Honey Bee Genetics and Behavior with Dr. Christine Grozinger (S6, E50)

S6, E50 - Honey Bee Genetics and Behavior with Dr. Christine Grozinger

Jody Moore: I'm Jody Moore with Rocky River Bees in Pittsburgh, North Carolina. Welcome to the  Beekeeping Today Podcast.

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

Becky Masterman: And I'm Becky Masterman.

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You can find it all at www.beekeepingtodaypodcast.com. Hey, thanks a lot, Jody Moore in North Carolina. Becky, there's North Carolina, we get to fill in our map.

Becky: Sweet. Now, do we have South Carolina yet? Because if we don't, they better get on it.

Jeff: [laughs] I'd have to look at the map. I don't recall. I don't think we do.

Becky: I don't think we do either.

Jeff: Well, thanks, Jody. I appreciate your opening and stopping by the booth there at the North American Honey Bee Expo in January and leaving us that listener opener. Hey, Becky, this has been one heck, and I'm using the inside term, heck of a swarming season.

Becky: I think if we could put one in the books as the longest swarm season, I think that we might be in it right now. Short winter, long swarm season. Is that the new saying? [laughter]

Jeff: Yes, I don't know.

Becky: Warm winter, long swarm season. I don't know, maybe we have to work on it.

Jeff: Yes, we'll make it into a tagline for sure. They never swarm at a convenient time, right?

Becky: They wait till you're busy.

Jeff: They wait till you're busy like sitting down to record a podcast.

Becky: Has that happened before?

Jeff: That has happened before. Just ran-

Becky: Does it feel recent?

Jeff: -downstairs fill up the glass of water to go to a podcast and look out the back window, and I can't see the trees because the bees are swarming so much. It's like, "Oh, my gosh."

Becky: Despite our best efforts, they do it. Absolutely.

Jeff: They just wanted to be on the podcast, I guess.

Becky: See, it's great to have your bees in your backyard. I don't and therefore-- unless it happens as I'm driving up to the yard, I can think that it happened. I think it might have happened, but you live it.

Jeff: It is fun. Let's talk about swarming since it's the topic of the day. It's easy to say how you manage it before the swarm, and there's a lot of discussion about capturing a swarm. What about during the swarm? What are some of the things we can do during the swarm to take advantage of both the educational opportunity and behavioral opportunities to learn and get those bees back?

Becky: Get the bees back. Well, I don't know of any technique that you can do to make sure they land low. That's a major factor in how safely you can retrieve the swarm.

Jeff: The banging of pans doesn't really work. It doesn't.

Becky: I haven't seen good data on that one, but I will say that there's a point at which you just can stand there and say, "Okay, this is really amazing." I don't care how many swarms you've seen in your life, it is always impressive. It might be disappointing, but it's always impressive. Maybe the bit of advice is to enjoy it. Maybe take your camera out and take a picture. Maybe go ahead, video that swarm so that you can remember it next spring when you're actively doing your splits.

There is something to be said, too, for making sure that the type of bee you're trying to manage fits into the boxes you are using making sure that-- I have a colony and it's made it through two winters now. It's not the same queen. I'm sure she's been superseded. They really like to get ready to swarm early, so I just know I'm on them early. Being aware that if you catch a swarm, one of the first things you might want to do, and it's not always their fault but is replace that queen to a queen that might be a little less likely to swarm. It's in the genes.

Jeff: I'm asking for a friend. What do you think about a colony that starts, but then stops and comes back to the hive, and they're all kind of clustered on the front or on the ground and everywhere all around?

Becky: There's a rule that I follow. It just happened to me the other day, too. I don't care if it's a swarm or just a cluster of bees, but when I see bees huddling up, my first go-to is, why is there a queen in the middle of that group of bees? If they were swarming and they ended up back in front of your hive, there might be a queen who didn't quite make it. Maybe your queen hasn't lost enough weight to get out there and fly. Maybe they were a little premature. I mean, not yours, your friends. I'm sorry.

Jeff: I knew that you weren't speaking at me. You're looking at me, but you weren't--

Becky: I am looking at you and I forgot what I was talking about, but it's a really good rule in beekeeping, though. It just happened to me when I was-- every time I pull off an inner cover, I'm going to look for the queen. I put her off to the side, close to the hive, but all of a sudden there was just kind of a mass of bees the next time I looked. Sure enough, that queen was just hanging out on the inner cover. I missed her and I only found her because there were a bunch of bees around her. Look for the queen.

