Science Friday - Bees! May 24, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: May 24, 2019

For the hobby beekeeper, there’s much to consider when homing your first domestic honey bee colonies—what kind of hive to get, where to put them, where to get your bees, and how to help them survive the winter. But when left to their own devices, what do the bees themselves prefer? From smaller nests to higher openings, wild honey bees seem to prefer very different conditions from the closely clustered square boxes of traditional beekeeping. But there are ways to adapt! Seeley joins Ira to explain his theory of “Darwinian beekeeping” as a way to keep bees healthy even in the age of varroa mites and colony collapse. Plus, apiculturalist Elina L. Niño of the University of California Davis talks about the microbial world of bees, such as whether probiotics could benefit bee health, and how honey bees and bumblebees could be used to distribute beneficial microbes to plants, an idea called ‘apivectoring.’ Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. I have been waiting months to open a discussion about our next topic. You know how they say timing is everything? Well, it's spring and finally time to talk about one of my favorite subjects, bees. Perhaps you've seen them swarming. Now, you may think you know about bees, but you would be surprised by what you don't know. Certainly, I was and I am. And if you have any beekeeping questions or you want to know anything about bees, Bees. Our number is 844-724-825-8-8-4-Sai Talk or tweet us at SciFry, and we will begin our discussion with a scientist who has spent 40 years following wild honeybees to their trees and intricately noting how they live their lives unfettered by human beekeepers, not living in confined and neatly stacked white boxes. and he has some ideas about how understanding the wild bees better could help us cultivate the domestic ones.

So they survived the threats that seem to be imperiling their survival today. Dr. Thomas Seeley, Professor of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University, author of the new book, The Lives of Bees, the Untold Story of the Honeybee in the Wild. You can read an excerpt on our website, ScienceFriday.com slash wild bees. Dr. Seeley joins us from Ithaca, New York, where he has spent most of his career learning about honeybees. Welcome back, Tom. Thank you back, Ira. Thank you for having me back.

It's very happy to have you. What got you interested 40 years ago in the lives of wild honeybees? Oh, my goodness. I think it has something to do with admiring these bees that normally we think of as having to live under our supervision, but seeing that, oh, no, they actually can live in the wild. And of course, that makes sense. That's where they started out, and that's where they are still, to a large extent, today. We talk a lot about the plight of bees and pollinators right now.

The varroa mites and other causes of colony collapse, are wild bees having as tough a time as the kinds that we have in our hives? The answer is no, they're not. They're not receiving any treatments against the mites. that you mentioned, these parasitic mites, and yet their mortality rates today in the 2010s are what they were back in the 1970s and 1980s when I first started studying the wild colonies.

That's interesting because you talk about in your book that you did notice that the bees in Ithaca did go through a population crash, though they were able to survive and come back without having to use a pesticide against the mite. How did they do that? They accomplished that through the process of natural selection. We know from genetic analysis that just as you said, the population went through a bottleneck.

Probably only 10 or 20 percent of the colonies survived, but those have what it takes, and they have repopulated the forests around Ithaca. All right, let's talk about in specifics, what makes wild honey be so resilient and how different are they from the kinds that we see in the white box beehives? Well, you wouldn't be able to tell them apart at a glance, but they're a little bit smaller, but more important than the managed bees, but more importantly, they have some behavioral traits that are not good for the mites. For example, they're able to, they're very good at chewing the legs off the mites, and

mites die when that happens. they're also very good at opening up the brood cells of their own brood cells in which the mites are, these parasitic mites are reproducing. So that hinders the reproduction of the mite. So they get them in both ways by reducing their survival and toning down their reproduction. Do they have other habits that can't be accomplished inside the managed beehives? Well, there's a number of things that bees living in the wild do that is different from bees living in managed hives. And it has to do with, a lot of them have to do with the difference between living in a tree cavity and a managed hive, a beekeeper's hive.

A beekeeper's hive is actually quite large compared to a tree cavity of the wild colony's home. And that's intentional. it's because a beekeeper wants to give a colony lots of space to store up honey. But it also means that colonies under a beekeeper supervision don't go through the process that we call swarming, and that helps the bees also resist the mites. Are you saying that we are too self-centered about the honey production versus the general health of the bee population? Yes, we are most beekeepers. are focused on honey production and crop pollination.

