Regeneron STS Finalist, Atreya Manaswi - SHB (339)

339 - Regeneron STS Finalist, Atreya Manaswi - SHB

Jason Davis: Hi, this is Jason Davis of Homer, Alaska. I keep 30 hives here in Homer, and I use the beautiful wildflower honey that they produce to make meads at my shop, Sweetgale Meadworks & Cider House. Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast.

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Jeff Ott: Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast presented by Betterbee, 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 Betterbee 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, thanks, Jason Davis, for that wonderful from up in Homer, Alaska. That's our first Alaska listener opener.

Becky: First of all, I love that there are beekeepers in Alaska.

Jeff: Oh, yes.

Becky: We should talk to somebody about beekeeping in Alaska. Let's put that on our to-do list.

Jeff: Hey, Jason, give us a call.

[laughter]

Becky: Yes. Hey, Jason, after that. You've got work to do. You're going to take care of that map, aren't you?

Jeff: Absolutely, yes. If people haven't checked out our Listener Opener Map on our website, you can do so. It's under Additional Resources, and it's under a list there. Check it out. Look at all the states in the United States, all the countries around the world, provinces in Canada, where we have listeners who have sent in an opener. Where it's yellow or honey-golden, then that state or country has been represented. If it's blank, we are looking for openers from that country.

Becky: I would just like to say, we've got some listeners in Singapore, so I think we need an opener from Singapore. I'm just going to call that out.

Jeff: Please do that. If you're in Singapore right now listening to this message, send us an opening. We'll get you on the podcast. [chuckles]

Becky: Excellent.

Jeff: Hey, Becky, how's your spring going?

Becky: I'm having so much fun introducing queens into my colonies. I just introduced four Caucasian queens into four different colonies. Actually, I had to rush back from the apiary to get here today because I had to release-- I always put them in a cage and then release them in a couple of days, so I could see they're welcome into the colony. I want to see them march out of that cage and get welcomed into their new home. How's your spring going, Jeff?

Jeff: Well, the spring's crazy in so many different levels. We're in the middle of moving. We're in a temporary apartment. Basically, we're sitting here side-by-side, almost. You'll hear Frisco in the background for the last couple of episodes. It's all good. We're managing through that. Earlier this spring, I had to move the bees. My buddy Paul and I moved the bees from one yard to another, got them all set up.

It's a new experience because now no longer are the bees right out my backyard. I have to drive for 20 minutes, which is fine. Part of this process, I no longer have a barn to store all of my equipment. What I did was I set up extra stands in the new bee yard and just set up all my empty bee equipment. It was really fun on my sensors to see that, "Oh, no, I have a swarm." I could see the weight go down, the temperature go up, the weight go down. A year ago, I would've been running out the back hitting a pan or-- [chuckles]

Becky: Trying to find them.

Jeff: With my Colorado Bee Vac in hand, trying to chase down these bee swarms. These bees- I felt so smart- they went right into my empty equipment. I had two swarms take up residence in empty equipment. I only registered two swarms on my bee sensor, so it's like, "What are the odds?" I should go buy a lottery ticket.

Becky: I know. Everybody wants to know how you did that. You didn't use a swarm lure or anything like that?

Jeff: No, [chuckles] no.

Becky: It was a random assortment of equipment?

Jeff: Well, they were set up just as a regular hive. I use 8-frame equipment, and they all had 8 frames of drawn comb. It was nice. I felt successful that day. I didn't even lift a finger. I guess I would recommend to anybody if you have empty equipment this time of year or during the swarming time of year, there's no harm setting it up and leaving it outside. Later in the season, I don't know if I'd recommend it, but right now, when there's scout bees all over the place, yes.

Becky: If it's a window where it's okay. I've had a yard where- I think I mentioned last year- I had to move the bees out because of a bear. I had somebody else's swarms move into my stored equipment there, but they moved in underneath the bottom board. I had a high stand. It was just a nice little opening that they moved in and out of. I was there getting equipment, and I'm like, "That's--" I actually had one move above and one move below. They were using the same colony that I saw them coming and going from the ground, basically.