Jeff: Look for the queen.

Becky: Tell your friend to look for the queen.

Jeff: I will let them know. We have a great guest coming up, Dr. Christina Grozinger. She's been with us in the past. Today we've invited her here to talk to us about her lab there at Penn State.

Becky: Excellent. I'm looking forward to hearing all about what they're up to. That is a productive lab. Lots of good stuff coming out of there.

Jeff: Yes, they're doing work with pollen, and pollen identification, and pollen and honey.

Becky: Just overall habitat suitability. I think that's such an important question we all need to ask.

Jeff: All right, we'll talk to her right away, right after this word from our sponsors.

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Hey, everybody, welcome back. Sitting across the virtual  Beekeeping Today Podcast table right now is Dr. Christina Grozinger from Penn State University. Christina, welcome back to the podcast.

Dr. Christina Grozinger: Thank you, Jeff and Becky. Thank you for inviting me. I'm excited to talk with you.

Becky: What a pleasure. Thank you so much for being here.

Jeff: For our listeners who may not know you, can you give us a little bit of your background and history and how you got interested in bees and this whole field?

Christina: My background was actually in molecular and cellular Biology, and I did my degree in chemistry. I really loved the kind of work that I was doing and I enjoyed it very much during my PhD, but I wanted to do some field and research that would be really broad. Where I wouldn't be able to answer all the questions, and I could spend the next four years of my life discovering new questions and trying to answer them.

I was thinking I'd really be interested in doing something with animal behavior. Actually, my brother started keeping honeybees, and he would tell me these stories about bees that were so fascinating. Some of it I was like, "Well, clearly, someone has to have figured out the molecular mechanisms regulating queen versus worker cell differentiation." I would look it up and I was like, "Actually there's really not much work that has been done in this."

At the time that I was in graduate school was when these new technologies were coming online that you could start to look at gene expression patterns in animals that were not traditional no lab organisms. Not just mice, not just fruit flies, but you could start going into these wild animals like honeybees. I thought, "Gosh, somebody should really start looking at the genes that are regulating behavior in honeybees."

I thought, "Well, what am I doing? This is a great thing for me to try to do for my postgraduate work." I looked around to try to find who might be doing that kind of work, and I came across Gene Robinson's lab and I was a perfect fit. The type of work that he was doing was exactly at the forefront of tying together these new genetic and molecular tools and understanding the behavior, and so that was how I made the switch into honeybees.

Becky: We are so lucky. What's your brother's address? We want to thank him.

Jeff: Yes. He's still in bees? Actually is a question.

Christina: Actually, after a while, he got very disappointed with his bees dying off frequently, and so he has not been keeping bees for a while. Though I did send him a solitary bee hotel, so he does have that up at this point.

Jeff: There you go. There you go. I'm glad you decided to take up such a light easy subject as you did. Tell us about your lab there at Penn State.

Christina: We cover a lot of different things. As I said, originally, my interest in bees was really to study their behavior, and understand the molecular and genetic basis of that behavior. We're still doing work in that area. As people have become more interested in bee health, and bee management, and wild bee conservation, we spread out the kind of work that we're doing to include those broader topics as well. Originally we were looking at how bees are responding to different stressors at the molecular level.

Again, looking at the genes that are responding to pesticide exposure, or poor nutrition, or parasites, and pathogens. Then one of the things that we realized as we were building up all these studies and datasets was that a lot of the genes that were responding to these different stressors were also genes that responded to poor nutrition. Specifically nutrition in terms of pollen. Whether or not bees had pollen in their diet. We started doing studies to see if we give bees a high-quality diet with diverse pollen, are they more resilient to these stressors? Indeed they were.

That led to questions of, well, what don't you know? There's lots of different flowering plants in the world, which ones provide the best nutrition for bees? We did a series of studies looking primarily in bumblebees to start looking at how bees were selecting different kinds of flowers in the field and how that related to the nutritional content of the pollen. All of those things is telling us that the landscape that the bees were in was really important for what stressors they're exposed to, and then how resilient they are to those stressors because they have the right floral resources.

