Wild Bees Gone, Hawaiʻi Farms Now Need Beekeepers

0:00 Lehua: Hello everyone, welcome to the bee panel of Buzz About Bees. Today I asked some of my beekeeper friends who are beekeepers here on the island to come and help us give a picture of what the situation with bees are as beekeepers. And so I'm going to let each of them introduce themselves. And yeah, thank you all for coming to our panel.

0:37 Audience: Did you introduce yourself?

0:39 Lehua: Oh, yeah. My name is Lehua, and I'm right now at UH Mānoa mastering in animal science. I just started. I just graduated from UH Hilo in May, and that was in plant science. and I also, during that time there, I worked with Danielle Downey and the Hawaiʻi Apiary Program and learned about bees for two years and got on the fast track to learning a lot about bees and have some hives of my own in Kona, and so I'm doing pretty well. So, what do you guys got going on?

1:20 Danielle Downey: I'm Danielle Downey. I work at the Department of Agriculture. I have a statewide apiary program that was started in Hawaii because the varroa mite and small hive beetle came and the state got some federal funds that said support your beekeepers, they're going to need it. Basically, beekeeping got a lot harder in Hawaii and there's new pests just like the coffee berry borer. The beekeeping industry got the varroa mite, which is devastating worldwide. So I spent a lot of time trying to prevent the spread of pests, doing biosecurity and looking around ports

1:52 in case there's accidental entries of something like Africanized bees or the varroa mite, which is only on two islands. We don't want it to spread any further. If you want to sell anything in Hawaii like sell queen bees to the mainland, which is a pretty big industry here. It's my program that goes and does the inspections and facilitates that commerce to make sure that you meet the requirements that the receiver requires so you can do business. We also have some research projects. So we're trying to develop resistant stock, mite-resistant stock here in Hawaii

2:25 so that we can have a more sustainable practice with less pesticide input because a lot of beekeepers moved quickly to using chemicals to kill the mites in the hive to keep their bees alive because it kills them if they don't do anything. So we have a chance here to do something differently than they did on the mainland. We got 20 years of their information to kind of guide us how not to make some mistakes. And I run that program here out of Hilo with a very small staff. We cover statewide, do a lot of outreach and education.

2:55 There's a beekeeping class coming up here in Hilo. It starts Tuesday. It's three Tuesday evenings. If you're interested, you can find it on the Continuing Ed UH Hilo website. So that's the State Department of Agriculture, your State Apiarist. If you have questions, I'm pretty easy to find.

3:18 Jen Rasmussen: I'm Jen Rasmussen. I own Paradise Nectar Apiary in [unclear]. I do treatment-free beekeeping. Something that I'm pretty big on is caring for bees naturally, trying to do less with them rather than introduce chemicals that treat symptoms. I'm really trying to go for the cause, the root of the problem, and find ways to heal them naturally from there. I work with top bar and Langstroth hives, but my big thing is that bees make their own combs, So I don't use foundation sheets or give them foundation with plastic or things like that. So a couple of different ways that I've worked with it.

3:57 After workshops and a lot of my videos and things are available on YouTube, Paradise Nectar videos.

4:04 Jenny Bach: My name is Jenny Bach and I'm a beekeeper from Hawaiʻi. And I started beekeeping in college. I was first introduced to bees by removing them out of places where people don't want them, like houses, cars, garages. And that first gave me my relationship with bees in a natural way, like to open up wherever they were and to see their colony interact without humans. So it started this relationship where I could kind of understand what they did without the human interference. And I began to be a beekeeper and have slowly transitioned out of being a commercial beekeeper

4:44 and doing more education and now I work with school gardens. So I've kind of taken some steps back and developing more of a hobbyist relationship with my bees right now.

4:54 Lehua: Where are you located?

4:56 Jenny Bach: I live in [unclear], in [unclear, possibly Hāmākua].

5:01 Lehua: So these are all our beekeepers here today and they're really great beekeepers, all three of them. So we're going to go kind of like in a format of we'll post a question and then each of the three will answer and then we can have any questions maybe after each question. So we have eight questions, we might not get through all of them, but that's kind of the format that we're going to use. Okay so, are you ready? Okay so the first question is what is the state of Honeybees in Hawaii as beekeepers who see the bees? So Jen, do you want to start?

5:37 Jen Rasmussen: Well at this time I see bees thriving. I get a lot of calls about hives that are in houses, people needing help removing them. I have more work than I can keep up with. So that has been kind of my hope and what keeps me optimistic about the future with bees. And then also some foreshadowing things that have been on my mind lately with the amount of chemicals that are used in the environment around us. And my opinion is that these chemicals continue to be used in agriculture like they are, that honeybees will decline more rapidly.

6:12 So a lot of the work I'm doing right now is trying to figure out, you know, exactly how to keep bees safe from what's being used in our environment. I'm still learning about that and I hope to share more as time goes on. But overall, I think the honey bees have evolved and adapted to the changes that they've been faced with, the pests that they've been introduced to. And they just continue to amaze me at how vigorous and amazing they really are, how capable of defending themselves they are. Sorry.

6:49 Danielle Downey: Sure. The situation in Hawaii is pretty unique. Varroa mite is, like I said, the most devastating pest to hit bees in our lifetime worldwide. And it was on the mainland in the 80s, and it didn't reach Hawaii until 2007 when it came to Oʻahu. And then 2008, it was found on the Big Island. and so far hasn't spread to any other islands. So when you talk about the situation with bees in Hawaii, there's very different examples. So where varroa goes, the feral bees get wiped out. We know that from the mainland, that almost all of them suffer from the mite, and slowly some of them may come back.

7:33 But on Oʻahu and Big Island, you've probably heard, and as farmers you know, there's just not as many bees as there used to be. You used to hear them when you walked through your blooming trees and now you don't hear them anymore and if one catches your eye you realize that you haven't seen any bees anymore. And that's because of the Varroa mite. The small hive beetle came in 2010 and it widespread throughout the island so that's another pest but usually the small hive beetle damage is downstream from Varroa.

8:02 So if the bees are weakened and the Varroa spreads viruses then they're much more vulnerable to other things. I think habitat loss and agricultural practices do have an impact on bees, but in Hawaii, for the most part, there's no mysterious bee losses like there are in other places in the world. We know we've just got these really serious problems that we need to work and manage. That said, I think the beekeepers are getting better, even on the islands with Varroa, and the bees are getting better, so we're all selecting for our best behavior. And there are more and more calls for swarms,

8:35 and I think the managed bees in those areas are a really critical pollination resource for growers so it used to be that you had free bees for pollination and you didn't have to think about that and you didn't consider it, like the mac nut guys, they would talk about the weather and the rain and things that make the blossoms fall off it didn't even enter their mind that they needed those pollinators to optimize production and now they're realizing now that they've lost all of those feral, very, very high density of feral bees in Hawaii before these problems.

9:08 And now we're noticing that bees are a factor. So if you're a beekeeper, you're really supporting a couple miles around you, providing pollinators for everything that's growing. So managed bees are more critical than ever because we've lost the really rich resource, which is the feral bees. I suspect they outnumbered the managed bees by 100 to 1.

