or nest in these different hole sizes. So, what I'm hoping to do is look at the species diversity and compare it to those historical samples. But what I'm also adding is the. We are potentially doing a metagenomic survey to look at pathogens to see what pathogens viruses are occurring in natural native populations in the northeastern.

Speaker 1

And I'm looking at them here on your poster. You've got pictures of what does not look like a healthy larva. There's one there. It looks like a black curled-up thing. There's our crimson-red one. So, these are larvae that nested in these holes just like people at home. They didn't make it because they had a disease. And you're what you've described is you're going to go through; you're going to sequence the DNA from these. And figure out we'll tell. Just restate what? When you got all this DNA out of all these different disease larvae. What are you going to do? What? What's that going to? Tell you so basic.

Speaker 6

Basically what? We found that, like you said, some of these blackened larvae. And what I'm going to do is essentially what you said. I'm going to extract their DNA. I'm probably going to keep half of the cadaver just in case it might be a species. We don't know what it is yet, so I can maybe culture these in the future. So, we're going to sequence their DNA and put them through a metagenomics survey and hopefully through that. The general Metagenomic survey we're going to identify is this ask aspara what other fungal species are there, trypanosomes or viruses that we really don't know about that occur in these native natural populations. Because we really don't know about these diseases that are occurring in our natural solitary populations because we're looking at honeybees and everything. But what about our native natural pollinators? What do they have, naturally? And then maybe seeing what these potential commercialized solitary pollinators have as well?

Speaker 1

Oh, I guess that is the risk that we're moving a lot of cocoons around the United States that some of these diseases might spread to our native cavity-nesting bees.

Speaker 6

It could happen. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And. And that's just one of the things that I'm interested in is that if these commercials, if these become commercialized, are we going to have the same happenings with honeybees? But we don't know about that yet because we're still looking at these commercialized things of Osmia like, what do they potentially have? Do they also have chalk brew, what's going on there? And like honeybees, are we hopefully not going to spread these around, but that's the whole thing. I want to find out what's there naturally, and if there's the potential to compare it to commercialized, you know, are there any similarities or differences within those? Yeah. So, I'm just really excited to see what comes out of this project and hopefully, we'll be identifying these soon to see what's there. Compared to Parker and Peppino's original data. And again, tacking on the pathogen stuff.

Speaker 1

Looking forward to catching up with you later on. Thanks so much for taking the time.

Speaker 6

Thank you very much.

Speaker 1

OK, great. Well, I am here with Scott Mitchell, who's from the De Bano lab based out in Hermiston at the Hermiston Research Station. Welcome to pollination.

Speaker 7

Hi. So, as Anthony said, I'm out of the Devanna lab in Hermiston and we work in the Starkey Experimental Forest and Range, which is run by the US Forest Service. And it is near La Grande OR so I'm interested in my study. Looking at shrubs in a restored repairing area and the reason we're interested in looking at that is that shrubs are commonly planted in restoration projects, in particular in the Pacific Northwest and all along the West CoaSomesome monitor restoration efforts because they provide shade to streams and can help cool streams to benefit. So, we're interested in how those same shrubs can benefit bees and what bees mix. So, this study was conducted in 2018 and for this study, we did hand netting on shrubs in the riparian area. Our hand netting in 2018 was kind of haphazard. We did some opportunistic collections sometimes time-targeted collections, and then we had some other collections that were just from. Our other.

Speaker 1

Studies that we're doing so by netting the bees on the plant. You could then sort of rate there, you know, relative importance, the diversity of the bees, the abundance of the bees going to those shrubs. Yeah. So, by collecting the bees on the shrubs, we only collect bees that are foraging on the shrubs. So are clearly in contact with the reproductive parts of the plant.

Speaker 7

And what that tells us is that those bees are foraging on those shrubs and those shrubs are likely an important food source, or at least one food source for that particular bee that we collect. Tell us about some of the shrubs that are planted and how they performed in your study. So, we collected bees from a bunch of different shrubs, not just the ones that were planted in this restoration area. I think the main shrubs that were planted were willows. They're really commonly planted in restoration areas, but there were some other shrubs that I think were planted and others that were opportunistically just recruited onto the site. Naturally, some of the other shrubs that we looked at were wax currant or ribose. Cerium melanine, bark, blue elderberry red osier, Dogwood white spirea to some extent, wild rose, and snowberry.

Speaker 1

And what did what did you?