And that's fair enough. It's their bees. But it does make life harder for the honeybees themselves. And I think every beekeeper would probably acknowledge that. It's a management situation. I would say I'd like to draw analogy between beekeeping. is a bit compared to living in the wild, beekeepers' hives live a life that's kind of like

the chickens on a poultry farm versus the birds that are living out in the woods. And so they're living close together, they're large numbers, and they're very prone to diseases under management in both situations. There's also something wild bees do to their nests with antimicrobial tree sap, right? Tell us about that.

Yes, that's a good point. That's another thing that they do, they collect tree resins, and the trees are producing these resins to seal off wounds of their own, and those resins are filled with antimicrobial materials, and the bees collect them, can bring home little loads of them, and they smear those loads, they coat the walls of the insides of their nests. And that experiments have been done that shows that if these live in a hive that has that on the walls.

The level of activity of the immunity genes of the bees is lower than it is if the bees are living in a hive. Those walls do not have these resins on them. So they really, sorry. No, go ahead. Finish, please. So we know that these resins not only work in the laboratory, but they also work in the hive in terms of fighting infections. Give us more of an idea also about what's difference in structure and function from a little hole in a tree. where they wild bees live to the big white box that we have?

Well, we've talked a little bit about the most conspicuous difference, the difference in the size, but there are quite a number of other differences. I'll just mention a few. One is insulation. A beekeeper's hive is only three-quarters of an inch thick wood, whereas a tree cavity, the home of a wild colony can be five, eight, ten, twelve, 20 inches thick. And so there's a huge difference in insulation.

and thus the thermal stability of the cavity homes between beekeepers colonies and wild colonies. Another difference is the height of the entrances. That might seem like a small fact, but it's actually really important to the bees, especially in the winter. Beekeepers' hives are close to the ground, and that's, of course, sensible. You want your bees down where you can work on them easily. Bees in the woods, their nest entrances are typically, 20 or more feet off the ground.

And that makes a difference in the winter. When bees have to fly out in the cold, when they come out of a tree cavity hive home, they're not right next to the snow. So if they're a little shaky in their flight, they don't crash into the snow and get killed. And whereas beekeepers see a lot of that, and I'm a beekeeper, I see a lot of that in the winter. Interesting. We know that there are really no native honeybees in the United States, correct? That they all have come in from Europe or other places.

Yes, that is correct. There used to be, we now have a scientist found about 10 years ago a fossil honeybee in Nevada. So there were 20 million years ago. There were honeybees in North America. But they went extinct when we went through a cooling period. So all of the colonies we have in North America now are introduced from Europe. Can we say that even domesticated bees are truly domesticated? Good question.

Not in the full sense. When we say we domesticate a species, that means usually that we not only change where they live, bring them into close to where we're living, but that we've also changed. them dramatically in terms of their genetics by controlling their breeding. If you think about the difference between a wild pony and a racehorse, you see that. We haven't done that with honeybees, and that is because we do not have the ability to easily control the matings of honeybees. And do some people want to do that?

Yes, there are breeding programs of honeybees, and people have done that in a number of and a number of times they've bred for resistance to a disease called American Fowlbrew. They've also bred for pollination ability on particular crops. But it's really hard to maintain those lines because as soon as one queen dies and a replacement queen comes along, that replacement queen, she goes out on her mating flights and she will mate with whatever drones she encounters. And so the control of the breeding is quickly lost. Give me a quick rundown on how you find wild honey bee nests.

It was fascinating how you set up traps for them and you mark the bees and you basically watch them come for food and they fly back and forth to their nests in the wild. Yes, that's right. I use a craft called bee hunting or bee lining, which has been done for hundreds of years, probably even, goodness, hundreds of years in North America, probably thousands and or tens of thousands of years in the old world, where, yes, you find bees on flowers or by a spring of water, and you entice them with a little bit of honey on a comb or sugar syrup on the comb. And the bees like that very much.