9:27 Jenny Bach: Yeah, so bees have been around for a very, very long time, much before we had been here. And worldwide they're having issues. What kind of things have happened from another perspective, just besides Hawaii, is that we depend on these pollinators, as Daniel said, for large-scale farming. They pollinate, you know, they say a third of our food. And we put so much pressure on these declining pollinators. They're actually having a big problem worldwide and people think we can fix it. So that's a good opinion. It might be true.

10:03 Here in Hawaii, before the varroa came, I was fortunate to work with the bees before that. There was so many wild colonies. You talk to your auntie, uncle, oh there's one in my backyard. It would go everywhere. They say that there might have been 800,000 hives at one time on this island from all around. They're even up on Mauna Kea at the top, on 8,000 foot where the visitor center is. So there was bees everywhere. And then yes, there was a huge decline because the varroa mite got here mysteriously. Maybe from equipment, I still haven't heard how it got here.

10:35 Danielle Downey: Yeah, it came in a produce shipment.

10:38 Jenny Bach: Yeah, in a produce shipment? Or is that the beetle? I don't know. I haven't heard the difference, where these pests have come from. But yeah, this is a problem, but like Jen said, their bees are coming back and I hear beekeepers are doing better I hear more swarm calls though just the same there's definitely bees have ability beyond what we know to take care of themselves they see it in like hygienic behavior for example they have a behavior to clean out their hive and to sense that there's a mite in their cell and they'll open up

11:09 that cell where the baby or that brood is and they'll take that cell out and destroy it So bees have an array of knowledge that we don't even really know. And that's just, yeah, bees are going to be fine. I think we just have to be really aware of what we do and the environment. And a lot of beekeepers, too, do a lot of pressures on the bees so that that can actually harm them more than it would be in the wild. So there's all these different supports for sure.

11:35 Lehua: Great responses. Thank you all. So we're just going to move on to the next one, which I'm sure you guys have all had a lot of experiences with. So what are the worst pests and problems you deal with as a beekeeper, and what do you do to solve them? Sorry, did you have a question? Oh, you have a question. What's your question?

11:58 Audience: Do you want all questions at the end?

11:59 Lehua: No, no, go ahead.

12:03 Audience: Before 1980, no varroa mite? On the mainland. Where did it come from, or how was it in the past? How did it suddenly bloom and take over so badly?

12:12 Danielle Downey: It's native to another bee species, so it hopped from an Asian bee species into our bees. So it's kind of a, you know, it's a very unnatural leap. Nobody really knew that that would happen and then they discovered it in our bees and it doesn't kill the Asian bees. Asian bees are able to detect it and grab it and groom and bite it and get rid of it so they can suppress the populations. For the most part, our bees, you can tell that they have it on them. I'll show you a video and you can see that she gets a bee on her and she's like, get it off.

12:45 But they don't have the, they can't catch it and fight it and kill it. And so it just builds up and builds up and infects viruses and sucks the blood and makes holes in the bees and they get sick and decline. So it doesn't kill a bee outright, but it just makes the whole kind of factory line of a beehive, like everybody doing their job, a little less able and resilient and they're just on the edge of collapse.

13:10 Jenny Bach: How it came to the United States is they've been shipping bees and things across the world. And even here in Hawaii, the first bees are not native here. The honey bees are not native here. And they brought those bees from a ship and took them three times on the ship to get to Oahu. And a few times they died. They went through a storm. So everything was blocked. And the continuing problem is that what we do is we ship everything and we were a bee paradise. And we have year-round nectar flows and we didn't have any pests and we have queen producers here

13:41 and they have the best job and now we've really changed up by the things we bring here.

13:48 Audience: One other question. And that is, the small hive beetle looks just like the beetles that get on my guava. Is it the same thing?

13:56 Danielle Downey: Same family. It's one of those picnic beetles that causes fruit to rot. The pineapple souring beetle is related to, it's in the same family. So anytime you turn over fruit in Hawaii, you will see beetles that are related to that. But the small hive beetle really, and they can complete their life cycle on fruits, but they're much more prolific and they're like heat-seeking, so it's kind of a stressed-out problem. And they explode in there, like thousands and thousands of beetles in a couple of days.

14:26 Audience: I had a question for Danielle about the bees regarding coffee. I'm working with coffee growers, particularly coffee berry borer, and of course Beauveria is used in coffee to control that pest. Have you seen any evidence of Beauveria in brood of honey bees at all? And second of all, have you seen any evidence that loss of yield associated with lack of pollination?

14:59 Danielle Downey: I don't know that. Actually Ethel Villalobos at CTAHR at UH Mānoa has studied some coffee pollination and benefits of pollination. I think she just bagged flowers and counted the pollinators with and without bees and then measured yields. So it doesn't take into account the CBB situation. But with regards to Beauveria bassiana, this is an entomopathogen, so it's a fungus that eats bugs. And we know that if you put it on a bee and she doesn't get back to the hive, it will kill her and colonize the body just like it kills the coffee berry borer.

15:38 but studies have shown that bees that go back to the hive and groom and get a normal grooming procedure which they do all the time and at the temperatures that the hive is maintained homeostasis the Beauveria won't grow so as long as the bee gets back to the hive and grooms herself which they normally do that actually there's an Australian group that was looking to do biocontrol of the small hive beetle in the hive using Beauveria because it doesn't harm the bees. So CBB, Beauveria is really expensive, it's finicky to apply, you have to watch the temperature

16:16 and the light and the coffee guys that are applying that, I hope it's working and I'm glad that they're doing that. My greater concern for the bees is because coffee has beans and flowers all the time together, we hate to apply pesticides to a blooming plant, that's off the label for some of it. But when they do that, I'm more concerned about them sort of panicking and throwing everything they've got, trying to preserve their coffee crops and systemics. And there's a lot more damaging synthetic stuff that I worry is getting put on coffee than Beauveria, in terms of being harmful.

16:52 Lehua: And that brings us right into our next question about your worst, those pests that you deal with and how you deal with them.

17:01 Audience: Does the state of Hawaii have an apiary source?

17:15 Danielle Downey: Right now it's all in. You can't bring bees from... Oh, the hardware? There are several guys that have come to me, carpenters, and said I'd like to build stuff and make it available. And I think there's people that would do it, but you need to have people to pay for it because they can't really sustain themselves to build a bunch and sit on it. So there's guys that I can put you in touch with that want to do that.

17:38 Audience: For both the bee sanctuaries in Hawaii, one at the [unclear] farm and one on the west side? Yeah.

17:47 Danielle Downey: It would be much, because the woodenware, getting it from the mainland, the shipping doubles the cost. So just like everything else, it's hard to get, and once you get it, you're already in a much higher overhead to get started. So I would really like to find somebody to go over and make that stuff.

18:02 Audience: You can go in the Home Depot and find wood too.

18:05 Jenny Bach: I know that the Farm Supply Co-op, I don't know if you're on this island, but on this island the Farm Supply Co-op sells boxes and smokers and random things. But I know you can get boxes and things.

18:16 Audience: Yeah, I'm trying to get pieces for the apprentices to learn. That can be a cost item.

18:23 Danielle Downey: Yeah, they're expensive. They last a long time, but it's a high start.

18:28 Jen Rasmussen: You can make your own if you have fabric. Ripstop nylon. They have it at the fabric warehouse.

18:34 Audience: You mean the breathable one?

