Dr. Lewis Bartlett - The Evolving Challenges Beekeepers Face (347)

347 - Dr. Lewis Bartlett - The Evolving Challenges Beekeepers Face

Dr. David Peck: Hi. This is David Peck from Greenwich, New York. You are listening to Beekeeping TodayPodcast.

Jeff Ott: Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast presented by Better Bee, your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment. I'm Jeff Ott.

Becky Masterman: I'm Becky Masterman.

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Jeff: Hey, a quick shout out to Better Bee and all of our sponsors whose support allows us to bring you this podcast each week without resorting to a fee-based subscription. We don't want that, and we know you don't either. Be sure to check out all of our content on the website. There, you can read up on all of our guests, read our blog on the various aspects and observations about beekeeping, search for, download, and listen to over 300 past episodes, read episode transcripts, leave comments and feedback on each episode, and check on podcast specials from our sponsors. You can find it all at www.beekeepingtoday.com. Hey, everybody, welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast. Becky, did you recognize that voice, the opening?

Becky: Not only did I recognize the voice, but I think the voice is still with us.

David: You can't get away from me.

Jeff: Who forgot to turn off the recorder?

Becky: Oh, I love it. This is exciting, a live listener opener. We're moving along here in this podcast.

Jeff: David, thanks for opening the show for us. Our guest today is somebody, I think, you know, Dr. Lewis Bartlett from University of Georgia.

David: Absolutely. Lewis and I go back some ways, we're good friends with each other. At least to a casual observer, we apparently look very similar to each other. That's really how he and I got to know each other. I was at a meeting in South Carolina, meeting of beekeepers, somebody came up and started asking me questions about varroa and referencing a talk that I'd given about varroa, and there was a talk that I had given about varroa, so I started answering questions.

We had this conversation, and at a certain point, she said, "What happened to your accent?" I said, "What are you talking about?"

Becky: Oh, no.

[laughter]

David: She said, "You have a British accent. Why are you putting on this American accent?" I said, "I don't. I'm from Baltimore." We came to find out that there was apparently this other person who was doing all of the same varroa disease ecology research. His name was Lewis Bartlett, and he was at the University of Georgia. I just sent him an email, and I said, "Apparently, we're twins. People are confusing us for one another, and so we might as well be friends." We had a little Zoom chat, and then we've randomly bumped into each other speaking all over the country to beekeepers, and are quite good friends and colleagues. We've got an ongoing scientific collaboration going as a result of us being bald, bearded, and wearing glasses.

Jeff: I did see you together at NAHBE last year, and I couldn't tell one from the other walking across the convention center.

Becky: Not only that, Jeff, but you knew to not interrupt them because they were having a conversation every time I saw them. It was a serious conversation, and it was maybe only at dinner where we got you two to open up to other people.

David: The podcast medium, I think, gives a good opportunity here for folks to try to learn to distinguish between Dr. Bartlett and myself because you can't see us, so you can't see that he has tattoos, and I don't. That's one clear indicator. I also don't have any facial piercings, and that same can't be said for him. It's possible that by listening to this podcast episode, folks will be able to discern a very, very slight difference in our voices, which is to say an American listener will be able to understand most of what I'm saying. Even though I love Lewis, I still sometimes have trouble understanding what he's trying to say to me because his accent is so thick.

[laughter]

Jeff: Speaking of Lewis, I see he's out in the green room. Let's invite him in, and we'll be right back after this word from our sponsors.

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Jeff: Hey, everybody. Welcome back. Sitting around the great big virtual Beekeeping Today Podcast table stretched across the country, we have Dr. Lewis Bartlett down in Georgia. We have Dr. David Peck up in New York. Dr. Becky Masterman. I'm the only one who's not a doctor, so just put that across. Becky is in St. Paul, and I'm sitting somewhere in Olympia, Washington. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the show this afternoon.

Becky: I love this. I love my screen with David and Lewis. I just wish everybody could see that we've got two brilliant scientists who look like they're twins.

Dr. Lewis Bartlett: Twins separated at birth, reuniting at honeybee conferences across the US. I did just send--

David: Separated by an ocean.

Lewis: Yes, an ocean, an accent, and a couple of things that we shan't mention on the podcast.

[laughter]

David: All right. I feel like you really only need one bald varroa scientist to get this podcast moving, so I should probably bow out and let you guys get on with the real interview. Good to see you, Lewis.

Lewis: Nice to see you too.

David: Tata.

Becky: Bye, David.