Because of course bees can travel really, really long distances, especially honeybees in search of their food, that then led to this problem where, yes, you can plant a pollinator garden nearby that can provide resources for your bees. Your bees can forage over such a great area, so how do you know what the bees are actually collecting food from and what are they being exposed to as they're foraging out in this broader landscape.

Then to try to address that both for us for research purposes, and then also to help beekeepers, or conservationists, or growers. Also, begin to understand that we started developing tools to help people understand what their individual bees are doing and what their personal landscape is providing for bees. That then led to our honey and pollen diagnostic lab and our Beescape tool.

Jeff: Sounds like you're keeping very busy.

Christina: Well, it worked out. Honeybees definitely have given me the research project that I need to have lots of questions over my research career. It's been really interesting.

Becky: The fact that you ended up framing all of your work in habitat. That's the science that we've needed because for years people are saying, "Okay, well what do we plant? What do we plant?" You just kind of answer as best you can, but you're bringing it down to an actual level where it makes physiological sense. Is that right?

Christina: Yes, yes. I think part of this again was motivated out of my discussions with beekeepers. Because I would share with them our molecular studies and our physiological study. The beekeepers are great. They're a great group of people to work with. They're very interested and curious on many things. They were interested in all these studies. I would feel like, "Gosh, I'm not really able to help you make better management decisions for your bees.

Or understand what are the ways that the landscape around you can be improved or what can you do to manage your bees to deal with a landscape that might not be ideal." That's where we started thinking these are really landscape scale issues, and so how can we get that information to people? Then, again, that's what led to moving up into this landscape scale studies.

Becky: Are you collaborating like with USGS in this work?

Christina: We have collaborated with Clint Otto, for example, from USGS on some of our work, and then a lot of the data sets that we're pulling to use for our Beescape tool is coming from USGS. For these data sets some of them are newly made by people that I've been working with, and some are existing already in public databases. They're not easy for people to get to. Partly what we're trying to do with our Beescape tool is take these complex spatial data sets that may exist in a government site and put it into a site that's really easy for people to interact with. Aggregating all of this data into one place.

Jeff: That's really the basis of your Beescape tool that is available on the website. We'll set that aside and we'll come back to that in a moment because I think that's a really cool tool. The genetic-based behavioral research, you've taken that into the areas of nutrition where you're looking at other ways, other areas where the genetic basis for hygienic behavior or any of those other behavior traits that beekeepers are interested in. Did you look in those directions as well?

Christina: Most of ours like, I guess, pure behavioral work has really been looking at queen worker interactions and colonies. It's really from the standpoint of how does this complex social behavior arise. How is it regulated? Why would a worker not activate her ovaries and lay her own eggs? Why would she feed the queen and spread the queen's pheromone around the colony? It's been primarily focused on that, and we could probably spend a whole podcast talking. You should just invite me back.

Becky: Yes, you're invited. [laughter]

Christina: It's really interesting. Some of the work that we've been doing over the last few years has been looking at conflict that's predicted between the mother's genes and the father's genes. This was an evolutionary biology theory that was predicted to hold in bees. Because of, again, the new genetic tools and bioinformatic tools we had, we could actually test it.

We're showing that indeed that the theory holds that the father's genes and honeybees are regulated in a way to have the bees act selfishly. They activate their ovaries or they drive the larva to become a queen and not a worker while the mother's genes are acting more altruistically. Super cool. Maybe not totally super relevant for beekeepers though.

I think one of the interesting things that comes from that study or that set of studies is that the genetic basis of behavioral variation is actually more complicated than we thought. It's not just that you have certain stocks or that you cross those stocks, but the direction of those crosses, like who is a father and who is a mother will change the behavior of the worker, which is really interesting.

Jeff: It goes beyond the old discussion of the workers in a given colony having different family groups

Christina: It does go beyond that. Depending on who the father was and who the mother was, those stocks, if you flip it around, you get a different behavior from those workers.

Jeff: Ultimately, I guess it's needed for survival?

Christina: Yes. We have been focusing on it from really the standpoint of the workers behave selfishly, or the father's genes are driving them to behave selfishly. It also leads to different behavioral variation among the workers in the colony, which we all know is that that diversity of behavior is really what helps colonies be more productive and more successful and survive longer. All of it is just adding into that behavioral diversity of that social group.