18:36 Jen Rasmussen: Yeah. The ripstop nylon is actually the best because it's lightweight. The kids can wear it and they don't get overheated. So for like small keiki that I have, I make some of these.

18:46 Danielle Downey: I think also, some of them are like paint, one of those Tyvek sort of white. Some of them are more breathable than others. And that's fine if somebody's just looking on and learning, but if you're actually doing the work and making money, you want a suit, some of the assessments aren't quite as durable.

19:04 Jenny Bach: Or if you're not that afraid and you're not allergic, you can just get the helmet and wear a long sleeve shirt and pants, which is actually way more comfortable. Yeah, but you have to be really careful, too. You have to know what you're doing, because that could be dangerous as well.

19:17 Danielle Downey: Or distracting, you're not used to getting stung.

19:19 Jenny Bach: Yes, definitely. And it's not funny if it's stung that much.

19:21 Danielle Downey: It's worse to drop a super of honey because you were afraid to get stung. It would be better to just wear a suit. Yeah.

19:29 Jen Rasmussen: So about the pest question, I feel like the best way to tell you about the pests is to show you a visual of what they do and what they look like. So this is a documentary that I made that is a 45 minute documentary. You can find it on YouTube, Paradise Nectar [title unclear]. This is kind of like a small clip of the documentary just to show a little bit of what we do and how I do it. This is like, you can see the heartbreak of beekeepers everywhere. This is the slime out. So what happened was the beetles laid eggs all over the combs in the hive, and the

20:16 larva had hatched out and now it's become a slime. Can you hear this?

20:22 Audience: Not really.

20:23 Jen Rasmussen: So right now this is a bunch of combs that were pulled out of a hive that were, these These combs were from another hive, but all of a sudden he's scraping off the little maggots that came out of a hive that was just lost. So these are the small hive beetle larvae. This is what it looked like when we actually opened the hive up. And from the outside, it looked like there was healthy bees. The population of bees on the outside is normal, flight in and out. But when you actually open it up, this is what they were living with. It can happen overnight.

20:52 If you put your combs together the wrong way, there's not enough space for bees to crawl in between, it can be 24 hours before the larvae start to hatch. So this is scooping bees after cleaning up the whole hive. We got all the larvae out as much as we could. We got to take it to get it all hosed down in a different yard. So I take the bees and I put them in a package box. It's something I've made that's quick and easy to transfer bees with. And then I can reestablish them in another place in a cleaner box. So we didn't actually lose this hive. We got there just in time.

21:22 It's pretty awesome that that happens.

21:25 Danielle Downey: You did lose a lot of honey.

21:26 Jen Rasmussen: I lost a lot of honey. All the brood. Yeah. So, varroa mites, you can see the little round specks here, those are varroa mites. And they will cause deformed wing virus. So, to see more of this, I recommend checking it out on YouTube. Where you can see more about how I work with bees. It's a very natural approach to it. So I choose to wear no protection. I feel like it kind of evens things out a little bit, I guess. Can you see my YouTube?

22:02 Audience: Yes.

22:06 Danielle Downey: So my answer is going to be the varroa mite, because I've already told you I think it's the worst thing. One of the ways that we're combating the varroa mite, we're trying to make it... Yeah, so... don't start again. So basically the varroa came to the mainland and a lot of the bees were dying and getting wiped out and researchers noticed and beekeepers saying well these ones aren't dying why aren't they dying what's special about them and they realize that bees some of them have this behavior and it's genetically passed on so it exists out there and you can select for it

22:48 and they can sense that something is under that cell so varroa mite crawls into the cell right before the bee is capped so the bee goes from egg to larva, caterpillar, eats, eats, eats, this all happens in the hive once it's done eating you get its wax capping over top and it undergoes metamorphosis it gets wings and legs and antennae and mouth and eyeballs and all that kind of stuff So as that's happening, the varroa sneaks in right before it's capped, pierces a hole in that developing bee, and feeds, and vectors viruses, and lays eggs, and makes babies, and they all come out together.

23:19 So somehow these hygienic bees realize that something is happening under there that's bad, we don't know, maybe feel, smell, we don't know yet, and they open it up and uncap it and pull that larva out. So they're not able to grab the mite and bite it, although we do have evidence that there are some bees that can do this. This varroa-sensitive hygiene interrupts the life cycle of the varroa so if it's trying to make babies and you interrupt it every time, although you're not killing it, you're keeping that population down. So basically we can't bring those bees here but we're getting semen

23:56 from the USDA lab that selected this trait. And it's not GMO, it's like brown dog, white dog. This stuff is all in every population, but once you identify it, you take your two best ones and you make more. So we're getting semen and we have done consecutive years of cultivating these strains of bees here. So this is just a really cool video. This is a wax capping where they're developing bees underneath. And it's not just one bee that does this. There's a whole bunch of bees that work on every single baby that is growing.

24:37 They feed it, they cap it, so you'll see lots of bees in there. So they're uncapping it. There's a cost. They're eating the babies. That's part of the behavior. They have to cull that pupa that's in there developing. They recycle what they can and then they'll just throw out what they cannot. And there's the mite. And in the animal kingdom, this is, for a parasite, this is the largest parasite relative to its host. On me it would be like a tick the size of a grapefruit. It's really big. So you saw when she got it on her, she felt it, that she didn't just bite it and get rid of it.

25:16 A tick the size of a grapefruit? That's like really, that's pretty impressive. Yeah, it's a devastating pest. Yeah, but hopefully, you know, when the varroa mite first got here, the beekeepers were treating with chemicals every month, two months, because we have year-round brood rearing here, which means year-round varroa rearing. On the mainland, in temperate areas, the colony stops rearing brood, and that puts the varroa through that bottleneck too, so it suppresses the population. Here we don't have the luxury of winter, so you can't wait to see it.

25:52 But we're having some success with these bees. They look good. So that's probably one of the things I'm most hopeful about.

26:02 Audience: Why can we not bring in the super hygienic bee after running it through quarantine?

26:10 Danielle Downey: There's just too many unknowns. There's too many times it's gone wrong. Having varroa here is a perfect example of why we shouldn't do it. I don't see that changing. There's viruses in bees we know. There's almost 30 viruses we know of, and there's probably who knows how many that we haven't identified yet. So we just, I think we have a lot of great stuff to build with here. We just have to use it. And a lot of what beekeepers are doing right now is just learning how to recognize the problem, what your management options are, and taking action. It used to be that you could have bees here

26:47 and not really manage them and be a bee-haver. So a lot of beekeepers, when I first got here, they never even opened their brood chamber to see if it was healthy. They just took the honey off the top, extracted it, put it back, and the bees refilled it. And for all they knew, some of those bee colonies may have died and turned over, but it didn't matter because there were so many. And now you can't do that. You'll have a slimy mess. Mm-hmm.

