Tropilaelaps and Varroa Update with Dr. Samuel Ramsey (331)

330 - Tropilaelaps and Varroa Update with Dr. Samuel Ramsey

Rainier Eich: Hello, my name is Rainier Eich. I'm a beekeeper from Maine who has 28 colonies. Welcome to the Beekeeping Today Podcast.

[music]

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 who 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.

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You can find it all at www.beekeepingtoday.com. Thanks, Rainier for that great opening up there in Maine. I think that's our first main opener, Becky, and that was from the floor of North American Honeybee Expo in January.

Becky: I wonder if his 28 colonies are going to become 40, 56 colonies. I can hardly do math today. It took me a minute.

Jeff: Don't ask me to do math. Oh, yes, maybe he'll let us know. Rainier, how your colony's doing. It's a good time of year.

Becky: It's divide time. Is actually here close to divide time.

Jeff: Divide time or catch swarm times.

Becky: Oh, yes. The seasons come close to each other.

Jeff: Yes, they do. One of these days we're going to have to have a special episode on the Demaree. How do you pronounce that?

Becky: It's funny because I call it Demaree. I actually just gave a talk in Wisconsin, and she raised her hand and she's like, "It's Demaree," but I've looked it up and it depends upon which pronunciation you want to pick. The good news is there are many correct ways to say Demaree or Demaree.

Jeff: Pillow, pillow, tomato, tomato.

Becky: Exactly. It's Demaree, Demaree, Demaree. It's literally a system that is so nicely complicated that as many different ways as you can pronounce it, you can use it to either divide or temporarily prevent a swarm and then recombine your colonies. It has a lot of flexibility in its application. Yes, that'd be fun to talk about.

Jeff: I would like to talk about it because there is so many different ways. There are several videos on YouTube about doing it. They're all similar, but they're different enough that it'd be fun to hear. You like it a lot, so it'd be interested to hear.

Becky: I know a lot of beekeepers who use it in bigger operations.

Jeff: Demaree, Demaree. Anyways, that's a good springtime topic. Maybe we can do it in a short or have a special episode. Speaking of shorts, hopefully listeners have heard some of the shorts we've produced. We've tried to explore the use of doing those quick 15, 20 minute episodes. We started them back in February, I believe.

Becky: February, long time ago now.

Jeff: Seems like it.

Becky: Also, I just want to bring up, we need to make sure people who have subscribed to the newsletter check their junk folder for the newsletter because I have seen a few people keep trying to subscribe, meaning they don't think they're hearing from us, but their names are already on our list. If you are a subscriber and you're not hearing from us, please check that spam or junk folder and take us out of there right now.

Jeff: You produce the newsletter every Monday. It comes out shortly after our Beekeeping Today Podcastepisode. That's a nice piece. I hope folks are reading it.

Becky: I think it's a nice summary of everything that beekeeping today and honey bee obscura are doing so that you can forward it to a beekeeping friend if you'd like and share some good information.

Jeff: It's springtime. Besides taking care of your quickly expanding and growing colonies, what is one of your favorite springtime activities that you look forward to?

Becky: Beekeeping wise or non beekeeping wise because of--

Jeff: Beekeeping-wise.

Becky: I'm like, "Don't make me say I have any other hobbies because I don't." Honestly, let's see. I'm a big fan of a growing colony. What I tried to do last year and it worked is try to catch some of that dandelion nectar. I like to start the honey season sooner than usual. I did it last year and hopefully it'll be the same and I'll be able to get some early season nectar.

Jeff: You can try those hogg halfcombs that you got in January.

Becky: Those are going on my strongest colony. Even though they're really set up so you don't have to have an overstimulated, ready to swarm colony in order to get the comb honey, but I'm still going to put that on a nice, strong colony and see what happens. I'm excited about that.

Jeff: We look forward to hearing reports on those. Looks exciting. They were in the booth next to us speaking at NAHBE. It was fun to watch them all be sold and him explain it and it was just like, wow. That would be fun.

Becky: I'm excited. They're in my kitchen right now. They'll be going out to a colony soon.

Jeff: This spring for me has been dominated by our household move. We're moving from where we've lived for 20-some years, 21 years. Then we have to temporarily live at another place for four months or so while our new places being renovated. I tell you, it's disrupting.

The worst part about it is I have to move the bees. I will be happy to talk about moving bees. I haven't done it for several years. Last time I moved many colonies was in Colorado. I plan to do it smarter. I think I've told you about my very first experience moving bees in Ohio when I pounded hive staples in the side of the colony and that was not well received. They did not like that.

Becky: It's always nice to have a partner if you're moving bees. I hope your friend Paul is going to help you. I'm just going to shout that out right now. Paul, hopefully you're going to help Jeff move his bees in the middle of the night because that's the best time to move them.

Jeff: It's going to be the first and last time he helps me move bees. I'm sure.

Becky: It can be a good experience. If you have temperature concerns where it's too warm, then you have to worry about the bees overheating. If they're heavy, then you have to worry about actually physically lifting them. Do you have a hive mover or is that you? Is that Paul?

Jeff: Yes.

Becky: Because they sell these lovely metal contraptions where you can pick them up and move them with two people pretty easily.

Jeff: The biggest challenge is going to be just the site prep of the new location. Just all it takes is time and we all have plenty of that.

Becky: Of course.

Jeff: Hey, I'm looking forward to our guest today. It's a return visit from Dr. Sam Ramsey from University of Boulder now. He's just gotten back from a trip to Thailand. We'll be talking to him about tropilaelaps, varroa, and anything else he's discovered.

