Nuanced. - 48. Paul van Westendorp: Asian Giant Hornet, Honey Bees, & Agriculture

Episode Date: March 22, 2022

Paul van Westendorp is a bee expert, researcher and British Columbia's Provincial Apiculturist. In 2019, Mr. van Westendorp was called in to help address the Asian Giant Hornets discovered in Nanaimo, BC. As provincial apiarist, van Westendorp oversees statistics and the provincial beekeeper registry, which includes approximately 4,300 beekeepers, most of whom are hobby beekeepers concentrated in the Fraser Valley. In an interview with Provincial Employees Association, Paul comments “The importance of bees is not a luxury. Deep down we know that without bees we are in trouble”.Introduction to Beekeeping Course: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/industry/agriculture-seafood/animals-and-crops/animal-production/bees/bee-coursesWatch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/LsIQlr1lbWcSend us a textSupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

My name is Paul Van Westendarp, and I am the provincial apiarist of British Columbia. That means that I look after the program on apiculture, on bees for the Ministry of Agriculture. And we try to deliver our services throughout British Columbia wherever honeybees are kept. Right. So one thing that's on a lot of people's minds, or that makes the news a lot, is this idea of the Japanese hornet or killer bees that's been making the news over the years, and you're the person they call in. Can you give us a little bit of background on how this got started?

Okay, well, the hornet is actually the Asian giant hornet, that is Vespa mandarinia. That one was first discovered in 2019 on Vancouver Island, And that is an invasive pest, an invasive species that we have tried to control together with our friends down south in Washington State. So that's a totally separate enterprise, if you will, compared to the main activity that we are involved with in the apiculture program dealing with honeybees. And honeybees, you should consider those as livestock. They are not just lovely little sweet bees. Yeah, they are. But we use them and manage them for a number of reasons, not only to produce honey, of course, and things like this, but most importantly, to bring about the pollination of flowering crops from which we get fruits and seeds and things of that kind.

And that is the main focus of our apiculture program. Yeah, and so people are terrified of the idea of this killer bee that's going to come after our people. And so can you tell us about when they were first discovered, were you concerned? It sounds like in the beginning you were a little bit skeptical of whether or not they had arrived here. Could you give us the background? Well, we have to step back. The honeybees belong to the genus apis. That is why we call beekeeping apis or apiculture, apiculture.

The genus apis has never been represented in America. So neither in North America, Central or South America, representatives of the species or the genus Apis didn't exist. So it came about because of the, you know, introduction of honeybees from Europe doing the settlers 400 years ago. And so the honeybee, the European honeybee, has become totally endemic now and found in many other places. Settlers also brought,

European bays and consider those of course within an untemperate climatic regime they brought them also to South America to the tropics and in the tropics they didn't perform very well so as a result some researcher in Sao Paulo brought some some Gen & Wine African bees to to South America to breed and these African bees are a subspecies, are not a species difference, but a subspecies or a racial difference, if you will. And that is important to recognize that you have different races of bees can easily hybridize. They can mate with each other successfully. If you have a different species, the genetic differences is too large for it to reproduce successfully.

In some cases, that is possible, but mostly you have offspring that is not very viable. A good example are a donkey and a horse. Yes, you can get successful crosses in that, but they are mostly sterile. There is too much genetic problems, is there, if you will. So these African bees were brought to South America, and they were, that is a different subspecies of European bees. So it's a different subspecies. And they bred or they escaped and they started to run or hybridized with the European honeybees that were already there. And those Africanized bees, they were not African bees anymore.

They were Africanized bees, right, started to spread very rapidly throughout the Amazon basin. And from there into Central America, from Central America in Mexico and from there into Mexico. and from there into the United States. And they arrived in the United States in 1990. And these are, because of their highly defensive behavior, that's why they were dubbed not by beekeepers typically, but by the media, as killer bees. And the reason is that they tend to be when the nest is disturbed,

that instead of just a few bees being unhappy, a whole pile of them will come out and start to do some serious damage to whoever is disturbing their nest. So they were, and particularly in Central America, a lot of livestock are often teethersed. They cannot roam freely and they cannot escape when the bees attack. So that is why you had quite a bit of livestock and human fatalities over the years. So the reason that I'm not that concerned about Africanized bees is here in Canada is because the African bees that were brought to South America in the 1950s by this researcher at Sao Paulo University. These bees also, when they escaped, they also migrated southward in South America towards the more tempered. climatic zones.

And it is interesting, the scientific community tends to ignore that, or doesn't pay enough attention to it. But if you look at the map that when you travel southward from Sao Paulo, everything in that area southward is Africanized up to roughly the 35th parallel, southern parallel, of course. If you go further, and around the 35th parallel, you have typically an hybridization zone. You have both European bees and Africanized bees kind of both represented. Where you go further down into the Tampa, into the Pampas of Argentina, where a lot of bees are kept.

All of those are European. I spent some years in East Africa, and on the hot savannas of East Africa, you have typically there apismalifera scutalata, the African bee that was brought to South America. And they are very challenging to manage to deal with. There are certain techniques that really lowers their hot temper. But aside from that, when you go into the higher elevations of the Roanzoris, the Roanzorys or the mountains of the moon in western Uganda, close to the border with the Congo, I saw bees out there that were behaving the same as our bees out here. in Canada. And that is, and there is no physical barrier. I mean, the ones from the hot savannas in Africa can literally fly up the hill in order to get to these higher elevations in the Roan Zores. But the ones in the higher elevations are distinctly different because they have

acclimatized to a very different climatic regime that does not tolerate that highly defensive behavior. And in fact, A researcher, I don't want to go into too many details, but a researcher in the 1970s traveled through there and identify this particular group of bees in the higher elevations as being a different subspecies again. And that was called not Apis Malifra Scutalata, but Apis Malifera Monticola. So it appears that clearly there are some very significant climatic limitations. that enable these Africanized bees to function well in our temperate zones.

And you can also say, we put a qualitative judgment on bad behavior, this highly defensive behavior. But let's turn it around and look at it in a different way. This highly defensive behavior can also be seen as an expansion of an enormous amount of energy, because it sacrifices a lot of food reserves for these bees to get so agitated and to be defensive in an behavior that is often not very cost-effective. Right. When honeybees start to expand much of their reserves, their energy on this highly defensive

behavior, they reduce the chances of wintering successfully. And I think it is therefore, it can be viewed that this highly defensive behavior is unaffordable in an environment where you have strong seasonal food availability and long periods of non-food availability, which means the winter season. Right. Okay. So Africanized bees or African bees enjoy the luxury of having little dribblets of nectar sources and pollen sources through much of the year. It may never be a large amount, but steady over the months and over the entire year. But the bees in the temperate zones cannot afford that. They have to work very hard throughout the spring and summer season in order to build up enough reserves,

that that gives them enough food reserves for the entire winter season. Now, we as beekeepers take that honey away and we give them sugar syrup instead, which is totally fine from a survival perspective. But coming back on these killer bees or these Africanized bees, I believe that when they are brought up here in our tempered zones, that much of their behavior must be tempered simply because they cannot afford to survive very well in the wintertime. Right. So what if, like I watched a documentary on these and they seem to go after honeybees. And so is there any cons? Maybe the Japanese.

Oh, yeah, you're talking about two different things. So the honey, the what you called killer bees or these properly called Africanized bees are honeybees. Okay. When you were talking about the Japanese hornet or the Asian giant hornet, this is a totally different beast. Okay. Completely different. And I can show you a sample of what that looks like. They are about three or four times larger.

They are like an hornet. And the easiest thing to separate these things out is this, that if you deal with wasps and hornets, they all come from the same ancestor. They are all within that group of humanoptrans, so called, that consists of the wasps and the hornets and all those, including the ants, by the way, who in the process through evolution lost their wings, of course. but they are in that same order called the humanopterans. And the ancestors to the bees are wasp-like or hornet-like ancestors. And over millions of years, in fact, roughly 95 to 100 million years ago, that is when the beginning of a separation took place. Hornets and wasps are by definition insect hunters, hunters of other insects.

And for that, you don't need hairiness. You need a stealth, heart-coated body to fly fast and to have good eyes to find your prey and have good mandibles to bite and to chew and things of this kind. The reason that there was this separation is because the world started to develop flowering plants for the first time. Prior to that, the world was a pretty dull place. Much of the vegetation was kind of wind-pollinated or through spore reproduction, vegetative growth rather than sexual reproduction. It was about 95 million years ago, or 100 million years ago, give or take,

that the flowering plants started to develop, and that was actually revolutionary in the living world. Because what happened was that these plants, started to develop very specific gender or sexual organs, female organs and male organs. So you have there the need for having pollen, male seeds, if you will, to transfer over to female flower parts to create crossbreeding. That allowed for the development of a much

greater biodiversity of both plants and all kinds of animals that depend on these plants. The bees that became the precursors to our current bees started to modify their physical functions and body sizes and shapes and everything else and their behavior as well to take advantage of the food sources, food rewards, if you will, that these flowering plants started to offer. and that is why that over millions of years we had to the development of what we collectively called the bees or the pollinators and honeybees is only one species of some 20,000 or so different species of what we call bees throughout the world

so honeybees is only one specific species generally but it's not totally true but let's say the majority of what we call bees can be identified of being hairy. They have a lot of pubescence, hairiness. And that is a great advantage because when bees land on a flower, they grasp that flower or crawl into the flower, and the hairs are like little brooms that will pick up pollen grains. And when they say enough and they go to the next flower,

they will have a whole bunch of these pollen grains on their body on their hair parts and they deposit these pollen grains onto the next flower and that is where you have pollination taking place so it's it's both an extraordinary and beautiful process of the interaction of and dependency of bees pollinators and the flowering world if you take all the bees away we are going to starve to death because you have an ecological collapse because we no longer have any food. Well, we could have food in the form of grains. Grains belong all to the grass family and those are all wind pollinated. So if you look at wind pollination, the evergreen trees are also wind pollinated. You don't need an insect for the transfer of pollen grains. from one part of the, from a male flower part to a female flower part. Mostly the wind pollinated plants tend to dominate in environments where there is a relatively low biodiversity.

In other words, there are only a few, relatively speaking, a few species of plants that dominate the landscape. And the prairies is the best example of that. So when the grasses start to become sexually active, reproductive, they release pollen grains. And these pollen grains are swept up by the wind and they just blow in great distances and hopefully some of those will fall onto female flower parts. But most of it is wasted. Because if you park your car somewhere, you will see that after you come back, after a shopping spree, you see that your windshield is covered in yellow powder, okay? Or it lands onto the road service or into a lake or wherever.

It means that a great deal of the pollen grains that grasses and evergreens release, since they are wasted, most of it, that plant cannot invest a great deal of food value or nutrition in the form of amino acids that lead to protein development. That plant cannot afford that. So it has, in the eyes of bees, the pollen of grasses and pollen of wind-pollinated plants are relatively unattractive. While the flowering plants that are dependent on bees can put in, in order to make sure that the bees will come a visit, they will make sure that there is a nutritional value to it. Okay. So therefore, bees, not just honeybees, but also bumblebees and all these are much more focused on those plants that need their presence. Because that plant will invest more resources, nutrition, or a reward in carbohydrate sources, which is nectar, to attract these insects and to give them a food reward.

Okay. So the, what I'm illustrating out here is a very important. important symbiotic relationship between vastly different organisms. You know, the bees are of course very differently organized. They have a nervous system. They have muscles and they have everything else. And they're totally integrated with the survivability and the reproductive success of the flowering plants. So, and it happens to be that we are the pickers, humans,

are the pickers of fruits and everything else and we have you know we we like to have wonderful fresh fruits in the middle of winter okay this is all possible or made possible only because of the presence of bees not necessarily just here in north america but it could also be somewhere in the kiwi that is produced in new zealand for that you need and a bee to transfer this this the pollen grains to ensure proper, what we call proper fruit set or seed set, depending on the plant involved, or the crop involved. Right. How does the, which one was discovered on the island?

Was that the Japanese? That is a hornet. You're not talking about bees. Okay. So we have to really keep those things separate. Yes. So if you're talking about the hornet, it is the Asian giant hornet. It's the largest hornet in the world.

Again, that there's about four bodies, four times large. larger than you're, at least, than the honeybee. It is a predator. And in fact, the Asian giant hornet is the largest hornet in the world. It comes from Asia, as the name suggests. And it is what we call an apex predator. It is, there are no other insects that will eat or hunt the Asian giant hornet. but keep in mind that often people's fantasies run wild when they hear these stories

and partly the media has to be blamed for this but the ancient we call it the Asian giant hornet but in down south here south of the line where they have a propensity to sensational lies a lot of these things and they like to call them the murder hornets and, you know, all kinds of other dubious qualities are being subscribed to them. But I think it's, again, important to step back

and realize, well, what is actually its function? How does it actually behave? And I think the best way to compare it with is, as an apex predator, if we compare that with other apex predators in their respective environments, So, for example, here in Canada, we have up in the high Arctic, we have polar bears. That's an apex predator.