Jeff: Thank you, David.

David: Bye.

Jeff: Lewis, what an opening. This is one for the books. Appreciate your flexibility in joining us today.

Lewis: Absolutely. I'm glad to be here, and I appreciate being invited. Any excuse to speak to beekeepers instead of attending to my email inbox is deeply welcome.

Jeff: I definitely enjoyed talking with you at the North American Honeybee Expo in January, and have been looking forward to getting you back on the show ever since. For our listeners who may not know who you are, can you give us just a quick background on how you got started in bees and what brings you to today?

Lewis: I'm an assistant professor at the University of Georgia, specifically an assistant professor of honeybee health. I currently head the University of Georgia Bee Lab following Keith Delaplane's retirement some years ago. I've been keeping bees for coming up to 14 years now. I first learned beekeeping back in Yorkshire in Northern England, where I was born and raised.

I didn't necessarily know that I'd end up working on them as a scientist. I've done research on everything from captive breeding in zoos to working for the United Nations Conservation Program. It was about 10 years ago now that I was given the opportunity to combine some of my interests in infectious disease with beekeeping. I was a hobbyist beekeeper by that point. Really, my training throughout my doctoral degree was in infectious disease ecology and evolution, and I applied that to beekeeping. That's what brought me to the US both to work with people at UGA as well as at UC Berkeley over in California, where I kept bees as well.

As I've been able to combine my academic interest in animal health, and parasites, and all the needs that there is in beekeeping, it has led me to grander and grander positions. Every time I've tried to leave the University of Georgia, they have come up with reasons to keep me here, for which I'm deeply grateful. I have very strong support from our Georgia Beekeepers Association, which means a lot to me on quite a personal level, which has helped cement my activities here, working on everything from varroa to small hive beetles to yellow-legged hornets, to honeybee immunity, impacts of pesticides, nutrition, and everything else that makes bees happy and healthy because when you're trying to understand what makes bees sick, you have to understand what's good for them. I might have started working on disease, but I'm now a holistic honeybee health biologist.

Jeff: That's why we invited you here today.

Lewis: You'll quickly learn that asking me for a short summary of anything leads to a medium summary.

Jeff: [laughs]

Lewis: If you ask for a long answer, this podcast is going to go far into the night.

[laughter]

Jeff: We'll keep all our answers short today, so we could get through them all.

Becky: Oh, we could do a medium or two. We've got a medium question. I'm sure we do.

Lewis: We can [unintelligible 00:10:28]

[laughter]

Jeff: No, this is great. This is fantastic. We did invite you back in January because we just touched on a couple of topics. We wanted to delve into them a little bit deeper because it raises interest around the country when you start talking about the yellow-legged hornet and its impact there in the Southeast. Let's open this can of worms, if you will. I'm mixing metaphors, but let's go explore this. What is the Asian yellow-legged hornet, and maybe the biology, and then its impact to beekeeping?

Lewis: The yellow-legged hornet, Vespa velutina, was characterized in Georgia in 2023 in August. It was six days, in fact, after I'd been made an assistant professor here.

Becky: Oh, the timing. [laughs]

Lewis: We found it in Georgia, and so I was thrown in at the deep end. I actually thought I'd escaped yellow-legged hornets. When I first began my PhD in Falmouth in England, working with people like Pete Kennedy, who's very well known for working on this species now. It just started arriving in the very southern tip of Britain, coming over the English Channel from France, where it's been invasive for about 12 or so years now, maybe a little longer. I said at the time, I don't want to have to deal with anymore problems in honeybees, so I'll gladly go over to the US, where we don't have this hornet.

[laughter]

Lewis: For my sins, it seems to have followed me. You mentioned just Asian yellow-legged hornet. Traditionally, this thing was referred to as the Asian hornet. We don't really use that word anymore, both with the giant Asian hornet or the Asian hornet. We now call them the northern giant hornet, and we call it the yellow-legged hornet. That's because every single hornet species on earth is found in Asia. In fact, there's only one that's found outside of Asia naturally, and that's the European hornet that also exists in Asia.

[laughter]

Lewis: We have that in here as well. There's multiple species of giant hornet as well that all exist in Asia. It's not a particularly useful descriptor to start differentiating all these different hornet species that we need to be aware of, in particular, confusion between the yellow-legged hornet and the northern giant hornet. One is characterized as this huge, quite dangerous murder hornet. That was the one that arrived up in your neck of the woods in the Pacific Northwest some years ago that has since been declared eradicated or extirpated, and we don't want people confusing that with the yellow-legged hornet, which is quite different.