It's a much richer food source than they would find naturally, and they go home, they bring their sisters. And you develop an aerial, they provide you with an aerial, they provide you with an air, aerial trail back to their nest. That's fascinating. And if you have good eyesight and you're patient, you can step by step work your way down, back down that trail by moving your little feeding station towards their home. That's great.

Tom Seeley is author of The Lives of Bees, the Untold Story of Honey Bees in the wild. We're going to time, stay with us. We're going to take a break and come back with Tom and talk more about how you can be a beekeeper. Everything you want to know about bees, maybe you would like to be a beekeeper.

Yourself will give you some tips on how to do that. Our number 844-724-8255, also a little bit later. My Adventure, we're finding a swarm of bees in Midtown Manhattan, and how the NYPD has its own beekeepers to take care of things like that. It's quite fascinating. We hope you'll stay with us. Stay with us right after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking this hour about honeybees living in the wild and in hives. We want to know from you. Do you have a beekeeping question, or you want to know anything else about bees are number 844-7248255 also you can tweet us at si fry my guest is dr tom seeley professor of neurobiology and behavior at cornell university he's sort of the beekeepers beekeeper

he's been doing this so long he's got a new book out a great new book called the lives of bees and i want to bring on another guest now who's interested in all kinds of things from honeybee health to whether probiotics might give bees a boost. Elina El Niño is an apiculturist and extension specialist at the UC Agriculture and Natural Resources Division. That's at UC Davis. Welcome to Science Friday, Dr. El Niño. Thank you. I right.

It's great to be with you. Nice to have you. Your interest is what makes a healthy queen bee. Have you figured it out yet? I wish I could say I have, but not yet. we're working on it. That's sort of my lifelong passion, I would say, and it's going to probably make a career, I hope, for me.

But we're working on it. We're definitely our finding some very interesting things about Queens. And as Tom said, we still don't know everything about bees, which is what makes this field of study great and fun. I understand, speaking of fun, I understand that you're looking into giving bees probiotics. Tell us about that. I am. This is a new adventure for us in the lab as well.

We connected with researchers at the University of Western Ontario, London, Dr. Gregory Reed and Dr. Brendan Daisley. And we've been working with them. We just started this spring, and we're feeding them probiotics and protein patties and sugar water. And we're hoping that it will actually boost their immune response and help them out, fight off some of the. the diseases and issues that they have. Tom, what are some of the things that we can practically change to make our domestic bees more comfortable? Well, there's two parts to that answer. I'd say we can work with their genetics

and we can work with their living conditions. And with respect to the genetics, we could breed from colonies lines of bees that are living out in the wild because they have the right genetics. that we know that their genetics is different and in ways that give them behaviors to fight the mites. And in terms of the living conditions, I think if we can adopt beekeeping methods that allow the bees to live closer to the way they do in the wild, and I think that is actually realistic for hobby beekeepers, then that would, changing their living conditions or lifestyle,

it would also be helpful to the bees. Are they scrunched up in those little boxes? I mean, they look so many. How many have 20,000 bees in a box or in a hive, Tom? I mean, it seems like such close quarters in there. It is close quarters. That aspect of their closeness is, however, not unhealthy. I mean, that's healthy for the bees.

What's unhealthy is the scrunching up of the hives in apiaries. In the wild, they live about 1,000 meters apart, whereas in a beekeeper's apiary, they're less than 1 meter apart. And that gets the bees into trouble because if one colony gets sick, diseases can spread easily to the adjacent colonies. Very different in the wild. Alina, did you want to say something? So, yes, well, obviously I followed Tom's work for a long time now, and it's, It's really, really interesting, and he's absolutely right. The beekeepers that we think about when you think about beekeeping do definitely keep their colonies very close,

and that definitely can cause issues with pathogen and pest transfer as well. And especially if you're bringing in the pollinating colonies, so colonies that will pollinate many, many, for example, almond orchards. I like to say it's a most popular and the biggest pollination event in the world. in February, where almost 80% of the country's colonies come into California, the pollinate almonds. So it definitely can cause potential issues with disease and pest transfer. Let's go to St. Augustine with Sydney. Is there? Hi. Hi. Hi there. I just had a question. I heard that when bees pollinate almonds, they actually, the buy products they use fur almonds harm bees. Is that true?

