25 Dr. Dewey M. Caron – Managing and Preventing Varroa Mites

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. This week on Pollination, we're going to revisit the terrible scourge of honeybees, the veromite. Veromite is a challenge to all beekeepers, beginning beekeepers, beekeepers with a lot of experience.

It really gets in the way of being able to keep bees. And this was a great opportunity to catch up with somebody I've been trying to get on the show for a while, Dr. Dewey Karen. I know most of you know Dr. Karen. If you spend any time in beekeeping, you know him. Either from his career at the University of Delaware, where he provided extension, really right across the region in the Northeast, to his many other, his popular writing, his books. Or you may have run into him, Eastern Napa Cultural Society. He was the president, director. He's been chairman of the board for Eastern Napa Cultural Society. But also here in Oregon, he's been part of the Oregon Master Beekeeping Program since he's moved out here. He spends part of his time in Oregon. Anyways, he's still a very, although he's in retirees, very active.

And we caught up to talk with him about an initiative that he's been involved with for a number of years, headed up by the Honey Bee Health Coalition. It's this guide and these tools for managing veromite. It's very intuitive. It kind of demystifies all the complicated biology and kind of gets you directly to the kinds of practical understanding and tools you need to manage this mite and return to beekeeping. Really informative show, a lot of detail. I'm sure you're going to enjoy it. Okay, I am so excited to have Dr. Dewey Karen here in my office. We're going to talk about veromites on pollination. Welcome to pollination. Well, thank you.

Speaker 2: Pleasure to be here.

Speaker 1: And this is a lot. I've been hoping to catch up with you for a long time. For those of you in Oregon who know Dr. Karen, he gets around a bit. He's a very busy person. So I'm glad that we could fit an interview into the schedule.

Speaker 2: Well, a pleasure to be able to join you. Yeah, I still, although retired officially, still giving lots of extension talks and I have become one of these people that is really focused in on veroa as one of our major problems.

Speaker 1: Well, that's great. And that's one of the reasons that we wanted to talk to you today. I think for a lot of beekeepers, especially people who are just beginning, but also experienced beekeepers, veromite management is a real obstacle to getting to the business of beekeeping. We talked a bit about verom management with Ellen Toppins-Hofford in the summer, but I wanted to begin by just getting your gloss on why verom management is just such a difficult problem.

Speaker 2: Well, there are a number of stressors for honey bees and I and a number of others are focused on veroa. We think it may be as much as 70% of the reason for we're getting losses, although the numbers are not solid.

It's a biological relationship that's out of balance. Right now, the veromite has all the advantages over our European honey bees. They can do some things very well that the European honey bee doesn't have defenses for. The original hosts, the Asian honey bee, some of our other bee groups, for example, our African ice bee in the US, the African bee and African bee races in Africa, have some better resources, a better capability of handling the veromite. Our European bees have very few.

Speaker 1: Okay. So one of the challenges, one of the reasons why people have a challenge is because they're inheriting a pretty tricky biological problem.

Speaker 2: Correct. One in which the veromite is because of the fact that it has a very rapid reproduction. It's on a new host for it less than perhaps 50 years. Then it seems to have the biological advantages right now. Okay.

Speaker 1: So with that in mind, you are involved with the development and writing and subsequent, there's been even involved with these six revisions of this online publication, Tools for Veroa Management, a guide to effective veroa sampling and control, which is published by the Honey Bee Health Coalition. Tell us a little bit about what this publication is about and what it does to help beekeepers with dealing with these challenges, dealing with this mite that seems to be so well suited to taking over the colony.

Speaker 2: We view this tools for veroa management from the Honey Bee Health Coalition as another tool, a tool that supplies the beekeeper with the basic information in terms of this biological relationship that out of balance, that seems to be favoring the mites.

We have tools such as chemicals to use. We have techniques that we can use to try to keep a lid on the growth of the veromite population, but those all require another level of management over and above the level of management of your colonies to produce honey, if that's your reason for keeping bees, or to pollinate crops, if that's your reason for keeping bees, or just to have bees around to pollinate what's available in the environment to beautify our environment for all of the wildlife that need those plants. So it's adding another whole layer, another whole level, and for that, our beekeepers need some non-biased, good, practical, basic information.