The yellow-legged hornet is native to parts of Southeast Asia, and China, and India, even as far as up into the Himalayas. It's also invasive elsewhere in Asia. Some of our best work on controlling and understanding this hornet actually comes from South Korea and Japan, where it's been invasive for the last couple of decades, but it's not naturally found there. Just because it's the yellow-legged hornet from Asia doesn't mean all parts of Asia have it. They're often the first line of defense because they're more likely to get it before Europe or the US.

I mentioned it's been invasive in France and elsewhere in Europe, Portugal, Spain. It's currently expanding through Germany. It's found in the Netherlands, Belgium, and it's repeatedly being found in the United Kingdom and Great Britain, where I first learned to beekeep. We've been able to look to the scientists on the other side of the Atlantic, as well as the other side of the Pacific, to see what they've been doing in understanding this.

I will say it's one of multiple hornet species that exist in the United States and its territories. We've had the European hornet Vespa crabro for a long time. It is invasive. It's what I'd call naturalized. It doesn't tend to cause many problems. We have the bald-faced hornet, which isn't a true hornet. That's just a really big yellowjacket, but it occupies the same, what we call, ecological niche, the same role in its ecosystem.

Some of these other ones that we're getting, like the yellow-legged hornet, like the Northern giant hornet, which we don't have anymore as far as we're aware, as well as the third one that I'll mention in a moment have different strategies as predators than some of the other ones we're used to dealing with, which is where the problems come in, both for beekeepers and for the natural environments that our bees are positioned in and that these hornets exist in. That's where we have to be careful about making sure we understand what they do.

The third one that I mentioned is the island of Guam, where we have a significant US military presence, and it's a US territory, has Vespa tropica, the greater banded hornet. That hornet is actually a specialist of predating other social insects. It's a huge problem for beekeeping in Guam, for instance. If we'd have maybe paid a little bit more attention to that and its control, we might actually be a little bit further ahead on ways to now combat the yellow-legged hornets in the contiguous US because we do have a test system for controlling a honeybee-eating invasive hornet in Guam. That's some work that I'm trying to explore, maybe using for developing controls for Vespa velutina as well.

Vespa velutina, in terms of its impact on beekeepers, because that's what you asked about, is an aerial predator. It's quite small. It's quite agile. It's quite a svelte looking hornet. Unlike the European hornet or the bald-faced hornet, and certainly unlike the Northern giant hornet, it's quite an acrobatic, agile insect. It's acrobatic and agile because the way in which it hunts, at least hunts honeybees, is that when it locates a colony, it will take a few moments to assess the colony entrance. It will identify the landing board in the colony entrance.

Unlike the greater banded hornet, Vespa tropica, and unlike the Northern giant hornet, Vespa mandarinia, which will actually raid, and enter, and attack the colony, which we then can intervene on on beekeepers.-- we can put entrance reducers, and guards, and things, and so on-- Vespa velutina doesn't really do that. Instead, it turns its back to the colony, typically about three feet from the colony entrance, and it hovers, and it assesses the flight path that the returning foraging bees are using to come back to their colony.

It intercepts them at that critical point where they're coming back with a crop full of honey or with corbicula fullof pollen. It intercepts them, kills them, takes them to a nearby tree branch or any other place it can perch. It butchers them at that point, so it chews off the parts that it doesn't want. Mostly, it's just after the muscular thorax, where the flight muscles are, and carries that back to its nest. As soon as it deposits that in its nest, it comes back to get another honeybee.

We think they're able to communicate to their sisters that they've found a honeybee colony, and that allows for aggregation. That's a little up in the air, and we don't know how hornets communicate. We know they don't do waggle dances like bees do. There's some evidence with Vespa soror, which is the other giant hornet, that's a pheromone trail, but that's not well demonstrated yet.

All of that to say that the main impact on the colony is that they're hunting forages as they're returning to the nest. Obviously, that weakens the colony number. In extreme instances, it depletes the foraging force that causes the nurse bees or whoever to age up too rapidly. They're then depleted, and you essentially get colony collapse disorder then because you're seeing all your adult honeybees removed from an otherwise healthy-looking colony.