I'm like, "Honey bees are not ground-nesting bees. What is going on?" The queen missed her entrance and went under, and they ended up just building combs. I ended up taking that bottom board and flipping it over. All the comb went just fine. It turned over, and then I put a box over that. Then I just built a colony over it. Anyway, it was pretty cool.

Jeff: There's a solid bottom board?

Becky: It was a solid bottom board, yes.

Jeff: It's one of those reversible bottom boards with the three-quarter on one side and a three-eighths on the other? You can't remember the dimensions?

Becky: I don't know the dimensions. There's basically a right way and a wrong way, though. Some people flip it for mice. It worked out really well.

Jeff: That's cool.

Becky: I ended up moving them to a new yard and everything. I don't know, There's just something special. Actually, at my house here, I have equipment set up. I don't have bees here. If anybody has a swarm in the neighborhood, those girls are welcome to find a place in some of my equipment. I want to know your secret, exactly what they look like. How many boxes?

Jeff: The one was a single-deep with a cover and top.

Becky: Just a single?

Jeff: Yes, and the other an 8-frame at that.

Becky: Wow.

Jeff: Take that Mr. Whoever that it has to be exactly a 10-frame deep. No, I'm just-- Then the other one, though, I had four deep stacked. [chuckles] They went in the bottom of the four deep, so now I've got to split that up somehow. Something for a different day.

We have a very interesting guest today. I'm looking forward to getting him on here. I know he's out in the green room. We have another Regeneron Science Talent Search student who has submitted some research that he's done, and this time it's on small hive beetle. I'm looking forward to talking to him, how he used artificial intelligence to track and, I don't know, some solution for preventing small hive beetle, so this ought to be interesting. He's in high school, so I'm ready to be intimidated. [chuckling] We'll be talking to Atreya right after these messages from our sponsors.

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Jeff: Hey, everybody, welcome back. Sitting around this great big virtual Beekeeping Today Podcast table, stretching all the way from Orlando, Florida, stopping off in Saint Paul, Minnesota and out here just south of Seattle in Olympia, Washington, we are happy to welcome Science Talent Search award-winning Atreya Manaswi. Atreya, welcome to the show.

Atreya Manaswi: Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here.

Becky: We're happy to have you here. We're happy to learn today, too.

Jeff: For the last several years, we've welcomed on high school students who participated in the Regeneron Science Talent Search who have presented science projects focusing on anything related with the honeybees. You are one of this year's winners. You looked at the small hive beetle. This is going to be a fun conversation to have someone who's still in high school who's working with AI and all of this. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background with bees. When did you get your first honeybee hive?

Atreya: It's quite a story and something that I've been working on for a couple years, as you were talking about. It all really goes back to a story that started six years ago. It was with a friend and his grandfather. We went on a short fishing trip. My friend's grandfather basically started narrating how decades ago, he would get dozens of barrels of honey. He was showing us printed pictures of these supers stacked on top of supers, stacked on top of supers. This was just mind-blowing to us seeing these pictures.

Then he showed us recent photos and also took us into the hives and showed us that there were only a couple supers on top of each brood box. Then opened them up and showed us some of the damage that had been done by pests, including the beetle that I ended up working on later. Just seeing all of this in real life was really impactful to me. Before this, I'd taken life science classes in middle school, and keep in mind I was 12 years old at the time with my friends, so we were very young, first exposure to anything like this. We zipped up in the suits, smelled the smoke, and opened up the hives. It was just a surreal experience. Seeing all of that was eye-opening for me.

Then I went home and looked into the stuff that he was talking about. Seeing that in the US, beekeepers are losing anywhere from 50, 60 to even 80 or 90% of their hives over winter. He was losing dozens of hives each year as well. Just seeing this, I wanted to do something to help him. The first step of this whole journey was actually a conference at the University of Florida, which is called Bee College, and this is where everything took off. It's a two-day conference over the weekend. I went to the conference and met a professor there who was an expert in honeybees. His name is Dr. Ellis.