Becky: I am really looking forward to an update too. Let's talk to Sammy.

Jeff: We will, right after these words from our sponsors. We'll be right back.

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Jeff: Hey everybody, welcome back. Sitting around this great big virtual Beekeeping Today Podcast table with Becky and me is Dr. Samuel Ramsey. Sammy, welcome back to the show.

Sammy: Hey, it's great to be back.

Becky: We're so happy to have you here. I can't believe it's been over a year.

Sammy: I know. I can't either. It's been a pretty busy one too.

Jeff: 2023 was the last time you were on. It's been a minute as they say.

Sammy: It has been a minute.

Jeff: I think this is the sixth time you've been on the show, on the podcast.

Sammy: Oh, okay, so we are counting. All right.

Jeff: Plus the two holiday replays we did way back when.

Sammy: I love getting to do this thing. Beekeeping Today has a very broad reach. I was talking to some beekeepers from Australia, one of which is a volunteer on our international trips. She's like, "Oh, yes. I was listening to your Beekeeping Today Podcast episode. I learned this, this, this, and this. Love it. Love the reach."

Jeff: There you go. Australia is our number three or four, depending on the month, top downloads.

Sammy: Got you.

Jeff: Aloha to all of our friends in Australia.

Sammy: Hey, down under.

Jeff: Sammy, if you would for the new beekeepers or new to beekeeping this season who may not know who you are, can you please introduce yourself and where you are?

Sammy: For sure. Hey, everybody. I'm Dr. Sammy, your friendly neighborhood entomologist. I am, I guess, one of these people in the the beekeeping bee research world who has made a name for himself as a science communicator. I've spent a lot of time giving presentations and talking to beekeepers about the dreaded varroa mites.

My research as a graduate student was about how these mites actually impact the bees, trying to better understand what exactly they're doing, their capacity to attack the bees. We understood a lot about it, but there were some gaps in our knowledge. It was a really fun process of thinking that, "Maybe they're feeding on the bees blood, recognizing that the liver is the key feature that they are impacting in the bee's body." It's been an entire journey since then and a wild ride.

I have loved it because that gave me the opportunity to get in front of a lot of beekeepers, talk about these subjects that get me really excited. I've been passionate about entomology since I was seven. It's just been such a great community because beekeepers want to know more about how to protect their bees, how to keep them healthy. I want to ramble about how cool insects are, so it's been a match made in heaven.

Jeff: You moved from Maryland to Colorado, Boulder.

Sammy: Correct. I moved at the end of 2022, started teaching immediately. I teach insect biology and science communication. That's been really exciting to have the opportunity to craft courses and really get to mold how these next mind of researchers, these next group of researchers how they're going to think through a lot of these scientific subjects, and to get the opportunity to expose them to international research because it changes how you think about the world to have the ability to conduct research in other countries and to see how much broader the questions are that you can ask.

I am the endowed assistant professor of entomology at the University of Colorado Boulder, which is just such-- Every time I say it, it still feels crazy to me. I'm a professor, I have my own lab. I have several students now, five students, a postdoc, two undergraduates, lab tech, lab manager, apiary manager, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Becky: Oh my gosh.

Jeff: Apologies to anybody you accidentally forgot about. How are you liking the Boulder area?

Sammy: Boulder is wonderful. I love the Boulder area. I will always have a special place in my heart for the Maryland, DC, Virginia area, just because I grew up there, and the diversity, if I'm still allowed to say that word, is that still legal? Can I say that?

Jeff: We haven't taken it out of our language here.

Sammy: Got it. Appreciate it very much.

Jeff: We haven't gotten that memo.

Sammy: I absolutely love the diversity in that region of the country. You can get any kind of food you want. You get to interact with so many different kinds of people from so many different backgrounds, and that molds your mind in a very specific way. I think it's great, I will not belabor that point. Here in Colorado, there is a very pronounced difference here.

There's less diversity, hopefully, that's changing in some ways. It looks like Coach Prime showing up, and I hope maybe me showing up a little bit, but probably mostly Coach Prime, has also been hoping to expand out the the reach for the University of Colorado Boulder to more minority individuals who are interested in coming to this institution as well, which has been really exciting to see.

Colorado is just one of the most gorgeous places I've ever seen in my life. Such a great place to bike, and hike, and run. There are cool bugs. It's just really, really dry.

Jeff: Oh, very dry. I will tell you just a pro tip here, stay away from the Rio Grande or the Rio. The margaritas are really strong. I think there's a two margarita limit. I can't remember. I might have the name of the restaurant wrong, so that's probably just as well anyways.

Sammy: Somebody will correct you in the comments. Do podcasts have comments?

Jeff: Yes, you see comments all time.

Sammy: There you go.

Jeff: We encourage that, in fact.

Becky: Nice ones. We encouraged the nice comments.

Jeff: You take a yearly trip. It seems like a yearly trip now to Thailand.

Sammy: It started off as a yearly trip to Thailand. That has expanded dramatically because, one, I had that sweet, sweet startup money that allowed me to feel very-- It allowed me to go for very ambitious goals. Instead of the goal that I originally had of just studying certain elements of one specific species of tropilaelaps mite, I recognized there are four species of tropilaelaps mites, and at least nine species of honeybees, and I would like to learn about all of them.

I started something called the Honey Bee-nome Initiative or the Honey Bee-nome Project ,where I've been going successively to all the different countries that have a unique species of honeybee. We've been collecting those bees and doing a parasite logical survey on them, where we're looking at all the different diseases, all the different parasites that they have, collecting them. We're sequencing the genome for everything, all of the viruses, all the parasites, all the bees.