Tom? Elena? I'm going to defer to Alina on this one. So when you say byproducts, what exactly do you mean? Do you mean like perhaps pesticides, fungicides that they're using to fight off the diseases of almonds? She's dropped off the line, so we'll have to assume. We'll tell us what your point is. Yes.

So, yes, there's definitely some research showing that some of these pesticides can be harmful to bees. And I think the Almond Board of California has done a wonderful job of coming out with the best management practices for pollination in almonds when the bees are present. So they're definitely promoting not using pesticides when the almonds are in bloom, definitely not during the day when the bees are out foraging. And in fact, I just took a really interesting workshop on apivecturing, where the idea is to use honeybees to deliver biocontrol agents, so for lack of a better word, good microorganisms, two plants and flowers that they're pollinating to actually fight off the pathogens, and in some cases even pest insects. So that could be something that

could potentially replace these potentially harmful pesticides that are being used in various crops, and I'm really excited about it. Some of them are being banned now in Europe. even here some of these pesticides. Are they not? Yes. We called up our friend to Hollis Woodard this week, Assistant Professor of Entomology at the UC Riverside who studies wild bees, and she had this comment about honeybees. There are no truly wild honeybees here in the U.S. They're a part of life here in the U.S., but in the context of agriculture, they're really livestock. So there are feral honeybees, but these are bees that have escaped at some point or swarmed from managed hives.

So this matters because if your focus is on wildlife conservation in North America, then honeybees simply aren't a factor in that equation. And in fact, there's growing evidence that honeybees might actually be threatening our native bees in some ways. So we know, for example, that wild bees and honeybees, they visit some of the same flowering plants for food. So they might be competing for food resources. And then there's also increasing evidence. that manage bees like honeybees are even spreading diseases to our wild native bee populations. And this includes some diseases that we think or know are important drivers of native bee declines.

So honeybees are super fascinating and they're part of our agricultural system. But when it comes to pollinator conservation, for example, in the U.S., then we really need to keep the focus on our wild native bee species and not detract from that by supporting honeybees under the guise of conservation. Tom, Missile, how do you feel about that? She's making a difference between honeybees, which are not native to North America, as you say, and wild bees. People do not realize how many wild bees other than honeybees are out there. Is she making a good point about being competitive detrimentally with those other bees?

I don't know. I'm sure she's correct. She knows that literature better than I do. but I do want to make a comment that there's different ways of defining wildness. Now, Dr. Hollis' definition emphasizes the history, whether the bee is introduced or is native, equating native to wild. I'm not sure that's quite right. I think most biologists would say that an animal is wild

if it's not being managed by human beings. And by that definition, there certainly are wild honey, honeybee colonies. They have, in fact, in New York State, there are living out in the woods, by my estimates, based on my knowledge of the density. There are more wild honeybee colonies than one's under supervision by humans. So it comes down to how you want to define wildness. Any comment, Delina? So this is something, obviously, that has been on the back of people's minds when they're thinking about pollinator conservation, but it really would be, I guess, unfair to not point out

that the honeybees are still used as the primary managed pollinator, and that is because of their ability to actually be moved around the country, whether that's good or bad. Of course, we use them for honey production as well to use a sweetener, and some of the native bee species are not necessarily present at times when we are needing them to pollinate crops. Of course, one of the biggest ones, again, going back to almond pollination. So I think that it's probably fair to say that when we're thinking about

probably native bee conservation, we should be still thinking about honeybees and how to incorporate them within this larger agricultural system, especially here in California, because, again, not to be cliche, but we do have to feed the country and the world, right? So from those sort of pragmatic perspective, well, I would argue that we should think about both. Tom Sienle, if people are trying to rule out pesticides, how else would you combat the varroa, the deadly varroa mite that attacks the bees?

Thank you, Ira, for asking that question. I would let natural selection solve the problem, That's been done in several places of the world. It's happened in our Cornell's Arnott Research Forest, where there's been nobody treating those colonies, but that population exists. An even better example is on an island, on Gotland, in the Baltic Sea, where Swedish beekeepers took out 150 colonies

and just let them go. And with the mites, the population dwindled to eight colonies, but is now rebuilding itself, based with the resistant stock. But the best example are those countries where the beekeepers were too poor to afford the miticide, the chemicals. These are in Africa.