Jeff: That's really interesting. Part of me wants to ask, well, why is it the male genes wanting to be selfish? [laughter] Maybe that's a different topic for another time.

Christina: I can explain that relatively easy. With honeybees, there's a single queen, and then she mates with multiple males. That means each daughter has genes from the mother that they share. They're related to each other through the mother's genes, but the father's genes are not shared if they're in different paternal lines.

The mother's genes are going to promote altruistic behavior of helping my sister, "Because you are my sister, you share my genes." The father's genes are like, "This is not necessarily related to me. The same genes are not in there. There's a benefit to me to act selfishly and have my own offspring, and pass off my genes because helping this other individual in the colony is not beneficial to my genes." Does that make sense?

Becky: I think what you're saying is that even in a honeybee colony, the boys are competitive with each other. It's just genetically.

Christina: Perfectly.

Jeff: I feel underqualified to join in this discussion.

Christina: There are other species where the mother's genes are predicted to be the selfish ones, but yes, for honey bees and for humans, the thought is that the males genes are behaving selfishly.

Jeff: I think this is a great time to take a quick break subject to hear from our sponsors-

Becky: Change the subject.

Jeff: -to hear from our sponsors and we'll be right back.

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Jeff: Well, when we left moments ago, we were talking about the rivalry between the drone, the male genetics and-- let's get away from that topic for right now. Actually, it's really interesting. You do a lot of work at your lab on the pollen. What about the pollen are you researching?

Christina: Primarily in terms of the nutrition, it is looking at the protein and then the fat content of the pollen, and how that relates to bees' choices. Then the physiological effects on the bees, and their ability to be more resilient to different stressors, including pesticides, parasites, and thermal stress. You also need to know where did the bees get their pollen from. The original studies that we were doing we're using controlled, forging arenas or we knew what plants that we were putting in those arenas.

Or we had plants that we had out in the field and we would look to see what insects were visiting those plants so we could identify them as being more or less pollen air attractive. Of course, honeybees and other bees are great at flying around the landscape and picking up the resources they want, and then just bringing it back to their colony or their nest for solitary bee. We can just let them tell us what they're interested in, but in order to do that we have to be able to take the pollen that they're bringing back and analyze it in some way that we can match it back to the flowering plant species that they were collecting the pollen from.

There's really two ways to do that. One is using microscopes where you take the pollen sample, and you would stain it and you would spread it out in microscope. Then the pollen is very beautiful. It has different shapes and different colors. You could then look at those images and match it back to a pollen library that you made from individual plant pollen of plants that were growing in the area. That's the traditional approach. It's difficult. You have to have that pollen library that has everything in the area.

Then the plant shapes are not always so easy or the pollen shapes are not always so easy to distinguish, and you have to make individual slides. It's difficult. There were several labs that were developing new molecular techniques where you basically can amplify up a small bit of DNA that's common-- well, you can amplify it across many species and then you sequence that piece of DNA, and then that will tell you what plant that DNA came from. This is called pollen DNA metabarcoding.

For that, it's genomics, it's bioinformatics. It's not really easy to do on your own, but if you have access to all of those, the instrumentation and the resources, then you can do this on a pretty high throughput way. We can process, at this point about 100 to 200 samples at a time. It takes a while to process them, but again, you can do them all at one time. We did this for a research project, and then our beekeepers in Pennsylvania were saying to me, they're like, "I really wish I could know what plants my bees were collecting pollen from, and what my bees were collecting nectar from to make honey."

We thought maybe we could take this technique and adjust it so that we could offer it as a service to beekeepers or others. That required a lot of troubleshooting and trying to make the process a little less expensive. Finally, it took us a while, a couple of years, to get it to the point that we felt like we could really offer this as a service more broadly. We just launched this, I guess, it was last fall, our new honey and pollen and diagnostic lab, where beekeepers or others can send in samples to us and then we process it using this metabarcoding approach.

Becky: Christina, what is a sample? When you say sample, I'm thinking an individual pack of pollen, or are we taking a tube and running it through the pollen stores?