No other animal hunts, apart from humans, hunts polar bear. But what is the characteristic of apex predators? They may be very fearsome and can be caused terrible damage to you and I and whoever. But their density, their population density, is very, very low. In other words, the probability of you running into, or anyone running into a polar bear is exceedingly low. The problem only arises that when you run into one,

then you scratch your head and say, well, who can run faster? But generally speaking, you're pretty safe when you go to the high Arctic, the chances for you running into one is very low. Likewise, with the apex predator of the Asian giant hornet, they produce relatively small nests and I say relative because the numbers may appear to be large but it is in comparison to honeybees low

say a nest maybe of a few hundred individuals and for most of the season they hunt other insects and quite frankly when one flies around in the neighborhood so to say they will ignore you altogether we as humans tend to think that we are infinitely interesting but we're not

within the larger natural world where often by other creatures viewed as a threat and a pest but in itself there are no hornets that say aha there isn't human being

I better go and stain it or whatever no not at all they will actually avoid you quite a bit so in their normal behavior they go after other insects and it is only later in the season that is to say when that nests over the course of the spring and summer season when that nest grows larger and larger and basically it reaches its maximum size in and around late August then it comes into a

phase of development where the food availability starts to decline and then has the urge to produce offspring that will sexually mature. Prior to that, from the spring all the way up to the early fall season, you only have females in that nest. So you have a queen that lays the eggs, and you have a whole bunch of workers. They are sterile. They are infertile. They are never mate. They just basically help Mama to build a larger nest.

So they have food gathering. and they bring that food to the nest and then the young ones are being fed and in that way over the course of the summer that nest gets larger and when finally the late summer arrives they will then finally produce offspring that will sexually mature

so these are going to be virgin queens and males and in order to be able to do that such a nest requires a great deal of animal protein and for that they will start to hunt honeybee colonies and it is really interesting how that happens

is that you have a scout that comes from such a hornet's nest and will perhaps enter an apiary an apiary is a place where honeybees are kept maybe one colony or maybe a hundred colonies but mostly a few number of them and she will then assess which hive with the bees in it

is suitable for raiding It will then assess that and then it will fly close to the entrance and it will deposit a marker and pheromone marker and kind of an insect hormone that it places on it and it flies back home. It will then basically gather some of her sisters, if you will, other workers and will then go onto an raiding party. So they go towards that selected nest or this colony, honeybee colony, and they are trying to get the bee brood. They are not that interested in the actual honeybees, but they like to get inside and start pulling out the bee brood. Before they can have entrance or gain access to the brood,

they will start to sit in front of the hive and basically create a panic by biting and slashing whatever honeybee they can get. So the honeybee colony gets into a panic and eventually is overwhelmed by these huge insects and they will crawl in and then will pull out the bee brood which are nice, soft and easily chewed into meatballs essentially

and they will carry those back to their own nest and feed it to their larvae, to their young ones. Okay. Okay. The interesting thing is that these adult hornets don't feed themselves this animal protein. They feed it to their young ones, to the larvae. The larvae partially digest this chewed up material, and then a portion of that is regurgitated, and it is that regurgitated, partially digested protein, that is what these adult hornets.

eat and actually live off, okay? So it's a very complicated, lovely little story, but so they are totally different from our dear beloved honeybees. Right. To follow up on that, I had the opportunity to watch a documentary where they talk about how the honeybees responded or the bees responded. And it sounds like they, when that scout comes in, they all started moving together to heat up the,

hive in order to, it seems like, melt the body of that hornet. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah. Well, the problem here is, is that we talked earlier about the genus Apis. And so in Europe, we have the European honeybee, it's called, or the Western honeybee, and it is called Apis Malifera. Okay. In Asia, where these hornets originally came from, you have there another honeybee species

called Apis Serrana, not Apis Malifera, but. a Bessarana, the Asian honeybee. We don't like that honeybee because it is not very productive and there are a number of negatives associated with it. But it has evolved in an environment where it is predated upon by these hornets and they have learned or acquired a defense technique, if you will, that put serious limits on these hornets. And what they do is they ball an intruder.

Rooting Hornet and create an enormous fighting ball of these honeybeys. They try to sting and everything else. And quite a few of them die in the process, of course, because this Hornet is a big one. But basically what they do is they get so tightly around the body of this Hornet that they raise the temperature. And they raise the temperature at a level above the lethal nevo for the Hornet. In other words, they suffocate and overheat, or you might say cook, this hornet. Some of the bees are just about close to death themselves also.

So it doesn't go without a serious price to pay, but the nest is protected that way. So, but that is you're dealing with another honeybee species, apisorana. And some uninformed people say, well, wow, why don't we get apisorana out here? No, we don't want it. Because in addition to poor productivity, the Apis Serrana carries with it carries a number of diseases and pathogens, viral pathogens, that we certainly don't want to hear in North America or in Europe. What do you, you study this. Is it really interesting to see that evolution of at least Apis Serrana and go like, how did it, like, how does this, like, this is so interesting to me to think that there's these. there's this problem

that they don't know how to solve they're getting wiped out it seems like from what I recall the hornets can kill like 30 bees and like just so quickly and so to come it seems insurmountable

when you stop there and then you hear about how the bees kind of responded in at least that region does that set you back and go like this is so interesting yeah oh it is but keep in mind

to acquire that defensive response of bawling and intruding hornet, that will take, you know, thousands of years, if not tens of thousands of years for that kind of behavior to be incorporated in our honeybees, Western honeybees. However, our Western honeybees are managed by beekeepers, and beekeepers like to defend their beloved bees. And I can tell you, since 2019, when the first hornets arrived in Nanaimo, and the nest was subsequently destroyed, I have received quite a few suggestions and ideas and designs by beekeepers how to deal with these Asian giant hornets. These hornets have a particular, they're not only physically very large, but because they are, about five centimeters in length, body length, and they have a wingspan of up to about seven centimeters, which is getting close to that of a small hummingbird. They're characterized by having an oversized head, an head that is shaped like a shield. It is a very impressive-looking insect.

And that large oversized head and the body size in general makes it kind of difficult to crawl through very narrow spaces. And it is precisely this is what they call the Achilles heel, if you will, of the hornet, in that there are already all kinds of designs of barriers that beekeepers have designed to make it exceptionally difficult for these hornets to crawl into a nest of honeybees, while the honeybees themselves, being much smaller, can go in and out. So I think that the point what I'm trying to get at here is that I have full confidence in the savvy and innovative minds of beekeepers who will help and protect their bees from these hornets in case these hornets established themselves out here on the West Coast. And that is a whole different story because that is not proven yet at all.

We have been working very closely since 2019 through surveys and close collaboration with our friends in Washington State to hunt down these hornets and whenever these hornets nests are found, they are destroyed. So it's, and I have the optus, hope really, cautious, hope that indeed we will be successful. That's fantastic. Can you walk us through the timeline of what took place from that first initial? Who did the call in? It sounds like from how you described it, that the Nanaimo beekeepers played a really positive role in addressing these problems. Can you walk us through that first sighting to you getting involved to starting to make a plan to address this? Yeah, it was basically in August, the middle of August of 2019, when a beekeeper contacted me and said,

you know there are some huge hornets out here that are pestering my bees and there was a man who was sitting in front of his hive you know hives communing with them just looking at the traffic of it and relaxing and a nice launch air and saw these hornets he had the the quickness of mind to catch them and they were then carried over and we identified them as as vespah mandarinia. In the subsequent weeks or in the weeks following these these these finds in middle of August there were a number of other reports of sightings some of them were photographic proof they were not all physical collections but photographic evidence that clearly they were there and this is when I engaged the local beekeeping community in the

And by plotting them on a map, these sightings, it became quite evident that we were talking here about a cluster of findings or sightings. And that is a key because through triangulation on this map, if you connect all these finds together, there was a very distinct geographical area where it was very likely that they would have a nest somewhere. Now, from the published materials and from Asia, it is very evident that they have a certain preference of a certain habitat in which they establish their nests. And that it tends to be maritime forests with an high level of humidity and dense undercover and preferably on a sloped surface. So there is a reduced risk of flooding, for example. And they are typically what we call a cavity nester. Cavity nesters are those that basically have an hollow space or they dig in hollow space where they can create their nest. It could also be in a hollow tree or in a rock crevice.

This sets them apart, of course, from many wasps and hornets that build in the open. So typically when you walk out here, you sometimes in the late summer have these paper brown colored nests. So they are not in a cavity, but they build a little. a spherical shaped nest in which they raised their young. So these Asian giant hornets like a cavity environment. And so these, we don't have the personnel and the resources to do this on a quick basis by going through all of this searching, but these beekeepers did on their own accord. It was quite remarkable.

And within a remarkably short time period, they identified, they located this particular nest. In a public park, right in, well, yeah, in central Nanaimo, which is quite remarkable, and proceeded with its destruction at night because you do these things only in the dark, not in the daytime because... How do you destroy them? Well, there are different ways at that time because it was also new. What they decided to do is they didn't, for further study purposes, There was an entomologist involved in one of these beekeepers who trained entomologists. So they decided to first basically blast them with CO2 and that deprives them of oxygen, of course, and you stun them, that there's only short term.

And while they are stunned, then he would, with gloves and everything else, he would have a bucket with alcohol, with windshield wiper fly, fluid, for example, methanol, and throw them in as quickly as he could. After a short while, they would wake up again, so he had to blast them again with CO2. And in that way, it was a kind of a slow procedure, and in this way you will, of course, never get all of them. So you get a bit of exposure and danger of getting stung, and that there's also a couple of people there also did get stung.

But they're experienced beekeepers. They know what it's like to get stung. This is a far larger insect, of course, and more painful, but it's not like a person who is not familiar with that would be heart-pressed not to panic because these insects are very large and intimidating. So they were successful. If we find a nest today, we do it very different. We would just coordinate off, make sure that there are no public access and no media, for sure not, things like this.

And we will then plan an evening where we can go in and we use an insecticidal foam and encase them in this insecticidal foam. We don't do anything else. The next day we'll come back. We'll apply it again. And maybe on the third night, we will start to dig out the nest. We are less concerned about preserving some specimens for whatever further research. Let me go back to what the chronological set of events were. So after this nest was discovered, that was on September the 17th.

So that was basically a month after the first sighting. This nest was destroyed. And of course, some beautiful samples were collected. and they were, later they were sequenced, in other words, DNA analysis was applied to them, and they were identified to have had a Japanese origin. We thought that this was the end of the story for the year, because it was already in September, we thought, well, that's it. And then suddenly in the middle of November of 2019, we got,

got a report in from someone in White Rock on the mainland who had found one of these large hornets and the photographic evidence was quite clear. Unfortunately, we're never able to collect the actual specimen that was thrown out and destroyed, but we were shocked to learn that this insect was active, not only that it was on the mainland, but that was still active in the middle of November. Then three weeks later, in early December, two specimens were found in Washington State, in Blaine. And that raised further concerns that we realized that there was some active, you know, hornet activity going on out there in all the mainland. The specimens that were collected in Blaine were also sequenced

and they were found to be of South Korean origin or generally Korean origin. That is perhaps of academic interest where they came from being Japanese or Korean. That doesn't really matter for the Joe average. But what is significant there is that clearly we were dealing with different introductions at different times. And this placed a completely different picture into the scenario.

So it was all late 2019. So we set up surveillance, the surveys, both on the mainland as well as on Vancouver Island to see what was going on. I leave the Vancouver Island now apart. So we were into 2020, and the Americans were doing the same thing. We surveyed and had bottle traps and all kinds of other traps out close to the border from White Rock all the way to Alder Grove. And it were not only our traps that we were manning, but we also engaged, you know, beekeepers and there are an estimated 200, close to 200 beekeepers or 180 beekeepers or something in that target area in the Fraser Valley. We engaged, you know, various municipalities, you know, parks and rec departments so that their crews that are outside keep an eye open. We also gave them advice as to what to do and not to do in case they do find some of these things.

Who to report to. We had an engagement of the Simea Mou First Nation that was involved. In 2020, we had the RCMP, of course, involved because of the border. You know, we wanted to let them know from, look, don't be cavalier. If you find something, let us know. The Canadian Border Agency was involved, at least notified about all these things. So we had, and not just that, we had, of course, also the public at large involved. And we invited people to, essentially, whenever they found kind of an ominous, large, wasp-like creature, take a photograph, send it in so that we can identify it.

Right. Out of the survey activities that took place in 2020, there were a grand total of five specimens were found in that year. Unfortunately, these, they were not, we could not consider those as a cluster of finds because they were very far apart, both geographically, as well as in time. Some of them were found in May, others were found all the way in October, or November, in 2020. So there was no correlation between these finds. And in fact, the total area exceeded 350 square kilometers. So there was no way we were able to locate nests just on the basis of these five finds. In the United States, in Washington State, it was in October of 2020.

when they found their first nest. And that was about a couple of kilometers south of the Canada-US border in equivalency to Langley, south of Langley. And that was subsequently destroyed. They had a very dramatic, you know, they had a big film crew out there. They had, you know, Hollywood had descended kind of thing. And, you know, it was on the news and, you know, it was quite a circus. Again, we don't do it this way out here in Canada.