Speaker 7

Notice, that we collected a total of 283 Bs from April 2018 through July 2018, and that kind of covers the span of the bloom period for those shrubs. So, in the early season, we collected these mostly off of willows and off of wax current. Later on, in the year. Around June, we collected bees off of Redos or Dogwood snowberry wild roses.

Speaker 1

Mallow 9 bark and then in July we collected bees off of blue elderberry. Again, Wild Rose and off of whites by Rio. Did any of these shrubs? Well, the one thing I did notice right away was you've got a nice little pollinator plant network and wax current. Attracted a very very specific bee. It's very kind of particularly tell us about us about that relationship.

Speaker 7

Yeah. So wax current is actually an interesting story all by itself too, because it was the plant that we collected the highest diversity of bison. So, we collected 16 different bee species on wax current. Of those, and of all the bees we collected, the one that we collected the highest number of individuals of was a bee calAnthophorahora Pacifica or the Pacific Digger bee, and this is a fairly large, bodied bee. It's about the size of a mid-size bumblebee and every single individual of that bee species that we collected for this study was off of wax current. Now when we look at floral records and associations from other studies that we've done in the same area. And we look at all of the anthophora pacificas that we've collected. And the whole time that Sandy has been sampling this site, about 97% of them have been collected on wax current. Oh my God. That's amazing. Yes, it's pretty interesting. And we think it might be some kind of. Strong preference for wax current, if not some kind of specialist interaction. Now of course when you look to discover life. And though Pacifica has a whole bunch of different flowers listed under its plant associations. Wax current is on there, but there's no indication on there, at least as far as I could tell, that it was a.

Speaker 1

A big component of that bee's diet, something we're hoping to look into more in the future. So wax current really had a diverse set of bees. Were there any other plants that relative to their, you know, amount of bloom they put out, they really were punching above their weight?

Speaker 7

So that's actually interesting that you bring that up because in the early season, we looked at the importance of shrubs in the blooming plant community. So, this was work that we did in April, and we surveyed 11 different sites. And we counted a total of 22,045 balloons on those sites. These were just exhaustive searches of the sites. We probably missed some flowers, but it was. Probably got most of the ones that were. Out of three of those flowers in the 11 sites, about 40% of the total number of blooms that we collected were this small white annual called spring draba. And while that made up made up 40% of the total blooms we collected, we didn't catch any bees or C any bees on that plant. Now, Willow, on the other hand, is a shrub-like I was talking about earlier. Made-up about 7% of the blooms that we counted, but it made up about 58% of the bees that we collected or observed during that survey, which is pretty astounding.

Speaker 1

Well, that is incredible. It is supposed to give a lot of information back to people who are looking to do restoration.

Speaker 7

Forested lands and other lands in Eastern Oregon? Yeah, it definitely is. So, we're definitely interested in continuing this work, and we're hoping to. Get an extension document put together so people can use this information in making repair and restoration decisions.

Speaker 1

Fantastic. We're looking forward to it and we have got to do our full show with you at.

Speaker 7

Some point, Scott, thanks. Sounds good.

Speaker 1

I'm excited to be here with Crystal Waters. You're in Hollis Waters's lab. We had Hollis on a previous episode. Welcome to pollination.

Speaker 8

Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

Speaker 1

Now, this is a fascinating poster. I see you got a picture right there of Bumblebee Queens being born at the end of the season and you're looking at their nutrition afterward. Tell us a little bit about what made you interested in them.

Speaker 8

All right. Well, bumblebee Queens are an important part of the bumblebee life cycle because near the end of a colony season, they the colony produces new Queens and males. And those Queens go out and mate, and they effectively are going to be the future of the colony who hopefully survive over the winter. To start brand new colonies in the spring, they're this critical life stage that we know is very important for the persistence of a bumblebee. Pieces and they have some energetic needs, some nutritional requirements to be able to survive over wintering. So, our labs have been doing a good but good bit of work manipulating their diets to see how malleable it is and how much they can rebound from maybe a nutritional deficit and recover from that. And still, be able to survive and make babies.

Speaker 1

Because we're now right now, late summer, we're starting to see or if we've had for, you know, a couple of weeks now or month Queens being produced. So, they go out into the landscape. And I guess if what the experiment is simulating is, what if they get out there and it's raining for three days or what was blooming, what grew the colony, I guess suddenly disappeared. What would be the implication for those bumblebees? Tell us a little bit about your design, how you were able to test this?