You can also get what's called foraging paralysis, where the bees are aware that it's not safe to leave their home, and so they just simply cease foraging, and eventually that will lead to colony decline or possibly absconsion. There's very little, unfortunately, that we've been able to do anywhere in the world to prevent this in the apiary so far, because they're not interacting with the hives like any of our other pests are. It's not like our other predatory hornets, or varroa, or small hive beetles, or anything where they're at least in or on the hive. This is happening in the immediate area of the apiary, which is a place the beekeeper, ultimately, does not have much control over, and that's why they're quite frustrating.

The response has been, elsewhere in the world and especially here in the US, to find and destroy as many nests as possible and to trap emerging queens in the spring. These nests only exist for a year at a time. When winter rolls around, the nest dies out. They produce their males and their future queens. They go off and mate. It's just the queens that hibernate, typically in the soil, completely on their own.

Then, that queen has to found a new nest it builds up through the year. They consume honeybees, especially later in the year when there's a fewer insects around for them to eat. They produce their reproductives and they die off, and that's very similar to most yellowjackets, bald-faced hornets, bumblebees, and similar.

Jeff: Do they build aerial nests or ground nests?

Lewis: Yes.

Jeff: Okay.

Lewis: They're not mostly ground nesting. There's always exceptions. We have good reports from South Carolina. Shout out Brad Cavin, who's one of their leads there. Clemson Plant Protection Services. He has attested to observing ground nesting ones, which there's no rule in biology that's not broken.

[laughter]

Lewis: Broadly, these things are aerial nesting. They have a reasonably distinct approach to that where the new queen founds what we call an embryo nest. That will look very similar to any other paper wasp nest or any other hornet nest. She'll raise her first generation of daughters of workers and then they'll take over hunting nest construction and similar. That nest will grow to a certain size, at which point they seem to have a tendency to abandon it and create a secondary nest where the colony migrates over to.

That first embryo in primary nest is often on a human structure. It's often on a building or perhaps under a bridge. Then, the secondary nest tends to be in a tree a lot higher up and a lot larger. We don't know why they do it. My hypothesis, currently, and the people I've discussed this with seem to think it's reasonable, is that that embryo nest and primary nest is often suspended from almost one tiny little string, really, of this cement-like wood, that these hornets build their nest out of. Once the nest reaches a certain size, I think it becomes structurally unsound and so they're forced to go and create another nest at the elbow of a tree branch that provides structural support.

We've taken down nests in Georgia, or rather the Georgia Department of Agriculture, who's leading the control, have taken down nests that look the size of secondary nests but aren't in trees. They're often in cases where that primary nest seems to have been founded in the corner of the eaves of a building or under a bridge where there's a slope where that same structural risk doesn't exist. My current working hypothesis is that they're found in this secondary nest only when they have initially grown in a location that limits the size of their population.

Becky: Have people witnessed the hornets leaving en masse?

Lewis: Not as far as I can find, which is frustrating. We don't know as much as we'd like about these things, and that movement to the secondary nest is still, as far as I'm aware, scientifically unanswered in terms of how it's coordinated, whether they're building the nest in advance and then they're only moving in once it reaches a certain size. How they're coordinating it will probably help us understand how they're possibly recruiting other hunters or the workers to these foraging sites and apiaries. All of that remains, honestly, pretty mysterious.

In the US, at least, we're not doing any of that work because these things aren't yet classified as established, and so per state and federal responses, as soon as a nest is found, it has to be destroyed, which means we're looking elsewhere to understanding the biology of these things until such a time as we decide or don't either we eradicate them or eventually we'll work on them natively.

Jeff: How many adult wasps are in the nests?

Lewis: Hundreds to thousands. Not the tens of thousands that we see necessarily in honeybee nests. We don't have exact counts often again because bringing them down from these trees, these secondary nests are often 80-foot up in a pine tree. They need to be spread with pesticides so that it's safe for the tree surgeons to remove them. They break apart while they're being taken down, and so our estimates of absolute size are a little less precise than I'd like.

We have examples from Europe and elsewhere, but that was a much more temperate climates, whereas here in the subtropical Southeast, their growing season is just much bigger. Our observation so far is that our nests are much bigger than they experience in Europe, and it's at least thousands of individuals. I would say a peak commonly hundreds, even at the earliest stages of development, particularly if you include the brute.

Becky: What is the foraging range? Hunting range?

Lewis: I don't know that it has been exactly characterized, at least here in the US. It has been elsewhere to a degree. We can infer it a little bit from matching trapping efforts to nested detections. There are thousands of traps for forages laid out across Georgia and South Carolina, currently, as well as a bunch on the Florida border by FDACS, Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to detect these things.

