The Habitat Crisis #1 - Dr. Gabriela Quinlan (299)

299 - The Habitat Crisis #1 - Dr. Gabriela Quinlan

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 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. 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 250 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.beekeepingtodaypodcast.com. Hey everybody, welcome to this special kickoff of our October series on the habitat crisis.

Becky: Yes. I'm so excited. We're going to talk about flowers for the next month.

Jeff: Becky, not only are we talking about flowers, but all of the habitat. Roadsides, the corners of the fields, the back lots, the green lawns, everything that packs honeybees and other native pollinators, actually.

Becky: The way this is framed is that we hope to bring attention to the fact that honey production is down drastically in the United States over the last 30 years. For one of the factors, it's tied to a dramatic decrease in land use and how many flowers are out there for our bees. We're talking flowers and how it impacts honeybee health, and hopefully some solutions that people can implement.

Jeff: For the next four episodes today, as for the month of October, we're talking to scientists and other personnel who are involved in discovering the habitat problems and being able to define it for us, the challenges to pollinators and honeybees, and those are looking for solutions and steps that we can take both as landowners and beekeepers and as just stewards of the earth to help protect it from being worse.

Becky: Let's make it better out there for beekeepers, bees, and other pollinators. I'm excited because I'm wearing two hats. I'm co-host of this podcast, but also this series is sponsored by the Minnesota Honey Producers Association. We started a habitat committee a few years ago, and the honey producers want to really promote the messaging and make it accessible to beekeepers. I'm a sponsor today. Isn't that-- Not me. The Minnesota Honey Producers of which I'm a member.

Jeff: Fantastic.

Becky: We're sponsors, Jeff.

Jeff: Thank you, Becky. Thank you Minnesota Honey Producers for bringing us this series of episodes focusing on the habitat crisis. I do like your double hat that you're wearing. You look like Sherlock Holmes with this little-- It's a very attractive hat.

Becky: We're excited to do it. We realized that habitat's not a Minnesota problem, it's a problem North America and beyond. Anything that our organization can do to promote beekeeper education and the importance of nutrition and habitat for bees out there and to share it with all the beekeepers is something that we feel that it's a great project to invest in. Thank you for giving us this opportunity. We really look forward to Habitat Month.

Jeff: It's going to be fun, even though this is brought to us and to our listeners by the Minnesota Honey Producers, the message is for everybody in every state and every country around the world where all of our listeners live. Habitat's an important issue. Who is our first guest today, Becky?

Becky: We are lucky enough to have a scientist who is trained in honeybees and native bees, Gabriela Quinlan. Dr. Quinlan is just finishing up a postdoc in Christina Grossinger's lab. I'm excited to hear what she's going to do next. She has published some key work that described both the crisis and the importance of good nutrition for honeybees. She's the perfect guest to give us the framework for this month of habitat-related episodes.

Jeff: Fantastic. I look forward to hearing and talking with Dr. Quinlan right after this quick message from our sponsors.

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Jeff: While you're at the Strong Microbial site, make sure you click on and subscribe to the Hive, the regular newsletter full of interesting beekeeping facts and product updates. Hey, everybody, welcome back to this kickoff episode of our Habitat series in the month of October. Sitting across the virtual Beekeeping TodayPodcast table, is Dr. Gabriela Quinlan. Gabriela, welcome to the show. We look forward to talking to you.

Dr. Gabriela Quinlan: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here kicking off the Habitat Series.

Becky: We're honored to have you as our first guest.

Jeff: Can you tell us a little bit about your background and where you're at in the country and how you got interested in the subject you are interested in?

Gabriela: I'm very happy to be here kicking off the habitat week with you all because honeybee habitat and pollinator nutrition is really my bread and butter.

Jeff: No pun intended.

[laughter]

Gabriela: Exactly. I think nutrition, especially for honeybees is so interesting because it's so integrated into everything else that's going on with them. If you have well-fed bees, they're better able to resist pathogens and pests, and all the others stressors that we know affect bees. That's really what got me interested in it. I really examine honeybee nutrition across all sorts of scales. I did my PhD at Michigan State. That really focused on the boots-on-the-ground habitat work. What kinds of plants do we want to plant? What's the best way to provide pollinator habitat to support honeybees and other pollinators?