So that was the end result. In 2021, so this last year, we went through the whole survey, caboodled again, and we did not find anything except one single worker, small-shaped worker hornet, about 200 meters from the Canada-U.S. border in late September that we believe, we are pretty sure had come from a nest that was destroyed by the Americans around that time. In Washington State, they found three nests throughout that whole year. They have also done sequencing again, and they discovered that the one in October, as well as the three in 2021 last year, all of them were related to over 99%. which means they all came from one original introduction and then spread. And the reason I mentioned this is because if we can now talk about the chances for this pest to establish itself here on the West Coast,

if you have such a lack of genetic diversity, you have much less of a chance to establish yourself successfully. Because what basically means is that when you have a nest and it produces at the end of the summer, it produces males and females, then they don't have much of an option to go down the street and have fun with an set of individuals from another nest. They may, but that nest is basically so closely related that you're dealing essentially with brothers and sisters mating with each other. So you have an high degree of inbreeding. Again, that lowers that you have, as a result of that, a much higher rate of unsuccessful matings, in fertile matings, and an high level of attrition. In other words, individuals that just basically do not really make it. In addition, of course, we have an high degree of human predict.

on these hornets. In other words, whenever a nest is found, humans come in and destroy it. That doesn't vote well for the survival of that pest either.

Lastly, well, there are a couple of other things. Its preference for maritime climates are as important too. So the chances for them to be

successfully spreading into, let's say, the Okanagan is not very likely because of of the climate. Further into the interior of British Columbia, you have too many mountain ridges and mountain ranges to overcome. And then, of course, the Baldface Prairie. There is no way that these insects can survive out there. Now, of course, humans play a role in the spread of these

things. So it doesn't mean that you would never have a chance for one of these hornets to be transported. That's quite possible. But it is a whole different matter to be successful in establishing a reproductive population. That's much tougher. That in addition to it, we have here in British Columbia a predominant evergreen vegetative cover, evergreen forests. While in its native range in eastern Asia, China, Korea, Japan, that is comprised of a lot of disigious forests. And that kind of vegetation dictates a very different insect fauna than, what you would have out here. In other words, the dinner table is going to be very different out here

compared to what they are accustomed to back home. And we just don't know how successful this insect could be if it would establish itself out here and then predate on an insect combination or fauna that it is not familiar with. So in other words, it's ecological impact. here on the coast, we just don't know. It could well be highly destructive

because it may predate on other hornets and wasps or it may just, and it is known to be hunting down other wasps, by the way. So we don't know what kind of impact that it would have. But I still have quite a bit of optimism and hope that this character is not going to be successful. That is so interesting and I'm grateful that we're able to go long form

because that is a lot to explain, and I think that I couldn't agree with you more that it has been overhyped by the media. And that's why I felt like it would be a good place to start is because I think that we enjoy, there's something about us that enjoys the sensationalism. We enjoy the idea that there are threats all around us and we have to be ready. And I also agree that there's something so maybe not narcissistic, but there's something so self-executive. but there's something so self-absorbed about people that we think the second there's something going on, whether it's a black widow, whether it's a giant hornet, that it's after us, that it's after us and our children and our family. And it's just that's its only focus. And we kind of, we enjoy thinking that. We enjoy thinking that we have to protect ourselves and get ready, putting nets around our house. That's the kind of mentality people go for. What was it like working with the Nanaimo beekeepers? You had a lot of admiration in the articles I saw. that there are these communities, there are these people who care about their honeybees, they care about their community, and they were willing to step up. And I think that that's sort of what this podcast is about, is about the community coming together.

And it sounds like you saw that, and it really kind of made you happy or joyful about that. Oh, it's, it's, I don't want to go into too many philosophical diatribes here. But, you know, Machiavelli wrote it down some 500 years ago quite well in the, in the, in the prince. The best way for a politician to unite an unruly crowd is by identifying a threat from the outside with the current malaise between Russia and Ukraine. I mean, this is the best example you can have. Likewise, with beekeepers, beekeepers can be highly individualistic and often in competition with each other, but when they get together, they can talk about what they all love and it is to do with bees.

And if there is a common threat from outside, let's say like this hornet, boy, everybody is on their warpath to make sure that these hornets are not going to have too much of a chance. Yes, beekeepers are very dedicated and a very enthusiastic lot, if you will. And I think that with their engagement was critical in the success of eliminating this best from, from Vancouver Island. And I like to add to this that after the elimination had taken place, since that event, so that was September 2019, despite constant surveillance in various parts of Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, not a single specimen was cited or collected since that time. And since that is now approaching three years, or at least two and half years, I think it is reasonable to assume that we will declare Vancouver Island and Gulf Islands free of the Asian giant hornet.

Sometimes people ask, well, what is the actual risk? I mean, why do we fuss so much about it if you have an apex predator, relatively small colonies and so on? Apart from, of course, what I said earlier about, you know, they can pester honeybee colonies and they may have an ecological impact. I think that the nest that was found in this public park highlighted the risk that is associated with the presence of these hornets in our environment. Because they are cavity builders or ground nesters for most of the time, generally people or livestock or animal, pets, for example, or wildlife, are not aware of their presence until they just about step on them, or step on the nest or the entrance of the nest. Or, you know, you walk your little lovely dog, and typically what a dog does is you often put his nose in places where he shouldn't. And if that happens, the hornets will come out en masse or, you know, you don't need that many.

and that really would pose on public health risk and again I don't want to over-dramatize it but it's definitely a risk that we just don't wish and then of course humans to have a tendency to do the wrong thing when they get into a panic situation like this they tend to run away which is perfect

but they often run into the open which is the worst thing to do because and that is not just applying to these Asian giant horse. Hornets. It's the same with any wasp that you nest did you disturb. Don't run into the open because they can fly much and much faster than you can run. And then with waving arms and hands and everything else, you are a visual target that is very easily identified by these hornets. The trick by any hornet or wasp. So the trick here is, is that as soon as you get into a confrontation

like this is to aim of course physical distance away from the nest is important but try to aim for shrubbery in which you crawl through the shrubbery. You can even go on your hands and knees as long as you crawl

crawl through there as quickly as you can because the sweeping branches behind you will confuse the wasps and the hornets so that's really important to do so no problem I'm interested to

understand um no problem um i'm interested to understand what the harms can be of these um of these hornets is it comparable to like a black widow or is it is it less so how much worse is it in comparison to a bumblebee or something like that the cricket of course it has to be a summer cricket it's perfect um the problem with with with these asian giant hornet hornets compared to, let's see, with a honeybee, because beekeepers get stung by honeybees quite often, of course. Honeybees, they're much smaller, of course, but what they have is they have a stinging apparatus and which is an, well, all these stinging insects, they have an stinging apparatus that

consist of a small sphere that contains the venom. And then you have surrounding it is a muscle tissue and a nerve node that is programmed to say contract relax contract relax okay and then you have a stinger in honeybees that stinger is an harpoon so it has little hooks and that is why when a honeybee stings you being an elastic skin it holds on to the stinger and the bee cannot pull it out so eventually it will fly off and it creates a big wound in the back of the abdomen of the bee that is what kills the be eventually, basically a huge wound. It doesn't die just because it stung something.

If it manages to pull its stinging apparatus out, that bee can sting again, for sure. So that could happen with, like, other creatures, other end? It might sting other things, but when it comes to a human, it does that harpoon and then it can't get out because we're too big. No, our skin is elastic. It doesn't mean our size. It's just simply, we have a rubbery skin, and that holds on to the, harpoon. In an evolutionary term, actually, that stinger was designed, essentially, to fight other

insects. And insects have their skeleton on the outside, an exoskeleton arrangement, right? So, if you have an harpoon, you rip that out and you create a much bigger wound than if it is only a dagger. Now, the hornet, like the Asian giant hornet, has a dagger. It doesn't have harpoon so it can easily pull it out again and sting again and it can sting repeatedly now its huge size means that it not only carries a much larger volume of venom but this particular venom also contains a peptide or an enzyme that is causing tissue necrosis in other words the tissue of the animal that or human that is being stung starts to dissolve at the point of stinging.

In other words, the wound is created much larger. You have then a higher risk of infection. There's bleeding taking place. So it's a more dramatic encounter than what it is with our honeybee. Now, that is the immediate effect of it. But the problem is, is that most of us. most people have, so we say, the ability, our chemical factory in our body is capable to neutralize this venom after a short period of time.

There are, of course, some people that are having hypersensitivity to these kind of venoms, and we call those people allergic. Now, there is a lot of misconception about allergies, pertaining to these stinging insects. A lot of people claim to be allergic, but technically they're not. But the reason that they claim that is because when they get stung, mostly by, let's say, by a bee or by your typical garden variety wasp, they do the wrong thing.

So a lot of people, what they do is they say, apart from all the swearing and the agony and whatever, they have now, their hand is, they got stung. So what do they do? They follow often medical advice that is often totally wrong because most doctors cannot be expected to know anything about insects or stinging insects and their behavior. So what do people do? They go to the cabinet, to the medicine cabinet, and they find some ointment or something and they put ointment on it. Like polysborne or something? Yeah, totally nonsensical.

But, you know, it feels good psychologically apart from the swearing and all the complaining. or they put it under water and then they have soap and then they wash it and the surface and do all this wonderful stuff. But again, step back and say, well, what are we actually doing?

That venom is already underneath the surface of the skin. Okay? It's not on the skin. It is underneath it. So washing with soap is silly. It doesn't mean anything. But what you do is with

by touching your affected area and basically washing and drying and touching it, what you're doing is you're rubbing that venom deeper into the tissue and you spread it around. So after a few hours or the next day, you're going to have an elephant hand. Okay. Now, that is pretty cool at the office.

You can say, look at what happened to me, I'm hyper allergic to it. No, not at all. The hardest thing in the world is not to do anything. In fact, you get stung, and you can swear what you like. That's not the problem. But don't put it underneath the water

and start rubbing it or put ointments on it or anything. The key here is that the only thing that you could do is to cool it down. And cooling down means that you put an ice cube on it. And don't rub it. Just let that tissue become as cold

as you can get it because that basically immobilized the venom and it stays right where it is. And your body will have generally the chemical capabilities to break this down after, you know, maybe a day or so. I know it's this agonizing the desire to rub it because it starts to itch. The desire to rub it is enormous. And you really have to force yourself not to rub it. But that is key.

Now, for those people that have a true, true. allergy to these kind of venoms, and again, it could be just honeybees or wasps or any of those stinging insects, the first time you would ever get stung, if you prove to be of hyper, have a hypersensitivity or a true allergy to these venoms, the very first sting that you would ever receive is not deadly. That one is mostly showing signs that your body start to show you provide you with all kinds of signals. For example, you get stung in the hand or in the arm, but you get after a short while discoloration or redness on your chest and in your neck.

Okay? You start to hyperventilate, you know, fast breathing. You're going to get a snotty nose. You start to tear in the eyes. And you're breathing quickly. These are signals that are basically caused by your body responding to. this venom and it generates histamines, okay? And those histamines cause you to do all these wacky things.

This is a signal from, you know, this is not good news. So that's why we tend to take antihistamines. So that is a signal. It is mostly that then a week later or two weeks later or a month later, if you would get stung again, those symptoms may get worse. So that is why some people carry these epipens with them. in case they have a true allergic reaction. So the courses that I teach on introductory beekeeping

and things like this, that is also one of the things we cover. I said, you know, all of you may have a great interest to keep bees, but test yourself first that you are not going to be hugely disappointed in a few months and you have your bees and then you get stung and then you realize them, whoa, I have a serious medical issue. Okay. So generally your body becomes accustomed to it And there are two these B-Vanoms.

And keep in mind, there are also very positive sides to getting stung. Because it has been known for hundreds and hundreds of years, if not thousands of years, that B-Vanom is very effective against arthritic pains. Okay. We are so accustomed in our modern world to always run to the pharmacy and get ourselves a magic tablet or some sort. But a hundred years ago and more, the pharmaceutical industry didn't exist. You had some snake oil characters, but generally the true pharmaceutical industry didn't exist.

And at that time, I still have some old textbooks from Europe where you see actually that bee venom was collected by people that had, of course, a veil on and everything else. And they had something like what they do with snake venom. That they have a membrane and they forced the snake to the teeth to go in and then a few droplets are collected. Well, basically the same thing was done then to collect bee venom. And that bee venom was then used in a reduced or in a diluted form for people that suffered from acute rheumatoid arthritis. And that seems to, so we say, alleviate these pains. And it is true, even though I don't suffer from arthritis, I mean, I sometimes when I have stung, let's say, near the knuckles in my hand or one of my fingers, that it gives it a very nice, warm sensation afterwards. Yeah, there is a bit of swelling, of course, but it is, the temperature is much and much higher.