Now, those really aren't there for controls, they're there for detection. We can infer from where we're seeing workers in traps versus not in traps. This is all work done by the Georgia Department of Agriculture and their equivalence in South Carolina to Clemson Plant Protection. We can infer how far they're going, and it seems to be not very far. We're talking hundreds of meters. That's not to say that in an environment where they're struggling to find food, they might not go further.

At least in and around Savannah, we have very high densities of things for them to feed on, whether that's fruit, whether it's honeybees, whether it's discarded fish, whether it's dead deer. They will feed on all these things, and we've observed all these. It might be that they're not having to fly very far to forage, and so we're not able to estimate their maximum size of flight distance. We do know that when they produce the males, particularly alongside the future queens in winter, we find the males disperse far further from the nests, probably questing for females, which would suggest that they are capable of flying a lot further than we observe them foraging.

Becky: Are these traps, pheromonal traps specific to the--

Lewis: No, no. The traps--

Becky: I just saw him shake his head no. [laughs]

Lewis: Yes, sorry.

Becky: That's okay.

Lewis: The traps currently being used are a mixture that the Georgia Department of Ag have been standardizing. They've tested a bunch of different stuff, and by far what they found to be the most useful so far is what they're calling this Georgia juice mixture, which is specifically brown sugar and grape juice and allowing it to ferment a little bit. We know that these things will visit rotting fruit very gladly, and so that tends to be a good detection. Now there's some bycatch as there would be with any sort of mixture like that, but a lot of other insects aren't very good at getting into the style of trap that GDA rather-- a lot of the insects aren't good at getting into the style of trap that GDA are using.

What's nice about the style they're able to use is it's like a bucket where once they find a hornet in that juice, they empty it out and then they replace it with a dry protein bit they will allow the hornet to take back to their nest, and then they begin this, what they're calling hornet lining triangulation process, exactly as you would when you are bee lining to find a wild nest. They've got very good at it, I have to say.

Becky: That's impressive.

Lewis: I think average times now, if my understanding and recollection is right, is that if they find hornets in an apiary, they're often able to find and destroy the nest within about six days on average. Some are significantly faster than that, which is a real skill, honestly.

Jeff: What's the impact to beekeepers at this point in Georgia and the Southeast?

Lewis: They have not dispersed very far, which means I'm not willing yet to start making statements about impacts on beekeeping because we really haven't observed them in our major beekeeping regions. They've been a problem for our beekeepers in Savannah when encountered. Very famously, the Savannah Beekeeping Company had quite severe hawking in that very first year at their demonstration apiary, one of their major shop fronts.

I know some of our commercial beekeepers who routinely move apiaries to the Georgia Coast and Savannah have withheld to doing that because of the risk of these things, which, obviously, does have an economic impact. It's a little bit more complicated when it's beekeeper decision-making for me as a scientist to necessarily quantify, but it's obvious that these things are going to have an impact.

Unlike most other invasive insects, tree-killing insects like green citrus psyllid or whatever it is that causes citrus greening disease or any other crop-damaging insects,

because of the way their nest works and the fact it's a queen and workers, you only get one bout of reproduction a year. That's unusual for an invasive pest. Those nests are stationary in space to an approximation. You're only getting one dispersal a year, which is very, very slow compared to almost any other invasive species that we deal with in agriculture or for any reason.

By virtue of that, yes, they've spread through parts of Greater Savannah and into South Carolina, but we're still only talking miles to tens of miles, which in the scheme of the US is not much. There's, obviously, concerns that these things might be incidentally transported via human mechanisms much further, and that's for the regulatory authorities who have expertise in that to make sure they're aware of. So far, they're taking it very seriously.

Things like ornamental plants, that people are maybe buying and bringing home from Charleston, or Savannah, or the surrounding region are really what we've got our eye on. For any ornamental nursery plant or any nursery plant to leave Georgia, it has to be drenched in insecticide. We have control mechanisms already in place for that.

Becky: That's because there could be an overwintering queen in the soil?

Lewis: Precisely. There could be an overwintering queen in the soil in that nursery plant.

Becky: A mated overwintered queen.

Lewis: All overwintering queens are almost by definition mated because if they don't successfully mate, they just stay hunting for drones. We don't really call them drones, but male hornets.

Jeff: The young boy in me needs to ask, because I've stepped in enough yellowjacket nests, how defensive are these yellow-legged hornets?