By the end of this project, we'll have full genome sequences for all the be species, all of their weird little parasites, including all the different tropilaelaps mites, all the different varroa mites. It's been incredible. I have seen some phenomenal places. I am literally just getting back from the Philippines, still a little bit jet lagged. That was an incredible experience just on two of the islands.

We immediately found the bees that we were looking for in the country. Literally day two of the trip, we were able to find Apis breviligula, then Apis andreniformis. We were hoping to also find Apis nigrocincta, but found out that our intel on the subject was apparently from a paper that asserted that they were present, and it turns out that they are not. We'll go to Sulawesi to find that one.

Jeff: Are you finding these in the wild or are they kept managed?

Sammy: Oh no, we are finding these in the wild. It would be incredible if anybody knows of anyone who has found a way to officially domesticate the giant honeybees, I would love to see that because they are surly, they do not like to be put in boxes. Can I tell you guys a crazy story?

Jeff: Sure.

Becky: Please do.

Jeff: We were just on the island of Palawan in the Philippines, gorgeous island, lots of divers everywhere. That's one of the primary things that people go to that island for. We went deep into this forested region, into a mangrove forest. There's giant gnarled roots sticking out of the ground in every direction. We are in this thicket. The honey hunters that are there, the local honey hunters had found this colony for us. It was just unusual. It was so low to the ground.

Whenever we find giant honeybee colonies, they're 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 feet up in a tree. This one, the bottom of the colony was maybe a foot from the ground. It was very odd to see. I was telling everyone, "Hey, guys, a colony like this probably has a good reason for being this close to the ground" because remember, it's protective to be all the way up there. If you're all the way up there, very few things can access you all the way up in that tree.

If it's down here close to the ground, these might be some really surly bees. I'm like, "Everyone, make sure you put on your protective equipment. Let's get the--" While I'm getting everybody fitted in their protective gear, and I've got a big team now, I've got a couple of videographers with me, a National Geographic photographer.

I have my postdoc with me, a volunteer from Australia, a couple of volunteers, one from Germany, one from Slovenia. We have a big old team. I'm getting everybody fitted with their equipment, I've pulled mine on. One of the guys that we're working with walks over and he's like, "I want to take a selfie with the colony."

Becky: Oh, no.

Sammy: Yes.

Becky: Oh.

Sammy: I love that you're already ahead of me, Becky, the "Oh, no." He's like, "I want to take a selfie with the colony." As soon, and when I say as soon as, as soon as the flash in that picture went off, the bees scattered and they were out for blood. They wanted to find everybody that they could, anybody with exposed flesh, they were going for it.

One of the guys, literally, he had just been taking off his shirt because he didn't want to be too hot in the bee suit, and he was putting another shirt on, and I'm so glad that he had gotten the other shirt on before the bees attacked, but they just swarmed. Everybody's scattered.

We're running through a mangrove forest and I'm like, "No, no, no, guys. Guys, guys, guys, stay together. I want to make sure I know where everybody is." The photographer, true to form, he's photographed things in war zones and everything, this guy has very little fear. He's turning around documenting the whole thing capturing people scattering. It was so wild. I have now gone back to, "We can't get lax with these kinds of things." I have to be bossy in some of these contexts because a lot of people who don't have a lot of experience with these bees can think that because under some circumstances, we are not wearing all of our protective equipment or we're getting really close to them, that all the bees are just super friendly.

It's after we have recognized, "This colonies personality is one where they're a bit more docile, I will wear a little bit less equipment." That's not always apparent to people. In this context, I'm realizing I got to be really bossy and just be like, "No. No, no, no. You're not going near that colony right now. Everyone doesn't have their personal protective equipment on."

I learned some lessons in this process about being the boss man. It was crazy. Everybody was fine. Everybody made it out. Nobody broke an ankle on any of the mangrove roots. A few people got a number of stings. I think somebody got 12.

Jeff: Are they the same anatomy as a regular European honeybee, but just larger in scale?

Sammy: Yes, it's the same anatomy, but their actual venom gland is actually much larger so they can inject more venom with each sting, and the stinger is longer, so it can get a little bit farther in there. It definitely it's a very spicy sting. It was very spicy.

Becky: Does the selfie exist? Did you get the selfie?

Sammy: He did get the selfie. He did get the selfie.

Becky: Is his face like "Ooh," or is it like this nice calm moment before--

Sammy: It's a nice calm moment right before the storm.

Becky: Oh my gosh.

Sammy: It's like the eye of a hurricane, because I mean, aargh--

Jeff: I can imagine it's like a far side cartoon with just the moment before disaster.

Sammy: Yes. They tried to joke with me about it afterwards. They tried to be like, "Oh, Sammy, that was such a hilarious thing," but I was still climbing down from, "Oh my gosh. What if somebody had tripped and fallen? What if somebody had an enough electric reaction? What if somebody had gotten stung a bunch of times when we had to--"

It was just such a scary experience in the moment. The photographer then compiled, his name is Shin and he is such a troublemaker, he compiled a bunch of photos from that experience, that he collected and just basically turned it into a reel.

Becky: Oh, gosh.

Jeff: You have to send us a link to that. That would be fun to see.

Sammy: I will have to.

Becky: These bees aren't cavity nesting, so they're open nesting. They give you that calm feeling of a swarm.

Sammy: They're not a swarm. They have everything to protect the queen, all the broods. They can be very surly when they want to be. You should be very skeptical of a colony that's really close to the ground because one of their primary methods of defense, they have decided to abandon, they must be really good at the others. They didn't even do the flashing thing.