And you can go to a country like Ethiopia when the colonies have Varroa mites in them, but nobody's treated them, and those colonies are doing just fine. I think it may be unrealistic, but where if beekeepers in a location can get together, and decide not to treat them, they will, within, I would guess, two or three years have bees that they would be delighted in.

And there's certainly commercial, a few commercial beekeepers that have taken that route. I'm thinking of Kirk Webster in Vermont. You mean that you allow bee Darwinism, the survival of the fittest? You let the bees that are susceptible to Varroa die out, and then you have surviving the stronger bees take over? Precisely, precisely. And it's happened, we know that that has happened in many, many places. It is the only long-term solution. Beekeepers are probably going to run out of effective miticides, and then that will be it

for actually being able to control Varroa. But maybe Dr. Nino has comments on that, too. She's a little closer to the technology of the treatments than I am. Dr. Nino? Yeah, so I think thinking about this in terms of natural selection, I think I was reading on your website, Tom, talking about sort of a, depending on the area where you are. Here in California, for example, we have a really high concentration of beekeepers, whether that's backyard beekeepers or commercial beekeepers.

And I've noticed this in my own hives, our laboratory hives, that if we do treat, but what happens is if other people don't treat or do something about their mites, there's a lot of drift that happens and the mites come in and they do kill off colonies. So relying on pesticides as a short-term solution or a varroa-sides as a shorter solution might be, again, a short-term answer. But I do agree that, and this is something that we've been thinking about for a long time now, that working towards breeding or letting a little bit of natural selection do its work carefully and slowly is definitely something that there are beekeepers here in California who are taking that on, breeding for local bees and breeding for bees that are able to withstand some of the issues that are in their local area.

So just, you know, be careful. Can I add something to that? Just give me one second to jump in and say this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios, and you can jump in now. Okay. What Dr. Nino said about requiring a community of beekeepers working together is precisely right. And there's a wonderful example of that I want to share with you. It's from Wales. On one of the peninsulas in Wales, the beekeepers, seed.

Well, first of all, I should explain there's a law in the U.K., a United Kingdom, that you have to treat your colonies. But these Welsh beekeepers, well, they see themselves as Welsh, not as English. So the law may not apply to them. They feel, anyhow, they got together and decided, let's not treat our bees for Varroa. And now they don't have to treat. But it's a good example of how it took an agreement among the community of beekeepers in an area to proceed along that course for it to work well. Let me see if I can go to a quick question, a phone call before we go. Deborah in Converse, Texas.

Hi, Deborah. Hi, how are you today? Go ahead. With the influx of the Africanized bees that seem to be migrating up into our area, how is that affecting your wild or even our hives in the box? Tom, good question. I don't have firsthand experience with that because those Africanized bees don't survive. winters in the northeast.

But those Africanized bees went through natural selection. They picked up Varroa in Central America, South America. They went through selection for resistance to the varroa, and that's why they have it. So in that sense, they're bringing relief as they come along. Do we know, have they been, quote, unquote, tamed any by mixing in with the other populations of bees? I think that happens initially, but they're so successful, they're so hearty that their genetics, unless there's a lot of commercial queens are brought into an area, the population genetics switches over to African bees. And we've seen that in the mountains of Arizona, for example.

They switch over. Switch the African genes become the genes of the population of honeybees. in the area. Elaine, any reaction to that for a break? Oh, no, I think I completely agree with the comment. And that is something that I'm probably a little bit more familiar with out here in California because we do have a quite healthy population of African-Ease bees, especially further down south.

And thinking about human health and safety, we don't recommend folks who want to keep bees to collect swarms. We do recommend them to requeen with a gentle stock just because you want to keep in mind human safety first. Okay, we're going to take a break and come back more with Tom Sili and with El Nino. And we're going to also talk about local bees here. And what happened in New York City last summer and some interesting NYPD beekeepers. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday.