I didn't notice at the time, but I attended a lecture that he was having on honeybee anatomy and physiology. Just went up to him afterwards with a couple questions. To my surprise, he resonated with me. He said that he too, at a young age got started in this world of entomology and research doing science fairs in middle school, just like I wanted to do and get involved. He really sympathized with that. I got to explore his lab a couple weeks after that and got started on our project that summer on honeybee nutrition, which was basically looking at pollen patties and bees' preference towards them.

At the time pollen patties were being used in the industry, but people weren't really sure, first off, which ones the bees liked the most, and then whether they were actually liking them, like actually eating them and consuming them. I was working under a master's student at the time, Emily Noordyke. She was looking at staining these pollen patties and then seeing where the residue of these would go. I remember they were talking about stories in the labs where there would be flowers and fields, and sometimes people's windshields on their cars with different colors of pollen patties with [crosstalk] very funny.

[laughter]

That was my first experience with bees in the lab. I remember that vividly. That was very, very cool. Then, after that, I got connected by Dr. Ellis with my current mentor at the USDA. Dr Stahl, who's taught me so much. I'm so grateful to him, wouldn't be here today without him. I worked with him on small hive beetles and their control, which is what I presented at STS. That project spanned the course of over four years, where I was basically working on capturing those small hive beetles using organic attractants. I developed something very cool at the end, which was a bait that's developed based on the volatile composition of beer.

We created that in the lab after identifying that beer was the most attractive compound to those beetles. Then created this 3D-printed trap that uses some AI to predict future infestation levels.

Jeff: I have to interrupt you, Atreya.

Becky: Yes, there's an age problem, isn't there?

Jeff: Yes, I was going to say, how did you go into the convenience store and convince the clerk, "Yes, the six-pack is really for my honeybees and is an attractant for the small hive beetle"?

Atreya: Paperwork on paperwork, on paperwork, right? [laughter] That's what these competitions [crosstalk] are about. These other kids are doing stuff with maybe fruit flies and looking at stuff in the lab. The amount of paperwork that I had, I remember one year, 40, 50 pages of paperwork talking about the use of these controlled substances; what I'm actually using them for and how an adult is buying all of this. I can't tell you how much I went through each year regarding that. An adult was handling it at all times.

Jeff: I'll take your word for it.

Becky: Oh my gosh.

Jeff: I still would have loved seeing the convenience store clerk's face.

Atreya: My mom was super, super instrumental and super helpful in all of this. The year that I started, this was actually the year during COVID. Lab access was limited. You can imagine I had all those samples from the field. I was using these beetle blaster traps and they get messy. You have to count this stuff at home. You can imagine, I had to find somewhere to do this at home. The best spot, in my head, was my mom's kitchen. I makeshifted it into a lab and we were counting sometimes live beetles in there that can also, if you didn't know, fly for miles on end. Sometimes they would get loose.

My mom actually has very fond memories and me and my brother also remember taking fish nets and catching these beetles in our house. We obviously didn't get all of them, so there may still be some loose beetles, but that was definitely a core memory in the first couple of years.

Jeff: Becky, you're a PhD. How much research actually gets done in kitchens at someone's home?

Becky: It depends upon if COVID is happening or not. I think microscopes were moved home to people's kitchens during COVID. I think I remember hearing about that at the University of Minnesota. Not a lot, though. Not a lot. There's a reason why you wanted to keep those insects in the lab.

Jeff: You attributed this to your mentor at the USDA on the small hive beetle, but what made you interested in the small hive beetle as opposed to another pest of the honeybee?

Atreya: It was really seeing my friend's grandfather talk about how these beetles would actually cause spoils in the honey. When they reproduce very quickly, the larvae especially like to defecate everywhere in the hive. There's this yeast that's intimately associated with their feces. It's called Kodamaea ohmeri, K. ohmeri. When that yeast starts breaking stuff down, it obviously renders that honey unsuitable for consumption.

Like I was talking about earlier, he was talking about how he was just losing these barrels of honey. Part of that was due to the beetles. He actually opened up one of the hives and showed us some of the damage, the larvae that were crawling around. That was just a very disgusting, gnarly sight to see as a kid. Seeing that, I think it just piqued my interest and I wanted to do something to help somebody who was directly in front of me and facing a problem that I was seeing. I think that's where that came in. I had an amazing mentor who was already working on this. I really learned a lot from him about it. I'm super grateful and I learned a lot.