Since that time of finishing up my PhD, I went on to work at Penn State as a postdoc. I really expanded in both directions. Looking not only at what is happening with pollinator habitat that the bees are interacting with, but really broad landscape scales of what is really shaping the availability of forage for bees at really broad scales. Be it climate, weather, soils, land use, all of these different factors that really have a top-down effect on what ends up available to bees. Then at even finer scales, how do all of those factors shape what's available to bees? Then even smaller scales, how does that affect bee health? I'm really interested in all things pollinator nutrition across all scales. I'm really excited to be here today.

Jeff: That is a broad topic, and it's very important.

Gabriela: Absolutely.

Becky: Do you consider yourself an ecologist, an entomologist, or something-

Jeff: Or else?

Becky: -else that that I'm missing?

Gabriela: It depends on the day, depends on the project that I'm working on, because I do really wear a lot of different hats, depending on the question that I'm trying to address. I think the term that I've settled on is an integrative ecologist, which is integrating all of these bits and pieces together, of using all sorts of different tools and borrowing from all sorts of fields, be it ecology, be it geography, molecular biology, all of these different pieces that can come together and really help us answer the questions that we're really interested in.

Becky: I want to get into the fact that you have explored the USDA NASS database. I cannot tell you the number of talks I've given to beekeepers, even across the country. I've just shown them the raw data for their states. I've said, "Somebody needs to analyze this data. Somebody needs to look at it." When I found out that you did, and that work was so well received, I was really grateful and excited. Can you take us way back and explain about that database and then how you got started on that work?

Gabriela: The NASS honey database, the National Agriculture Statistic Service, collects data on a ton of different agricultural commodities, honey production and bees being one of them. As Becky was saying, it's this hugely rich data set that beekeepers contribute data to, that gives us an idea of what has been going on with the honey production industry going back 50 plus years. It's a really, really excellent resource. When I go to beekeeper meetings and talk to beekeepers, a lot of the people are contributing data that have actual experience sending in their own data to this database. I think it's really cool what you're saying, Becky, about you've connected with people that are really interested in the data, but they've also been invested and actually contributing to the data as well.

Becky: It's where you see really dramatic information. One of the characteristics of beekeepers out there is that if you get in front of a lot of them and ask them to raise their hand and say, "How many of you have beekeeping for longer than five years," you don't see a lot of hands. Their perspective of how much honey yield per colony is normal is very different, if you compare that to what's been going on 30, 40, 50 years ago in the same location. You don't have enough beekeepers concerned about a decrease in yield and a decrease in production overall. You looked at that information, didn't you?

Gabriela: Yes, that's so funny that you say that because I've done that exact exercise when I go to speak to Beekeeping Club. It's so fun. I was actually inspired to do that exercise from an activity at a wedding I attended, where, I don't know if you've ever seen this, where it's like, "Everyone that's been married, get on the dance floor." Then the DJ calls out, "If you've been married for over a year, leave the dance floor. If you've been married over five years," and they keep going until they have the longest married couple on the dance floor. I was inspired by that game-

Becky: I love that.

Gabriela: -with beekeepers. I would say, "Put your hand up. Now put your hand down if you've been beekeeping less than a year, less than five years, et cetera." Then I could go to the person that has been beekeeping the longest at the club and ask them exactly that, Becky asked them, "What have you noticed over the last x number of years that you've been beekeeping?" Some people have been beekeeping for 50 years here in some of our clubs in Pennsylvania.

Exactly like you said, over and over again, I've asked this question in Pennsylvania, beekeepers in North Carolina, I get the same answer. They say, "You just can't make honey like you used to." It was that sentiment that I heard before even starting on this journey of analyzing the NASS data. I heard that sentiment when you go to the National Beekeeper meetings. Having heard that, that's what really inspired me to dig into this really rich data set to understand what's going on. It's so interesting that this was a sentiment I heard at the national scale. It's something that's reflected in the data that we're in the NASS data, and it's something that's reflected in beekeeping clubs across the country.

Becky: I love the wedding part of it. When you look at that information and you've had, actually, one of your research articles go popular and be pushed out into the nationwide press as far as what's driving the habitat crisis. Can you share the parts of your research in your words, what they're summarizing in that national news?