It is almost as if your body is flushing your joints in that area. And that is what alleviates the arthritic pain, of course. So there is even in North America, so-called the American AP Therapy Society, where they use B-Venom for people that suffer from various ales, and they use B-Venom as the principal agent to bring that relief. So it's not, there are some rewards, if you will. Wow. That is, I think, so interesting to realize that we do have this mindset in life towards wanting to go to the pharmaceutical industry or wanting to go to our doctor and wanting to have our pain or discomfort validated. And there is something about this culture right now that's interested in the problems we're facing. We're very introspective on the challenges. And that's not to say people don't face anxiety and depression, but it's almost like a currency right now. It's something that other people will validate for you. And you're right, going to going into work the next day and saying, I got bit by a spider and look at how horrible my hand is. It's like it gives you some sort of bragging rights that you've faced some sort of challenge and

you've overcome adversity. And I think that we, we often like to demonize things. We like to put things into a box of good or bad, evil or peer. And we miss out on the fact that we're not perfect. other people aren't perfect, animals, creatures, insects, they all have struggles, they have complexities, they're not a one or a zero, they're part of the ecosystem, and I think that that's the struggle we have, particularly with spiders, is often people will go, oh, like spiders, they're super dangerous, and then there's always that person who kind of goes, right, but they take care of the insects, and they make sure their populations are good, and then you kind of go, right, but I don't want them in my house, and then there's always this balancing act

that we do and we've kind of grown, I think, with spiders to understand their role. And I think we've done the same with bees when we started realizing that these bees were absolutely essential to our survival, but then there's still those people who have hesitations or discomfort. But you're right, there's this currency to want to do something about it. And I don't know why perhaps we underestimate our body. That's become commonplace to think that we need something else, that our body isn't capable of solving it. And I think that that's short-sighted because when it comes to depression or anxiety, we know exercise helps. Well, that's you pushing your body.

That's you straining your body in a positive way that helps you get stronger. And we're okay with that. But then again, when it comes to wanting to fix problems with bees or with certain things, we start to go, well, the doctor knows what to do. And it's interesting that you say, well, they're not bee experts. And that's fine. That's not their fault. but they're not experts in this area. And so they're not going to give you the perfect information

because they don't have an understanding the way that you do. Can I ask, how many times have you been stung? Because I'm guessing based on what you've said, you've been stung a lot of times. Well, of course, I have been around bees for a long time. And so I couldn't even guess what the number of times are. I mean, it's not that I invite things. It's just that when I go into and bee yard,

into an apiary, I still, depending on the time of the year, when I deal with larger colonies, I have a veil because it's not nice to have a bee crawling on the edge of your nose or in your ear or close to your mouth or whatever. Generally, bees are not particularly interested in staying. It's just simply you don't want to have them in your face. But for example, in my courses, I always suggest to people, look, don't you wear gloves. Because you have sometimes people that have an entire approach to beekeeping where they dress up as if they are going to the Arctic, okay, while it is a summer day. Bees, if you are, and I'm trying to convey the idea to aspiring beekeepers, but even experienced beekeepers to say, look, when you interact with the bees, you should consider yourself a visitor. And you should be polite in your visit to the colony.

When you open up an hive in which the colony lives, you handle them with gentleness and with peace. You come there as a good messenger rather than as an intrusive predatory animal. No, not at all. You should be polite. When I have seen it over many, many years of often beekeepers coming in that have, you know, heavy gloves on and they have veils and I don't know, all kinds of stuff, when they go into a hive and they take the frames out to look at the bees, when they have gloves on, you see them that they tend to be far rougher, far more abrupt in their movements than if you have gloves on. you see them that they tend to be far rougher, far more abrupt in their movements than if you have your bare hands. With your bare hands, you have much greater dexterity.

And not just that, you know that if you are misbehaving, if you do it too erratically and too quickly, then the bees will remind you by occasionally giving you a sting. Not that that is an guiding principle, but the essence of it is, is that your hands, you can wash your hands regularly as well, rinse them with just plain water while you're in the bee yard so that you have no sticky fingers and you can you have much greater this

dexterity and an ability to manipulate the equipment much better because eventually it is all kind of sticky because of the honey or the wax or things of that kind. So I try to convince beekeepers to commune

with the bees. Try to have a closer look at what they do and why they do things. I hear so often of beekeepers coming into a bee yard and open up a hive and they say, oh, we're going to go and look for the queen. Okay? Yeah, that's a very nice idea. Why?

Is that because it is a larger bee compared to all the others? Is that the reason why? Often people don't realize that you don't have to search for the queen at all. Just leave her alone. All what you have to do is inspect. those frames and look at the brood patterns to see whether there are aches and that there are larvae in there and capped brood. If you have all of that in there, you don't have to muck around in that colony and disturb

that brood nest too much. You can leave them alone and go to the next colony. You also have to use your other senses. It is not only visual, but you have to also listen to the bees. When you lift out on frame and let's say the bees are queenless if the queen has been lost because of some injury or whatever the reasons are

the bees sound differently because they walk on the frames when you're taken out and you see them they're slightly nervous they walk around kind of a little bit the girls are all edge sorry girls I mean they're all female so I often refer to them as girls

and so when they when they They walk around on the frame in a kind of a slightly nervous manner. You know, something is cooking out there that's not entirely correct. Again, that is both visual, but also sound-wise. They have a slightly different pitch compared to a colony that is happy with an egg-laying queen in there. Everything seems to be happy and in balance. Then the bees ignore you altogether. They walk quietly on the comb.

You see them. They ignore you. Again, we're not that important. So if we can make ourselves virtually non-visible, the better it is when we visit an colony. So I recall years ago, there was a field day organized by a local beekeeping club. And the beekeeper in question, very experienced beekeeper, but he wanted to perhaps dramatize the situation a bit. And with 30 people around, you can imagine how confusing that was for the bees that were flying around out there. He selected for reasons that were not clear to me and a particular colony that was quite large with a whole bunch of boxes on top of each other.

Yeah. And he started to take that apart and he was going to show the queen. And you had there all these novice beekeepers in sparkling, clean coveralls and veils and gloves and everything else. And I was not in the front at all, but I was in the back out there. But the way how I could hear from a distance that there was something wrong with that colony. And I didn't know what, of course, but I knew that the pitch, the sound was wrong, was different. And as further he went into this thing, he couldn't find the queen because, of course, the queen, there was no queen in that colony. It wasn't queenless colony.

And by that time, by the time he finally concluded that there is no queen, the bees were pissed. they were really angry and they were flying around and they were basically unhappy so that's why I like to always recommend beekeepers when they manage their colonies to try to

listen to the bees and to commune with them as best as you can and observe them to see why do these things why do they do things or why don't they do things there are reasons for all of that And also in much of their management, they should try to follow the rhythm of honeybees over the course of the season.

So in the early spring and summer, much of the summer, bees are just so busy with themselves. You are just an big blob of interference, but there is no further issue. It is only when it is late in the summer, when the wasps, the local wasp population, becomes. hungry and other bees become devious and like to steal honey from other colonies. So you have then what they call the robbing stage,

the robbing period in late summer. That is when bees can become a bit nastier, a bit more defensive, of course. And so then it's getting better to wear gloves and to use a little bit more smoke and do these kind of things in order to

handle the bees better. But for much of the season, you can come in there, your t-shirt and you put your veil on and bear hands and you can visit in honeybee colony and have no problem with it at all. What you just said is so important. I interviewed Eddie Gardner, who's an elder here in the Fraser Valley. And as I mentioned, he describes bugs as the ones that crawl rather than bugs. And I think that that's so important because, and he didn't do it like intentionally

to make this point, but I think the logic behind it was that we get this attitude of get off me, I don't want that insect on me, I don't want this bug near me, and we start to treat everything around us like it's less than us, that it's not as important. And I think that we forget that we're just one part of an ecosystem, that the bees aren't that concerned with us all the time. And we get so, I think we're, as we disconnect from nature, as we live in apartments, as we disconnect more and more and we live in cities, we start to forget our role, our connection, and that these things are going to be taking place regardless of whether or not we're watching

them, and that it is a privilege to be among them. That is sometimes how you feel when you're around certain people. It's like when you think of some celebrities that you like and the idea of being able to sit with them for 10 minutes, people go, this is a privilege, it's an honor, like, oh my goodness, like to get your attention. But then we don't do that with the bees or We don't do that with animals in the wilderness. We want it to entertain us. And when you were describing how people kind of treat the bees, it reminds me of that scene in Harry Potter where the young boy starts banging on the glass and goes, move!

And like, tries to get the snake to entertain him. And that's often what happens at zoos is people want the creatures behind the glass or behind the cage to entertain us, to make us surprise, to give a growl, to do something that shows their fearsomeness rather than just appreciating that this is a majestic animal, that this is an ecosystem in this bee habitat, and they all have a job to do. And you just get to watch, and what an honor it is,

because I've never gotten to watch bees in that way. And so just to be there would be a privilege. But then we have this instinct to want to find the queen, and we want that queen to entertain us, and we want to see that big one. And there's always this instinct, the bigger, the better kind of United States attitude. And the other thing you said that I'd like,

you to elaborate on is I interviewed Brian Minter. He runs Minter Country Gardens and you two just had an overlap that I saw. He talked about being able to walk over to a plant, pick it up, look at it, just see it from a distance and know that that area needs water over there, that those plants need food. And he said he can just feel that. He's got, he's worked with plants his whole life. He knows them better than most. And so he can just see, like that whole patch over there needs water or it needs food or it needs more sunlight or it needs something he can just feel that that's kind of what you just described being able to hear from a distance the sound that bees make and there is something so heartfelt there's something so motivational something so

inspiring about what you two do because you've found what you're passionate about but you know it better than most and you you take responsibility to to that environment to the bees to the plants that other people miss out on. And they miss that deeper understanding of how bees work. They miss out on the deeper understanding of what plants need. And I'm just interested to know what that journey has been like to understand these bees better and to learn about them and have that humility of like, oh, I can hear that. And I understand what that means. And that's so cool.

Yeah. It's, of course, these things tend to grow on you the longer you are involved. with these things and and of course I don't want to date myself too much but I mean I was introduced to bees you know about 60 years ago and but if you look at there is an enormous interest nowadays in the public to get into bees and beekeeping and that is why these courses that I teach on an online course I mean you know it attracts I mean the one that I just finished I mean I had about almost 800 people on there and some of them were and Not just in Canada.

I mean, there was, you know, some from Africa, from Senegal and Kenya and South Africa. There were some from Kazakhstan and Nepal. I mean, it's crazy how they got wind of this. But if I look at what is the interest? First of all, I do not know in, you know, with absolute certainty, the average age, but many of the people that want to get involved in bees are typically in their middle age period or older. it is often people that are younger some of them are interested but by and large they're too busy with other things either from raising children or paying the markets or doing things that are occupying their heads it is typical that we as humans tend to travel through the various stages in our lives and become slightly more retrospective of what we are doing and what the future will bring in our lives when we get into this if i can call it this this middle-aged period And one of the things I think that I hear quite often of people say about why they are motivated to get into bees is because it is an – it offers an opportunity to open up an door, if you will, into observing a world that they probably experienced when they were small children.

Small children are soaking up whatever they see in their environment. and if they are lucky enough to have been in a flowering garden or in an area where you have bees and butterflies and all kinds of other small little creatures, they can sit out there when they are young and observe these insects, or these creatures, not just insects,

in their own accord without making a judgment saying, oh, there's a dangerous one or it's not an dangerous one. They observe them from, hey, these bees, for example, are visiting flowers. and why do they visit these flowers? They get their food from there. It is like an totally unspoiled experience

of being closer to nature. When you get into your middle age years, you have a desire after having been chasing after your mortgages and all kinds of other problems and car payments and you name what, that you have, many people have a desire to take stock of where they go in their lives. And I think that that is where often people become more, you know, attracted to these things like bees.

Bees have the extraordinary quality that they can show us to highlight and to display the interconnectiveness, if you will, between the living creatures. You mentioned earlier about an ecosystem that is full of all kinds of interdependencies of different organisms. and that is precisely what bees display so very clearly, and we can use them as a means to observe that more closely. It is therefore also, I hope, and aim for seeing also in the future different approaches to agriculture. We have been often very linear in our thinking to produce crops. Often, as what you said, the larger is better,

the bigger is better, the more is better, rather than looking at how nature offers all these foodstuffs that we are dependent on, how we can do that in a more genteel way, I'm not saying crop reduction, I'm saying just simply a better approach and a better mechanism to use these resources that are available. Because with much of the agricultural activities and methodologies that are that have developed that is taxing the natural resources enormously and and I of course don't want to criticize farmers today but I mean I think it's worth

our much of our management practices are actually consuming the principle of much of the resources that are there and what I mean by that is that we take more out of the environment than what comes back into the environment. If you grow a particular crop over and over and over again on the same plot of land, you're going to be depleting that soil. It is interesting that, for example, at the time when the settlers first came to the prairies,

that on average there was a depth of about three feet or almost, let's say, a meter of soil that existed in the prairies. Now today on average that is less than 30 centimeters. This is of grave concern because it means what is going to happen in the next hundred years.