Jeff: Not every region in the country has small hive beetle. Do you know how big of a population of small hive beetle needs to be in a colony before it starts ruining crops of honey or till you just going to give up, throw your hands up in the air?

Atreya: There's actually no single answer to that. I think the better way, or maybe the more sound weight to approach it might be looking at the hive's strength generally because we can have very strong hives that also have a large number of beetles. I've seen this too, and they do just fine. It's really these beetles being a secondary indicator or a secondary threat, meaning that they are definitely dangerous, but they're definitely exponentially more dangerous to the hives that are already weakened by things like varroa, malnutrition, poor management practices, or by overuse of pesticides and weak immunity.

Once the hive is already weak, it could be a couple dozen beetles that reproduce very quickly. Again, they can reproduce in weeks. The weaker the hive, generally you see the faster it dies if there's no action taken.

Becky: It can be really detrimental if you pull your honey supers and you have maybe one in there and they start laying eggs and you don't extract your honey fast enough. It can mess up your crop.

Jeff: You pull your honey, you want to make sure you extract it quickly, is what you're saying?

Becky: Yes. In Minnesota, it's more of a honey pest than a colony pest because we don't see a lot of colonies get taken down by hive beetles. What you want to do usually is stack everything up so nothing can get into it. Instead, with hive beetles, we offset it so that they don't have a good environment to reproduce, and hopefully get them into a dry room. It's not a lot to cause that damage.

Atreya, is it a bait then, you have for these traps, and is it going to be commercially available?

Atreya: That's the plan. Basically, what it looks like right now is this bait that's used to go inside the beetle blaster traps. That bait just sits in that beetle blaster trap and these beetle blaster traps are generally going the top of the hive and the supers, which is where most of the beetles like to roam around. What's actually being worked on is, instead of using those beetle blaster traps, creating a 3D-printed trap.

This 3D-printed trap is reusable. If you've ever used those beetle blaster traps, they're one-and-done. You put the bait in and then you toss it, generally. Sometimes it can even get very hard to see what's going on inside the trap. A lot of the times, since the slits are on the top, bees will either cover it with some propolis, maybe, or deposit lots of debris inside the trap. That also makes it very hard to count what actually happened in the trap. Basically, creating that 3D-printed trap was what I did for this SDS project.

That trap has slits on the side of it, firstly. It also has these LED sensors that are around each entrance, basically. What those do is basically have a beam of light. Whenever that beam is broken, it registers the count. You basically have an automated reusable trap instead of something that's just a one-and-done that's creating material waste, you don't know what's going on inside of it, sort of a black box. That was the goal with that 3D-printed IoT trap.

Then the goal with the algorithm was basically to take that number of beetles that's showing up inside your trap, the stuff that's being automated. Then take that and the count. Then the hive's strength from one to five, which a beekeeper would grade. Then, predict the future infestation levels inside the hive. Basically, saying you're going to see this many beetles inside the trap the following week. Of course, this is still a prototype, but the whole goal with this is basically to forecast the hive's infestation is going to develop in this way based on these initial conditions. A beekeeper should take X, Y, Z protocols into account to try and save the hive or improve its health, and basically reduce the small hive beetle population.

That was the whole goal with that. It was tested in the field, it was very successful. It had high accuracies, above 99% for the automation. The algorithm was also over 94% accurate. Basically, those two input factors were able to explain a lot of the output. It did very well. With more testing, I think the bait is already good. It could be refined. Definitely has potential for that.

Becky: Just to be really clear, you're not telling people to open up a can of beer and put it in a super. We don't want anybody to put beer in their colonies right now. Right?

Atreya: Absolutely not.

Becky: [laughs] This is refined.