We saw that with some of the other bees. I was literally pointing to the bees with the stick, some people saw that in my story on Instagram, and showing them the flashing pattern that they do. Every so often they'd send out a single bee to try to sting me, but this colony skipped the whole flashing pattern thing and just sent out an entire squadron. It was crazy.

Becky: I just love the evolutionary context of it.

Sammy: Me too.

Jeff: Besides the, do not take flash pictures of a low hanging giant honey beet colony, what else did you learn on this trip? I didn't realize there were four different species of the tropilaelaps.

Sammy: Here's the interesting thing. We originally thought there was just one tropilaelaps species, and then Dr. Dennis Anderson, he spent some time really looking at the genetics for these species and started noticing that there was more going on there than you would expect to see, more diversity there than you expect to see in a single species.

And was able to do some parsing out and recognize, "Oh no, there are four." There's Tropilaelaps mercedesae, Tropilaelaps clareae, Tropilaelaps koenigerum, and Tropilaelaps thaii. Tropilaelaps thaii is named after a researcher in Vietnam, so not for Thailand. That's species we found in Vietnam, but his last name is thaii.

Tropilaelaps koenigerum is named after Dr. Koeniger. Mercedesae is named after Dr. Mercedes Delfinado Baker. You can trace them back to those different things, but the progenitor, the original mite was found in an area of the Philippines called Batang. Tropilaelaps clareae, that's the type specimen that they're all described as. I have always been really, really interested in this mite and its story.

Specifically, because its story is so very unique. We typically don't find what we found there, but Dr. Delfinado Baker and her colleagues found these tropilaelaps mites on rats, and a bunch of rats with these mites on them. It took some time actually for them to actually figure out that these were not parasites of rats so much as parasites of the bees.

The rats were in some way potentially incidental, but the connection with the rats was never figured out. It's like one of those lost elements of history where most people don't even know that that ever happened. That's an ignored part of the history of the tropilaelaps mites, but I couldn't ignore it. My brain is one of those weird brains that doesn't do well with unsolved mysteries.

I applied to the USDA actually for funding for us to conduct a study to determine whether the rats are actually a part of the tropilaelaps mite lifecycle. Are they an alternative host? It'd be odd for these tropilaelaps mites to actually use a mammal and an insect as an alternative host. That's a very odd lifecycle. I still don't know of that consistently happening with any group of mites.

They typically will feed on some mammalian hosts or a bunch of different vertebrates, but switching between a vertebrate and insect and feeding on both would be very odd. We're trying to figure out where those rats actually fit in the lifecycle or if that's just one weird one-off thing that happened one day.

Jeff: Were the mites feeding on the rats?

Sammy: We're still trying to figure all of that out. The problem is, when the data were collected at the time, that wasn't something that was collected along with the data. They didn't actually look at whether the mites were feeding on the rats or not. They just knew that they were on the rats. They were on the rats in substantial enough numbers to be then collected.

One of my students, when I told her about this, it basically kept her up at night. She kept thinking about it. She was like, "Oh my gosh, what is the deal with all of this?" I passed on, I didn't know I could do that. I passed on my obsessive context to her, and she actually found the original type specimens.

Jeff: Isn't that awesome?

Becky: I was like, "Are you going to test the mites?"

Sammy: Yes, she found the original type specimens. It took a little bit of ping ponging back and forth. I emailed a couple of researchers who've worked with her in the past and they're like, "Yes, she's in her early '90s. I don't know if you're going to be able to contact her." I was like, "Wait, she's still alive? Oh my gosh. We have got to track her down." We tracked her down, found he, got her email address. She responds to email at 91, bless her entire heart.

We found all the type specimens. My student Carmen actually located the type specimens. Then we were able to get those sent over. We're really hoping that we might be able to do some DNA testing to see if there's actual rat DNA inside of the body of these mites, but they're all slide mounted. They're smushed and mounted under resin and I just don't know how much-

Becky: Oh, they ran alcohol in my head.

Sammy: -is possible

Becky: Oh, is there any precedence for this?

Sammy: It's possible. We could actually take the slide mounted specimens off, but there aren't a lot of good ways to do so that won't cause substantial damage to them. We are now in conversation back and forth with the university and museum that own these specimens about how much we could actually do, but because we don't want to ruin the original type specimens for this mite, we probably won't be able to actually do the DNA work. Which is why it's also really great that my student is particularly excited about going to a country within the range of tropi mites, and actually sampling the rodent life there to see if the ones around the apiaries happen to have trope.

Becky: That is a special student.

Sammy: I fully agree with you. You don't always meet students where-- I knew when I met her that because she was both very interested in bats and very interested in parasitic insects, I was like, "Wait a minute."

Becky: There you go.

Sammy: "Wait a minute, so you got a thing for mammals and the bugs?" She's like, "I love them. I love the mammals, especially the tiny ones. I love the bugs." I was like, "Oh, I think I've got a project for you." Now I've been talking about this project for years.

I've been telling people I really, really, really want to know what's going on with those rats, but it's really hard to find a graduate student who wants to chase down rodents, dip them in flea dip to get all their parasites off and then start IDing parasites. It actually is not as hard as you would think because Carmen showed up and was like, "That is my wheelhouse. Let's do this thing."

Becky: I just can imagine the emails that you send before trips that are talking about the different vaccinations that you might need and the protections against rodent bites and insect bites. You've got to be really good at that now.