Christina: What we've been recommending for beekeepers is sending a tube that you've run through a pollen trap or two 50-milliliter tubes of honey. The honey is really difficult because you have to spin it down and get whatever pollen is stuck in it, which is not very much. The more honey we can get the better. If there are research labs that are interested in sending us samples we also can process those. For research purposes, we can do a single corbicula load of pollen from a honeybee and analyze that. That's enough material for us.

Becky: With the pollen samples for your physiological studies, how do you separate out the impact of the pollen and its nutrition from the potential pesticide contamination?

Christina: Aah, that's a great question. We've done a couple of different studies. We try to avoid pesticide contamination by getting pollen from our own honeybee colonies or from vendors where we know that they have their honeybee colonies in areas where there are no pesticides. We have also analyzed our pollen to look for trace pesticides. As I was saying, we're really interested in the proteins and the fats, but pollen has a lot of other stuff in it.

If we're seeing these effects, how do we know where it's coming from? It could be some micronutrients that are also in the pollen or some plant secondary compounds that maybe are toxic. We try a couple of different approaches. One is that we can take a single batch of pollen and then add things to it to modify it. We can add canola oil or we can add casein as a protein source to change the protein lipid ratios.

We did that for a bit and I have to say, it's not the best because if you're at a very high concentrations of either of those things, bees do not like to eat that. Then, in the most recent studies, we've been collecting pollen from our honeybee colonies throughout the season weekly, and then analyzing it for its protein and lipid ratios so we can get natural pollen that has different nutritional content and then use that.

It's multi floral and so yes, there might be some other components in there. If we have two batches that are both high protein-lipid ratios, then we can hope that the result that we're seeing is more from the nutrition of that pollen as opposed to some other aspect of it.

Jeff: You mentioned you've studied the different seasonal pollens. Can you generalize what the spring pollen differentiate from the mid-summer pollen to the fall pollen? Is there a trend? Is there any difference or are they all the same?

Christina: Yes. We have found that there is seasonal variation in the nutritional content of the pollen that you get throughout the year. This is specific to our regions, in the Pennsylvania region. Then also work that was done by Gabriela Quinlan and Rufus Isaacs in the Midwest, and I think also Gloria DeGrandi-Hoffman did this work more in the west. I think they saw similar changes. What we find is that basically, the spring pollen is very protein-rich. It has high protein-lipid ratios, and then as you go into the fall protein content decreases. The protein-lipid ratio also decreases and so you basically have more fat less protein.

Jeff: That makes sense, I guess, from a evolutionary standpoint, I would think. Just clarification, lipid is the fat content, right?

Christina: Lipid is the fat content, yes. The thought is that, again, the pollen they're collecting is helping them potentially transition into these winter bee state.

Jeff: That might make a difference for when beekeepers feed a pollen substitute, whether it's a fall pollen, or a summer pollen, or a spring pollen that they're using in their feed.

Christina: Yes, exactly. That is something the bees are mindful of that the pollen changes with the season, the bees physiology and their physiological needs change with the season as well. Trying to match those up is probably beneficial for your bees.

Becky: That's really interesting. It reminds me of every other livestock group out there has amazing detail about nutrition for their animal. What you're doing is groundbreaking. There are people who have studied nutrition in bees, but not to this detail. I think it was studied early on and then were like, "Okay, we know enough," but turns out we need to know more, right?

Christina: Yes. Again, what we've been finding with different bee species, they seem to also have different preferences. Obviously we care a lot about what we feed to our honeybees. We've also been finding this for bumblebees as well, which are also commercially reared. I think trying to understand what they're willing to feed on because they also just don't eat everything that you give them. They have these preferences. Then also trying to understand, how those different nutritional profiles will influence the physiology, the behavior and the seasonal behavior of these bees is really important.

Jeff: It's like preferring McDonald French fries to Burger King French fries. They're French fries, but they're-- anyways.

Christina: They're different.

Becky: They have a preference.

Jeff: There are preferences. [laughter]

Becky: Does it impact our stimulant feeding? We will feed syrup in the spring to stimulate brood production, pollen substitute. You just brought up a really good example for pollen substitute. In general, does our stimulant feeding impact the health of our bees? We know the data look good for the most part where you have more brood and that's what the goal is. Is there a possible negative effect of the stimulant feeding?