Atreya: In the first year, actually, what I was doing is taking those beetle blaster traps and putting Miller High Life beer, which people say is not a great beer. I think it's called the champagne of beers. From what I've heard, at least from talking with beekeepers, they say they do not like the beer. They always rejoice in saying that that's the beer that they don't use. Now they can use that in the colonies. That was what would go inside the beetle blaster traps. If it's hot, especially when the beetles do well, it can evaporate. What you could do is add 25% mineral oil or vegetable oil at the top just to serve as a coating to prevent some of the evaporation. It's really the volatiles from the beer that are attractive.

As you may know as well, beer is like 90, 95% water. It's very diluted. The hops, the malts, and the yeast are what really make it attractive. In the following year, the whole goal was to concentrate it and make a better version of the beer, which is the bait.

Becky: It's not a simple process to get something approved to go into a colony while the bees are making honey. Are you working on that right now?

Atreya: Yes, that is definitely a concern. Actually related to that, I think there's only one EPA-approved in-hive pesticide, which is coumaphos. A lot of them are for outside the colony to use as drenches, such as permethrin. That is definitely something that would need to be investigated if it is used inside the trap. I haven't looked into that too much as of yet, in regards to the safety concerns with approvals. What I can tell you is that those four agents that are being used inside the blend are all generally recognized as safe by the FDA, which is GRAS. That's what they fall under.

One of those compounds is actually used as banana flavoring in baking products. They're not generally toxic. They are also present in very low doses. You put about 10 milliliters of the solution in the hive, and those agents only compose about 1.5% of that 10 milliliters. They are volatile, but there's a very low risk. I don't think there would be any major issues with that, looking forward.

Jeff: The bait trap has the LED sensors on it that count the mites as they come in. Then is there basically a Bluetooth?

Becky: They're beetles.

Jeff: What's that?

Becky: You called them mites.

Jeff: Oh, did I?

Becky: We're so used to talking about varroa.

Jeff: Yes, I know. I won't delete that on the show. I'll just leave that in. The beetles, as they go into the trap, trigger the sensor, and then is there a Bluetooth device that the beekeeper uses to scan the device?

Atreya: Yes. The way it'll work is basically the counts are all registered by this Raspberry Pi, which is a little computer thing. Basically, that's what stores all the stuff. Then this Raspberry Pi is connected to a power source and then a Wi-Fi router. It's all powered by solar. Through the Wi-Fi, basically, you can interface your phone with the Pi and then get all the data. It's very easy to get all that data. You get it in seconds. Then it's just all on a spreadsheet and you can see everything, break down, then all the totals as well, which is very neat.

The eventual goal for this probably would to be having something that runs off 2G. Something that even remotely, when you're miles and miles away, you could get a signal for, such as, "Oh, the trap has accumulated 50 beetles now. You noted that this hive was a weak hive, so this is a problem. You need to come check this out." That sort of thing. SMS notifications. As of now, yes, it uses Wi-Fi for all that data transmission.

Becky: You're establishing field thresholds based upon the beekeeper's assessment of how strong their colony is. Basically, what you're saying is that you've worked on a count that is harmful to the colony if it is not strong enough. Are people going to have to do this math themselves or are you putting in your colony rating, and then your count is going to give that beekeeper an answer?

Atreya: That's a good question. That's actually something I'm going to work on with the forecasting. Right now, strictly speaking, the algorithm is just giving you the future number. It's not doing any forecasting yet. The trickier job is looking at the data, looking at the patterns, and then actually seeing what I was working on training this model. Because, with all these AI models, the quality and the amount of data that you give the model will dictate how well the model does in the real world. I think the goal would be looking at that past data or maybe collecting new data and then seeing what is that threshold when the hive actually starts to crumble, when it starts to die, and what is the strength of the hive? What are the hive's different metrics for when you can establish a threshold and say, "At this threshold for this week, this hive is actually going to do poorly."

I think that's interesting. There's not a lot of data in the literature on that, from what I've read and what I've seen. I was trying to do a deep dive when I was working on this project originally. There's actually no other projects I could find that have large data sets with beetles and with prediction. There's lots of other pests that people have modeled using these deep imaging and IoT traps where they have these sorts of things outside the hive or outside whatever they're looking at. Then they're monitoring it. For beetles, there is no data on that. Hopefully, in the future, I think in a year or so, could work on a threshold.