So we feel this publication fits that need. It is to be layered in with all of the other information from industry, from your local clubs, from your local mentors, from all the others that have a bit of a better handle on how they're managing veroa, but a lot of people that, particularly that are starting, a lot of people that are trying to ramp up from being a part-time beekeeper to having more colonies, they need this information to try then to include management for veromites along with the management of everything else that they're managing, their honey bee colonies.

Speaker 1: And it really does strike me that what it does is it has, as you sort of set up the problem, it really begins by thinking about veromite populations and how they work in the colony, but then kind of rafting on all of this information on management. It just strikes me that whenever you pick up a bee magazine or something, there's just so much out there and it does, it seems to do this really remarkable job of shoring up what we know.

Speaker 2: We think so because it is particularly focused because it was developed, I was a principal author, but was developed with a lot of input from all aspects of our industry. That's what the Honey Bee Health Coalition is all about. And it then is able to focus in on this issue. A part of our, I think of our issue with veromites is that like all pests, it, on a new host, it does have some biological advantages. And so we need to understand the pests' life cycle. Where in its life cycle is it vulnerable? While it's in developing on a pupae inside a cap brood cell, for example, or while it's riding around as a phoretic mite on top of a Honey Bee. All of our pests do have some part of their life cycle that has some vulnerability. And so the tools for verom management is focused to show that whatever stage you have mites in your colonies, we have some tools, some techniques, some chemical tools, some things such as dividing colonies, things that we can do that will then help blunt the advantage that the veromite seems to have with our European Honey Bee.

Speaker 1: Taking that, you know, one thing that seems to, you know, really be a kind of foundation of the publication, kind of building on what you just said is being able to estimate the mites population and be able to, you know, figure out what to do in relation to those numbers. And I wanted to maybe set that question up for you by just asking a little bit about the Honey Bee Health Coalition having just concluded a national mitathon. So tell us a little bit about the mitathon, how did it go, and why, again, and maybe bring it around to why monitoring for veroa is such an important and foundational aspect of management.

Speaker 2: The mitathon was actually a collaboration, again, much like our own Honey Bee Health Coalition. We were a part of it. The Bee Informed Project was a part of it, as was the Pollinator Protection part of it. It was designed to develop, to try to show in a snapshot in a week, the numbers of mites that may exist in bee colonies. Try to bring together those local resources to local people that are actually looking at and monitoring mites and put them into a national database. We got over a thousand participants.

Wow. Our present expression is the highest mite county for any, highest mite count for any county in the U.S. But behind that, there are some other counts.

So we're going to go ahead and take a serious look at that data for that week. The mite check program developed at the University of Minnesota is continuing, so that if you did not participate in the mitathon, there's still an opportunity to share your numbers, if you are willing to do so, with the national mite check. Then I do encourage our listeners to do so.

Speaker 1: Well, we need to link the national mite check website on the show notes. So all of the information listeners we will, that we're talking about today, will appear on the show notes. Okay, so this sounds like a great initiative to kind of get people to think about mite sampling and kind of relate what those numbers are and also get valuable information back to researchers. But maybe just come back around to this question of like, why should a beekeeper monitor for Varroa? Why is it such an important aspect of Varroa management?

Speaker 2: We do encourage all beekeepers starting at early in the season of their bees. Usually we're talking a month of July, but July, August, September, and particularly October to do a sample. The tools for Varroa management and our mite check was designed to help people become more familiar with the effective tools for sampling. Those two are basically a powder-sugar shake, where you add powder-sugar to a sample of 300 bees and then remove the mites off the bodies of the adult bees or alcohol wash, which does the same thing, sample 300 bees and you're taking and removing not just the ferritic mites, but also the mites that are feeding on the adult bees. And then it gives you a percentage, you convert that into a percentage of mites, so that if you have a sample of 300 bees, you then in your sample find that there were six mites on those 300 bees, you divide the 300 by six and then you get a percentage, which is 2%, six into 300 is 2%. So that is a number. The number is a relative number because it will not be the same the next time that you sample.