Lewis: That's something that me and you have in common. I have a really nasty habit of sticking my face in bulk places that it does not belong. I'm even worse with snakes, actually. That's a real problem of mine. If I see a snake, my first instinct is to grab it to see what it is. We don't have venomous snakes in Britain. They're basically all safe apart from adders, which are fine. Less so here in the US. I had to learn-

Becky: In Georgia.

Lewis: -to curtail my enthusiasm.

Jeff: Especially in Georgia.

Lewis: They're as defensive as most of our similar species. Particularly the bigger nests, I'd anticipate they're much like a bald-faced hornet or similar. The examples we have of them being on people's structures, it's not like having a hybrid bee nest in your wall. It's no different to having any other yellowjacket or paper wasp or similar from what I've observed. Now these things do get big, and that's where the concern comes in. Five or six aggressive paper wasps are going to give you a nasty time, but that's not dangerous. Hundreds of hornets is different.

That's where I think the risk comes in. It's not necessarily that they're unusually defensive in any capacity. I think they're perfectly in line with similar species. I would imagine that they are right now capable of delivering more venom in a defensive behavior than anything else, except maybe our defensive hybrid bees.

Jeff: Hey, let's take this opportunity to take a quick break, and we'll be right back after these words from our sponsors.

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Becky: Welcome back, everybody. Lewis, we've been talking about the yellow-legged hornet, and it really is a case where we've got an invasive pest to honeybees. That means that we need a coordinated response to that pest. Could you just give us maybe a high-level overview of what that looks like and any other details you want to include?

Lewis: The first thing to say is that the boots-on-the-ground response, the actual detection, eradication, control, and experience of handling these things is mostly with our regulatory agencies, Georgia Department of Agriculture and Clemson's Plant Protection groups, like David Williams and Brad Cavin, and their teams, Chris Evans, and others. They're the ones really having to do the hard work, frankly, here, the hard sweaty work of hunting down these things in swampland, let me make that clear, swampland in the hot Southeast.

The other side of that is parts of the scientific response, and some of that's in direct support of the regulators. Anything we can do to help them, whether it's efforts to improve nest detection-- I know there's money that's gone to other universities to try and use AI, or drones, or harmonic radar for tracking these things back to their colonies-- all of those things have been broached by different specialists. Myself and Jamie Ellis down in Florida have been working together on some things since we're the two labs who have major active bee research programs close to this.

That's included trying to use eDNA for early detection of these things. That's been done by Dr. Kaitlin Deutsch, Dr. Leigh Boardman, myself, and Jamie Ellis. We're doing a lot of genetics to try and pinpoint not only where these things came from. We know they came from somewhere in the Asian range, possibly coastal China, possibly Korea or Japan, but it's not the European population.

By working with Dr. Brock Harpur at Purdue, one of our fantastic geneticists in honeybee world, he's assisting getting some deep sequencing done from my specimens to try and really hone in on where they came from, but also confirm if it was just one single queen, as we believe it was in Europe, how many males she had mated with, and whether we can back calculate how much they've been inbreeding to confirm that that 2023 detection was indeed the first American-born generation of hornets.

All of that's useful then for our understanding of the response. I have a fantastic PhD student, Daniel Gilley, who just won a three-year fellowship with the Wormsloe Foundation to help continue a lot of our characterization of how they're an ecological risk. Part of that includes running thousands of samples of their larval poop pellets to see what these things are feeding on beyond just honeybees, not only because that's important for their risk to biodiversity, but it allows us to tailor possible baits and controls to what we know they're eating in those environments, for instance. That's work that's continuing here at UGA.

I'm hoping to be sending some samples up to Dr. Declan Schroeder in your neck of the woods, Becky, to do some early pathogen detection to see whether there's any diseases these things brought with them that we need to be worried about. It really is one of these cases where everyone who has an idea is getting involved. He's a brilliant master's student working at South Carolina who's trying to get into the depths of where locally in the environment they seem to prefer to nest, so that we can more accurately predict where we're likely to find them at a small scale.

I've had a excellent scientist do what's called a species distribution model, which is a range projection of where in the Americas we expect these things could possibly naturally invade to if left uncontrolled. We're hoping that that will be ready for release following peer review by the end of the year, showing where not only in the US these things might, eventually, get to and become a problem, but where else in the Americas, because this is one of the first intrusions or the first intrusion we know of on these two continents.

All of that work is moving forward. There's some efforts to come up with controls, should we have to move towards mitigation rather than eradication. Although countries haven't necessarily solved that problem yet, we're going to give it a go. I have money from Project APSM and Bayer's Healthy Hive Funds to try and begin working on that as well as support from USDA NIFA in my case and Florida's case. USDA APHIS has funded some work, although none at UGA as of yet.