Speaker 8

All right. So, we know fundamentally that bumblebee Queens. Require a good bit of food, especially in the 1st 12 days, but mostly in the first three to four days of adulthood. To be able to sort of build up their fat body and put on some weight so that they can fly around and get more food. And so that they can survive over winter. So, we wanted to manipulate that. Their food in the lab and. To see if they have a period early on where there is no food, either the landscape, there's no more flowers out or their colony is struggling, and the workers aren't bringing in food. What happens to those Queens? And if they are able to recover from a nutritional deficit and still be able to make it too?

Speaker 1

How did you?

Speaker 8

We took the bees out of their colonies once they were brand newly emerged as adults and we put them in little cups and gave them different diet treatments. So, if they were a control B, we gave them all the pollen and nectar they could desire. For some of them, we restricted their sugar. Availability. So, we gave them just water plus as much pollen as they wanted and some of them restricted their pollen. So, we gave them all the sugar water they wanted, but no pollen.

Speaker 1

What else was the effect of either pollen or nectar restriction and did time matter?

Speaker 8

Time does matter, so in general, if a bee has access to pollen but no nectar, that is going to be really bad for the bee because it seems they need the sugars in the short term to be able to function. So, we had most of our bees starved of nectar for six or more days. Most of them died. They were not even able to make it a full 12 days without dying because they needed that fuel personally for their muscles, for their metabolism. Whereas if we pollen starved them, they were actually able to survive a full 12 days because they had those immediate sugars available. But some of the other research that we've done has shown that pollen starvation actually has many longer-term repercussions where they're not going to be able to survive overwintering because they don't have that. Lovely fat layer. Store it up to be able to slowly burn through it. As they're hibernating.

Speaker 1

Fantastic. Well, we're going to catch up with you as you continue with it. This work. Thank you so much.

Speaker 8

Thank you.

Speaker

OK.

Speaker 1

Hey, I'm here with Brooke Sayer Chavez from the Department of Biology at Colorado State University. Welcome to pollination. Thank you. And you're an undergraduate. Well, you're not an undergraduate anymore. This is undergraduate research you were doing, looking at the difference in the quality of pollen in Colorado. Tell us why. Why does pollen quality matter?

Speaker 9

So, we know that whatever is in pollen ends up in the hive and especially the larvae are the ones that need that. So, if they're not getting enough nutrition, then that's pretty detrimental to the whole hive in general.

Speaker 1

And I'm looking at some of the things that you measured. So, it looks like you were in apiaries on 2, two different parts of the Rocky Mountains, right? And you looked at? Standard things like protein, lipids, and water the in the pollen. But you also looked at a bunch of compounds. I guess they're called phytochemicals. They're not, you know, micronutrients or gas you would.

Speaker 9

Call them, right? So, phytochemicals are like, I guess, comparable to vitamins for us. So, we chose four that we've identified through literature. And in our lab, our own studies are helpful for pathogen tolerance, just fighting off diseases. Insecticide resistance, cognition. So, the four that we chose were caffeine, Picometrix, camper, fall, and Gallic acid.

Speaker 1

Wait, did you say caffeine?

Speaker 9

Caffeine. Yes, in Colorado, we actually didn't find any caffeine, which is not unusual because caffeine is found in citrus plants, and we can't really grow those and our climate.

Speaker 1

I can imagine. OK, so tell us what you found when you sampled it in commercial beekeeping operations at different times of year when you put pollen. Traps on the colonies and you collected this. One, did you see any difference in these different locations or by?

Speaker 9

Season no. So, we were hoping that we wouldn't, and we actually didn't. So that's really good. That means that everything's consistent and no one so far needs to be supplemented with anything.

Speaker 1

Oh, but the one thing I did notice we were talking about before is that you did have this strange spike in the late season of, I don't know how to pronounce it. Is one of the phytochemicals tell. Me about that.

Speaker 9

Yeah. So, Kemper fall spikes in the late season, but we know that sunflowers contain a lot of that. So that's what we're attributing that too because we know sunflowers are late blooming flowers. So that makes sense to show up in the late season.

Speaker 1

Fantastic. Well, thanks for taking the time to tell us about your research.

Speaker 9

Of course. Thank you.

Speaker

So much.

Speaker 1

OK, I'm here with Jeremy Hamburger. He's at the University of. You know, Wisconsin, Madison, and the entomology department. Welcome to pollination. Thank you. Now you've got a really stunning poster. I have to say, this is probably the nicest poster I've ever seen, and it has to do. It's called saved by the pulse. What is that? That. What is what are? Are you referring to so?