We find that starting in July, the numbers will be increasing. Now, the number is essentially an element of risk and individual beekeepers then have decisions that they can make based on what they feel, what they know, and what they want to do in their management of mites as to what level of risk they might be willing to assume. Large-scale beekeepers that must use their bees, use their bees repeatedly for pollination services, are talking about a 1% to 2% level of mites.

And they don't want to see the number go above that because once the numbers are higher, it's often more difficult to correct a situation than to try to keep the mite numbers low continuously. Back-eyed beekeepers don't have that investment. Yes, they need the bees for pollination on their own home properties and for some harvest for their own family or for neighbors, whatever their reason for keeping bees are.

And so their level of risk may be different. So we have a sliding scale as I indicated 1% to 2% perhaps for those that are very intensely using their bees, perhaps as much as 5% at the peak population. What seems to be most critical in our present situation with Varroa mites is they're interfering with the bee's ability to be prepared for fall and the winter season.

So if you live in an area that has a more intense fall, a short fall, then a longer winter season, cooler, wetter winter season, then your level of risk, particularly in that September and October count, should be different, should be at a lower level back to the, let's say 2% to 3% rather than as high as 5%. We find with some research that if the levels jump above 10%, so 10 mites per 300, so that would be a sample with 30 mites when you wash 300 bees. The colony really doesn't have much ability to set up and prepare for winter to rear the fat bees, the fat, what we call fall bees, to prepare their winter stores in a pattern inside of their colony, whatever their colony is, whether it's a bee tree, whether it's a managed hive, whether it's a managed hive that doesn't have movable frames.

They don't have enough time to set up and be fat for the colonies and so those colonies limp into winter, some of the viruses that are spread by mites then have a chance to become an epidemic proportions, killing more adults and or the brood itself and so by spring the colony is either dead or at such a weakened state that your management is just then compounded and more difficult in the spring trying to manage a colony that's coming out of winter so weak.

Speaker 1: Okay, so if I get this straight, the reason why it's important for management of being able to monitor for mites is one, you can do it. There are these real easy methods for being able to monitor. The second is that there is, it is this expression of risk to the colony, it has these manifestations, but that it also has a seasonality to it. So what I heard you talk about was the way in which monitoring for mites, for example, at this time of the year can really kind of predict the colony's capacity to make it through the winter for a variety of reasons. So being able to monitor in some ways lets you know that you need to take action. Correct.

Speaker 2: I view our mite control a little bit like we think of mosquito control. Mosquito spread some very serious human diseases. Of course the latest in that list is a Zika virus. We don't have any control in humans for the Zika virus. So we try to prevent humans from getting the virus being transmitted by the mosquito.

So our direction in terms of trying to control the virus, the Zika virus, is to try to control the adult mosquito so they don't end up passing the virus when they bite a human. The same is true with our mite management and bee colonies. The mite, yes, it does cause the bees to be anemic. It does expose them to pathogens getting in their body, but it is also enhancing some of these viruses. Some of the viruses that are very, very harmful to honeybees will kill bees and they have for centuries and centuries, but don't reach epidemic proportions. We have particularly right now a single virus, deformed wing virus, that is not as toxic. Bees that have the virus become adults. These are the adults that come out with deformed wings and unfortunately live long enough to reinfect other sisters. So this is a case of a virus that is being spread that is not by itself as harmful, but then reaches epidemic proportions. And so if this virus is then in these large proportions, because there's a lot of mites with viruses and feeding on the bees, if there's a lot of virus present, then it's taking its toll over the winter. The fat fall bees should live four, five, six months. With the virus infections, they're not.

And so that's why the colony either doesn't survive the winter or survives in such a weak state that the spring management is just compounded, is much more difficult for the beekeeper.

Speaker 1: Well, this is great and we're going to talk more about viruses on the show in future episodes. And it's also really timely in some ways because the show that we just had was with Dr. Kristen Healy talking about mosquito control and pollinator.

So nice little segue. Let's take a quick break and we'll come back and let's talk a little bit more about the tools that are available for people to be able to prevent all of this from taking place and have healthy colonies. All right, well, we're back here and we're going to talk a little bit more about controlling.