When we have many of these humongous monocultural farm practices they may produce an awful lot but the problem is that if you have one little bug that comes in there that loves to eat whatever that may be that crop is,

and you don't control it, then your entire crop goes. So monocultural practices, as economically interesting as they are, do demand a great deal of inputs and controls to safeguard that crop from pests or from diseases or from whatever. So our reliance then on pesticide usage, on fertilizer usage, and all kinds of other inputs, rises hugely just because if we pursue this monocultural farm practice. So I recall when I lived in Africa, in East Africa, visiting some subsistence farmers, people that had no nothing except a small plot of farm. land and that is the land on which they have to produce their food. They don't have money to buy food like what we do. They have to produce it themselves and eat. And if they fail to

produce it, they go hungry. But I was just totally amazed that here people followed traditions that have been developed over thousands of years probably. The high degree of of multi-cropping or intercropping that they had. So they had a relatively small plot of land and on this land right next to their hut to their small little home

and they would have a ground cover consisting of beans and peas and things like this well they're legumes and these legumes of course enrich the soil. Then as an intermediate height they would have cassava bushes growing

that grow up to about a meter and a meter and a half. And then as a shade above that, they had plantain. They call that in East Africa. They call it a patoki. And these are basically banana trees. So they had three layers of production going on on the same plot of land. Oh, and of course, on that forest floor or on that property, they have a whole bunch of chickens walking around as well that control.

insects and all kinds of other things. What I'm saying here is that they developed systems that were kind of environments that were basically sustaining themselves quite well without a great deal of input in terms of pesticides because the farmers wouldn't have the money to do that anyway. Now, I don't want to idealize this because in Uganda particularly you have fantastic, the growing conditions. I mean, this phenomenal climatically

a beautiful area. Not everybody in Africa is blessed with that kind of condition. You have also in Africa a lot of areas where, you know, the crop is being eaten up by locusts or by other, by molds. Much of the crop is lost in storage

because they don't have appropriate storage facilities. So, but I'm only saying is that with beekeeping the importance here is that beekeepers could try to manage their colonies more harmonically and more effectively

by if you can emulate and enhance the performance of bees at certain key times of the year they have also greater resilience to fight various diseases and pests And it is a question of understanding what is going on inside of that honeybee colony to make you a much better beekeeper. You get much greater results and much better results out of your bees than if you follow the tradition of just putting a chemical in to control mites, for example, or a drug to control America phalbrood disease. It's one of these bacterial diseases that cause a lot of damage.

but if you kind of strategize it and if you are more in tune with doing proper management of preventing diseases to develop and preventing parasitting mites to explode in your colony for that you need to be observant and to be in close connection with your bees that is incredible I'm you're our provincial apiculturist if I said that correctly you play such an important role in how our environment works and keeping an eye on all these colonies across British Columbia. When you decide to, you've been doing this for a very long time, when you decide to take a break or to relax,

do you worry about who's going to take this over? You mean when I retire? That's a nice way of putting it. I am trying to say it politely, but I'm just interesting. interested to know, is this something that, like, your perspective is widespread? Do you think that it's the dominant perspective to not use these chemicals? I'm just the idea of not having, you care about these bees, you seem to treat them with the utmost respect, you talk about being in harmony with them.

I just, the idea of you not being in this position freaks me out. Oh, well, no. First of all, I mean, I'm not irreplaceable. I am definitely replaceable when it comes to that function and I'm sure that there are a lot of fantastically well-trained and well-versed people that would love to take over this position when I decide to retire. I think what is important to recognize

that the philosophy behind it is something that I don't have to try to convey to any of my successors, but more towards the beekeeping. that are actively involved in bees. And again, this is not a critique on our beekeepers in the United States, but in the United States, they have every year and very high colony losses, not just due to winter conditions, but throughout the season. And I think if I use this as a kind of a general observation, is that with modern farming

practices and how we treat bees, they produce a large number of crops out there due to their favourable climatic conditions that are dependent on honeybee pollination. And the result of that is that they truck these honeybee colonies all over the continent from the East Coast to the west coast and, you know, in almond production, pollination. And then they dragged them up out here to do pollination in blueberries, and from there they go to the Dakotas and they do canola and then they go down to Texas for watermelon pollination or whatever. The problem is that these colonies are basically spending much of their existence on the back of a truck.

Well, nature hasn't designed it that way. And all these kind of manipulations and activities essentially constitute stresses, enormous stresses, that jeopardizes or challenges the survivability of these colonies. these. And if you have stresses applied to an organism, be that a bee colony or a cow or a goat or anything else, or humans for that matter, you become more susceptible to disease. In other words, you jeopardize one's health. And it is that drive for endless outputs coming from honeybees that I think we have reached in many of our practices the upper limits of what we can expect from bees. in terms of their performance and their productivity and everything else.

And it behooves us to be more respectful towards the honeybees and step back and say, how can we manage our colonies, our bees, in a manner where we are less abusive, less greedy in trying to always get more out of them than what they actually can do? You know, it's interesting that in my courses and the course that I teach right now, the first session, we talk about bees, of course, but the focus of it is, has little to do with the bees. It has to do with pollination and with the world around the, the flowering world around them. Because I like to emphasize over and over again that we can only expect something product-wise, productivity-wise, but also survival-wise, health. from these bees, only if they have an environment that offers them the food rewards and food resources on which they thrive.

If that is void of those things, then what can we expect from them? They are not just simply sitting out there waiting for the immaculate delivery of nectar or pollen sources. It doesn't work that way. They have to work for it to collect that, these two food sources. Nectar as a carbohydrate source, as a fuel in the tank, so to say, the energy source, and the pollen needed for the protein. That's the equivalency for meat, for example.

I mean, they get their protein from the pollen. If that is not available, then they cannot thrive. And often beekeepers are so focused on their bees that they are kind of blind of what the environment is doing or not doing. I started out with my course by saying, if you ever wish to or expect to be a good beekeeper, you have to be a gardener. You have to be an horticulturalist, if you will, to be aware of what the environment can offer the bees to thrive. And so there is, again, this interconnectiveness that beekeepers, and in many other agricultural pursuits as well, but if I just limited to bees, they have to have. The phrase I hate because it is often different meanings are applied to it. But they must have, obviously, an holistic approach to it.

They cannot just look at the bees by themselves. They have to see it within the context of how bees thrive or how they function in the environment in which they are operating. There are a lot of parallels to that when you think of people, because right now we're having this conversation of what is a meaningful life. Are you going to find that in your legal career? You can find that in your work. You need to be able to go home to a loving family.

You need to be able to have other things outside of your career that are going to sustain you, that are going to make it okay for you to go to work, going to make it worthwhile. It's not just about the money. And often the people we think of are the people who are making the most amount of money. And it's like, oh, the goal is to be the most productive and make the most amount of money. And there's parallels to that to bees and saying, And there's just something about people, I think, that when you say, oh, you did this well, there's an instinct to be like, well, why can't I just make it 85% more, 90%? Why can't we get a hunt? Like, there's this instinct to never feel satisfied, to never just go, I did a good year. I worked hard. I didn't make a million dollars this year, but I did good work that I'm proud of and that's, that's okay. And we always have this instinct of like, well, why couldn't I have made a little bit more? And maybe I could have gone in an extra vacation. And maybe I could have bought another half.

house and maybe I could have done all these more things and we're just there's this inclination not to just be satisfied with what you did and what you have and it sounds like having a more quality be life is far better overall long term and when you talked about monoculture it's like it's not that you're getting the best yield because you are paying a price in the future you just don't get to see what that's going to cost you because in 10 years your your output's going to be worse. So you're basically taking from the future in order to get more now. And when you think of people who are really good at investing their money and being strategic, they know that they're going to bring some money in, but they're going to invest it. And then they're going to have more in five years.

And the strategy seems the reverse when we talk about monoculture, because we're saying, oh, well, we'll just take from the next 500 years so that we can have the best yield this year. And you are paying a price. You just don't get to see it yet, but the bill will come due. And it sounds like you're saying that in the prairies that bill is eventually going to come do and we're going to have to adapt and figure out different approaches because we have been purchasing from the future and it's just you don't get to see it the same way that you see it in a year bill where you have your purchases and your outgoing expenses but that would be terrifying as a farmer to think if I bought this nice piece of land I've been using it for 10 years but in the next 20 years maybe it'll be

useless to me maybe it'll be like sand where I can't get anything out of it and now you just to own a piece of land that nobody wants, that's far worse than having that more balanced approach where you were describing in Uganda, perhaps not going 100% that way, but working towards that sustainability where we can have good things now, good things tomorrow, good things in 10 years, and there's this idea in indigenous culture of seven generations, where you look back seven generations previous and you think about your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents, and what did they do? And what were their hopes and dreams for their children and grandchildren?

And then you're supposed to look seven generations into the future. What are you leaving behind for your children, your grandchildren? And if you're leaving behind useless plot of land that you can't grow anything on because you were so focused. Yeah, you were greedy in your life. And I think that that's what we're struggling with right now. That's what it feels like a lot of people are struggling with is there's a sense of, as I said, anxiety and depression. But I think that that's a consequence of looking too much at yourself and going, where do I want to be? What do I want for my life? And it's like, what happened to wanting

the best for your kids? What happened to wanting the best for the next generation? Why is it about you? Why is it about the things you're facing? Because when you're a part of these ecosystems, whether it's with bees, whether it's with birds, whether it's with plants, you start to recognize that you're just one little piece of this giant machine. This puzzle, probably machine isn't the right word because you're just a participant. And it's, again, a privilege to participate. It's an honor to, I'm sure, when you get to see these bees working, it's something different. It's like artwork. When you get to see them flying around and doing their thing and not caring about who you are and what you're thinking, there's a sense of connection that

you start to develop. And I think that we're so lucky when people like you are willing to share that because that's not something you see in the news. That's not something you see when we're talking about conflicts in the world. We're not talking about how connected we are. You talked about in one of the stories that was written about you, about how you got started in this when you were, I think, eight years old in your grade three class. Can you tell us about how you got interested in bees? Where did that connection start for you?

Oh, well, yeah, what you just said. I mean, you know, it was getting close to the summer holidays and the teacher having trouble to fill the time and with a bunch of unruly boys because there was a boy school, elementary boy school. And, yeah, we were dragged out to the local bee. to a local beekeeper. And I still remember the gentleman, well-retired lawyer at that time.

And I remember, you know, 20 little unruly boys of all in that same age group of about, yeah, 7, 8, somewhere in there, 9, somewhere in there. Beautiful sunny, after sunny, warm afternoon. And I recall they had two hives. And Mr. Onus was his name. Mr. Onus opened up these hives. And I remember that he was talking about it, and we were all in a big circle around these two colonies. And I recall seeing all these bees on the top of the frames, just walking. And just I still remember it as if it happened yesterday.

Of course, the first thing that you think of, dear Lord, each and every one of those bees can sting me. So you first had this kind of instinct of fear factor. But when we look closely at it, and Mr. Honos was very quiet and he was doing his thing, it became quite evident that these bees were truly ignoring us. Even though there were 20 little unruly boys out there, the bees had no interest. They were just minding their own business. And apparently it had such an enormous impact in my mind that, according to my parents, I talked about it for weeks on end, that how fantastic it was that I had seen these bees.

So that eventually resulted in me taking an introductory course with another beekeeper in the area. And it didn't take long. And I had my first two colonies in the backyard. And I enjoyed that quite immensely. And I still, I would have never guessed that I would end up, you know, being involved in bees for the rest of my working life. but it is something that is extraordinarily gratifying and yeah, it creates a sense of peace and harmony that is rare. And the fact that, you know, I don't look down or criticize anyone with other professions.

It's just simply it, these has always, they have always offered an enormous amount of gratification. And I will probably never lose that. That's incredible. So that happened in Holland and then it sounds like you came here to British Columbia for school. What went into that decision? What made you? Oh, very simple. I mean, originally I had to plan to study forestry. But again, I curtail my critique. But the point is that I became somewhat less enthused about forestry because of some of the clear-cut practices that they had at the time. I just didn't feel very connected or happy or comfortable with the practices that took place. And I actually enjoyed student life. So I studied political science, which I thought was fascinating for a few years, read material that I would have never bothered to read myself.

Was it not because of the guidance that profs offered in that field? political philosophy, things of this kind. And then eventually, of course, I knew very well that I would not gain any serious employment within the field of political science. So I studied agricultural sciences with an emphasis on entomology. And that was fantastic. I really enjoyed that. And then I eventually was to have offered an wonderful.

position with at the Beaverlaughts research station up in the Peace River in Alberta where I worked for several years in a large bee breeding program one of the biggest

if I'm not mistaken right at that time yeah it was a large program to build a better bee if you will for Alberta Alberta was flush with money at the time and apparently it is there again

but anyway that's a different thing so it was It was really gratifying to do this. And then out of the blue came this opportunity to manage an B development project, an apocultural project in Uganda under the auspices of Care International. And care is a very large, originally American-based organization, which has three different divisions, if you will. One of them is medical assistance, that is in particular division, and another one is acute food aid that is often very short term in emergency situations. And then you have a much larger division which deals with agricultural development whereby specialists are sent to whatever number of countries to be there to run projects of various kinds. well, in my case then about bees

for several years to try to assist in the development of beekeeping. Beekeeping, of course, was done in East Africa for thousands of years but that was often not very what we would call not very well managed. It was very much more of a raiding process, you know, a nest somewhere

and they would basically destroy the nest in order to gain honey by developing management programs or actual management that would retain the colony. You don't have to kill the colony and you could get some honey out of these colonies. That was one thing. The other thing, what made beekeeping so attractive as we talked earlier about intercropping

on subsistence farmers or small little plots of land, much of the land ownership in many of these countries is very traditional and long held I mean they have had generations and generations of people living on that particular plot it is also dictated by certain tribal traditions and things so sometimes we when we come in we collectively from Europe or from North America and want to create these development projects we have with our concepts and therefore we say well you know what we have to clear the land and so many acres of this and that to make it worthwhile to sell our massy ferguson canadian built tractors to do it more efficiently but that often the result of that is that you eventually end up with the displacement of a great number of people that have lived on these lands for a long time and you get all kinds of strife of land ownership and things of that kind. Bees, on the other hand, give this extraordinary opportunity for subsistence farmers to stay on the land, but to just merely

without alteration of the ownership of the land, to add some level of productivity to it in the form of honey, or wax, that they can then sell to supplement their very meager incomes, and their existence. So it doesn't change the existing setup, if you will, local setup. So it is less of an intrusive form of agricultural assistance compared to saying, oh, we have to get everybody off the land and then we can grow all the bananas or we can grow all the coffee plantation or whatever. So, and I think that that, excuse me, lends itself superbly for this kind of development.