27:12 Jenny Bach: Yeah, so yeah, I would say definitely the varroa mite. Combined with the small hive beetle, it just creates a huge problem. It's really hard to keep bees. But I always like to go the route of things, and maybe that's just my personality or something. But it's, you know, the history of beekeeping has been we've bred bees to be friendly and to be gentle be gentle and to produce lots of honey and there's different varieties or species of bees and like particularly Italian honey bees have a larger brood nest so they

27:46 naturally have more varroa mites so it's kind of our, I don't want to say it's some of our mistakes to breed bees for certain characteristics and let them do what they do so and we've done so many things to suppress them to do what they do like a lot of beekeepers don't allow them to swarm or just there's so many lists that can go on so it's like a deeper problem than just the pests and once we start looking into that maybe we can actually start helping the bees rather than give them like little like tools and then it doesn't help and then the next thing

28:17 comes because there's worse things out there right there's things that can come from Asia I mean once our military ports start to open up which we might have already there's countless of things that could be worse than this so it's just like really understanding well what can we really do on a deeper level to help this island to help our food to help everybody and then things will start to change.

28:38 Audience: Cell size: do you find that it's a big difference with the varroa mites and beetles if you use like a smaller cell size instead of the larger cell size?

28:52 Jenny Bach: Jen and I kind of practice the same thing where we let the bees make their own cell size by using either top bar hives or no foundation. So they'll make the cell size that they need to make. I definitely have found that cell size matters.

29:05 Jen Rasmussen: I started with plastic foundation sheets in stock hives. That's how I learned about beekeeping. And bees were big. And then I learned about drone foundation. I tried that one out and I found that you put drone foundation in a hive and you got a lot of varroa mites all of a sudden. So I started to see that effect. And over time I started to actually, when I first started growing my apiary, I was getting bees from another beekeeper. And then I would shake the bees from his hive into mine, take them home, and they would build all their own combs.

29:35 And then to multiply the hives, I would make splits from that. And I would keep shaking. I didn't have combs to work with. So a lot of times I just shook all the bees off with the combs and maybe gave them, or I'd split the hive, take half and half, but I'd start the new hive out with a comb or maybe no combs and just see what they built and how they did. I found that every single time I restarted them in a new box, new box, they made smaller cells. They kept making smaller bees and pretty soon I had this super healthy hive with really small cells. So by studying their behavior and seeing

30:05 that they pick when they want to make drones, they'll make the combs the size that they want them. That was a definite selling point for me of, I don't have to buy this stuff anymore, it saves me money, and my bees are healthier. So that was kind of how I came to figure this out just so you can see that it was a process, not just an idea and I'm going to make it work it was actually the bees taught me that they were healthier and cleaner combs that they made.

30:33 Lehua: Okay so we're gonna go down to I think another question that kind of fits in with what you guys are saying and why we're all here. We're here for the Korean Natural Farming Symposium and do you guys see any benefits that Korean natural farming is having on honeybees and other pollinators? Maybe we'll start from that side this time. It's number seven. Number seven, okay. So I skipped.

31:02 Jenny Bach: Well, I haven't seen anything that's really directly. I've experimented with like using, collecting a bunch of dead beetles and putting them in like lactic acid and brewing them and trying to spray that on my hives to see if that would be like a natural repellent. We thought it worked, I mean I don't have any hard data to tell if it did or not, but just more and more people becoming less dependent on inputs from the mainland is going to help I think this island beyond what we can think. And just for people taking food in their own hands is the best thing we can give to these

31:38 honeybees and to anything around us. So if it has that much of an impact for people taking responsibility to farm in a different manner than the farming practices that we've seen that don't really work, especially with systemic pesticides and how detrimental that can be. And we're still choosing, I mean, we're not doing it, but they're still doing it. And it's proven that it's killing bees. So it's an amazing thing to see that people are starting to take responsibility for their farming practices.

32:07 Danielle Downey: I don't know much about KNF. I know that it's kind of a probiotic approach to soil remedies and just being conscientious of what you're doing and how connected things are, and I think that is obviously a good thing. There is actually a lab that found that dead beetles repel live beetles. Peter Teal, I think, has published that, so you can look that up. I didn't know that that was part of it. But I only know a couple of people that have made tonics for honeybees, and I've never tried it myself, So I don't know how it's changing specifically direct effects on honeybees.

32:47 But I agree that everybody thinking about what's happening around them and taking a conscious approach to knowing where your food comes from and that bees are part of that food chain obviously benefits the most.

33:02 Audience: I have a question from a family member. If they get honey from an area where they know they spray a lot of glyphosate, is there going to be glyphosate in honey?

33:11 Jen Rasmussen: Very likely. Wax is little fillers, so it sucks up everything that comes in contact with it. So if one bee goes out into an orchard or a field and it gathers nectar and pollen that's been contaminated and it takes it back and it puts it in a cell in the beehive, now they're feeding that nectar and that pollen to the baby bees that are growing inside the cells and that is getting sucked up into the wax. So there's a high probability that any chemicals that are surrounding the area are definitely going to be found in that. I mean, it could possibly be found in the wax.

33:45 Audience: So is there a lab in the state of Hawaii to see if they could identify it?

33:49 Jen Rasmussen: Yeah. In fact, Danielle actually gave me a number for somebody who I talked to this morning, and I'm actually having somebody come out to my apiary on Monday to do an inspection on stuff. You know, I feel like right now what we have for us as people in this world is voice and an opportunity to use it. And for me, I really don't like to use my voice unless I have proof that what I'm talking about is beneficial. And I'm grateful that we have labs that will do analysis for us and give us feedback. So it is out there. There is a resource.

34:23 Jenny Bach: They do say that even organic beekeepers, Richard Spiegel, who opened up Volcano Island Honey Company, he recently sold it, he sent his wax samples off. and it was older wax and he said there was like 60 different chemicals that were in his wax and he's a certified organic beekeeper and he keeps his bees, well, he used to keep his bees in the [unclear, possibly Kawaihae or Puakō] area, there's not that much out there, I mean in terms of farming, so there are so many different environmental things that get into the beehive and get into the bee and their bodies

34:55 are made for it they're fuzzy they kind of have electromagnetic energy and then things get stuck to them and bring it into the colony as well as the nectar and the food that they eat.

35:05 Danielle Downey: I would agree that bees are excellent sentinels. They are a very good way to sample your environment because they come to a hive, they fly out a couple miles and forage on everything that's good and appealing to them, they collect water and then they bring it home. And wax is a very sticky substrate so if you want to see anything, if you want to see the maximum exposure beehive over all the years that you've had it, sampling the wax is where you would find the biggest reservoir. Glyphosate is not going to be in the wax, it's going to be in honey

35:37 because it's water soluble and wax is a lipid. And it might be in the bees, it might be in the bees' body as well. It's an expensive test to do. Right now we do samples statewide as part of the national survey. We sample the pollen in the hive and we've taken some from many of the islands and we're doing a pretty focused study right now on Kauaʻi that the Kauaʻi County has given some money because each test for this battery test I mean for Jen's situation she has an idea of what happened on her property and so the inspector can go and take a sample and tell the lab to look for this

36:13 but with the litany of agrochemicals that's out there I don't know if you've seen these lists or these websites but there's literally hundreds and hundreds of chemicals. So when we take a sample of pollen we have to tell the lab what to look for. There is a lab in North Carolina that does these analysis. They're the ones that take something off the shelf and just test it and make sure that it is what it's supposed to be and no more no less. And they have a a battery of tests that looks for over 100 residues just blindly. Send me a sample, we'll test it for everything that we can.