Bro, we've talked about monitoring. We've talked about the reason why we don't want these mites to rise in population and the risks associated with that and how it manifests itself throughout the colony. But let's talk a little bit more about the elements in the tools for varroa management guide that we've been talking about that helps beekeepers understand the myriad of options for suppressing varroa populations that present them. So if somebody was to open up the guide, how would they sort of what would they see and how would they be able to use the guide to make choices?

Speaker 2: Well, the guide is developed so that there's some basic information about varroa mites. And we make the point, it's not that your colony has varroa mites. That's not the question you should be asking. You should be asking the question is, how many, how many mites does my colony come? And so then we start with explanations of sampling, how to do the sampling, which we've covered a little bit already. And the two effective ones are washing the adult bees. Then as I indicate, that gives you a number, a number that helps you determine a element of risk for your colony, whether it's going to have a good chance or a poor chance to survive the winter, what kind of shape it might be in the next spring. So then the guide goes on to discuss the various tools that are available.

available. There are techniques that we can use and then there are chemical tools that we can use as well. And as with the tools guide, these are just tools. They are crutches, if you will, because there is this imperfect balance that might have advantages over the European B.

We might have to rely on use of a tool. Our earlier seasoned tools, when the mite populations are lower because they too suffer over the winter, just like the honeybee colony, lose population. There are relatively few adult mites that are able to do very effective reproduction. So their numbers will grow like the honeybees with a lag period. So our early season controls are basically directed towards population management. That's what we're doing with honeybees. We're trying to maximize our population to kind of coincide with whatever might be our major plants that come into bloom. We want them to pollinate those early seasons, but we also want them to be at a strong point so they can take advantage when there is a very favorable nectar source that's out there that's available.

Speaker 1: So the information is organized seasonally. So when you're looking at control products, it will sort of contextualize the time of year that you're trying to sort of deal with things.

Speaker 2: Yeah, very much. And of course, seasonally in a state as varied as Oregon or the Pacific Northwest varies. If you are down in one of the valley locations versus your 500 feet higher or a thousand feet higher, your season is quite different.

The basics are there, but the season can differ. And so too with the mite numbers. And so when you apply these techniques to try to keep the population at a lower level will vary to your own specific location and to your management and your management style and what you are willing to accept what you perceive as a risk level in terms of mites harming your colony.

Speaker 1: So explain those three. How would I if let's say I was a beekeeper who doesn't want to accept a lot of risk and it's very cold time of the year, how would I use this? How would I kind of navigate through the guide to make my selections?

Speaker 2: Well, for the period that we the bees are clustered when they're not out, there's very little forage. The early fruit trees will come into bloom, etc. But but the bees can't get out and get to the very much pollen sources. Then then your your options would be different. You don't want to do a lot of manipulation at that point. As the colony is growing, however, this allows you then to do some manipulations such as, for example, control where the bees rear their drones. When a mite goes into a drone cell just before capping, she has the capability of reproducing herself of mature daughters at a higher level than in just a worker cell. So you can essentially use a drone trap, drone trapping technique by actually rearing drones and removing some of those drones from your colony. So that works as the colony is expanding. Once the colonies are at a higher number, what we can do, particularly after the colony has done its pollination for our major crops, for example, but also for our major plants around the house in the spring, is we can cut that colony back. We can reduce the colony. We call what we would call that a brood break inducing a brood break because mites to reproduce and grow their

Speaker 1: numbers have to get into the brood.

Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. So so we can control that by how we then move things around in colonies. And also in terms of essentially taking a colony that's had a chance to develop a higher mite population and bringing it back to more spring like conditions when the mite numbers in each of the units that have been split or divided from an existing colony are smaller.

Speaker 1: So we'll get that kind of context contextual information about the management, the season. The other thing I noticed about the guide is it provides some information from the bee informed project in terms of what has been the experience aggregate experience that people have had with these products. Tell me a little bit more about that element.

Speaker 2: So once colonies, mite numbers are out of control, sometimes these techniques are just not as effective to try to halt a population or to help avoid an epidemic of a virus. So then we need to resort to a different type of tool and often that is chemical.

So the guide goes through the various chemicals as to when they might be used, under what conditions and some of the both the pros and particularly also the cons in terms of if you use this material, what might be some of the unintended consequences.