Gabriela: I think with that study, what we have really found is that there are these really broad-scale trends in what makes a good location for producing honey. There are these locations in the country, like the Northern Great Plains, like around the Gulf Coast, that just have the right weather, they have the right conditions, that mean that they're going to be able to be the top honey-producing states year after year. That's what we saw reflected in the data. We have these states that are just your North Dakota, Montana, that are just going to be some of the best states every year.

What we were also seeing is that there is a lot of inter-annual variation, which beekeepers know. You have good years and you have bad years, that comes with weather and things like that. Overall, what I thought was so interesting is that since the early '90s, the good states and the bad states have been producing less honey than they used to. This is exactly what we were just talking about everyone saying that you just can't make as much honey as you used to. What we found beyond those really broad-scale spatial trends and state to state differences, is that a lot of the things that were changing across time were things like herbicide use, changes in land use from more conservation-focused land to more intensive agricultural land.

Some of these trends could be related to what we're seeing. I think I've had a lot of really great conversations with beekeepers and other people since that study came out about what else could be driving that, because there were so many things that we weren't able to really explore in that study just because there wasn't the data. The obvious thing that's missing there is the varroa mite. We just don't have data at a national scale going back long enough to be able to gain insights into how varroa is impacting the honey production.

It's not something we were able to explore in this study, but really what we were interested in this study was more on the environmental side. We were able to pick up on that. It's my hope that going forward, this study was only possible because of these really amazing rich data sets that people contributed to. If we want to be able to answer questions about things like varroa, we have to start collecting that data now. People are doing that, but I'm excited to see what that might look like when we have those data in hand.

Jeff: We have a bunch more questions for you, Dr. Quinlan, but we're going to take a quick break, hear from our sponsors, and we'll be right back.

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Becky: Welcome back, everybody. Dr. Quinlan, I have so many questions, but I'm going to try to restrain myself and maybe let Jeff ask one or two more. One of my questions is, you participated in some work that looked at how important honey was for the health, and I believe wintering success of honeybees. I find it so interesting because the long-term data show that it's harder for beekeepers to get honey into their hives because the flowers just aren't as available as they used to be. Could you share that important work because you've got good data on the importance of good nutrition?

Gabriela: Absolutely. This was a collaborative project with Penn State Extension Robin Underwood with this study as well as the University of Puerto Rico. They did a lot of excellent work collecting data on how feeding colonies honey to over winter on honey as a carbohydrate source versus some of the common alternatives like your high fructose corn syrup, how those different sources of feed really can influence your overwintering success.

What I thought was so interesting about this experiment that they designed was, not only were they looking at just overall overwintering success, but they really got down into the nitty gritty about how this really trickles down to the whole colony and is affecting individual bees.

They were not only able to see these implications on the colony as a whole, but also when they were sampling individual bees, they were seeing differences in their gene expression profiles, their fat bodies, that really we use as a fingerprint for understanding something about the health of the individual bees and healthy individual bees make up healthy colonies. These specific biomarkers, these fingerprints of genes and physiology that they were looking at, really give us an idea of how healthy these individual bees are.

These genes are related to things like nutrition and immunity. If they're expressing these genes, we can feel pretty confident about something about their health. I think these sorts of studies that pair the molecular side of things with the broader colony health metrics really give us an understanding of what's going on underneath the hood. They give us a mechanistic understanding of why something might be happening and just more evidence to what we're seeing at the colony level.

Becky: It's interesting because I've had commercial beekeepers tell me, people always criticize us for feeding our bees, but if they saw the kinds of checks that we had to write just to make sure that they were fed, they would have to understand that we much prefer we can bring them to flowers. Every beekeeper out there I think prefers flowers.

This really is a habitat crisis because it's so expensive for beekeepers to feed their bees with corn syrup or with sugar in order to get them through the dearth periods. Really, if they could just have enough habitat that would be much more preferred for not just the pocketbook, but also for the physiology of the bees.

Jeff: Just to make sure I understand, your research indicated that the bees did better on a natural diet as opposed to the beekeeper-fed artificial diet.

Gabriela: Exactly. The way they designed this experiment was that they either left honey on for the bees to consume throughout the winter or they took honey away and then put in alternative feeds like your high fructose corn syrups for the bees to overwinter on. What we saw was that the honey performed better across a lot of different metrics compared to these artificial feeds.