Speaker 10

I'm referring to pulses of food. So basically. Agricultural landscapes as we know them now tend to offer these really big pulses of flowers during when crop flowers. So, for example, canola flowering apple flowering, cranberry flowering, and those big pulses of food have the potential to really affect bumblebee colonies and other bee colonies that are developing in the.

Speaker 1

OK, right. OK. So, and you'll have, you'll have this huge bloom. And then I imagine in a lot of these systems thinking in Oregon, when we have cherry bloom, you know, after that, everything kind of declined. So, if you're a social being like a bumblebee, you must do it. What? What's next? That becomes the issue. You have this pulse and then a decline.

Speaker 10

Exactly. Yeah. So, the whole the whole premise of this study is trying to figure out if can bees recover from these pulse periods or if can they use these pulse periods after starvation, either before or after to recover their colony growth and recover colony production of workers and production of sexual individuals. So, guns and males. So, we're trying to parse apart. Basically, if you feed these colonies the same amount of food over time, but you vary when that food is presented to them, do they, do they produce the same number of workers as they grow? The same trying to parse apart whether it's the total availability of food that matters more to them or whether that temporal presentation of the food matters as well.

Speaker 1

Fascinating. Well, how? How on earth are you able to test that? Seems like you can't. You can't just grow lots of cherries and then take them away. How did? What were you able to do?

Speaker 10

This experiment? Yep. So, we use microcolonies in the lab. So instead of using full queen, right, colonies, colonies that have Queens. Then we separate a subset of workers that establish these little, tiny colonies that are capable of producing drones. So, one of the workers will establish dominance and become sort of a pseudo queen, and then she will actually start to lay eggs. So, you can treat these as proxies of full colonies. And what we do then is we feed these reduced rations so like 50% of the food they would normally get for the number of workers that are in there. Or full rations. And then we vary. Whether they get. Those rations consistently over time in the same size. Or whether they go. Through periods of starvation and get a big pulse.

Speaker

Of food.

Speaker 10

So, this is a factorial design. We're able to basically manipulate these two things simultaneously.

Speaker 1

Right. So, tell us a little bit about what your findings were. What? Well, let's start. What did you expect to find? When you set out on this experiment, what did you think these? Treatments would look like?

Speaker 10

So, because we were working with bombs and patients, which is a pretty consistent and a species that's doing quite well in agricultural landscapes, we were expecting that they would probably do OK with these pulse pulses of food because they're present in agricultural areas where these pulses occur now right now. So, we were expecting them to either produce the same number of drones or potentially even more. And also grows at a similar rate to the constant high Fed colony.

Speaker 1

And what did you find?

Speaker 10

We found something similar to that, so we found that colonies that were fed consistently high amounts of food were the ones that grew the most, so they had the largest size at the end of the experiment, and they also grew the fastest during periods of the experiment. But in terms of the number of drones these colonies produced, they were actually the same as they got. High amounts of food, so if you get high amounts of food consistently or impulses, that doesn't matter if you produce the same amount of food.

Speaker 1

Well, that, that's really interesting. You would have. So, I guess what happens is when those colonies go into that pulse, they must decline a little bit because you measured the weight, you measured the weight of these colonies, but then when you put the give the resources back to them, they start to really catch up.

Speaker 10

Yeah, exactly. So, they're able to recover from those death periods. So, they deplete whatever nectar they have, and store whatever pollen. Have stored and are able to kind of bivy out for that period of time and just hang low and not really do too much. And then once that pulse of food comes around, they're able to take advantage of it and really ramp up production. It was interesting too, that we found that it was this we did this with two different pulses in these experiments. There was an early pulse in late Pulse, and it was really the late pulse that made the biggest difference in terms of growth. And the production of drones didn't really seem to do too much with the first one, so it was almost like they had learned what to expect. And they knew when that second pulse happened, what to do with it. So, it was pretty.

Speaker 1

Fascinating, amazing creatures. Excellent research. Thanks so much for telling us. A little bit about it. No problem. Thank you. 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. One you can visit our website to post episode-specific comments suggest a future guest or topic or ask a question that can be featured in a future episode. You can also e-mail us at the pollination podcast at oregonstate.edu. Finally, you can tweet questions or comments or join our Facebook or Instagram communities. Just look us up at OHSU pollinator health. If you like the show, consider letting iTunes know by leaving us a review or rating. It makes us more visible, which helps others discover pollination. See you next week.