Christina: I have not done any work on that, so I can't say for sure. I think the colony is really balancing and organizing itself. You'll want to try to match whatever management that you're doing with whatever is seasonally appropriate for the bees at that time. I would, again, triggering them to try to rear more brood, as long as the other resources are available for them to do that and the conditions are right, then the bees will respond, I think, in a positive way. Again, potentially long-term there could be changes, but I haven't studied it, so I can't really answer that.

Becky: I trust your opinion.

Jeff: Well, that's a lot of work in pollen. What's the work that you're doing in honey?

Christina: We have not really done too much work with honey. We were really interested in the pollen because-- again, some of those earlier studies that we were doing was showing that it wasn't how much sugar the bees had access to. It was really more the proteins and the fats that they had access to through the pollen that was influencing their ability to be resilient to these different stressors. Also, we know that the pollen is really important for brood rearing. Again, not just for honeybees, but also for wild bees where they'll collect pollen and make a little pollen ball and lay an egg on it.

There's nectar in there, but it's definitely not the primary food that the larva are growing on. We have not really focused that much on honey. Again, there's a lot of interest in identifying the floral resources that the honey was being made from because clearly there's different flavors and different colors. Again, to what extent that might be influencing outcomes for winter bees. I'm not sure, but that would be a whole other area of study.

Becky: Are you taking samples then from beekeepers right now for identification?

Christina: Yes. We have a couple of studies where we're working with beekeepers along landscape gradients to try to understand what are their bees foraging on. Does that vary with what the surrounding land use is? When those resources are available, does that also change depending on what kind of landscape you're in? We do have a project with beekeepers in Pennsylvania related to that.

Jeff: The tool that you have on the website that I could get lost in just playing that is the Beescape tool. Can you describe it for our listeners and why it was originally developed?

Christina: It's basically a map tool. You can think of like Google Maps kind of thing for the continental US. You can go into this tool and either put your address in and it will navigate to the site, or you can move around the map and find your site. Once you've located your site, you can either draw a circle so that you're looking at the land use in a certain radius or you can draw any kind of shape that you want. The tool will basically highlight in the area that you've selected, it'll color it in according to the land use patterns. Is it forest, is it corn crops, is it a orchard, is it develop land.

It'll give you the profile of what are the land use patterns in there and what percentage of lands corresponding to each category. It also will give you a score for the predicted spring floral resources. That depends on your landscape. If you have areas that have more forest, there's flowering trees that the bees really like. Spring floral resources summer and fall, and the score that it gives you is basically relative to what is the average for your state. Is your area better or worse than the rest of your state? Then it also gives you the predicted toxic load of pesticides.

For this, this is data that we have collected from USGS's pesticide survey data, and then integrated that with EPAs toxicity dataset so that we can say, "Certain crops, we know how much pesticide is being placed on it and what kind of pesticide and how toxic that is for bees." All of that score goes into Beescape. Again, you get this scoring that tells you is this really high pesticide toxic load in this area or low relative to the average.

We have pulled in data from the National Agricultural Statistics Service, Census Of Agriculture. Beescape will tell you what the contribution of honeybees are to the economic value of crops in your area. Basically, like crops that are pollinated, the amount of pollination services that you're getting from bees. What is the difference in yield and what is the associated price difference for that? It can say, again, in this area, bees have contributed $300,000 worth to crop pollination.

Then we also are providing data on the weather conditions. It's the average temperature for the month, for all the months from the current year, all the months from the previous year, and then the 10-year average, and then also the precipitation. The total precipitation each month from the current year and then the previous year. You can see, I always forget has it been a dry year? I'm not really sure.

This way you can go back and you can see, yes, it has been a dry year and compared to what we should see in normal conditions or on average in our area. How does that compare? Then finally we pulled in data from iNaturalist. iNaturalist is a citizen science project where people take pictures of things, and then it gets uploaded into iNaturalist. We pulled the data from there for flowering plants and for pollinators.

You can see in the area that you've highlighted these little icons will pop up, and you can click on those to see what flowering plants somebody took a picture of in your area. Then that gives you a sense of, again, what flowering plants are available at this time, and what other pollinators might be present as well.

Jeff: Is that all?

Christina: That's it. [laughter] One of the questions people always want to know, what flowering plants can they add to their landscapes to help bees? We're hoping in the future to also add that kind of data. What plants would be appropriate for flowering spring, summer, and fall in your specific location? What plants would grow there?