Becky: Just to do a deeper dive. If you're counting how many are going into the trap, you still need to correlate that to potentially how many are in the colony. In order to know how many are in the colony, you got to close them up, kill them, and count them, right? It's a big project.

Atreya: I remember now, I was reading some literature on that. With mites, you can shake them in a sugar thing or you can use, I don't know if it's patrol or what it is, the liquid--

Becky: Alcohol wash.

Atreya: Alcohol, yes. You can do that and then estimate the number with the frames and everything. For beetles, it's very difficult to do that. The only thing that people have done in literature is, like you said, you have to dissect the whole hive and you have to kill the hive to estimate. I think people have even done that and they haven't found any correlations. It's very difficult. The only thing that is certain is the more number of beetles that you're seeing in the trap, the more you have in the hive. It's very difficult to create a formula like you can for varroa.

Jeff: Hey, let's take this opportunity for a quick break and we'll be right back with our talk with Atreya.

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Jeff: Hey, everybody. Welcome back. We're sitting here talking with Atreya Manaswi. Atreya, you've been talking to us about your research that you've been doing. Just mind-blowing, and because I definitely was not anywhere near doing what you're doing at my senior year in high school, that's for sure. Do you have other high school students helping you with some of this research? Is this your Saturday with your friends is going out and counting small hive beetles? How do you get people to do-- Oh, because you have the beer.

[laughter]

I understand. I'm starting to put it together.

Becky: He's going to have to fill out more paperwork if you keep bringing that up.

Jeff: I know. I'm teasing him, I shouldn't do that. Do you have other students helping you?

Atreya: I have been doing this project on my own with my mentor at the USDA, but it has rubbed off a little bit on somebody very close to me. My brother has actually been doing honeybee research as well for the past two years. He's very passionate about it, too. He's working on an entirely different problem of his own. This is the varroa mite.

He's actually been investigating varroa and looking at different treatments that can be done using carbon dioxide sprays inside the hive that are lethal to the varroa mites, but not lethal at all to honeybees. Essentially being able to treat the hive in less than a minute. Basically, knock down all of the varroa to the bottom of the hive and leave the bees unscathed.

Jeff: I look forward to hearing more about his research. I have to ask at this point, your parents, do they help you with your bees? Do they have a background with bees at all? You and your brother playing with bees every weekend, I would think that you'd have immediate family history with honeybees.

Atreya: Actually, no. My parents do have science background, but absolutely nothing to do with bees. It all started with this generation. Me and my brother are first in the family to be working on this.

Jeff: Well, kudos to your parents for supporting you and your brother for doing this. It's quite an undertaking.

Becky: You're doing more than just honeybee research, though. You have written a book, correct? Could you tell us about the book that you wrote and why you wrote it? I think why you wrote it is pretty interesting.

Atreya: Yes. I worked on that at the beginning of high school when I was going into this, and I realized when I started out why I was actually doing this and what caused me to be interested. Also, the fact that not enough people know about this. I was talking to a couple of homeschooled groups and telling them about bees and maybe a little bit of their importance, the fact that they're pollinators. Most people know that, but most people don't know about what's happening to their populations, to their numbers, and maybe how they can help.

When thinking about how I got inspired by a story, I wanted to inspire others. I wrote this book titled The BeeStory. It basically details the life cycle of bees, what's currently happening with them, and basically how kids and youth can get involved in this problem and maybe do something about it. Maybe not just themselves, but maybe to support others who are involved in this, such as beekeepers.

That was really the whole motivation behind this. It's done very well. I've had teachers who have purchased this book and shared it with their kids, their grandkids, and they seem to love it. I've also been able to read it at schools and libraries, where kids love the pictures, and it is primarily a picture book. It's been very, very rewarding seeing how I've been able to give back, in a way, through that book. I really enjoy reading that and sharing that with others.

Jeff: Where can people find your book?

Atreya: It's available on Amazon.

Jeff: We'll have links for your book in our show notes on the website.

Becky: You're not just talking about bees to kids, are you? You've talked to adults about bees, right?