Speaker 1: Right. Another thing for our Canadian listeners, which is very useful, it does kind of indicate where products are registered. So you can say I'm in Canada or I'm in the United States and kind of be able to determine.

Speaker 2: We do key it by with a with a icon for a US flag, a Canadian flag. Some of the materials are in both, but there are some that are specific to each country that others in the other country cannot use.

Speaker 1: So the guide has all of this information. We've talked about the biology, meshing the biology and the environmental conditions, being able to figure out the sample for the varomites, but meshing these conditions with different kind of treatment options.

Many of them can, you know, there are chemicals, but they're also these nonchemical options. Now, it strikes me when you go to the coalition's website, there is much more than the guide. Can you tell us about some of the other tools that the coalition is offering towards helping people practically manage varomites?

Speaker 2: Well, what we have worked, of course, into the tools guide now is also a data sheet, because we know what we did last week, but this week we forgot what we did. So, so a good handy place to put all of that. The other issue is that when we're using some of these tools, these are techniques or these are chemicals we're not very familiar with.

So we have a video series connected with this as well. So if you are, for example, considering, let's say I'd like to use one of the acids, I'm thinking of formic acid. So we have a tool, the video that specifically shows how to use, there are actually three acids that are available to work during the period when there's not much activity, what we call the dormant season. But during the season, the formic acid is a treatment that can be very effective, but does have some, some negative consequences. So we actually demonstrate when you make your decision and then actually how to use it.

Speaker 1: So a person can go to the website and they're thinking about, they've gone through the guide, they think, ah, this product suits my conditions, and then they can watch a video that shows people, you know, how to kind of like use it. Correct.

Speaker 2: Yeah. That's wonderful. So it's all packaged together.

Speaker 1: I also noticed that it has, you know, we were talking earlier about the sampling methods and it does demonstrate the sampling methods as well. Yeah.

Speaker 2: If you have got a couple of colonies in your backyard, you could go and sample both of them. But when we start talking of larger number of colonies, that's not possible. So we indicate how, how to make a decision on sampling. And the other thing that we think the guide is, is, is strong on is that, again, if you've got a large number of counties, you're making a different level of risk assessment, but you're also managing your bees differently than the individual that has two or three colonies in the backyard. Right. So we've tried to build that capability into the tools guide, depending upon what your interest in the number of colonies that you have.

Speaker 1: All right. I want to kind of round this out by just remarking on, you know, the coalition as final, you know, as a whole, you know, you and I have been around beekeeping for a long time, certainly before the public attention got drawn to honeybee health. And, you know, there's, you know, in some ways, it seems like we take a lot for, you know, if you just came into beekeeping, you take a lot for granted. You know, when I got into apoculture, I don't remember the level of coordination among different agencies and groups that really, you know, most people just come to expect today. Tell me a little bit about the honeybee health coalition. Where did it come from? How is it a coalition? And what are the, what are some of the other initiatives that they're involved in?

Speaker 2: The honeybee coalition is, is, is unique in that sense. There, there are a number of progressive states and certainly we could think of Oregon and California, where extension services do have that level of cooperation. They involve stakeholders in decisions. They involve stakeholders in decisions, both beginning with higher of individuals, but then also continuing programs that individuals have.

Not all do, but some, some are more progressive than other. So, but extension is, is face some serious funding and the concept of the idea for coalition is to try to bring, to get a working dialogue between the all aspects of the industry. One of the things that has been used as a negative about the coalition is while you have as your members, individuals that are developing pesticides to use against these mites. That's very true. We do, but they have the same voice that I do as a representative of the, of Western apiculture society, for example, that represents all of the western states. And so, our decisions are not in terms of the fact that, that you have a commercial interest or you have, let's say the interest of a bunch of beekeeper organizations. We have a local group. We have Oregon state beekeepers are our state group. We have these regional groups.

We have a pollination groups that are, that are included conservation groups that are included. So it is, I think, a good balance. All of us with equal voices.

Okay. Now we then organize our self along task forces. And so let's say you were a representative of pioneer seeds, then your interest might be more in terms of crop pest management, one of our working groups.