Jeff: It's important to know this time of year in October as the beekeepers are getting their bees ready for the winter.

Becky: It might be a little too late for some beekeepers though, but I think that goes-- I think there's a balance. The supplement industry is really important because we know that the honey is so crucial for healthy bees.

Gabriela: I think it's one of those things where fed bees are better than starved bees, but it seems like honey is preferable if you can get it, but like you said Becky, it's getting harder and harder to overwinter them on their own honey.

Becky: Gabriela, we've established that things are bad out there for the bees. Do you have any hopeful words, or do you think that if we put enough effort into investing in habitat, are we able to turn things around?

Gabriela: I always like to think that there's a lot of hope out there. There's so many people that are interested in supporting pollinators. I think that's one of the best parts of what I do is, that people are so invested in bees and pollinators and everyone really-- Anyone who eats food or likes flowers or likes honey has a vested interest in supporting the bees.

I think that there's a lot of hope because there are a lot of efforts that are going towards healthy pollinator populations, healthy honeybees. I think that there are also a lot of scary things as well. What my research really shows is that there's a lot of factors that are beyond our control. We can plant pollinator meadows and do all of these things, but a lot of the factors that are affecting whether a plant actually produces nectar or blooms at the right time, all of these things are beyond our control as individuals.

Extreme weather events and climate are affecting a lot of different industries, not just beekeeping. I think that that is something that I certainly grapple with and I think a lot of beekeepers are grappling with as well, just these weather events that are beyond your control. It can be hard to make honey under those conditions.

Becky: You come from two institutions that have excellent records as far as putting out resources to support habitat and pollinators, Penn State and MSU. Could you share a couple of your favorite resources with us?

Gabriela: I totally agree. I have always been at these grand institutions that have a really strong history and reputation for the extension work that they do. I think that there are so many excellent extension documents that Michigan State puts out and so many great resources if you're interested in pollinator habitat and how to do restoration and just generally to support bees.

I would definitely point listeners to the excellent extension resources at both Michigan State and Penn State. If I can make a shameless plug for at Penn State, I have been on a team that was working on Beescape. If you haven't had the pleasure of looking into Beescape, it is a really fun, really informative decision support tool that a group of researchers led by Penn State, but with excellent researchers across the country have worked together to help people really see landscapes from a bees' eye view.

Since we're talking about habitat this week, I think it would be a great opportunity for people to go check out Beescape, so that's landscape but for bees. It's now a mobile app. Essentially what it allows is you can drop a point on a map, be it in your backyard or where your apiaries are, and it gives you an idea of what the foraging range looks like for your bees. It will give you information about the spring, summer, and fall forage, gives you a score for those sites, gives you a score for the insecticides, the economic value for that location.

It also updates with information about climate and weather. You can see are we having a warmer or drier year than last year. All sorts of exciting stuff and new utilities are being added all the time. It's really fun but I also think really informative. The team has worked with a lot of beekeepers that have had a lot of input into what this tool would look like. I know everyone's very proud of what's come out of it and we hope that it is very helpful to beekeepers and members of the public.

Becky: You should have told everybody that they have to wait until they finish the podcast before they go, because I feel that's where we lose people because that was just such a great shameless plug. No, I'm kidding. It is such a great tool.

Jeff: Is that one of the tools where a beekeeper can say, "Hey, I'm seeing the wild blackberry blooming?" Can they enter that into that app?

Gabriela: Not yet, but that's a great idea. Currently, we really wanted to give beekeepers an idea of what is living around them in real time. The way that that was integrated was by pulling observations from a site called iNaturalist. Some of your listeners might be familiar with that, might be contributors themselves. That site is specifically focused on what you were just saying, Jeff, where people can upload observations of plants and insects and all sorts of other things going on in their area. Beescape pulls those and has them as points directly on the map.

You can look around your area and anywhere else and see what people are saying they're observing. Our intention there was, if people post photos of black locust blooming or something, you can be pretty confident that you're going to get that flow pretty soon. That was a way that we wanted to give people real-time updates about what's going on in their landscape.

Jeff: That's such a useful tool to be able to go out there and see that for, especially new beekeepers who may not be all that knowledgeable about flowers or blooming plants and what's available to have that resource and say, "Hey, Yes, this is really cool."