Wow, that is absolutely incredible. You talked also about how there's kind of two different paths with the road that you chose. One is pest control, the other is supporting bees and bringing life to that. Can you tell us more about that decision and realizing that there's a way for sort of, that holistic, perhaps where everything can thrive versus choosing this, we need to, like, it almost seems like choosing pest control in that mindset is very pessimistic. It's looking, again, at life as something to be controlled, killed, destroyed, bring in pesticides, let's just knock them out.

Approaching it in that way, it seems like that would lead to a less fulfilled person because they view it as their role as there's a bunch of nails and I'm a hammer and I need to go find the nails to go take care of these things. Whereas with you, it's like, how do we make sure the life is full, that these are operating the best capabilities? It seems like a more optimistic, perhaps, path to choose. Well, of course, I should point out, though, that my position with the Ministry of Agriculture is, you know, I run the B program for the ministry, but the legal mandate, the legislated mandate that we have, is to address bee health. So we have pieces of legislation that gives us, I'll say, legal legitimacy of the stuff that we are doing.

But, and I should also mention that about 30 or 40 years ago, beekeeping was an, an, a fringe agricultural activity. I mean, there were very few diseases. There were virtually no pests. Bees were just largely looking after themselves. Beekeepers were kind of, you know, this was a nice site activity to, let's say, their fruit producers, producing activities or something else. But everything was much simpler. But it was really the, I think the critical change came, and if you can call it, Beekeeping lost its innocence in 1990 when the Varroa mite was introduced to bekeeping. The Ferroa mite, I don't want to go into a long detail, but it is an highly damaging parasitic mite that lives on the outside of the bees and it kills bees both the brood as well as adult bees. and if you do not deal with the mite situation the bees will die

it's a question of how long does it take for the colony to die but with the varroa mite introduction there are other diseases coming along with it as well and a number of them are viral diseases so my program deals with trying to control or prevent the introduction of or reduce the spread of and mitigate the impact of all these pathogens.

So that is the framework under which we have to ask beekeepers to try to deal with these diseases and pests. Now the problem is that traditional or what it has become with money of the agricultural activities, oh, we have a disease or we have a problem with these mites. what we do is we put a chemical in to control these mites, okay? And it is a simplistic approach, you might say. And as a result, because it is on the label, it says, you know, one's in the spring, one's in the summer and one's in the winter, for example, whatever the application is, okay?

And it is a kind of a cookie cutter design, okay, based on a calendar. But bees are far more complicated than that. And so our mites, there is a dynamic interaction taking, place between the mite population and the bee population. And in order to say from Yale, I'm not going to continuously depend just on a lousy chemical to put into the hive. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to measure what the bees, what the population of these mites do.

And as long as they are below a certain level, I don't worry about it. Okay. If they are reaching a level that is a bit too high, then and only then, Will I apply an control product? Right. Okay. So what you're dealing with is a more sophisticated approach. And what we call that, not just in honeybees, but in any crop development, we call that integrated pest management, IPM.

So I live in Delta, and there is a whole bunch of fields out there. They grow a lot of spuds. Lots of potatoes. Okay. Now, in the past, you would have the farmer going out there with two bulls. on the side of the tractor spraying the hell out of the crop regularly. Okay, they don't do that anymore. Okay, so what do they do?

Now they hire some underpaid students, perhaps, I don't know, students in the summer who have a sweep net and they have a certain plot where they go, so many rows down and so many rows up and whatever, and here they have a certain quadrant that they sweep. And they put their head inside of the sweep net, And then they count a total number of pest animals versus predatory insects. Okay.

So the predatory insects are there to eat the pest insect. And it is only when that ratio is becoming problematic. So if you have no more predators but only these pests, then clearly the predators can no longer look after the problem. So and only then you would spray. Okay, so this is a very carefully administered, strategically administered control product. The same we should apply to how we manage our bees. Now, the problem with that one is, is it needs knowledge.

You need education, you need training, and frequent monitoring. So, integrated pest management is often a misconceived idea. A lot of people think, oh, that is an holistic way of running organic bees or something or back to nature bees. Nonsense. It is basically a strategically well detailed technique to apply controls only when needed under the circumstances that you have collected facts and figures that say you better try. The result of that is that allows you to reduce your usage and dependency on drugs and on chemicals. And again, it is not unique to bees. This can be to all kinds of other crop or livestock production systems where maybe the use of chemicals and drugs cannot be totally eliminated, but largely eliminated.

Now, the problem that we have with feroomites, I'm the first one to admit it, is its virulence, its disease-causing or damage-causing effect is so high that our tolerance level, our tolerance to allow it to be in our colonies, is very, very low. Okay, we become worried when we have, for example, if we have a 3% infestation in our honeybee colonies with Ferroa mites, if it is above it, well, we better treat. If we allow it to get too high, then we lose the bees altogether. Okay. So monitoring, being engaged and learning and reading what's going on inside of that colony is a key component of operating or managing honeybee colonies successfully with minimal,

but not completely without, with minimal usage of those control products that help us to see the bees survive. There are also people naively, and I hear of them all the time, who want to get into the bees and say, oh, but I'm only interested in natural. be keeping. They don't know what that means, but it sounds good. Okay. And they often basically run the bees in a manner which I can only describe as being one of neglect. Okay. It's like the bees develop a disease. They don't monitor it often enough. They don't look after it enough. And they deny these bees the benefit of receiving a medicine in whatever. form that is, and the result of it is, is that the bees will die.

But the problem with that one is, is that the bees don't die just from one day to the next. They, that poor colony is generally going through a protracted period of decline, of suffering. And bees, although as individualistic, beekeepers are, because they, if you, you go to a beekeepers meeting, you'll see how many different opinions you have. If you have 10 beekeepers, you guarantee you end up with 11 opinions. So, ironically, as individualistic as beekeepers are, they deal with a unique form of livestock that is more communal, more sharing than you could ever think of. So if you have one colony with a disease or with a serious health problem, guess what? The colony next to it is going to have the same thing, not right away, but over time.

and another apiary and another apiary of another beekeeper. So, if you have people that go into natural beekeeping, okay, guess what happens?

They are basically, and there you have these colonies suffering painfully, going through declines, many of the bees at one point say, hey,

there is no hope out here, I'm going to move to another colony, okay? And because they share their misery with each other essentially. And that means you spread diseases, bring them to other colonies, to other beekeepers, and so on.

And that is why through education, we try to reduce that and say, I'm very blunt in my courses as well to say beekeepers, aspiring beekeepers, please learn from what I'm telling you in this course. If you realize it is way too much work, if you cannot commit yourself to looking after this unique livestock, don't. bother. Don't do it to the bees. There are other bees. People can have. One of them is these non-honey bees called the osmia bees or the blue orchard mason bees. They don't have communal nests. They are just individual females that will provision a little tubular nest. And you have fantastic, beautiful little honeybee, or not honeybees, bees that come out between March and June, and they pollinate everything you can pollinate, and then they disappear for the rest of the year.

So there's no maintenance, there's no lots of work involved, and I encourage people to consider that if they don't have the drive and the commitment to look after honeybee colonies. Right. What you talked about in terms of maintenance and monitoring things, it made me think of alcohol. And it might be a crude example, but I think of. how certain communities, particularly First Nations communities, we have high alcohol rates, and that does a disservice to the community in a variety of ways. Yes, and so you can think that perhaps we, and people might not know this, but 50% of crimes

have alcohol involved in them in some way or another. And it's curious, I had John Haidon, who's a professor at UF.E, and we talk about how alcohol really does just get a pass. We don't think about the ramifications that for one person having a little bit of that might or something, it can be okay. You can have it with dinner and you're fine. But for the next person, it can become a deteriorate. Yeah, it can have a lot of different effects on you and then you carry that over to your community and you start getting more depressed. You start getting worse sleeps because alcohol impacts your sleep and then you start treating people badly and then you start pushing this on to other people and you start wanting to go to the bars more

and you want to, it's helping you cope. And so it just made me think of that struggle of like, where do we put that line? Where is the limit for something like alcohol? Where is the limit for mites? And thinking of these things in your own life and understanding that there is a threshold where, yes, alcohol can be harmless or mites cannot cause damage. But you increase that threshold too much. It can start to have deleterious effects on the things around it, on the people or the bees.

And I think it's interesting that you made that comment. about this culture we have right now of all natural, non-GMO. Like, when you think of dogs, all dogs are genetically modified in that we've modified them over times of having different dogs and having them mate and then having saying these are like peer breads, but they're not really pure in the sense that they all came from wolves. And if your dog isn't a wolf, then it's no longer peer of what it used to be. And so we have this culture right now of non-GMO. And another good example, I think, are apples.

No apples are what they were when apples existed a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago. We've adapted them. When you think of Granny Smith apples and all these different ones, they're all adapted over time. It's not through perhaps chemical engineering the way we think of it in a laboratory, but it's through chemical engineering of having certain species of apples mix and then we like that flavor and then we purchase more of that flavor. And so things adapt over time. and we've genetically engineered them through just mating of them and having different...

Selection. Exactly. And so we have this weird mentality right now of thinking that we're going to go back to 10,000 years ago or 5,000 years ago. And that this is how it was done pre-contact. And so that's somehow better. And I see that, and I've mentioned this a few times, I see it with the vegan and vegetarian community. And there's nothing wrong with choosing that lifestyle. But Christian religions dealt with the guilt and the weight of killing animals.

killing life so they can live through things like grace, through giving thanks to a creator, a god, indigenous people, we have salmon ceremonies. So we take that salmon, we share it with the first salmon, with the whole community, we return the bones to the river, we give thanks for that. We do a prayer. And then we all take on a collective responsibility that if we're going to kill this, if we're going to do this, then we have a responsibility to the ecosystem, to take care of it, to be stewards of it, that there's a role to play. And it seems short-sighted when I hear parts of the vegan and vegetarian community say, well, I'm just not going to eat this anymore because I'm a good person and nothing should

have to die for me to live. And it's like, I sympathize, but I think that cultures have figured out a way to do this, but in a sustainable way where we go forward in better directions. And I think when we start to forget why people do grace, when we start to think, oh, this is a silly superstition of giving thanks, you start to miss out on the reason why is so that you remember what your role is. You remember your responsibilities. You are grateful for the life around you. And that doesn't require you necessarily believe in a creator. It matters that you understand your role as a human today. I think that there can be added benefits to believing that there's a creator perhaps. But it's not like the barrier. entry is to believe that in order to see the value in grace and to see the value in salmon ceremonies. And I think that it's important that we recognize our role in these ecosystems. And it sounds like those individuals who have that kind of mindset of like, well, I'm not going

to do anything and that's going to be natural, is not humans have existed for a very long time. And we've played a role in these ecosystems. And it would be hoove of us to take on that responsibility and do it in the way that you're sort of describing. Yes. Yeah. It's very true. Yeah.

But hopefully that the diseases will remain manageable. The problem is that a lot of people have an overly simplistic idea approach to the complexity of how to maintain and manage, for example, these honeybee colonies. You can actually just pull that up if you want to sit back and. And yeah, the, the, the, the, and in the courses, we try to continuously say, look, you have to become far more focused on, again, what I said from the beginning, being communal with the bees, so that you get a closer feel for what is happening. And our, when we talked earlier about monocultural practices, I give you an example, we have a lot of crop growers, particularly in business. blueberries that have difficulty to secure enough honeybee colonies for looking after their pollination needs in their crop.

Because we don't have enough honeybee colonies in the province. So we get bees also from the prairie provinces to winter out here because of favorable climatic conditions. And then in the springtime, some of those are used for pollination contracts in the Fraser Valley for blueberries. And even then, often there is a shortage of it. But I have said for, been trying to convince big growers for years, I said, DeLoc, don't just rely on honeybees, but also use other pollinators, natural pollinators.