I am Ira Flato. If you're just joining us, we're talking about honeybees and hives and feral honeybees, keep bees out in the forests with my guest, Thomas Seeley, Professor of Neuro Biology, Behavior at Cornell University, author of a really great new book, The Lives of Bees, the Untold Story of the Honeybee in the Wild, and Elina El Nino, an agriculturist, like bees, apiculturist, and extension specialist at UC Davis. and we're taking your question and comment your bee stories like this one from our listener. This is Catherine in South Orange, New Jersey,

and I keep honeybees in my backyard with my young kids. I got interested in bees as a child in Ireland where my father also kept honey bees. But now we've also learned about native bees. Through honey bees, we're learning about native bees and about how we can garden organically and plant lots of native plants to support all the bees and bugs in our yard.

That's interesting. Tom, Alina, any really? response to that? I think that's great. I think we definitely, no, I really do. I think even within our, we have a California Master Beekeeper program that we started, and we do have classes that are specifically for that program and others interested in the community that teach about native bees as well and how to plant for bees. Speaking of bee stories, I have my own unbelievable one. Sorry, I had to get one of them in there. And it's a true story. Last summer, I was walking down Fifth Avenue, I noticed a crowd of people gathered

looking at something, you know, it was nothing unusual about crowds of tourists in New York, but this one was gazing at a swarm of bees that had camped out on a street fender's cart, a literal carpet of bees covering these sunglasses that the vendor was selling.

I took a video of this oddity, I was marveling at the uniqueness of it in Manhattan, until about a week later, I was watching the local news reporting the sighting of another swarm, you know, over a few blocks over in Times Square, where the bees had settled on a hot dog stand. And I bring all of this up now because it's my next guest job to corral swarms like that all over New York City.

He's a beekeeper right here in New York with a unique job. Police officer Darren Mays is a department beekeeper at the NYPD. Welcome to Science Friday officer. Hi, thanks for having me. You have a, you have some hives of your own for the NYPD? I do. I have a, uh, two registered hives on the roof of my command in Queens, just the 104 precinct in Ridgewood. And tell us about that swarman that was very famous over in Times Square. What happened to them? Unfortunately, I wasn't the responding officer. At that time, I have another partner, the officer's name is Mike Luriano. He worked downtown in the first precinct. So he was able to get there much quicker than I was. But I handled the questions via Twitter.

So any question people were having, I was answering the Twitter question, but he was the one responded and vacuumed him up. How did you get into beekeeping? Funny story, I had made fun of a friend of mine named Rich. He was a type of guy who lives in Massachusetts with start hobbies and never was followed through with it. So one day my wife came home and said, Darren, guess what Rich is doing now? And I said, some crazy hobby. And I know he's not going to follow through with it. And she said he's taking beekeeping classes.

So I started laughing. And I was like, what kind of hobby is that? Like, who would really want to take beekeeping classes? I immediately called them. And he said, Darren, I know you called and make fun of me. I said, absolutely, Rich. What kind of dumb idea are you into now? But he said, don't make fun of me.

Just wait until you see what's going on and come see my hives and taste the honey I harvest. And I never like honey growing up. I remember as a child in South Carolina, my brother, and I, we went through a farm, I went to action apiary, and we was on our bicycles, and we kicked over some hives. And, you know, thinking about it now, and I would love to apologize to that couple if I could. So, long story short, I went up to visit Rich Hive in Massachusetts. He said, come outside, and I didn't want to hurt his feelings.

I went out, took a look at the hive, and watched the bees come and go. I stayed about 30 yards away, said, come closer. I manned up and got a little closer and the next thing, you know, I was kneeling like two feet away watching them come and go with the, you know, with the pollen on their legs. And he got up and walked away, went in the house, and left me outside. And I didn't realize he was gone for an hour. I looked up, embarrassed, and he, him, his wife, my wife,

they were looking out at the kitchen window laughing at me how I was just fixated on those peace. and then I got up and my wife said, oh, you're very attracted to it, right? I said, no, it's not my thing. You know, honeybees are just going to sting. And she surprised me with a kit for Christmas. She did all the research, found a local beekeeper to sell me to bees,

signed me up for some classes, bought me a bunch of reading materials, and that was it. You were hooked, so to speak. I was hooked. I was stunged. And it was the sweetest thing. It is addictive, isn't it? Very.