36:51 And that test for one sample is over $400. So any beekeeper can send a sample, but it's kind of cost prohibitive. So what Jen will have done, the Department of Ag, if you suspect that you have an issue, not just with bees, but in any of your farming, you can call the Department of Ag and they have a pesticides investigator that will come out listen to you and look what happened and try to gather intel and see if they can trace a misuse and it's their job to cite people that misuse, that break the law and don't use the label

37:25 but um if you wanted to just say hey my cousin's honey is it clean it's going to cost you some money to have that test done.

37:37 Audience: So could that be part of the cost share, because these are [unclear]? How do you find that in the community?

37:39 Danielle Downey: There are beekeeping groups that have had a cost share on the mainland. So far, I know on Maui there has been a guy that approached me and said, how do we get Maui County to do this for us? Because Kauai County did it, we want to do that too. So there is some, probably the best way that you can get it done is to find people and talk to your county council, that's how it happened on Kauai. Say we want to have this too. And then say I will have my colony tested. knowing that anything you find in there is going to put you in a situation of knowing, okay, this is my stuff that I thought was clean.

38:14 If we find something, you've got to be prepared for the answer. That's always a tricky question, but we test pollen. A lot of the things in pollen are not going to be necessarily in honey because they're different matrices, but it's definitely a sticky situation. Yeah.

38:33 Audience: I'm wondering what your thoughts are on treatment for fire ants. It's becoming more and more of a thing. Specifically, I hear tango a whole lot, and I've also heard people say, oh, don't use tango, it's bad for bees. And then I've heard other people say, oh, well, you can train to apply tango in a particular way that it minimizes its effect on bees. I'm just curious to hear your thoughts as long as we have this body of knowledge here.

39:00 Danielle Downey: Yeah, I've tested the Tango baits. The Hawaii Ant Lab prescribes very specific recipes, and the baits that they use, Tango is an insect growth regulator. If you feed it to bees, it will mess up their development. But the bait that they're putting it in is lipid or protein. So it's peanut butter or it's oil. Bees have no interest. And I know this because I've made the formulations and set them on the front door of my beehives and watched the bees. And you can tell when a bee is curious about something and they have no interest in it.

39:30 And I put it there without the active ingredient in case they did get into it. And some of them did fall into it because they were trying to get out the door and do their stuff. But they didn't smell it, they didn't taste it, they just wanted it out of the way. So the only way that you're going to harm bees with that is if you spray blooming plants and the bees are foraging on them or you spray bees directly. Otherwise I don't see the potential intersection for fire ant base and honey bees. You guys?

39:58 Jen Rasmussen: I've had a different experience. I don't know, I haven't watched to see how interested they are in it, but I sold bees to somebody out in Kehena a while ago. And these bees were thriving for over a year, really healthy, and then he got fire ants real bad and started using Tango. I know he was putting it up in the trees. There's one main tree that hangs up by his house where it kind of goes over his outside lanai. And fire ants were getting in the house this way because they were way up there.

40:23 He only, after doing all the ground treatments and finding that the ants are pretty much non-existent down below, knew that this tree was the vector. So he started to climb up into the tree and paste the Tango up into the tree or put it in little containers and put it up in the tree where it stayed dry. And within about a few weeks of him doing this treatment for all the fire ants with Tango, he started having requeening happen in his hives. and what we found from that was a series of they would raise a new queen multiple new queens and

40:59 then swarm almost like the term swarm to death i've heard different beekeepers use when hives that are not large enough to actually swarm will make a bunch of new queens and they make like emergency queens they're half the size the cells like half the size of what a normal queen cell would look like these are obviously rushing them not feeding them properly so you get this like mini queen that's born from these hives and then too many of them to actually be able to do anything with but they don't really fight each other they all try to fly away so then you've got like these

41:28 handfuls of bees that are swarming off of this hive with multiple queens and then as soon as they one queen might actually get mated and stick around they start to try to requeen again within another two weeks so it's like this like there's no actual like solid queen behavior happening here And then you can shake all those bees off those columns, start it all over if there's enough to work with, introduce a mated healthy queen from another hive, and the bees will pick up again and start over like new and be able to maintain their hive.

41:58 So I can't actually correlate these things together, but what I do know about Tango is that it does, it affects the reproductive system of the queen. That's why people feed it to ants, so that the ants will take it back to the queen, feed her, and then she becomes sterile. So it makes sense to me that bees, if they get it in their system and they feed it to their queen through royal jelly or feeding it to the baby bees or the queen cells that are developing, that they're not going to be able to lay viable eggs. Which is why we're seeing all drone populations in these hives.

42:30 There are queens that are actually laying workers. They're sterile. They can't actually lay eggs that are viable. So that's my take on it. I had a serious fire ant infestation at the new property I moved on to, and I have been racking my brain about this because I've got horses and animals to take care of. You know, we've got goats. I can't have all these animals going blind and, like, you know, it's 24 acres to treat. So I've really been trying to figure out, like, what is the most effective way.

42:59 And what we've decided to go with is Avant and Tango intermittent so that you're not, like, giving the bees – I mean, sorry, you're not giving the ants something that they're going to develop an immunity to. So the way that these things work best is if you're not treating all the time, right? And any insect will develop an immunity basically to the poison. Or they'll start to get more resistant to it. So you need more, you need to apply more often to kill them. So with doing it back to back, you do the Avant and you do it every three months.

43:27 So like once every three months you do this like round of Avant in the area. And that is like a goop. You mix it with other things to make it really stick. stick. And then the Amdro, you can put in little containers. I go to [unclear] and I get these little sauce cups. You could get little sauces in. And I punch holes in the sides of them so ants can get in the side. I leave the top covered so if rain was to fall on it, it's not going to go inside. And then you can put those in your bee yard, like down at the bottom of the hive stands or in places so that they're covered, they're

44:01 protected. Bees can't get into these little things. But you can use the Amdro in these little containers and you can knock down fire ant populations. And by doing this, even not like religiously, you know, I'm not like out there every three months applying it. Sometimes I miss a beat, but by doing this I've been able to make the areas workable. And so, especially around bees, I recommend whatever you do, putting it in containers, not just like putting it out where they can get it. But I've had effective results by using these things, so I recommend them.

44:31 Danielle Downey: I'd put it in front of the bees. Convince yourself. They're not interested. They really aren't.

44:37 Audience: Amdro?

44:38 Danielle Downey: Amdro. Anything sweet, they will check out. But the peanut butter and the oil bait, I don't know what the carrier is. I think it is a peanut butter. I think it's what they use. Yeah, they just leave. We were not interested. It's good to know.

45:01 Jen Rasmussen: I get the same thing with beehive removals. I actually have had to watch it. The previous place I lived was no fire ants, and I brought them in three times on beehive removals from people's homes. So be aware if you're going out into somebody's house or a structure or someplace No, actually, they kind of work really well together. You know, fire ants are not fun to work with, the beekeeper. I want to get rid of them because they bite me, and I would rather get 20 bee stings

45:46 than, like, two fire ant bites because the bee stings go away and the fire ant bites linger for me. But at the same time, what I've found is that in the bottom tray, like, I have a tray underneath my hive where I put diatomaceous earth in. it goes under the bees, the bees can't get to it, and that's where all the beetles will fall into and they'll die. I've actually taken half of my trays out of my hives because what I've found is that the fire ants being down in the bottom eat the small hive beetles, and they sort of take over the space.