Gabriela: Yes. We hope so.

Becky: I have to ask, what's next for your career? What are you planning to continue studying as far as honey bees are concerned?

Gabriela: Oh, man. There are so many cool questions. That's the exciting part about honey bees, is you can truly have an entire career studying them and never get bored of all of their amazing attributes. My first love is always going to be nutrition. I think, like I said at the top of the show, there's just so many things that we can dig into about what's going on with honey bees and their nutrition across scales. It has, I think, really important real-world implications for beekeepers, for bees. I think that doing that research is exciting to me because it can have real impacts.

Jeff: Gabriela, is there anything that we haven't covered that you would like to tell us about? You've looked at and studied so many different things, and you provide a wealth of information. What have we missed that you'd really like to tell us about?

Gabriela: Going back to the first study that we talked about, the thing that is most exciting to me right now is the importance of soils. I am so excited about what that could mean for supporting honey bees and pollinator conservation. I think that there have been a lot of excellent studies that have looked at this, at field scales and greenhouses and things like that, found some pretty interesting stuff.

The fact that we were able to pick up on that as a really strong signal across the entire US is so interesting to me because it's something that we're not really currently thinking about when we're thinking about pollinator habitat, is like, what's going on bottom-up. Plant people and soil people, it's like, "Yes, duh." I think it's going to be a really important thing for us to think about. Think about how are we good stewards of our soil and where do we put pollinator habitat to be the most effective, and all of these other questions about how can we maybe even improve pollinator forage by focusing on soil health. I think that there are a lot of interesting and exciting questions there, and that's certainly something that I'll be thinking about.

Jeff: Are you familiar with the work by Dr. Jonathan Lundgren?

Gabriela: Yes.

Jeff: We've had him on the show a couple of times. His focus is always on dirt and the importance-- I shouldn't say dirt.

Becky: You're not supposed to call it dirt.

Jeff: On soil.

Gabriela: Is dirt a dirty word?

Jeff: I don't know, but it is-

Becky: Oh, to a soil scientist, it is.

Jeff: I have to diverge here for a moment, my niece has a PhD in soil, I always refer to her as a dirt doctor, and she riffled with that. Sorry, Emily. Anyways, so Dr. Jonathan Lundgren, he's been on the show a couple of times, and it's always fascinating because we just, I hate to say this, but mostly just walk across the ground and really don't think about it. The research that he's done and what he's working with on his farm and with the people he works on, the criticality of the, like you said, from the bottom-up of the soil as the beginning of all things, really is an eye opener.

Gabriela: Absolutely.

Jeff: Gabriela, we really appreciate your time this afternoon to talk to us about the habitat crisis and honey bee nutrition and your research. We'd like to invite you back at a later date to just give us an update and maybe even take a deep dive into one specific area.

Gabriela: I'd love that. I've had so much fun today speaking with you all. I will talk about honey bees and nutrition at any time.

Becky: We really value your information and how you shared it with us in such an easy to understand way because the complexity of what you're doing is a little daunting. Thank you for doing it and then sharing it with us.

Gabriela: Of course.

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Jeff: This Habitat series is fun. Just as we finished Gabriela, everything starts with the soil and works it up through the habitat, and that helps the honey bee healthy. Oops, they're not a sponsor, but yet there they are.

Becky: I started out by saying how excited I was to talk about flowers for the next four episodes, but it turns out we're going to talk about so much more than flowers, and we'll include the soil that they're grown in. I'm guessing we're going to get a lot more information that's really critical to healthy bee populations.

Jeff: This is an exciting series. I hope our listeners will enjoy it as much as we do. Coming up next week is Dr. Andony Melathopoulos, out of Oregon State University. He's going to join us to continue this conversation about habitat and the native bees and honey bees and everything about, again, the habitat crisis and what we can do as beekeepers for awareness in whatever way we can improve it.

That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to follow us and rate us five stars on Apple podcast 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 along the top of any web page. We want to thank our regular episode sponsor, Betterbee, Global Patty, 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 at the Leave a Comment section under each episode on the website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

Becky: Do you want me to say something else, because I feel like I ramble enough. Oh, no, you're going to put this at the end, aren't you? You didn't.

[00:37:56] [END OF AUDIO]