Yeah. Our hive management group is the one that has developed the tools. So each of these, these various groups are developing tools such as the tools for vero management to help in terms of that particular aspect. The crop pest management, for example, has worked intensively in terms of, of how to better promote the dialogue rather than saying this group is the enemy or that the farmers are doing something simply because a group is selling them something or the extension service is saying this to try it again, to be that unbiased voice, to try to demonstrate that crops too, just like a pest like Varroa can be managed. And, and there are tools to, to do that management beginning with how the soil is prepared, you know, when planting time occurs. So there are lot of various tools that are available.

And so the concept of that working group is to try to demonstrate these tools. Our third working group is just important is that is one of the other aspects that we see with pollinators and honeybees as one of those pollinators is the availability of clean forage, clean forage, meaning forage of abundant resource, both pollen and nectar, at the time of the season when the developing native bee or developing honeybee needs and clean in terms of environmental pollutants. So the plants are rooted in the soil.

So some of that starts with what's available in the soil, the clean water, for example, the uptake of the mineral minerals and nutrients, but then also things that might be applied to that, advertently or inadvertently with, let's say, drift of a pesticide chemical being applied to one field for a pest control of a crop, let's say that then drifts or, or moves from that soil by water, by a soil contamination, by an airborne, and then puts other pollinators at peril at risk.

Speaker 1: So the coalition, it sounds like a great, great thing. It's a national conversation in these very key areas of honeybee health that, and the thing that's been really impressive about this conversation is that it really seems to have translated into tools. One thing that seems really impressive about the honeybee health coalition is the way in which these task force seem to actually produce things that are really useful like Baroa guide. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Having been in this game, that is the under trying to understand honeybees, and I still don't starting in 66. So I've been in it a while. I thought we had in my last professional position in the university of Delaware, where I was for 29 years, I thought we had a good group that had a handle in terms of the nursery industry, the green industry, because we had a plant pathologist, we had myself as an entomologist, we had a plant person, and we've, we've functioned as a group. We had very good stakeholder involvement. We were doing monitoring, we were doing, we had progressive means of delivering our information.

And so I thought we had a good handle on that, not only in Delaware, but the, but a four state region, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. And so there are some of these, these good programs. What is really impressed me and why I guess I've been an advocate in, in, in staying with, even though I've got lots of other things to do in retirement, staying with this group is, it is on a national basis. I mean, we've got the major B organizations, we've got the regional B organizations. We do have the, the pesticide industry and, and we sometimes want to make them the demons in this case. But within that, there are some very bright people, some very progressive thinkers. And those are the type that would gravitate to this type of a working group of a collaborating group. And so those are the type of people we have, where we're bringing in the people that really know the native bees and the natural pollinators.

We're looking at whole pollinator systems, not just looking at, you know, this insect, not just the honey bee, not just a managed bee, but all of them. And so sort of in a, we want to call as a holistic approach. We're looking sort of at the big picture, but trying to come up with very practical solutions with focus on those things that seem in the short run, that seem that can make a difference.

And, and, and our high management group, the short run was we thought we needed to put more tools and more information on how to manage this nasty little mite, the Varroa mite on honey bees. Great.

Speaker 1: Well, let's take a break. And we're, we've got on the show, we ask people these three questions. We ask all our guests the three questions. We get the darndest answer sometimes. I am really excited to run you through these three questions.

I'm really kind of curious what your answers are. So let's take a quick break and let's come back. All right. Well, we've got these three questions, Dr. Karen, that we ask everybody. And the first one is, I'm really kind of curious, because it's a, what is your favorite bee book? And your book has been recommended on the show. Remember back to Jen Holt's interview, you're a writer in your own right. But I'm just wondering, is there a book about bees that either you want listeners to know about, or was really kind of formative for you? Like when you read it, things sort of clicked into place.

Speaker 2: Well, of course, it's got to start with my book because I think a lot of the material is there. I'm very proud of our field guide that we did with the, with Dennis Van Engelstor from Maryland now and Marion Frasier at Penn State. It's from Penn State. It's field guide for honey bee maladies. And it starts with the concept of what's normal, what's healthy.

Speaker 1: So the title of the book is Field Guide for Honey Bee Maladies.

Speaker 2: Yeah, field guide of honey bee maladies. And it's a free download. You can download it. You can also buy it for sale from Penn State Extension. And it starts with the concept, what's healthy? So you've got to be able to recognize what's healthy. And then how do you look for pathogens? And then what are the symptoms of what you might see?