46:16 So I actually have found that the fire ants are working for me in a pest management strategy, and they don't actually get on the combs. The bees maintain the combs, so I'm not finding fire ants actually inside the hive. I find them on the top bars and between the top bars. And they're also eating beetles. I found, like, a lot of times beetles will hide on the edge underneath the top bars in the wood, and there'll be, like, a beetle jail there. And the other day I went to find this one cluster of bees on the side, and I moved it aside, and there was all these dead beetles covered in fire ants.

46:46 It was like the bees were still maintaining that jail to make sure any new beetles that went in there, but it was almost like this, you know, they were working together to, like, we'll trap them here, you eat them, was what it looked like to me. So, you know, even though I'm not a big fan of fire ants, I do see that in this life we have to figure out how to live cohesively together. Because there's going to be many things that, you know, we don't like, but they're there.

47:08 And so that's kind of my practice right now, is like when I see beneficial relationships and they're balancing each other out, rather than waging war, I try to figure out how I can make it a more livable situation.

47:20 Audience: I just wanted to make a point about what you were asking about the contamination from pesticides and whatever. You can have an organic beehive because you have organic methodology in place where your beehive is. And then the bees leave and they go a couple of miles away and your neighbor isn't doing what you're doing and their neighbor isn't doing it. and that's what they're bringing back. So even if you find out we've got some sort of contamination like that, I wonder what you can do about it.

47:58 Danielle Downey: Well, on Kauai, with the battery of testing that we're doing, we're trying to sample comprehensively the island. Of course, there's suspicion and there's special interest in the areas near where there's commercial ag or seed companies and all that kind of stuff. And we're hoping that if we did find something, we could look at the chemical residue, to look at where it's registered for use on certain products and trace it back and say, hey, the bees are getting into this. Do you know how to, can we talk about how you apply it and see if we can break that exposure?

48:29 Audience: Yeah, it would have to be a pretty egregious, something really happening to the beehive surface to stimulate that sort of investigation.

48:40 Danielle Downey: What we're doing is sampling just healthy hives to see what's in there. So it is not an investigation to find something that went wrong, it's just sort of a fact finding. People suspected that they were getting exposed to chemicals, so what can we do? We can take samples and see. That's where we're starting. And actually most of the samples that we've gotten back have been clean, not specifically on Kauaʻi, but the statewide ones that we have preliminary data, the residues that we find are, some of them are beekeeper-applied miticides, so we know where those are coming from.

49:25 And a couple of other chemicals, there were only five positives in the hundreds that were tested for all of our samples. And the ones that were positive were orders of magnitude lower than what they find on average on the mainland. So I'm not dismissing the chemical exposure concern for bees, but I'm saying that Hawaii is a gentler practice in most respects for agricultural practices. It's diversified. There's clean forage for bees growing alongside the crops that the bees can go to. And most of the parcels are pretty small,

50:03 so we're not getting like a million acres of corn, which is a desert for bees, no matter what kind of corn it is. So it's a better situation here than on the mainland.

50:12 Audience: Danielle, have there been any tests for neonicotinoids in bee populations here in Hawaii?

50:18 Danielle Downey: Yes, that battery of tests includes neonics and some of the metabolites of them.

50:23 Audience: Are we in good shape there?

50:25 Danielle Downey: Yeah, I think there was one positive for clothianidin, or one of the systemics was one of those five. And like I said, that is my concern because a lot of the coffee guys are using some of those systemics because they last so long. And you can put them on and get protection for so long from the plant. Even if you apply them foliar rather than imbibe them into the plant, they last a long time.

50:53 Audience: So if the industry as a whole started using neonicotinoids, would that spell disaster for Kona bees, for example?

51:02 Danielle Downey: As Jenny said, bees are resilient and beekeepers are resilient. I'm not an alarmist thinking that we're all going to starve without bees. I don't think we can kill all the bees if we try. They're good at what they do and they're going to adapt and come through it. If they'll come through it in our lifetime to meet our pollination needs and help our food sustainability, I don't know if it'll happen on that time scale, but it would eventually happen. But it probably could impact bee health quite a bit to start, if everybody started applying that stuff. I wouldn't dismiss it.

51:41 Audience: And on the labels of those products, does it say not to use them around bees?

51:45 Danielle Downey: It does. For the systemics in particular, it says don't spray blooming plants. And if we could get people to just apply at dusk or dawn when the bees have gone home and are not foraging. For a lot of the stuff that's a wet foliar application, once the residue dries, it's not as risky to a bee because they don't pick it up really. I mean, they can land on it if it's dried. They're not eating it. But if you're spraying blooming plants, the bees could be in those flowers. And then the mysterious thing that we don't really know much about is

52:14 the systemics that are taken up in the plant. How much of that is in the pollen, in the nectar, in the vegetation water? You could find a science report to support your argument, whatever it is. It's out there. We have a lot of mixed results. The greater concern in my mind is the synergies of all these agrochemicals, which are going to take a very long time to understand. Because bees are not getting into one thing. We can kill and count with one thing and see what's the effect on bees. And that's what the EPA does. But bees are getting into, say, six different things.

52:45 And it's a fungicide, an insecticide, and maybe an herbicide. What do those do together? We don't know.

52:50 Jenny Bach: And not to mention that beekeepers will put miticides in their hive and then you're trying to kill an insect on an insect and the effect of that as well. And then like Jen said, we're breeding bees that are weak in some sense, but the mites get stronger and stronger. There's a whole list of things that can, of chemicals that are in the environment from both not in our control and in our control as a beekeeper.

53:16 Lehua: So the good news about all of this is that Korean Natural Farming doesn't use any pesticides or chemicals or fertilizers. And everything, all the inputs come straight from what's already here and it's all safe for bees. So as a beekeeper and as an aspiring Korean Natural Farmer, it's really looking hopeful and we're totally on the same team. Which is good for the bees, good for us, good for the farmers. so that's going to move us on to our next question. As beekeepers, what does the relationship between bees and beekeepers and farmers look like? Does anyone want to answer that? Yeah.

53:58 Jen Rasmussen: I think it's all a pretty important circle there, because without bees, you don't have food, and without beekeepers, you don't really have healthy bees. so the circle is complete with all of those together. And, you know, I don't, it's really important to me not to start pointing fingers at, you know, what kind of a beekeeper, how do you do it, how do I do it. For me, it's that common passion and love for bees and love for food and love for life that unites us. And so I really try to find ways that we can all, you know, join together and network to share ideas

54:36 and to come up with more sustainable farming practices, which will then create more sustainable, healthy beehives and make it easier on the beekeeper who tends to those beehives so that they can continue to sustain their own livelihood and make it all kind of pay for itself, because it is a labor of love. So in my own life, how that has applied is I'm a farmer. I grow food, and in that growing food, I teach my children and other people how to grow healthy food without the use of chemicals and things that I need to add to the earth that aren't already from it.

55:12 And then as another part of that, I care for my bees without the use of chemicals. I maintain a hive and make it healthy, and I get products from that hive, which I can then sell to continue to support my family and my practice of love. So I feel like all those things are very important, and that if we do them with motivation to keep it all continuing in that way, it can definitely be a sustainable practice.