Sammy: Becky, what's really funny, when I'm at church, I end up talking with a lot of different people about what I'm up to. They're always like, "Oh, what's going on?" I found out a few weeks ago that people think that I'm a parent because I am constantly talking about, "Oh, my kiddos, I had to take them to get vaccinated. I had to make sure that they--"

People have been thinking for some time now that I have multiple children. That is not the case, but it's the way that you talk about-- These are my kiddos. I worry about them all the time. One of my kiddos wants to study stingless bees in the canopies, like the top canopies of trees. She's getting her climbing certifications and all of that.

Every time I think about it, I'm just like, "I don't want you swinging from a rope on the side of a tree in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. Also, you're an adult human, and I've got to let you live your life and do your research, but at the same time--"

Becky: Oh, boy.

Jeff: Hey, folks, let's take a quick break, and we'll be right back and continue our conversation with Dr. Samuel Ramsey.

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Becky: Welcome back, everybody. Sammy, this is so much fun. I'm having a blast talking about your adventures and your students' adventures. I do think that-- Jeff's looking at us. We need to talk.

Sammy: I love that Jeff's the bad guy.

Jeff: Oh, I'm the bad guy now.

Becky: I want to talk about these rats a little bit more, but we should probably talk about the seriousness of tropi and tropi coming to the United States. Are there any updates since we last talked, and are we more prepared? It seems like a lot of people are talking about tropilaelaps.

Sammy: Personally, I love that now the concept of the tropilaelaps has entered public consciousness amongst beekeepers. I no longer have to explain what it is every time that I talk about it. People are actually concerned about the damage that it could potentially bring into beekeeping because the thing is, and some of you may be well aware, bees did not do well this year, or I guess over the last year-ish.

We've had some very odd losses that almost feel reminiscent of colony collapse disorder. In different areas of the country, people are reporting losses above 50% which is just not what you want to hear. In some areas, we've got 100% losses. My dad lost all of his bees. It seemed like one colony right after another, right after another, right after another.

He's been keeping bees for five, six years now, and this has never happened to him. Even from year one, he did not have losses like that. I think there's an extent to which he wants people to know like, "Oh, I'm Sammy Ramsey's father, I got my stuff together." He's good at what he does.

Becky: He's taken it seriously.

Sammy: He also thinks it represents me. I'm like, "Dad, you got this? You're doing a great job." He lost all of those colonies and then called around to other people thinking, "Maybe they can help me replace my colonies," and other people in the area told him, "Oh, no, I lost all of mine too." "You too?" "Oh, let me call her." "Oh, she lost all of hers too."

This year has really helped to put an exclamation point at the end of a very long sentence that I've, and a lot of researchers have been saying for a long time, honey bee health is not in a great place. If we don't do something about that in the very near future, we will eventually reach a point where it's not easy to recoup those losses. Oftentimes, the losses can be recouped simply by splitting colonies.

You end up breaking even for the most part when it comes to the numbers on bees, or sometimes depending on when you sample, you may even have more bees than before. If we continue losing bees this way, and we end up with losses well above 50%, no amount of splitting is actually going to be able to make up for that. It's my concern that the tropilaelaps might in and of itself, is already a devastating parasite just on its own.

We don't understand fully what happens when the tropilaelaps might actually synergizes with the varroa mite, and you have both of the parasites together at the same time. Is it an additive situation where it just adds some chaos there? Do they synergize and somehow become greater parasites than simply the sum of their parts? What exactly occurs there?

That's been very, very, very poorly studied. I can think of pretty much no research on the subject that really conclusively states what exactly we can expect to see in that context, and the fact that alone, they're already an issue. I was just talking to a reporter about this subject who was asking me, "I've heard you say a few times that in Pakistan, they lost a lot of bees as a result of this."

She's like, "How many?" I was like, "All of them. They lost all of their Apis mellifera bees, all of them within 10 years of these tropi mites arriving. Actually, I think it was actually within eight years of the tropi mites showing up. It destroyed their entire beekeeping operation within the country. It is to be said that Apis mellifera is not native to Pakistan.

They did have other bees that could pick up the slack. There's giant honeybees, there's dwarf honeybees. The fact that this mite has that power, the fact that in Afghanistan at one point, it had reduced their beekeeping operations by 95%. All that was attributed to just the tropi mites is really, really, really concerning.

Jeff: Just for clarification, the tropi mite feeds off the larva and not the adult bee.

Sammy: I have three students now studying tropi mites, three students. The first semester of their graduate studies, each one of them has to do a review of the subject that they intend to study. It has been absolutely fascinating going through the process of having them provide me reviews on tropi mites because when you do a review of a subject, you do a really deep dive into one specific thing.

You try to bring up as much accurate, interesting information as is humanly possible on that subject. What would consistently occur was my students would dig up this information, and they would say, "How confident can I be in this? Because it looks like the experimental design--" The actual number of experimental units that they had for this was four.

I'm like, "Yes, I'm not sure that we can trust that." Then they would bring up another thing, and I'd say, "Yes, I agree with you. I'm not sure that we can trust that either." That's a big issue as it pertains to tropi mite research, is that most research on this mite is observational. It's not experimental. It's someone making an observation maybe one or two times, and saying, "This is how it works with that mite."

Until that information is actually tested, it's hard for me to say for sure. Now, I think the logic makes a lot of sense that tropi mites don't feed on adult bees. When they are on the adult bee population, they do not live for very long, but that also is not an ironclad case that they do not have the capacity to feed on adult bees. Their mouth parts are actually pretty robust, but they don't have the right shape to fit between the plates of the bees so that they can access that thin intersegmental membrane.