We're just trying to see what we might do, really, to understand these things, understand their life cycle, understand how much genetic variation they brought with them. If they're really inbred, it will take them a long time to evolve resistance to anything that we use on them, which is important for our ability to control them. We're doing everything we can. My lab, if you open a drawer, you're probably going to find thousands and thousands of hornets in individual samples in ethanol saying exactly what nest they came from, when in the year.

Really it's always the more money and the more people we can get, the more we can understand. There's ideas that they get bigger throughout the year. We probably have the data to test that. I just need the right sort of nerdy undergraduate who's willing to measure 10,000 hornets to be able to answer that question. There's plenty being done. We're lucky in honeybee research that my experiences were broadly quite cooperative with one another, at least amongst the universities. That means everyone's pitching in and open to working with one another, which is hopefully what the industry wants to hear.

Becky: I want to step back to one of the things that you just mentioned, eradication versus mitigation. How many successful eradication stories are really out there when it comes to humans versus insects?

Lewis: Very few, though I will say the ones that spring to mind are often in the southeast of the US. We have eradicated this yellow-legged hornet from certain islands in Europe, for instance. Island eradications are much easier than continental eradications by definition. There are case studies where this thing has been eradicated from islands, which is promising. I think maybe if we can explore eradicating Vespa tropica on Guam, that will give us a really solid idea of how to help handle these things. More on that from me, hopefully, in the future. I'm trying to start putting together some work there.

Examples of farm eradications include malaria mosquitoes in Florida, for instance, and the Gulf New World screwworm, which was eradicated from the US for a long time, although that appears to have reinvaded. There are examples, and there are certainly cases of damaging crop insects that maybe haven't been technically eradicated, but has been brought almost entirely under control to the point where we wonder if they exist anymore. I'm going to betray my inability as an agricultural scientist here. The cotton boll weevil, for instance, was one that was obviously a huge problem in cotton, and basically does not exist as far as I can tell with the advent of growers using BTGM cotton.

I think there are cases, certainly, but there are certainly far, far, far more instances of invasive species arriving, eradication efforts being rolled out that cost a lot of money, use a lot of time, and maybe weren't successful. That's a decision for policy to make. Ultimately, the regulators, their job is to follow the law and follow instruction. They're doing that very, very admirably. I want to stress that. I really think they are slowing down the rate of impact and advancement of this hornet so far, which is extremely commendable.

When we look at what happened with tracheal mites arriving in the US, and we had hives burn and people being prevented from moving their colonies state to state, which meant cancellation of pollination contracts, inability to go to regular honey grounds.

We've seen exactly the same thing in Australia in the last two years. I was just there for all of June. Millions of dollars spent on an attempt to eradicate varroa that I think any reasonable scientist knew was not possible. Really, the response should have been to look at mitigation instead. Small hive beetles, obviously, we never really tried to eradicate them, but you're never going to get rid of them. We still see the shadows of some of those impacts. The Canadian border is still closed to US nucs and packages because of tracheal mites. What did that achieve? Does Canada not have tracheal mites? No, of course they've got them, because the tracheal mites don't care about that 48th parallel or whatever it is.

I think a slightly more honest reflection on when eradication has worked and where would probably be productive from across the board point of view, because some of those examples I gave of cotton weevils, of malaria mosquitoes in Florida, of New World screwworm, they weren't eradicated at arrival. It was the work on their control and mitigation led to such effective technologies that we were able to extirpate them from large regions.

I've been reflecting a little on what that means for future instances of things like Tropi mite arrival. Now, I want to stress that intercepting something at a port is done very successfully. There are tens of instances every year in the US, in Australia, in New Zealand, in Europe, everywhere around the globe, where potential invasions were quashed at a port of entry. That's very different to finding something miles inland, established, in my view. Our port defences always need to be number one.

I will stress something here, because I think beekeepers have forgotten about this for reasons that I don't understand. I need beekeepers to start shaming one another if they live near and beekeep near a seaport or any port, and you're collecting swarms from that area. Absolutely, do not be doing that. There are enough bees in the US that we don't need to be collecting swarms that may have come off a vessel, or a military transport plane, or anything. If there is even the tiniest chance that swarm is not from the US, do not be capturing it. Do not be housing it. Do not be bringing it into your apiary.