55:42 Danielle Downey: I think one perspective that I can share is on the mainland, the relationship between farmers and bees has definitely gone a different direction than I expected to go here. There are thousands and thousands of colonies that get loaded up on trucks, actually 2.5 million colonies, and trucked around to be put down when the plant is blooming that needs pollination. And then when that plant is done, because it's such a vast plantation, there's nothing to support the bees, so the beekeeper picks them up and drives to the next crop. So starting with almonds in California for a couple months,

56:15 and then going north to blueberries or raspberries or apples, whatever is up on that coast, and then going to the Dakotas to get a honey crop on clover, and then going either back to New England for cranberries or back to Florida to winter and get on citrus. So there's these whole pathways that bees get moved around for pollination because if you don't get pollination, you don't get your crop. And we're relying, we don't grow our crops in a way that supports natural pollinators. So we've kind of built sort of an irrational system on the mainland.

56:49 In Hawaii, I try to link farmers with beekeepers, especially because we don't have the freebies anymore. I like farmers to be able to find a beekeeper nearby, and there usually is a beekeeper that would be willing to put some colonies down and help support your farming. And so I give those referrals a lot. Most beekeepers would be willing to talk to a farmer, and they work out their own expectations from each other. I have a sample contract of what to expect so that they know, like, okay how am I going to access these because you have a lock on your gate or what time of the day will you come

57:24 you know there's things that you just need to work out, nuts and bolts. on the mainland they rent colonies because they compete and they all need them at the same time you may pay $200 a colony to get pollinators and if you grow almonds for example you have to show that you have contracted pollinators if you want crop insurance so it really is that type of a system Here, most beekeepers don't get paid and just say, hey, I'll give you some honey once or twice a year. If you let me put bees here and you get the crop and I get honey, everybody's happy. But that relationship still is growing.

57:58 There's not a lot of people doing that, and so we're hoping to just facilitate more and more cooperation. The other thing you can do is start keeping bees. If you have a small plot and you have time or want to learn, One colony of bees can do quite a bit of work. They fly a couple miles, so that's the other way that you can sustain your practice. But it's just another thing to add into the to-do list. And if you don't learn how to do it right and you neglect them, they will fail. There's just too many things waiting for the opportunity to pillage them.

58:36 Audience: So is it nice to leave the wild hives alone?

58:40 Danielle Downey: I think it is. You know, I think that's a hard way to get bees, especially now with the beetle. I know so many people that started with removals, and when you could remove it, and the bees could clean up and make a go of it, and there was no pressure other than them cleaning up and trying to resettle into this box, because it's a surgical, messy operation. You're cutting the whole hive, and it's messy, it's dripping honey and dead bees. try to put it into another box and convince them again this is where you're gonna live now. You know if they didn't have a choice and you did a good job and

59:15 there's you can do it with more skill and less skill for sure it would be moderately successful but now you have the beetle that smells a stressed hive and the race is on as soon as you rock that boat the beetle will outrun those bees more often than not these days. It's hard to do a removal without beetle pressure. so I always suggest find a beekeeper you can split a hive and get them that way get on the swarm call list, we have a list. Yes, this is on the swarm call list. statewide the Department of Ag has a list and you can get a call and when the

59:49 bees swarm it's really easy it's like when Jen was picking up the bees with her fingers, they're just hanging there with no comb to cut, you just whack them into a box and take them home. That's an easy way to do it. Cutouts are a lot harder.

1:00:03 Jen Rasmussen: I actually have come to really like the bees I get from doing cutouts so it's a definite love and dislike relationship for me in some ways because there's always the chance that somebody's going to call me up and say I've got bees in my wall and ask them a slew of questions. We've got a whole list of questions I ask before I even walk on their property and I have a set rate to even get me to show up. It's like, that's what it is. And then, of course, you might get there and then about 10 minutes after conversation, well, I might have sprayed them with, I'm not sure what that stuff was

1:00:39 and they might have swarmed like two weeks, you know, and so you never know what you're going to get. And so when I first got into this, I was like, I'll do it for the bees. No way, because half the time the bees are sick. You don't really have bees. They might have queen cells that aren't viable because they sprayed them so they didn't get to raise them all the way. It's not worth doing it for the bees. But if people are willing to pay, I will happily take the bees or the expired combs that have already been abandoned and grossed out of their wall.

1:01:07 And I have a whole protocol for how I go through this. If you're actually really interested in doing removals, call me and ask me questions. But the main thing that I like doing removals for is that I stumbled upon this black bee that I call German because I haven't been able to find any other way to identify it. But it's phenomenal. The laying pattern of these bees is so thorough that they don't, like, if you look at a comb, you'll see cells, right? And all those cells, if the queen has a nice laying pattern, usually it starts in a spiral and they're real tight all together

1:01:44 and it goes all the way to the outside of the comb. You can see the progression of how she lay. So this is how I determine a healthy queen or maybe a not so healthy queen, is by looking at her pattern. And across the board, these black German queens are phenomenal. They lay beautiful patterns. They are healthy and vigorous and strong. They've got just the right amount of defense and like, I'll kick your butt with like that, like, oh but you're cool so you can hang out kind of attitude, you know? It's really amazing to see the vigorousness of these bees, and they're so pleasant to work with.

1:02:17 And they're so communicative. I can hear them communicate with me on a whole different level. So just like Danielle was saying, I'm not messing with genetics and trying to create some super bee, but I did stumble upon this great bee. And so what I've been doing over time is I continue to raise new bees from these original genetics that I found. Anytime somebody calls me for a swarm removal, especially in certain areas where I know I've found these bees before, I'm on it because I want more of those bees. I've sold probably 60 colonies in the last two years around the island here.

1:02:54 What I've found is that people will call me up and say, Can you come look at my bees? I haven't been in my hive for a year. Can you come back and check up and see what's still going on there? I've found these bees will swarm every three months. They clean out their entire hive, all the cells, everything, every three months. Thorough cleansing. And they, even with untouched in a hive for a year, they have multiple sections. You can see new combs that they have built. They phase out all the old combs and turn them into pollen. They continually create this new nest for themselves.

1:03:26 And they're thriving without help from humans. So, yeah, if you have wild hives in a tree or in something where you don't have to mess with them, to mess with them, leave them alone and let them just do their thing. If they're in a house or a structure, you know, if you don't know how to do it, I highly recommend calling somebody who does because you can get really great bees from it, but you have to know what you're doing. When I first started, I didn't know what I was doing. I sabotaged hives and I've watched new people sabotage beehives and just wept for them. So don't go that route.

1:03:59 Call somebody who knows how to do it, but definitely know that there's some really amazing bees out there that you might not be able to buy from a beekeeper near you. So I'm not gonna, I don't want to make that not an option just to know that educate yourself before you do it.

1:04:16 Danielle Downey: And there are a variety of bees here. We do genetic testing of all the bees that we catch in our swarm traps. If you wanted to find out if those are German bees, you can send them and have them tested and compare them to other bees in your apiary to see how many varieties you have. And they might even be the hygienic ones; we can test them to see if they have that [unclear] behavior. And maybe found that thing that we're getting from somewhere else because it is out there.