My brother Carl has a couple of dozen hundred Hives in Long Island, and he's addicted to this, and everybody who talks to who comes in contact. Yes. Ariel Zich, our education director, also keeps bees in her backyard. And that brings us to two, I'm going to go to the phones because that brings up two of the biggest questions, all of our listeners I've been calling in, and I'm going to go to those two questions right now. First, let's go to Iowa. Jamie and Iowa, hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, hi there.

Hi there. Go ahead. So we recently were cleaning out our garage, and in our frame, we realized that we had wild bees coming in and out. And bees are protected species in Iowa, and we were just wondering, these were not bees that we want in our garage. So what resources can we do to recalocate these bees? Officer, how do you get bees out of a space? If, in fact, they're honeybees. You can call your local beekeeper, a local beekeeper.

will be happy to respond there and remove them no charge. And how do they do that usually? If they can, usually they get a heat-seeking device where they can find out exactly where the bees is pretty much centered to, and they would have to cut into the wall or, you know, if you're sheetrock and gain access to them. And Tom, do you, is there a way to attract the bees just to come out on their own? No, they're very heavily invested in that,

in that home site with their combs and things. So it's just, the process is just as Officer Mays explained. I have to do what we call a cutout. And, and, what if you bring them a hive? Will they fly themselves

into the hive if they see it? No, as they say, they're, they've got so, they've got, they're all set up in their, in their, and they've got their food and their brood and their combs. It would be,

foolish for them to jump ship into an empty box or even a hive that has combs in it because it doesn't have the honey and the brood. So Officer Mays, you're the guy people call. Who are you going to call? You're the guy that people call to take the bees in? Yes. Only if it's on, if it's, you know, public danger or public nuisance because, you know, New York is a very clueless and they can walk into a swarm of. without paying attention to anything. So yes.

That's the least thing they do. Here's a tweet. All right. So here's the other end of this story. What do you do if you have them and you want to get, you know, humanely take them away? Jake tweets, what advice do you give someone who's wanting to start beekeeping? My best advice is, like I said, before I did it, was do your research. find out where you can join a local beekeeping association or a club,

where you can learn from others. And I did that, and I learned from old gentlemen who were eagerly and happy to teach me the craft. So research and read before you start. I really want to second that. Beekeeping is a craft, and you learn it primarily by observing what an experienced beekeeper does. Right. See how they handle the bees, what they do. their equipment is like, all that stuff.

Elena, what about the fear of getting stung? How do you overcome that? Well, you just go in for it. That's probably the best thing. We've definitely had folks who have come into the class and were hesitant to go into the bees. But I think, much like Officer Mace, they probably got mesmerized by bees and how amazing and cool these creatures are.

And usually that's enough to get them a braided. enough to handle those frames of bees like pros and I would just also like to add that one good way of learning is by doing so looking for a mentor again is definitely something that would be beneficial to new beekeepers somebody who they can only not watch but also who can observe them and help them out so that's what happened with me when I joined that association there were gentlemen who've been doing it for years I mean years and and there was a little bit of those two gentlemen that I kind of went under their wings and they were eagerly to show me and I learned a lot from them. Yes, exactly.

Yeah, let's go to Dick in Tucson, Arizona. Hi, Dick. Hello. Hi there. Go ahead. I was a beekeeper for about 45 years, a hobby beekeeper. I had about 20 hides and I did what I called urban beekeeping. I had the hives, two or three hives scattered. around city parks in my backyard in the neighborhood. And then our Africanized bees started coming in.