It doesn't look like they can bite through a solid exoskeleton. They probably don't feed, but I would like to conduct some studies actually either radio labeling or biostaining the internal tissues of the bees and exposing the tropi mites to them and seeing if we get any of those biostains inside of the mites themselves, because maybe they're supplementary feeders on the adults. We just don't know.

Becky: The broodless period caused by winters would potentially impact the population?

Sammy: See now, this is what I mean when I say, it's so hard to know for sure what is going on with these mites because the broodless period it's something that, for quite some time, we were sure was going to protect us from ever having to worry about Tropilaelaps mites.

Becky: It happens during dirths all the time.

Sammy: It does happen during dirths all the time. These Tropilaelaps mites they still persist. There's a paper written, I don't know the exact year, so I'm not going to-- When you say things in a podcast, you're recorded.

Becky: It's there forever.

Sammy: It goes out into the world forever. One of the times I was on this podcast, I accidentally said Iraq instead of Iran, and I got messages about it, people called me. I was like, "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to." Instead of causing an international incident, I will say that there was a paper written many decades ago that said, soon after Tropilaelaps mites were discovered, there was a little bit of a panic of people saying, "Oh, no. Is this going to be a parasite of bees that actually hurts bees broadly?"

A researcher wrote a paper for which the title was something to the effect of Tropilaelaps mites. They will not be a problem outside of the tropics. It was very clear in that paper, they go through and they explain the tropi mites cannot survive in absence of brood, because there are lengthy broodless periods in any temperate regions, you don't have to worry about Tropilaelaps mites spreading into temporary areas.

For a while, that was the law of the land. It was not questioned. We were not concerned. Then they ended up in some of the coldest reaches of East Asia, in Korea and China. We got a little bit worried because, for sure, there are broodless periods that the colonies are going through. It is frosty up there.

My first time going to Korea, I was coming from Thailand after working in Thailand for a while, and then going to work in Korea for a bit. It was the middle of the winter. I remember a gentleman saw that I had Google Translate on my phone. He had been trying to talk to me, and it wasn't working. He poked the Google Translate app on my phone and then started typing.

Whatever he typed in Korean translated to, "You will be cold. Your jacket too cute, not warm enough." I was like, "I like this man. I really appreciate him. My jacket is too cute. Not warm enough." It's pretty cold over there. Those Siberian winters are something else. It stands to reason that there are some things that we've missed about the Tropilaelaps mites' biology.

Part of it could be that they have an alternative host. Maybe they're going and cozying up to rats during the winter. What we do know now, after it's been reported in multiple different countries independently, is that in temperate areas of the world, for some reason, we don't know how or why or what exactly is occurring, but we are going to figure this out soon because we finally got the funding for it, Tropilaelaps mites leave the colony for about four months out of the year, and we don't know what they do.

When it starts transitioning to winter, they flee. It can't be found in any part of the colony. We've had beekeepers actually break down the colony, look in all the cracks and crevices, can't find these mites. Then they return like clockwork in April. It's been very concerning to not know what this large chunk of their life cycle actually is. We're going to figure that out. We have an entire life cycle-based project that we'll be conducting over the next year.

Jeff: Are they riding rats?

Sammy: That is a great question, and it's one of the hypotheses that we absolutely need to test. We also need to know when exactly are they exiting the colony? Where do they go? Maybe they're like small hive beetles and they're digging into the soil, and they're hanging out down there. If we dig up some soil, we'll find them.

Maybe they're on an alternative host. Is the only alternative host rats, or is it any small mammal? Have they found some little crevice of the colony that we don't know about yet, where they're just tucking away, and we need to look into that, too. We're going to be really looking at this.

Becky: Carmen needs to look at winter rats. There could be a whole eight months out of the year where they're not on rats.

Sammy: They very well could be.

Becky: Or she needs to look at rats every month.

Sammy: This is why these subjects can be so complicated. Conducting scientific research it can be a real mind field at times because you can make statements that your statistics can't fully support. My statistics teacher, when I was a graduate student, he would critique the titles of papers.

He would show us a bunch of papers, and he would say, "What's wrong with this title? What's wrong with that title? What's wrong with that title?" Oftentimes, the issue with the title was simply, you would say, "Oh, this paper is called Mite Parasetism in Korea," but the entire research project occurred only in Andong, which is a very small part of Korea, so it should be Mite Parasetism in Andong.

It's those kinds of seemingly small things that are really important to making sure that you are conveying the information about a subject as accurately as possible. You'll hear researchers, often really good researchers, really parsing their language and saying, "We think that maybe this is happening here," and really narrowing down exactly what they're saying, and that's the reason for it. We want to make sure that we don't lead anyone astray or have you thinking that we are more confident in certain things than we can be.

Jeff: Wow. I'm dumbfounded here. So often you hear people raise a concern or raise a red flag, and you think that's what's scaring that person at this time, and it's not going to be as bad. Boy, as we get a little bit deeper into what we don't know about the Tropilaelaps mite and what we're assuming about the Tropilaelaps mite, and what it actually does and what it has done, it is a scary prospect.

Sammy: It is. Honestly, even if it turned out that the tropi mites weren't as-- Like maybe we end up with a haplotype of tropi, a specific genetic group of tropi that isn't as bad as some of the ones that we've seen in other regions of Asia, adding that on top of a tower that's already not very stable is not going to be great. We currently have giant hornets that have invaded the country.