Atreya: Yes, I've gotten to share this research specifically and how it can actually be applied in a real setting. The cool thing is I've been able to do this research with my mentors at the USDA and also UF, but being able to practically share how beekeepers in the field, who are either hobbyists or even commercial, could actually learn something, or maybe even apply some of this stuff into their practices.

Being able to speak to farmers and beekeepers at these clubs across different states is really, really cool, and seeing their feedback, because they always have something good to say or just critical feedback. That's really helpful to me, and just getting experience speaking to them. I always really enjoy that, and I think that's one of the most rewarding parts of this whole thing.

Jeff: We've covered so much ground, and I feel like we've only touched the surface in this short period of time. Is there anything we haven't touched on that you really want our beekeeping listeners to know about?

Becky: This isn't a trick question, Atreya.

[laughter]

Atreya: I'm trying to think of what we haven't talked about.

Becky: Give us a little bit about your social activism. You've been outspoken as far as supporting not just bees, but the climate.

Atreya: I have just started, basically in 9th grade, with an invitation for a fireside chat. It's called the Global Youth Biodiversity Network. It was just an Instagram Live. It was the first time, actually one of the first speaking opportunities I ever got. I was super nervous. I was glad I was hiding behind the screen for that first call. It helped me build up some confidence. I got to share that. Then got some further invitations in the future to different in-person events. I got to go to New York, some in Italy, recently in Azerbaijan, in Baku.

These events have just been really, really cool to meet others who are in the same space and the broader climate space and agriculture, and doing cool work of their own. A lot of these events bring together cool youth. I've seen other youth doing grassroots work in their homes and their regions and working on all sorts of things, which has been really, really cool. I've been in touch with a lot of them still. Also meeting people in the industry through different nonprofits, government officials. That's been really cool. Not only getting to share my work but also to hear about the cool stuff that other people are doing.

Becky: One more, you're headed to college next year. Can you tell us where you're going and what you're going to study?

Atreya: Yes. I am going to Yale in the fall, which is super exciting. I just got back. Actually, it's a month now. It did not feel like a month ago. We had visiting days in late April. We got to go for two, three days and stay overnight with current students. It's called Bulldog Days. It was an amazing experience. I got to stay with some friends that I had. We had five people in one dorm, which was supposed to host two people. We had three people sleeping on the floor. We would drag up the couch every night, and we were sleeping on that. Got like two hours of sleep every night, but made a lot of good friends and had a lot of good memories.

Hopefully, I get to sleep more in college because I've not slept enough throughout high school through the summer. I'm hoping to make up a lot of that. Senior year has been really, really good, and I'm really excited for the fall. I'm thinking about possibly doing something related to computational biology, maybe environmental biology, and maybe even neuroscience. There's a lot of cool different programs they have. You can also do certificates, which are like minors. I'm still looking into that, but super excited.

Jeff: It sounds like you're not going to have any trouble enjoying college or anything else in between. It's been a great honor to talk to you and learn more about your research. I look forward to exploring your website and keeping track of you.

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Atreya: Thank you so much. It was really good speaking with you guys.

Becky: Tell your brother we're looking forward to talking to him someday, too.

Atreya: [chuckles] I will.

Jeff: I am always so excited to talk to these young people about the research that they're doing. It's amazing. It's amazing.

Becky: It's truly something where he has a career in science, and he's probably just turned 19 and not a college freshman yet. It says a lot about Regeneron and their search for science talent, and how they actually are creating this environment where these kids are getting this great experience, and they're contributing to different fields, including we've talked to so many who are helping beekeepers. I just love it.

Jeff: We didn't really say he was a top 40 finalist in 2025.

Becky: Which is such a prestigious award to be in that top 40. He wins $25,000 to help with college.

Jeff: That's fantastic.

Becky: Isn't it? It's very impressive. Boy, he deserved it.

Jeff: Kudos to you, Atreya. I look forward to reading more about your research. Hopefully, it's picked up everywhere, and it helps beekeepers.

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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 Podcasts 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 Betterbee 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.

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[00:40:48] [END OF AUDIO]