Back in the 70s and 80s, there were probably 200 hobby beekeepers. I bet they're not 20 anymore. It's just too dangerous for a hobby beekeeper to keep these in their backyard here because of the way the queens reproduce. Now, there are still wild bees around or honeybees around, but often they're just in an attic or a garage or a wall partition. And every now and then somebody bumps into them and gets attacked. And the word that I keep hearing around here that I just absolutely

don't like is killer bees. The killer bees are at it again, but they are a problem, and it's really put the hobby beekeeper out of business. Let me get it. Alina, what do you think of that? Well, definitely, as I mentioned before, is a problem in Southern California, and again, pragmatically, people safety is the most important, and it is unfortunate that we do get. We do get, beekeepers who are new to the craft, and they try to keep bees that end up being Africanized, and unfortunately they themselves then are not able to actually handle and check the bees, so they have to call somebody to take care of them. So it is a problem, but we always, again, recommend if you collect a swarm in an area that

you know has Africanized bees, try and requeen it first. I'm Ira Plato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I have a tweet for a shout-out to the Savannah College of Art and Design Scad Bees. I have a spot in my heart for that because my daughter's alma mater. And we are in the finals, and like the real bees, could you support. And if you go to Savannah, they have a wonderful bee store there. Oh, yeah? Oh, everything you need to take care of bees.

Downtown, I can't remember the exact street. Tom, Alina, you know about that place? It's great. No. Yeah. No. We neither. You know, one of the interesting things, and you mentioned this a little bit there,

about your first taste of raw honey. Yes. How different. I didn't like the taste of honey either, of the store-bought kind. So I got some for my brother as a beekeeper, and it is such a different taste. It is what I've been eating prior to that, and I never really liked it. And it's probably because I was eating. probably corn syrup stuff, you know, not the real deal.

But when I tasted my first batch of honey, the raw stuff, it was so good, so pure. It, like, tingle your lips in your tongue when you eat it. Absolutely. You can't describe it. Tom, you keep both kinds of bees. You keep bees and you follow the wild ones. You have any advice for ways to appreciate bees without actually, like we're doing, keeping your own colony?

Yeah, the bee hunting process is a really good way to do it. This is that we talked about earlier where you capture some bees off flowers and you work your way back to their hive. And the reason that's a good way to appreciate bees is that you're not dealing and you're not disturbing a whole colony. You're just following a little group of bees. You've labeled them as individuals. You can really watch them. You can put your nose right up to those bees. and they're not defensive, and they're just doing their job of collecting food.

It's a great way to watch the bees and see just really this precise movements, what these little bees do. Let me go to our last call from Blue Springs, Missouri. Tamara, hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thank you for taking my call. Hi, go ahead. I recently moved to a city that doesn't allow beekeeping. So I was wondering what advice do you have to work with city officials to change the regulations so people can keep bees.

Officer May New York didn't allow beekeeping for many years. For many years, they brought it back in 2010. Well, the thing is you can kind of plead your case, and, you know, a few of you can get together and just tell them, you know, the importance of pollination. You know, having pollinators and honeybee is one of the, you know, is a great pollinator for that area. and what have you. All right. We have to stop there. So many calls about it.

I want to thank all of my guest officer, Darren Mayes, is a department beekeeper at the New York Police Department. Thank you for taking time to be with this today. El Nino is an apiculturist and extension specialist at UC Davis, Tom Seeley, Professor of Neuro Biology, Behavior at Cornell, author of the new book, The Lives of Bees, and we have an excerpt of the book, along with pictures of the NYPD Hives. Cool.

Bekeeping tips, lots more, up on. our website at ScienceFriday.com slash bees. Thank you all. Thank you. Say hi to Carl for me. I will for a beautiful segment. Quick program note, our sci-fi crew just got back from a trip to Huntsville, Alabama,

and thanks to all the folks and WLR for making our trip to the Rocket City so enjoyable. You'll hear more about that later as we get close to July. We're going to be hitting the road again this August. Coming to San Antonio, join us Saturday, August 10th. for Science Friday live from the Lone Star State. We'll talk about science stories in the San Antonio area. We're going to have live music and more. That's Saturday, August 10th.

Info and tickets at ScienceFriiday.com slash San Antonio. Circle your calendar Saturday, August 10th. And if you're saying, hey, what about an event near me? Well, visit the events page on our website. Sign up for our events newsletter to find out when we might be in your neighborhood. We're going all over the country. BJ Leherman composed our theme music, and if you missed any part of the program,

we podcast a few hours after we're done here. We'll have our podcast up there for you to download it, and you can ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday whenever you want. So every day now is a Science Friday. Have a great and safe holiday weekend. Go out and see if you can find those bee colonies. Maybe there's a hive near you. I'm Ira Flato in New York.