Spring is back in Illinois, and soon comes April showers, May flowers, and of course the bees that help those flowers grow. In recent years though, bee populations have been dwindling for largely unexplained reasons. If the trend isn’t reversed, food supply chains across the country could suffer shortages.
But one graduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is out to stop that, by arming beekeepers and concerned citizens alike with data.
Reporter Sam Dunklau sat down with entomology student Jacob Torres to talk about his work assembling a beehive database.
SD: Can you tell us a little bit about what you're trying to do with this bee database?
JT: In general [at] the Dolezal Bee Research Lab, we focus on trying to understand landscape level predictors of what exactly affects honey bee health, which means that we like to ask questions, like what practices work in certain places that might not work and others, and what beekeeping features are associated with better bees.
However, honeybee health is a very complicated topic to tackle because it's not just one factor that impacts it directly; it's actually a lot of different factors, including pathogens, pesticides, the microbes in their guts...being able to understand how these interactions impact honeybee health is extremely complicated and requires a huge number of hives to collect data from to be able to accurately understand.”
SD: In the last several years, we've been hearing a lot of news about things like collapsing hive syndrome; all of a sudden, there's all these bees, and then all of a sudden there's not. Did the impetus for this come from any of that?
JT: There's been a lot of stories that talk about this decline and bee populations across across the country and across the world...there are native bee populations and they are honey bees, and both populations are seeing a decline. With Bombus affinis, which is the rusty-patched bumble bee, that was listed here in the United States as an endangered species, and that was the first bee to be listed on there.
This has been happening due to several different reasons which aren't completely clear yet, and the reason why they aren't clear is because there are all of these factors that are in interaction with one another, whether that is virus loads, which is one of the hypotheses that a lot of scientists think is responsible for the decline of bumblebees, or also pests and mites. There are these little mites that are somewhat like ticks, but there bee-sized. They're called varroa mites, and these varroa mites have also been a large reason why honey bee populations have been in decline recently.
SD: You've talked to some land owners around UIUC about the health of bees and making sure that apiaries around their area are healthy. What are some of the other Illinois specific problems with be health that you're noticing in your research?
JT: Right now, there is actually this pest that is new to Illinois beekeepers. It's called small hive beetle, and it is a pest that has been creeping up from the south. Due to climate it hasn't been able to spread all the way to the northern region of Illinois, however, every year we have been seeing that it spreads a little bit more. This hive beetle takes over the honey bee hive, and will start eating their resources, but also it'll start laying larva throughout the comb. When these eggs hatch into larva, they produce something that's very slimy, and so a lot of beekeepers have been reporting that their hives have been slimed out, meaning that there is so much slime produced that it pretty much kills their hive and doesn't allow them to be productive or pollinate the plants around them.
SD: In talking about those sorts of problems, how do you and your team proposed that a bee database can start to address some of those things?
JT: We are really excited about this new project that we're starting in collaboration with Penn State and Purdue. We have made this new website and it'll eventually be an app. It can be accessed at beescape.org. This website [allows you to] see a map, pretty much like you would see on Google Maps through a satellite, and it uses several different layers, so we can start to understand how the landscape is around a certain apiary.
Let's say you have beehives at your house. You [can] click on your location or you type in your address, and it will give you scores based on the probability that they'll be exposed to pesticides, the probability that they have good quality forage throughout the summer, but also spring and fall and also the amount of nesting habitat for native bees, because native bees many times don't live in colonies but are actually solitary and nest in twigs stakes in the ground or in holes. By clicking on your apiary, you'll be able to see how these different landscape variables score in your area and then be able to better predict where you might be able to place a hive to reduce the amount of pesticide it is exposed to, or to increase the amount of forage that is available for your bees.
The idea is that over time, by informing beekeepers of where to place their hives, we can get better, healthier, more productive hives. Part of this project is also asking the beekeeper to collect information for us as well. Most beekeepers open up their beehive at least once a month to check out how their bees are doing, and make sure that the queen is healthy and laying. If all of these beekeepers, as they go through their hives, collected information for us and then sent it to us or uploaded it to this database, it would allow us to see not just as a local snapshot of what's going on in Champaign-Urbana or in Chicago, but actually got to see what is going on across the state and let us see these landscape patterns to better understand honey bee health and be able to produce these better, healthier hives.
SD: I imagine all that would be incredibly helpful and useful for all sorts of groups! How as hive your local hive outreach been going? Have beekeepers been willing to jump on board with this?
JT: Beekeeper reaction has been extremely positive so far, which is really exciting. I have been going around the state presenting to beekeeper associations, and at the end of my presentation, I have asked them to raise their hand if they were interested in participating. It's usually at least 75% of the audience members [that] raise their hand and said that they are willing to participate afterwards. I've gotten many emails from people in those presentations thanking me for giving them the presentation, but also expressing how excited they are for someone to be doing a project like this. Overall reaction has been really, really positive, and I'm just excited to get as many beekeepers to help us out so that we can get as large of a database as we can.
SD: After this database has been established, what are the next steps? How will all this data be used?
JT: All of this information will be used to inform other beekeepers of what practices work in certain areas, and what practices don't work in their areas. However, this may also lead to actual policy change. In this project, where we are using citizen scientists but also in this other pollinator project, [we want] to tap into that wealth of knowledge that is out there from people who are actually doing the work every single day. They know so much! It's just not described in scientific literature and that's what we're trying to gap. But, the scientific literature can then be used to make these recommendations, not just to the individual beekeeper but also regionally and in policy as well.