These are gifts of nature. And how can you get those? Well, if we step back and we realize that the, in the evolution of blueberries and cranberries, They evolved over millions of years in bog environments of the northern hemisphere in the temperate zones. Wet, soggy, often lousy weather conditions and there they are. The blueberries in bloom or the cranberries in bloom. So who are the pollinators? Typically bumblebees, okay?

Big hairy, fluffy balls. Okay. But so if we look at what bumblebees do, They buzz They buzz More than just making that sound What they do is they Go into a flower

They are heavy insects So they grasp that flower on the inside And they have a very long tongue Or proboscis they call it And they grasp this flower And put their head inside of this narrow Flower To gain access to the nectar

Ease, the nectar There's in the bottom of the tubular flower flower, and they have to bypass, of course, the pollen grains that are sitting out there on the anthers, okay? But not only that, in that wet, cold environment, the pollen is very sticky and doesn't dislodge very readily. Now, the fact is, is that these bumblebees have evolved to buzz, and what that means is that while they are on the flower, they relax and contract and relax their flight muscles without

moving their wings. So the whole insect vibrates z-z-z-z-z like this. And that extremely high vibration causes the pollen grains to dislodge and get stuck on the hairs. Now it happens to be also that because they're so hairy and big, when the wings go through the wet and humid air at a very rapid pace, they also build up static electricity. So when they are onto the flower, the different charge, the static electric charge that they carry is different from the flour and that causes the pollen grains

to stick to the hairs even more. So all what I'm saying is that bumblebee, honeybees don't do that. They also build up some static electricity charge, electrical charge, but they don't buzz. They have not learned to do that. So in other words, on a per insect

basis, bumblebees are far more effective in pollinating, more efficient, if you will, pollinating blueberries and cranberries than honeybees. They also are tolerant to forage under weather conditions that most honeybees say, forget it, I'm going to stay home. I'm not going to fly around to this weather, because they have evolved largely in warmer climates, Mediterranean climates and subtropical climates, honeybees. But bumblebees are very, very, very much. tolerant to these much lower and miserable conditions. So why not use more bumble bees? Okay.

So I recall now, almost 20 years ago that I got a very nice study grant from the BC blueberry growers organization to do research on how can we enhance bumblebee populations in blueberries. And what I thought was so remarkable. or I got great gratification out of this that we hardly spent any money and we already came very quickly to the conclusion what the reasons were

or what the principal reasons ought to be for them to enhance their populations because it was always argued that the biggest problem was not a sufficient undisturbed habitat not enough wild

undisturbed habitat where they can have their little nests in the ground. Bumblebees do that in the ground, their nests. That was not a shortage at all. What was the shortage? The shortage was, again, we were talking about monocultural practices before. When blueberries come into flour for three weeks, four weeks in April, there is, for the bumblebees, there is feast. There is an enormous amount of food available, unlimited amount of food.

never keep up with it. So much food there is. So they are very busy doing that. But their reproductive stage, it is an annual nest. It is not bumblebees only are active as a nest for the summer season. And then the nest collapses and dies out. And only the mated females, the queens will winter on their own to start their own nest in the following year. So their reproductive stage is something similar to what I was explaining about the Asian giant hornet. So the nest will start to produce reproductives in late summer, in August. So from early on in the spring, all the way up to that late summer, this nest must have access to food to get larger. Okay. And so after the blueberries have flowered, then often with monocultural practices,

these bumblebees have no food for months or hardly any food, so they struggle. Now, the difference is, I don't want to go into endless detail, but honeybees are long-distance forages. And the reason is, is that they are sophisticated enough in the evolutionary ladder that they can communicate with each other inside of the nest, inside of the hive. They have a special dance And they have a certain way To communicate with each other To say, hey, if you fly out of the hive

You have to fly in this particular direction And it costs so much energy To get to the food source So they don't have to search all over the place Okay You're blowing my mind They have a dance that they do in the hive That's right, yeah, that's right

So honeybees do Okay Um While bumblebees have not evolved enough on the evolutionary path to develop such a communication form within the nest. So all the sisters, because these are all these worker bumblebees, just come out and they basically forage on their own. Now, they cannot afford to fly three kilometers in a certain direction because they may not find anything. So they are relatively short distance flyers, short distance foragers.

So if you are in a monocultural setting, you may have a fantastic start to the season, but then after that blueberry flower is gone, yeah, the next food source may be the blackberries. But if the blackberries are two kilometers away, that is an awful lot of hard work and only a few out of this entire nest will ever find these blue berries. blackberries to feast and to bring food back. So in other words, the momentum of nest development is stagnating and therefore maybe by the end in August when finally the nest is ready to produce the reproductive stages, it may be such a small nest that it will never really produce many of those sexually maturing offspring. So it is key then for health these bumblebee populations locally to set a dinner table for them after the blueberries

have flowered. So in our research study what we said to the beekeepers or to the growers, it's very simple. We said, you know, if you want to have more bumblebees in your field or near your field, why don't you sacrifice a little bit of the ribbon, the edge of your field and plant a number of food sources that we can recommend. And there are a variety of floral sources from cat mint to bee balm to a whole bunch of things that are flowering throughout the summer season and that help these small little bumblebee nests that I may be in the wild somewhere to enhance in their in their reproductive success okay unfortunately at that time you're talking about 20 years ago a lot of the growers would say what me sacrificing a ribbon of land for these for these bumblebee

I can plant 10 bushes that offer me income to put in a garden for pollinators, you've got to be kidding. I might as well just rent more honeybee colonies. Do you know what I mean? That seems crazy to me. That seems so short-sighted and they paid

you to do the research and then your research comes back with... They didn't expect what the results were, but the results were remarkably simple. Okay. And today we are again talking with the blueberry growers to do exactly that. It's, by the way, this is not exclusive to blueberry

growers, but, you know, to many other crop growers as well. What I'm trying to, the message out here is this, that with a little bit of input effort, we can take advantage of a natural resource being the bumblebee population

in a local environment to enhance it, not to abuse it, just merely to popularize it, to give it strength and vitality and greater success in its presence in the local habitat, in the local environment, that then can assist us of setting a better crop fruit set in the crop that we are growing. And again, the blueberry growers are looking into that seriously now again,

and I'm in similar negotiations with the cranberry growers because they have the same problem. But honeybees are forced to go on to cranberry. but the honeybees don't like it at all because it doesn't produce any nectar it only produces a little bit of pollen well these girls are saying i i rather fly to something else with greater productivity so the reliance on bumblebees is even greater in cranberries when it comes to pollination and so there again too steps can be taken relatively simple uh sustainable steps to enhance local resources, local bee populations, in a very simple, simple and in a way that, and by the way, of course, when we promote the planting of some of these floral sources, you cannot expect one year to suddenly have been, the environment is not inundated with all these fantastic bumblebees or other species. This will take a few years for buildup, so to say, okay? But it is an managed, approach that is if you talk about holistic approach it is far more in tune with the environment with what the environment offers there is one more thing that I like to add not to endlessly criticize monocultural practices but studies have shown that if you have a plot of land and you put in a thousand honey peas that you

have let's say hive with let's say a thousand honey peas that pollinate okay in that particular crop you have a certain success of fruit set okay if you reduce that that population of a thousand you reduce that somewhat and you the difference you make up with let's say bumblebees so that you would have the same number of pollinating insects but of different composition you have better fruit set. In other words, why that is we don't know exactly, and I certainly don't, because I haven't done that research, but the thing is studies have shown that basically greater biodiversity, greater species diversity of the pollinator fauna in a given area provides greater seed set and fruit set than if you have only a single pollen

in an environment and that brings me to a last point and it is this that what we have seen in the world of bees pollinators in general you know it's interesting a lot of people are surprised to learn that we are currently operating more honeybee colonies in Canada than ever before more than ever but what is the difference compared to 50 years ago honeybee colonies currently have a surface life that is far shorter than what it used to be 50 years ago. In other words, we have to go through a replacement program of much greater frequency than what we employed 50 years ago.

And that costs money. In other words, the productivity level of each honeybee colony is lower today than what it was many years ago. okay so yes we operate more of them but less successfully if you will okay and that is one of the reasons why there are more colonies not only because there are more people interested in keeping bees but also many of the commercial beekeepers in order to compensate for or address that lower productivity level what they do is they start to apply what we call the economies of scale Instead of running 3,000 colonies, now you have to run 5,000, right? So that is an important part in our, in the management cycle that has been taking place in the honeybee business, if you will.

And we can go back and try to reduce that again by basically trying to manage these colonies better. so that they retain higher or high productivity levels. That is a lot. I think that it's so valuable. Talking to individuals like yourself, it's so humbling because you realize just how much you don't know about a topic. And it humbles you, and it's part of the reason I love doing this, is because I learn so much.

And I think that there's one thing that you've pointed out here several times, whether it's in monoculture, whether it's through natural beekeeping, whether or not it's through our instinct to want to use pharmaceuticals to address things is this small-minded approach to things and you kind of described it again when you were talking about this instinct well I could just bring in more bees

or I could just pay for more and there's this short-sightedness that people can have when they're just looking for productivity and it sounds like if we were more strategic if we humbled ourselves in so many of these industries and said how do we make sure that this is going to be here for the long haul

how do we make sure that these bees are successful because they're on my team and you think of there's a small movement growing of treating your employees better and the bees are on your team they're working with you and they don't get paid the way that you're paying your staff but they're on your team and you rely on them and so how about you treat your team better how about you have this mindset of investing long term just like you do with your employees if you give them health care benefits or if you invest in their education how about you you you invest in your team so they're here for the long haul so you can be not and like that's where there's these challenges of like once you like it almost sounds like you need like a campaign of like

we treat our bees well or something to get people thinking about these things of like are you because we have this movement of not using too much like pesticides and stuff and people are starting to go okay I don't want a lot of pesticides I shop at the town butcher here in Chiluac and they try not to use antibiotics on their meat. And it sounds like it would be useful. And I don't always know exactly how effective the campaigns are. But to have, like I just interviewed man farms here. And I know they have blueberries, raspberries, and they're doing all types of wine. And so when you're talking about this, I had them in my mind of like, could there be a business opportunity for them to say, we treat our bees well or we have like a bee aspect to our business where we're

trying to make sure that these bees are not only here, but they're here long term. And that their quality of life is improving. So we have statistics on that so that we can be proud. Because from my understanding, the Fraser Valley is one of the most full areas of bees. I think that that's correct. And so there would, and it sounds like there's individuals who care about the bees and want the best for them. And so there has to be something we can do to motivate these businesses to say, well,

because you have to unfortunately incentivize businesses to consider these things. And if there's no incentive for them to put a big brand on their wall that has a bee on it, it says we treat our bees well, then they don't really care because it's not on their consumers' radar. And that's sort of frustrating because there's no incentive to themselves to just be good stewards of the land. But if we can put in these incentives for them to say, oh, it's worthwhile because then my customers are proud to buy my product. I got that little bee sticker on it. And I've kind of talked smack about the sticker industry because you think of like green products. So many products say they're green and they're not green or they've met a minimum requirement.

It's same with recycled. We use 10% recycled products. If that. And then they say it and then they have like they can do up to 2% of recycled products in order to say that. And so there's all these challenges with that. But you've pointed out this small minded approach to so many different aspects that I think it's so nice to hear somebody saying like look at it from all these different perspectives and then you're right. You might not improve the first year. year two or year three, but over the longevity of your business, and hopefully you're a farmer

for 20, 50, 100 years, and you pass this business onto your family, that you've got a plan. And the reason I thought of manned farms is because they're a generational farm. So they're passing this on to their children and their grandchildren and their family. And so it's, if you're, if that's your plan, then you need to have a plan to have the crops work and have all these things function. And there's something, we have another place here in Chiluac that's an egg business. and they're like fourth generational egg farmers. And so there's this passing on of the torch and how can we do things better?

And it sounds like that's something that you really motivate. Can you tell us about this course that you provide people and what the different stages are? I think you have four and what you talk about. Yeah, well, basically, as I said earlier, when the Varroa mites came in in 1987 in North America and the subsequent misery that was brought about, we started to emphasize even more so than before to offer beekeepers training, how to become a better beekeeper.