Speaker 1: So it kind of like integrates that all together.

Speaker 2: So it sort of integrates that all together. Yeah. Recently, oh, the Tom Sealy's book, Honey Bee Democracy is a great read. Jürgen Tautz, the Buzz and About Bees, fantastic book, once it was translated from the German and, you know, great photos that go along with it. And I think for the youngsters, I read a book a lot to when I go to schools and give presentations. There are several good ones, but our reading literacy programs feature a couple of very distinct ones that are excellent for younger kids.

Speaker 1: Give us one.

Speaker 2: You can't off your head. The one that I like talks about a grandpa visiting with his grandson. His grandson comes to visit and they go and look at the bees and they extract the honey.

Speaker 1: Okay. One last question on this because I just can't let you go because we had a former classmate of yours on the show, Mike Bergett. And I was just wondering if there were a classic bee book, a book that you read back in the, you know, in the 1960s when you were getting started that was just like blew your mind.

Speaker 2: I think all of us have been brought up with the practical book, The Hive and Honey Bee, which has gone through many iterations and now is a very complex book. I actually try to use it as a textbook, but it's much greater than that. And I guess probably when Mark Winston and Tom Sealy published their work in terms of biology of bees by Mark Winston and Honey Bee ecology by Tom Sealy, those, because I'm a biologist and Mike Bergett is also a biologist. I think those probably were the two that had the greatest impact, particularly as we were students, particularly as we were learning the system. I got in Honey Bees to keep them alive, to be able to study a population without having to try to kill it, rather than being a person that went to the pesticide industry to understand populations, to kill them. I wanted to try to keep them alive. So, you know, I'm a basic ecologist.

Speaker 1: I think Honey Bee ecology, not to underscore Dr. Winston's book, which is remarkable in scope and sort of ease of reading, but Honey Bee ecology is out of print and I don't know if many people are aware of it. It is a really kind of remarkable study of thinking about Honey Bee's ecologically. It's a great book. I'm glad you recommended it. I went looking for it the other day and, you know, you find it a used copy for like $1,000.

Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 1: So, second question we ask, is there a tool for beekeeping that, like, if you were on a desert island, it's just like you could not do without? Or it's like, you know, I've never been out bee keeping with you. I don't know if there's a something that is uniquely a Dr. Karen tool for beekeeping.

Speaker 2: I don't have a tool that is unique. I guess my most popular tool is the hive tool, because bees do want to put things together and propylize together. I don't always use a smoker. I always do try to use a veil and then the hive tool. So, I'd say veil and hive tool, you can go into smaller counties without some of these other aids. As colonies get larger, their populations get larger than either a smoker or an atomizer or for sugar water.

Speaker 1: All right. The last question I have for you is, do you have a favorite bee? And invariably, for a lot of people who are in apoculture, it's honey bee. And so, then I ask a deeper question, is there a bee colony that was influential to you or, Jen Holt, it was her first package that was like her favorite bee. But what's your answer?

Speaker 2: I guess my favorite bee is beekeeper, my mentor, Roger Morse, where I learned a lot of the bees. When I first went to Cornell as a graduate student, he sent me out to the industry to three large commercial beekeepers for a month. And I did all the grunt work that you do for the large beekeepers.

And they taught me a lot, but then my mentor brought it back around to me. Right now, I would say my favorite bee is a bee that is, we can't continue to rely on our crutches of these chemicals or these techniques, which are very labor-intensive, hard to get right, timing is everything. So, right now, my favorite bee is one that has the ability to also fight the mite. And particularly, that seems to be something like the Minnesota Hygienic Bees, the Roa Sensitive Hygiene, the New World Carniolan. These are bees that are being developed and bred. So, they give the bee a fighting chance so that we can then help them. We can't ever win this battle if we're the only one trying to fight the mites, the bees that have to start with the bees themselves. So, right now, I would say bees that have more hygienicity, that are more better suited to meet the challenge of this nasty mite.

Speaker 1: Great answers, Dr. Karen. Thanks so much for taking the time to meet with us today.

Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. I appreciate it.

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