Guidance at the federal level does state we shouldn't be doing that, but I think some of our port authority people have forgotten. They have beekeepers they call up and say, "There's some bees on this cargo ship. Do you want to come get them?" The answer should be "No, spray them down with an insecticide immediately." Particularly with things like Tropi. Obviously, in the case of the hornets, they're not brought in with bee colonies, but most other things are. That's something that, given this platform, I would really like to stress people take a little bit more seriously and that there's some community policing about that. I'm not saying no fisticuffs in the parking lot outside the monthly bee club meeting, but be aware of what you're risking capturing a 2-pound swarm off a cargo ship that's come from who knows where.

Jeff: You're talking about actually going onboard ship to get that swarm or right on the port property?

Lewis: I'd say right even near it. If there's a feral bee colony in a tree near a major port in the US, I would err on the side of caution and obliterate it rather than bring it into one of my apiaries. That's true for even something like capensis, which would be disastrous if it got into the US.

Becky: Oh, you have to tell people what that is.

Lewis: That's the South African-- the Cape bee.

Becky: They're fascinating but not good.

Lewis: That's a whole other podcast episode. That's an example of a bee subspecies that could absolutely devastate our beekeeping industry if it was accidentally brought in. If you're anywhere near any amount of freight ships, cargo, airplanes-- I say this to my Metro Atlanta beekeepers as well. Busiest airport in the world is Atlanta. Don't be capturing swarms on and around the airport. Who knows where they came from?

Jeff: It seems like every year there's a story about a bee swarm in Atlanta. Of course, they had packages a couple of years ago, too.

Becky: We also have a bee veterans apiary for the University of Minnesota right at MSB. If there's a swarm, it could have been us. Lewis, you say that as far as swarms, and then my mind immediately goes to, "Wait. Isn't somebody already doing that as far as if a swarm is identified, they're eradicating it?" Isn't there an official procedure out there?

Lewis: That is the official policy. My understanding is that that hasn't been well communicated as part of port authority training. It isn't the job of these port inspectors to know how to deal with a bee swarm. Of course, they might call up their local beekeeping group or whoever and call about a swarm. "Yes, we'll go collect that." It's about thinking through location, context, circumstance there. That's why I just wanted to highlight that.

I'm not interested in saying, "Well, it's the law, so we need to do it," because I'm not the police. I'm not a regulator. I'm not an enforcer. In this case, I'm making a plea because I think it's good for the US beekeeping to not be picking up random swarms in places where they might have come a long way to get there.

Jeff: I'm glad you brought that up because I'm sitting here really a stone's throw from the port of Olympia. It's not container ships, but there are ships that come in that drop off logs, or they pick up logs or something like that from the state forest. I hadn't considered that. That's never been discussed at the local beekeepers meeting that I'm aware of. That's something to think about. Now I'm going to lay awake thinking about that at night, too.

Becky: One more thing to worry about.

Jeff: One more thing. I can't believe how fast this time has gone. I've thoroughly enjoyed listening to you and the information you have. I'd love to have you back at a later date to talk about all the other things that you're working on. Small hive beetles, one of them, that I'd like to discuss a little bit further. If we may beg to have you come back at a later date, and we'll talk a little bit more.

Lewis: Absolutely. Look forward to it.

Becky: Thanks so much, Lewis.

Lewis: All right. Thank you both.

[music]

Jeff: I thought I had a lot to worry about before we started talking about the port of Olympia and the threat of all those container ships. I don't know, Becky.

Becky: He delivered it in such a calm voice that, luckily, it was so calm you didn't panic and start establishing a quarantine around your apiary. It's something to think about, isn't it?

Jeff: Never considered it. Never considered it.

Becky: I think that it was such a good conversation to not only learn about an ongoing active potential eradication and then the subsequent scientific research that needs to be done in order to understand and better implement it. Then also, maybe put ourselves on guard and make sure that we're not going to be part of the next potential pest or pathogen invasion.

Jeff: I'm glad we have researchers like Lewis and all the other guests we've had on that give us this great perspective and have an understanding that will help keep us all out of trouble and bees healthy.

Becky: Well said.

Jeff: Well, that about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to follow us and rate us five stars on Apple Podcast or wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you like. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the Reviews tab along the top of any webpage.

We want to thank Better Bee and our regular longtime sponsors, Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and Northern Bee Books for their generous support. Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank you, the Beekeeping Today Podcast listener, for joining us on this show. Feel free to leave us questions and comments on our website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

[00:51:33] [END OF AUDIO]