And most of that activity was at the time in the 1970s and 80s, you know, these were seminars. And, you know, you show up at a local beekeeping club and you tell about this or that, or whatever, or you wrote articles in some of the magazines that they had, and that was all fine. But when it became a far more challenging enterprise, we started to organize specific courses. And we call it an introduction to beekeeping. It was maybe an introduction, but much of it was often also directed to beekeepers that already

had quite a bit of years of experience. The drawback of these courses were that not only were they brainers. a certain cost with them because we had to rent arrange with local colleges for example to have an classroom available and it's always in the evening

because in the daytime people had to work and of course a classroom only can accommodate maybe 30 people and the driving at night and all this stuff were all these limitations that were okay

except that you know who could you reach well typically people in the Fraser Valley or a course that we had done in the Okanagan or of course on South on Vancouver Island the problem was that it was very limiting because of the physical distances

the defect that people had to show up at classroom settings and whatever and therefore we didn't reach as many people as we could so that is why in 2015 which is now seven years ago well before we even ever thought about COVID-19 the technology started to

pop up more and more about having the opportunity of webinars online, live webinars. And so I approached my executive in the ministry saying, would this be possible to do that I organize and develop an course, an online course, and that would then be comprised of four classes once every week, sorry, yeah, once a week, and preferably on a Saturday morning. because then most people don't have to work and it is then for two hours or two and a half hours each Saturday and the whole idea was

not to charge anything the idea was free so that there was no monetary impediment to actually reach out to people because I felt you know people that live in Prince George

or in well I don't know in Telegraph Creek or in dozens City or Dawson Creek or another in B.C. wherever. They should have the opportunity to have some educational opportunities

equal to that or people that live in the Fraser Valley. Why would that be any different? The technology was enabling us to do this. So I got approval to do this and, you know, that was on Saturday morning so it was on my own time

essentially. And so without actually too much advertising, This has started to grow and the first year we had maybe 160 people on there or whatever. And so there were four classes and each class or each webinar would live webinar. And prior to each webinar, depending on the topics, of course, in these four classes, people would get a whole pile of email sent to them with reference materials, with suggested reading, materials with this, that or another and also supplemented them with

I had also an whole library of PowerPoint presentations so I would also enhance that by sending them a PDF file with a presentation about this or that or whatever so each class had a certain set of topics that we were covering and that has turned into

quite a success in that every year it has grown and So far, in 2020 was the first time that there were so many people in the class that, and it was always early in the spring, late January, early February. We don't teach courses in June or July. We never do. And the reason is, is that there is so much information about beekeeping management that you will then not be able to apply as a student until the following year. Well, most of people would forget about this. So we felt there was no way of any, there was no purpose for offering a course in the summer time, or in the fall, for that matter, only in the early part of spring, so that what they learned, they could apply promptly.

So we, it has grown since that time. I mean, in 2020 and in 2021, and now this time again, the interest are so high that I had to offer the course a second time. And so this year, for example, I mean, my contact list for the first course that just finished last week of class number four, even the webinar number four. I mean, I had an distribution list of what, 1,030 people on there. And therefore, we have now offered it a second time. And that's why later today I have to do this. It's not live. It is going to be a pre-recorded thing.

Correct. All the other information has to be sent. to them. And right now the list is maybe about 150, somewhere between 150 and 150 and 100, 200 people. So and most of them are in British Columbia, but

also quite a few. I mean, I have a whole contingent of beekeepers in Newfoundland for heavens, you know, while we are still slurping the morning coffee, I mean, they are just about ready for the cocktail hour. I mean, it's and this year earlier, I mean, that was one person

from Norway. And then what I mentioned earlier, Senegal, four people in Kenya. It was crazy how that word spreads. But I think that that is really, the fuel behind this is the gratification that I get out of the fact that I try to convey two aspiring beekeepers that they should have an approach to beekeeping that is not linear that is just simply oh you put in some chemical and you do this

and then whatever at the end of the season you take the honey out and all this kind of very calendar based poorly managed way of going about it you have to really

get into the bees in order to be a good beekeeper and to be a good horticulturalist or a gardener essentially so that you have a truly holistic approach from the environment in which the bees operate and feel how they, how they function

in that environment. And that's just, I think, my aim. And I think that that is the reason why the course has become so wildly popular. Yeah, there are certain guests that people have asked me, like, how do you do three hours? Like, that's a really long time for people to listen or something like that. But then you get certain guests on, like yourself, like Brian Minter. And three hours is like episode one, where I can feel that we have scratched the surface of all of your years of experience. We have not been able to dive into all the different types of bees.

You've highlighted a few, I guess, to you probably more obvious differences between honeybees and bumblebees. But we could dive even deeper into every single genus, how they function differently. We could probably spend another hour discussing how they dance and what it was like to learn about that. We could talk about, I know that there's some people who use the pollen as like we went to Chilliwack Honey and they have like pollen that you can eat and there's different benefits to doing that. There's different benefits to the wax that bees create. We can do like so many different conversations and I recognize that you're a busy person, but I'm interested to know, have you thought about doing a podcast at all where you can go like I agree that the live format for questions is completely. important, but have you thought about doing something where you're able to talk and break down like this type of B and let's go through it and break that down for people?

And then people can re-listen to it and go back through and tune in again to go back and refresh their memory because it seems like the webinar is fantastic. But I can just see that there's, I think there are only an hour and a half each time, that there's so much information that people won't be able to access, even though you're doing it four times, maybe eight times, that you're going to be. No, no, no, the course is, is, consists of four sections. I mean, not every webinar tonight, webinar number one is about a certain set of topics. Webinar number two a week from now is going to be dealing with beekeeping management issues.

Number three, dealing with diseases and pests, and number four, dealing with other things again. So, and the reason that it is spread out is because there's so much information that otherwise you overwhelm folks and most, of it is lost, okay? Keep in mind that the live webinars are, all of it is recorded. So even if people are overwhelmed with the darn thing. And on Saturday mornings, there are a lot of people that say, no, I have to drive Johnny to his ice hockey practice, so I can't do it. No worries. Because if, by being, by having signed up, they will have, they will be sent in excess code or a link to each of those webinars so they can sit

in the middle of the night staring at me for two and a half hours you know you need some stamina for that one but so and actually we have these these webinars these recorded seminar webinars will be available to

registrants for two or three months and then finally at the end of the contract that we have with the IT provider it is cut off But so if by that time people still don't know what they're talking about or have not absorbed any information, maybe they should get involved with something totally different. So it's and the reason that it is not going to be downloadable, for example, is because of ministries policies on copyrights issues and things of that kind. So that's why it is time limited and not downloadable so that before you know. or I can be, you know, shown on YouTube or some darn thing.

No, that's not the way it works. So that is the contract that we have with the service provider. So next year, you know, we'll do it all over again if I'm still doing what I'm doing. Yeah, I just see the – and perhaps this happens when you're done in this role, is that to me, I'm guessing that there are so many stories that you've been working on a particular hive or that you've had an experience in Uganda or you've had an experience in Alberta or you've had an experience in Nanaimo or that you have these stories that aren't going to train someone on how to keep bees but are super interesting to beekeepers to be able to tune into

because with podcasts you can have it on when you're working with your bees or you can have it on when you're driving down the road or you can be doing other things and be learning about a topic because when I saw the interactions with this beekeeping group they're super passionate people and to be able to learn or hear stories from yourself on like so one thing I'd like to talk about today is this experience I had in Uganda where I dealt with this problem and it's not going to be like this is step one step two step three but it's going to be consumable to people where they're like I didn't think of that or a life lesson of what you learned along your journey because there's so much information that I think people can gain from individuals like

yourself or Brian Minter where like no matter how many webinars you do you're going to have a story that you didn't get to share because it's not on point with what you're talking about. Fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, well, these things are possible. Yeah. If there's any way I can support that, please let me know because I get inspired off of individuals like yourself, knowing that

you have so much information to share and that you've worked to do this. Like, you were the one who went to the government. The government didn't come to you and say, you need to do a webinar so that you fit this. It's because you care about these things. It's because you want the best for British Columbia. You want the best for our crop yields. And

you've been kind of highlighting the concerns if bees aren't doing well and if we have declines and if they're not succeeding then our economies aren't going to succeed our farmers aren't going to succeed and so having that understanding i think is is so it would come through in every hypothetical episode you would do um when it comes to bees are we moving in the right direction um i watched the bee movie i was terrified um are we moving in a better direction since that? Or do you, like, what are your thoughts on British Columbia, Canada, the world? Are we getting the drift that we need to do something? Oh, we're doing things all the time. It's a question that some of the things that we do may not be the right thing. But I think that we

are going through and transition, not just on base, but on a lot of other food production systems as well, where more technology is going to be introduced. And I'm thinking here about vertical farming. You must have heard about that as well. And, you know, things like this. I think that what, what the era of having kind of a passive and often poorly informed management system is increasingly no longer sustainable because it takes too much resources and too much loss of these colonies, for example, then in other words, we have to beef up. the educational nevo and the insight of how to manage honey bee colonies better and more sustainably in an environment where we don't use nothing but chemicals and drugs to make them perform. You know, it's worth mentioning that in the 1970s, when I first worked for the ministry of agriculture

as a student, a UBC student, I was working for the ministry at that time as well, only summertime. But, you know, at that time, we had what they called the package operators. And the package operators were commercial beekeepers, not so much here in British Columbia, but they were in the prairie provinces. And it sounds terribly cruel, and most people don't know about this. But when the beekeepers would order packages from California every year, packages is basically a box with two pounds of bees, a kilogram of bees. And inside was a little cage in which they had a queen, okay, to protect her against shocks or whatever. And they were then, and there is a little feeding can placed inside as well,

with sugar syrup so that they could sustain themselves during the journey. So they would come out of California on a big truck. And there would be done, you know, several thousand of these packages. And then the beekeeper, and often sometimes in the snow, there was still a snowbank out there in the prairie. they would be hived, they will be put into the hive and then they were continuously being fed

either sugar syrup as well as pollen patties because there were no flowers yet but these beekeepers had to get these colonies going going going until finally the clover's and the canola and all these things come into bloom in what in June, July and take these fabulous honey crops I mean 200, 300 pounds per colony I mean, enormous.

But what did they do with the bees after? They would kill them. Okay? They would gas them because it was costing too much money to winter them for the whole winter. So all the bees that were these colonies that were then used to produce these fabulous honeycrops, the beekeepers would then go and kill all their bees. And then they would, after they had killed the bees, they would clean up all the equipment, store it into an warehouse and whatever.

and they would go ice fishing or they would go to sit on their lazy bum in Hawaii or California for the winter and then they would order the packages to come from California again next year. Okay. That's the callous way how an beautiful resource was utilized. If you talk about an grossly inappropriate way of treating an living organism, and, you know, with such a disregard and just expect these crops to come in and whatever. Now, that whole system collapsed with the arrival of the Varroa mite, because the Varroa mite was first discovered in the United States.

And we had at the time, I don't want to go into all detail, but there were legal issues and everything else and no controlled products available. and the border had to be closed for the import of bees from the United States. So suddenly a lot of these guys that were dependent on these packages were suddenly out of bees. They had lots of equipment, but no bees. And that highlighted the vulnerability and the total bizarre system that had been developed simply because it made some financial sense. But from a diversity, I would think, the most extraordinary,

disrespectful manner in which we were treating on beautiful livestock by killing them all off after they were producing our honey crops. It makes me think of, I just interviewed Lee Harding who's a biologist who's focused on wolf culling. And

we talk about how we currently just renewed a system in BC where we have people get in helicopters grab out a gun and just start shooting them from the sky. And I understand that there may be a need for conservation.

I understand that wolf populations could get out of hand. I recognize all of that. There just has to be a better way. There has to be a way where we're respecting the animals, where we're perhaps utilizing their fur, we're giving that appreciation for their sacrifice. Just, it's very arrogant of us to approach things in these ways and think that there won't be long-term consequences.

We don't know what those consequences are today. Right now, like to pretend that there won't be consequences to shooting wolves from helicopters, but I have to, again, I think that the bill is going to come due. And just like it did with, it sounds like the honeybees, this is not sustainable. It's not what we want to be remembered for. It's not how, it's not, it's definitely not the way forward. And it's just so unfortunate that we seem to learn these things only when we have to pay the price. It seems like it takes those consequences for us to wake up and go, wait, we were doing that. That's, that's crazy.

easy that we were doing that. And it's so unfortunate that now with movies coming out saying, like, we need to protect the bees, there's these problems, that we go, oh, well, how are we treating them? It's only then that we become self-aware of what we're doing. Exactly, exactly. Fortunately, that practice is no longer here, of course. I mean, people certainly don't do it now anymore because they don't have a resource to get these kind of replacement packages. So nobody does the gassing anymore, but they were just gassing bees off, perfectly healthy bees. and entire colonies just wiped out and they would bring in

250,000 300,000 packages every spring I appreciate you being willing to take the time I think that there's so much more to get out of this conversation because you know so much we are so lucky to have you

as our provincial apiculturist I have learned so much through this conversation can you please tell people how they can connect with your webinar oh well the best thing is simply to visit the government website.

And the government website is the easiest way to find about the bees because the government website is a big one and don't get lost because you will get lost. All what you do is you Google BCAP culture

and that will bring you to our page at some point and then you scroll down and it says something about courses or something. I can remember I better visit it myself but it's fairly straightforward

and then the key here is is that because it's so important, internet-based, people have to send me an email. And that email will put them onto our contact list, and then the steps go through to get onto this thing. Now, I should mention that the course is basically an annual affair, because with so much interest, you can hardly afford it as an organization to say, oh, we're not going to do it anymore. And it costs so little money for having such an IT contract for a few months and reaching out for so many hundreds and hundreds of people that is just wonderful. Awesome. Well, I highly recommend people go check it out just to learn more, educate themselves.

You are more than welcome to come back on at any time. We have so much more to talk about. I have learned so much. So if you're ever in the area or if you're ever coming through, I'd love to record another one of these because I think it's important that we highlight individuals like your stuff. yourself and take the opportunity to learn. So thank you so much, Paul. You're most welcome. It was fun.