While the population in the Pacific Northwest has been handled, there's still some concerns about potential active populations in part of the South, where a different species, the Asian yellow-legged hornet, has made headways into the country. That's another stress factor that could potentially be added to the list.

Then you think about all the things that the bees are already dealing with, with very unpredictable weather, very unpredictable weather, Varroa mites, all kinds of bacterial, fungal, and viral diseases. Then you want to add on top of all of those stress factors another mite, even if it turns out that it is the least problematic haplotype of all of the Tropilaelaps mites, just adding another thing in is not where we want to be.

Another thing that I'm glad that we have funding for right now, fingers crossed, hoping that there are no new cuts to these funding sources. One of the things that I've been pushing for for a very long time, you cannot effectively have a good emergency response plan if you don't have monitoring in place. Right now, we don't have an effective system for monitoring of Tropilaelaps mites, which is really, really disconcerting because they could show up, and it could take way too long for us to figure out that they're there.

Then by the time we figure it out, they could already be established. It's very difficult to manage a parasite after it's already become established. If you can find it at its point source, you can much more effectively eradicate that parasite and get rid of the issue altogether.

We are working on testing three different methods of monitoring for tropi mites, and we have seen some very exciting, promising results in Asia as we've been doing this with a very low-cost measure for monitoring for these mites. Just some really sticky paper that's got--

We were originally using the same glue that's used on the back of sticky notes because you can stick it, but it doesn't leave all that residue on the colony, pressing that up against the frame and pulling it off really quickly. These mites, they're really fast, but their legs are not that strong.

You can pull them right off the wax and you can see that there's mites in the colony, even though they're very similar to the color of the wax, even though it can be really difficult to actually pick them up when they're not moving, you can pull that sticky paper off and really get a chance to see how many mites are present.

We're testing that now against other methods to see what's the resolution where we can tell whether the mites are in this colony or not.

Becky: Sammy, do you shake the bees off the frame first?

Sammy: Yes.

Becky: The mites stay on the frame, but then they--

Sammy: We've tried a few different methods now. Do we shake them off? Do we smoke the bees off? Do we brush them off? Brushing them off can brush off the mites along with them, but shaking them off, the mites stay on.

Becky: Oh, wow. That's fascinating. I hope [unintelligible 00:48:54] is helping you with that at ease.

Jeff: We spent all this time talking about tropi mite. What's the latest and greatest in our last few minutes here on the Varroa mite, which we do have to deal with?

Sammy: We, as a lab, have really been splitting our attention in two directions. You said earlier that I take maybe a trip a year. Now it's two trips a year where we visit about three countries per trip or three regions of a country per trip. That's the tropi-centric part of the study. For the most part, that's about tropi mites. We've also been collecting Varroa mites.

We finally got the opportunity to see some of the other species of Varroa. There are four species of Varroa, four species of tropi mites, and two species of Euvarroa mites. That currently encompasses all of the parasitic brood mites that we know of. You just furrowed your brow with Euvarroa. Have you heard of those?

Jeff: No. No.

Sammy: What about Mevarroa? E-U-V-A-R-R-O-A. The family Varroidae has two genera in it, Varroa and Euvarroa. I don't know why we call them Euvarroa, because the prefix eu means true. These would be the true Varroa, even though they were discovered after the original Varroa. They're really interesting in that they can live a long time, sometimes 18 months or longer. They are odd little buggers.

They also have the capacity to reproduce on Apis mellifera, even though their original hosts are the dwarf honeybees, which are smaller than mellifera. There is a researcher who actually transplanted them onto Apis mellifera to see what would happen, which is some-- I see the faces that you're making.

It's not something that I personally would have done, just because you don't want to give them a taste for the European honeybees. They actually produce almost twice as many offspring on Apis mellifera than they do on their original host. Probably because their stores of proteins are so much larger, and they can really give you everything that you need.

They are a concerning threat as well. There's a concern about how well these can spread as Apis florea and Apis andreniformis, the two dwarf bees move around. Some have moved into Africa. In Australia, they've gotten dwarf bees that have shown up before, and the potential for Euvarroa to spread to Apis mellifera is quite high.

I've been really focusing my attention on understanding the very broad structuring of parasites that exist in these colonies, because I don't want us to have to be surprised in ways that we have been previously. I love the idea of us being able to be prepared.

If we think about all of the damage that we could have mitigated if we already had the full genome sequence for COVID, when COVID showed up, that was the thing that allowed us to really unlock these mRNA vaccines that were really helpful in driving down the spread of COVID. It just took us a good while to get that information figured out and then to get started on all these things.

The sooner we have that information, the better we can handle a potential incursion event. Working on that. Then, in the US, very important thing for us to remember is that we still have an enemy in Varroa. We aren't just looking to what could happen with tropi mites, we're also focusing pretty heavily on what is happening with varroa mites.

One of my students just gave a presentation this morning. We do these presentations to the lab as the field season approaches so that everyone can know what you've already accomplished, what you plan to do this year, and how we can potentially help you make that happen, because we as a lab are a super organism. We're like a bee colony. We all work together on this.

One of my students, he's just doing a phenomenal project. Tracyn has been looking at the mites inside of these colonies and the mites, so the mites in the brood and the mites on the adult bees, and really getting a better understanding of what a certain infestation in the brood means for the infestation on the adult bees, but really also getting an understanding of how the mites actually spatially distribute themselves in a colony.

Do the mites cluster in one part of the frame? Do you typically see lots of Varroa in one area of the frame and fewer in another region of the frame? That's important for understanding, if you are going to randomly open a bunch of cells, maybe clustering your attention in a particular region where you found a mite already would be a better way for you to spend your time.