1:04:40 And in theory you can find it anywhere and build it up and I wish every beekeeper would pay attention to these are the ones I like and think about that queen cell that you move to because if it's a turd, you don't want to make more of it. But you know in your own farming, sometimes you just do it, you're not thinking on that level where, okay, if I propagate this one, it's going to be more of the ones that I really want to have that one. Because it takes a step and some planning and some record keeping to actually get where you want to go.

1:05:11 So I wish I could get more beekeepers to pay attention and do that. Any quick questions? Yes.

1:05:16 Audience: About how many kinds of different bees are in Hawaii?

1:05:20 Danielle Downey: Well it depends on how you measure. We do mitochondrial DNA analysis and we know that there are certain mitotypes that are Italian strains, there's German strains, there's in the world there's probably 60 different subspecies or races of bees. African bees are one of them. So that's really actually why we started doing the genetic testing, is to make sure we don't get the killer bee here. We don't want African bees and so all of our tests are primarily just looking for that but in doing so we have found several varieties of bees and we know that the usual suspects are here the

1:06:01 Carniolans, the Italians, the Germans.

1:06:05 Audience: Do you have any bees that... how many of them are great pollinators?

1:06:10 Danielle Downey: Yeah, the big black carpenter bee. You know, there are not as many, when you see the glossy posters about supporting pollinators worldwide, most of those are not here. We don't have hummingbirds, we don't have bats that pollinate, we don't have bumblebees, we don't have many leafcutter bees or orchard mason bees, all those things that people bill as your rich landscape of pollinators, we don't have that here. We have the Hylaeus bees, they're the natives, the yellow-faced bees, and they primarily pollinate native plants. That's what they came up doing here, that's what they

1:06:43 evolved here and that's their their thing so if you plant a bunch of introduced ag plants like mac nuts, the yellow-faced bee is not going to pollinate them so the introduced bee the honey bee does a lot of the heavy lifting for pollination the carpenter bee is a great pollinator you see it flying around especially like lilikoʻi, it's a giant flower, a big bee does a much better job on that. And other than that, flies do a lot of pollination in Hawaii.

1:07:14 Audience: They raise a lot of different kinds of bees. And there's one kind of bee called the Mayan Tiny, tiny thing. It got into the flowers and nothing else can get into it.

1:07:23 Danielle Downey: Yeah, we don't have that. We don't have that. So there's stingless bees and orchid bees.

1:07:28 Audience: But the box is only about this big. Tiny box.

1:07:30 Danielle Downey: Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of cool bees in the world. We have moths.

1:07:37 Jenny Bach: Yeah, something that just about on the same level too, it's really awesome to see the hobbyist beekeepers come up. It's interesting, and it's not just me who says this, it's like other beekeepers notice it, that when the bees seem to have a problem that other people want to be beekeepers because they hear about it, or they're like, I want to help the bees. And if you become a beekeeper and you have good practices and you can actually help your neighbors or help the genetic diversity like how Jen found this bee and if I think you're a smaller beekeeper rather than

1:08:06 somebody that has 12,000 hives you can maybe understand all these little intricacies of each hive or have a different relationship with them so the I mean some people some beekeepers are like oh small there's always like the the talk between the two different types of beekeepers but you know this if you want to become a beekeeper and you have um you can take the time to do it I would definitely say that would maybe help our island.

1:08:31 Danielle Downey: I think also an interesting statistic, Hawaii is second in the nation for pounds of honey per hive. At 93 pounds average. That's about seven gallons of honey from one hive. And that's a standard statistic that they measure throughout the country. And I've heard reports from beekeepers, this is answering like who else is pollinating if you keep your bees healthy a lot of beekeepers are seeing bigger crops than ever because there's no competition so if you keep healthy honeybees your honey crops are bigger

1:09:08 and bigger and bigger because everything else is declining. We're number two? Two in the nation. Who's number one? Mississippi. I don't know how. This is beekeeper reported, but we have a lot of great plants, so 93 pounds per hive if you're interested.

1:09:26 Jen Rasmussen: Get ready. Seems like a good thing, and then you've got all this honey, like, what am I going to do?

1:09:32 Audience: I just have a real fun question. Yes. Have you read The Fifth Sacred Thing?

1:09:37 Jen Rasmussen: Yes. Okay.

1:09:39 Audience: More fun if the answer is yes, I guess, but you should check it out. Cool bees. No. Really cool bee stories.

1:09:45 Jenny Bach: What's it called?

1:09:46 Audience: The Fifth Sacred Thing.

1:09:53 Jen Rasmussen: Speaking of books, I know we're wrapping up. I wrote a book. It's called Intuitive Treatment-Free Tropical Beekeeping. And basically I tried to explain my journey into how I came to develop the method in which I care for bees and then break it down so that you can use that same method if you choose. You'll hear over and over again if you read this book that I do not say that my book tells you the right way to keep bees. There are many ways to keep bees, and I recommend learning from a variety of different teachers and finding the way that works for you. This is the way that works for me.

1:10:25 So if you read this book and you like what it has to share, I hope that these tips work for you as well. And I also have copies of the documentary that is also available on YouTube. If you want to save $5, don't get this here. Find it on YouTube. But if you really want to have it for yourself, there's a bonus track on here, which is a special ceremony dance that I did actually wearing bees and doing this whole thing. So it's a bonus if you buy it here today. Five dollars. Five dollars. And the stickers are free. Please take one of each. And then the books are $20.

1:10:58 Jenny Bach: So what were you going to say about The Fifth Sacred Thing? Was that all you were going to ask?

1:11:01 Audience: Yeah, that was it. Like I said, it's more fun if the answer is yes. But there's the, there's some, I guess the quickest way to say it would be like these bee shamans in this story. And they work the bee magic.

1:11:12 Jenny Bach: Yeah, there's an old saying that the bees find their beekeeper. It's not really us. We're the bees that they find us. It's true. And in everyone's stories, like my story, I didn't even think about bees, and all of a sudden I was totally involved in beekeeping. They say the same thing. Yeah. And so if you're thinking about them, they're actually thinking about you. I know.

1:11:30 Danielle Downey: Are any of you taking my class coming up? Okay.

1:11:34 Audience: I took it.

1:11:35 Danielle Downey: If you're interested, it's a good place to start to learn bee biology. I spend one session on bee biology, one on honey bee health issues, so the mites, the beetles, the bacterial diseases, the fungal diseases, learn to see it and what to do. Yes. So there's three classroom sessions, Tuesday nights in October, all lectures and hands-on stuff. And then we have a Saturday field day where we bring a bee suit and you get a guided tour through the apiaries that are actually out right behind here. And so you get to get into the bees. take a picture, put it on Facebook, it's a good experience.

1:12:12 The whole series is only $50. So I really, I don't make any money doing this, I just really wish that I could get beekeepers to get some book learning about bees and learn the biology. I think it makes you so much more appreciative of what they do and better at what you do for them.

1:12:32 Audience: Can we bring you to our chapter on Maui?

1:12:34 Danielle Downey: I teach on Maui all the time. Oh, okay. Well, not all the time, a lot. I mean, I've taught there probably eight classes in the last year. So I teach throughout. If you want to get on my list, email me, and we'll let you know. I teach through the college there, with [unclear] apiaries and the Master Gardeners. Lauren is also with the State Apiary Program, and she has information on the class. So if you would like to grab the information, please do. Thanks for coming. Thank you. Thank you.