Jeff: I was kidding, obviously. It's such a wonderful fun tool to explore.

Becky: Jeff, I think people stopped listening a long time ago and just went to the tool. Now, it's just the three of us. I'm kind of on the tool right now. Sorry. That is so amazing.

Christina: Thank you. Our first iterations, we actually have been working with a professor here at Penn State who studies human-computer interactions. He's been helping us do surveys with beekeepers of our tool. I will say the very first version, everyone was like, "No, I do not like this." This is a new version that took into account the feedback that we got from beekeepers, and growers, and customers. So far, we've been getting much better response at some time.

Jeff: Is it web-based only or is there a mobile version?

Christina: Hopefully, we're working on that mobile version now. It works on your mobile device, but the problem is that the main window that gives you all that information blocks everything else out. It's very clunky. We're working on a mobile version for that, which I hope will be available maybe in May 2024.

Jeff: Christina, is there anything that we haven't asked you about that you're just chomping at the bit to ask or tell our listeners?

Christina: I would love to get feedback on our Beescape tool. Because the information that we get really helps us learn better how to improve what we're offering. I guess I'll be able to share some of the websites with you for people to be able to go there.

Jeff: The Beescape and your lab site will be in the show notes for this episode. Anything else that you want to send me, I'll make sure they are posted there as well.

Becky: Christina, did you have anything about swarms that you wanted to share with Jeff right now?

Christina: Oh, yes.

Becky: That's kind of a topic.

Jeff: For my friend.

Becky: Sorry, Jeff, so that he can share with his friend.

Christina: Yes, Jeff, I hear you've got some swarming going on right now.

Jeff: My friend does. [laughter]

Christina: I did some work with Heather Mattila actually many years ago looking at swarming behavior. The thought is always that the worker bees are the ones that are designing, and deciding when the colony swarms and where it will land, and when it will take off to find some new home. We are interested in looking at whether or not the queen was at all involved in this decision-making process. We know that the queen releases pheromones during dating.

She releases pheromones when she's in the hives, and organize the behavior of the workers. We are wondering if she released special pheromones during the swarming process. Heather was an amazing researcher, and knew a lot about how to work with these swarms. She was able to collect chemicals or volatile chemicals that were coming off of queens in a colony that was not swarming in a colony where the swarm had just taken off and had left the queen there.

We could then compare them to see if there were differences. The queen where the colony has just taken off, she is releasing more chemicals and different chemicals from the queen that's inside the colony itself. Then when we ask the swarming bees which scent they preferred, they preferred the scent of the swarming queen. We think that she might be doing some special signaling to the workers during this process.

Jeff: As you've stated earlier, the queen is there to try to bridge peace and bring unity and kumbaya. Not bring division and divisiveness of the workers with different fathers.

Christina: [laughs] That's right. She's helping keep this form together.

Jeff: Folks, that's my summation not Christina's.

Becky: That's really interesting data though.

Jeff: That is really interesting. Well, Christina, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a true pleasure and look forward to having you back to discuss more on your research.

Christina: Well, thank you so much, Becky and Jeff.

Becky: Thank you.

Jeff: There is so much fun research going on with honeybees and the world of honeybees. It's hard to keep track of, really.

Becky: It is, except for there are these lovely personalities attached to these bodies of work, and they're able to translate it so effectively. I'm still stunned that we have a situation where somebody was studying something so complex and in a different field. She moved over to entomology, she focused on honeybees, and now her work is-- like I said, I don't think anybody's listening to us because they're on Beescape right now. When this episode's released, Beescape it's going to probably break down temporarily because of the traffic.

Jeff: You're right. A couple of weeks ago, was it Dr. Platner who was talking about her original start was in organic chemistry? Now she switched over to honeybees and was really enjoying that. We definitely benefit from the curiosity and professionalism and just plain hard work of diverse group of people. I like it a lot.

Becky: I love that the beekeeping industry is recruiting. We recruited Dr. Flenniken also from plant viruses to bee viruses, so there's a trend.

Jeff: I like it. Let's keep it up.

Becky: Very good. Let's get to Beescape now.

Jeff: 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 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 sponsors, Betterbee, 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 at the leave a comment section under each episode on the website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

Becky: I'm sorry, I'm having so much fun today.

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