Or maybe doing a scattershot approach is the way to go. Actually seeing his heat maps of what these frames look like-- This student has put a lot of time into this. There's like 1000 cells to open on a frame. To have to do all of that within a defined period of time, because the frame will eventually rot, and he has to freeze them to keep the bees from emerging from the frame, and then if he leaves it there for too long, it's just going to go rancid.

He's sitting there sometimes 10 hours at a time, picking all of these cells open, documenting everything that's inside, looking at how consistently there's infertility in the mites themselves, which has also been really, really fascinating. Several mites will go into cells, they're supposed to go into their reproductive phase, and they just won't.

We haven't been able to explain why that occurs. We don't understand what the heck is going on with with those mites. We don't know whether that's an issue with the mite itself or whether that's something that the bee is able to do to prevent the mite from reproducing, but we are going to figure that out.

The great thing about having data this broad is that there are so many different things that you can learn from it. Originally, we were just trying to better understand parasitological distribution amongst the adult bees, amongst the brood, and where in the brood they're distributed, but there are so many different things that can be learned from this data set. I'm really excited to see where all of it goes.

Jeff: Wow, wow, wow.

Becky: I think I have chills from all that. Sammy, if anybody questions the use of grant funding, if they questioned what are scientists doing, they just need to listen to this podcast. They need to hear you bring us through how an industry faces threats and how those threats need to be studied, and just what one lab is doing to make a difference. Thank you.

Jeff: Yes, thanks.

Sammy: Thank you, because I do think that it's worth reminding people that science funding doesn't just go to the-- I don't know, there are these studies that are almost the poster children for odd studies there. Was a study that I heard once, I don't even know if it was a real study, but there's a cartoon in which the characters run bent forward with their arms behind them. There's a study that wanted to see whether that's a better way to run than running standing straight up. I was like, "You know what? If that's what's [crosstalk]

Jeff: It sounds like a Monty Python skit.

Sammy: It's unfortunate that sometimes those stories become the key thing that we think about for science because those are the sensational, spicy, interesting, like, "Oh my God, did you hear they put hats on mice and wanted to see if it made the mice happier." I think people need to understand that, oftentimes in research, first of all, even those kinds of studies discover things that we never expected.

There was actually a study where they massaged rats to see how that helped the rats develop, and found out that it actually helped the rats, especially premature rats, develop a lot more healthily. They started doing it, is it called the NICU? With babies who were born prematurely. It's become this thing that has really helped these babies survive better. It has increased our survivorship of these children.

It started with a study that could have that exact reaction to it of, "What? You guys are massaging rats to see if it makes them healthier?" It turns out now we're massaging babies because we massage those rats, and they are surviving a lot longer than they did before. I think there's a lot of pushback on science right now about whether it's worthwhile for us to invest the way that we do.

I think that communities of beekeepers are going to be the first to tell you how important it is that we invest in understanding these organisms. Considering food security itself in a lot of ways is based on a lot of the food products that bees provide, but also, bees are adorable and deserve to exist regardless of what contributions they bring to mankind. They are awesome. I love them. I will always say that they matter more than just for the work that they can do.

Jeff: Well said, Sammy. Must be why you have that science communicator role. Sammy, as always, it's a great joy and pleasure having you on the show. Look forward to having you back. Bring us more updates and news from Boulder.

Becky: And the world.

Jeff: And the world, yes.

Sammy: I'm going to bring you all the updates. I love getting to do this thing and let people know what's coming down the pipeline. There are a couple of papers that we submitted a few months ago that hopefully will be hitting soon. They've been accepted, so you'll see some cool things from us in the very near future.

Keep an eye out because things have to start off a little bit slow when you're starting up a lab. Now I think so much of this is ramped up, that you're going to see a lot of cool stuff really quickly.

Jeff: Fantastic.

Becky: I can't imagine you going any faster.

Sammy: That's funny that you would say that because I personally think, like, "Oh my gosh, people are probably out here like, where did Sammy go? What's he doing?" I feel like I've been in this. I definitely caught a cold when I was in the Philippines.

I feel like people are going to be like, "Man, I feel personally like I've been in this incubator where all of the ideas have just been gestating, but nothing has been ready to launch," because I just started a lab, I've had to figure out how to allocate all the funds, how to hire people, and how to get things going.

I'm really excited that I can jump back in now, start giving presentations about work that we're doing currently, and show you guys what cool things we can learn about the world with the bees as our guides.

[music]

Jeff: We'll look forward to having you back, Sammy.

Sammy: Thanks so much. Hopefully I'll be over this cold by then.

Jeff: Sure you will.

Becky: Take care of yourself. We need you.

Sammy: Thank you.

Jeff: I really enjoyed talking with Sammy. It's just a firehose of information,. The tropi mite is a big question mark, isn't it?

Becky: It's a question mark followed by about 100 exclamation points. It is just something that you cringe at something else hurting the industry right now. If anything can do it, it's that little mite.

Jeff: It's especially sensitive, as he pointed out, coming right after the spring losses and the thought of, "Oh my gosh, what if we had the trophy mite to deal with at the same time," or the effects of that, if there's some synergistic effect. Oh boy. It's great having Sammy on. I look forward to having him back.

Becky: I think it's interesting because he was such a groundbreaker in Varroa research. He pointed us all in the right direction. As far as teaching us how Varroa feed, it feels really good having him with a lab with lots of graduate students working on these current and emerging problems.

Jeff: That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to follow us and rate us 5 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'd 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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