Fortifying Honey Bee Colonies with Researcher Jay Evans
Finding Genius Podcast
Richard Jacobs
4.4 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 27 January 2021
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Bees are not alone in their fight to survive. While the backyard beekeeper might start with a pollinator garden, researchers are also busy strengthening and shoring up these vulnerable organisms that are an essential part of our food ecosystem.
Jay Evans explains some promising efforts, telling listeners
- What the main stressors for bees are, from diseases to pests,
- Why protecting a middle-aged bee from stressors impacts the entire colony, and
- What exciting new management strategies are in the works, including botanical medicines for bees.
Jay Evans is with the USDA ARS Bee Research Laboratory in Maryland. He and his colleagues are approaching bee health from every angle, assessing direct and indirect factors that increase bee health and lessening those that cause habitat harm. The list is long, from increasing nutrition to mitigating pesticide effects, parasites, and the spread of viruses. Often the best solutions provide a path for the bees to help themselves.
Evans and his group in particular work on bolstering the honey bee immune system. Just as humans find their health affected by stress, so do bees, from temperature changes to chemical stress to nest disturbances. These stresses makes the bees more vulnerable to direct threats like parasites and pathogens. Their close living quarters in the beekeeping industry make for further vulnerabilities.
Once a colony in an apiary is infected with a pathogen, it spreads fairly quickly through the apiary. Researchers like Evans are helping them tolerate those invasions and push the pathogens out over time. He describes some of the most promising efforts, from breeding for "varroa-sensitive hygiene" to developing disease-fighting medicines from botanical sources.
For more, see the USDA-ARS Bee Research Laboratory website.
Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK
Transcript
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| 0:30.3 | This is the Finding Genius Podcast. |
| 0:33.0 | That Richard Jacobs. |
| 0:35.0 | Oh, this is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius Podcast, a part of the Finding Genius Foundation. |
| 0:42.0 | Today I have Jay Evans. He's at USDA. Genius Podcast, a part of the Finding Genius Foundation. |
| 0:42.6 | Today I have Jay Evans, he's at USDA, B research lab, and they conduct research to improve |
| 0:47.8 | the health of honeybee colonies and help the beekeeping industry maintain adequate healthy |
| 0:52.4 | supply of bees for pollination of crops. |
| 0:55.1 | So Jay, thanks for coming. |
| 0:56.6 | Thanks so much Richard, I'm really happy to speak with you. |
| 0:58.8 | Yeah, well tell me about your work specifically in the lab what do you do? |
| 1:03.0 | Sure so we're in a we are an applied laboratory so we're looking at |
| 1:07.1 | honeybee health in the context of keeping them that way or keeping them healthy |
| 1:10.8 | and as a group we do everything from mitigating the effects of pesticides on these to helping with nutrition. And then a couple of us are focused on the bad actors that affect these from viruses to parasites and trying to find management solutions, whether it's medicines or helping the bees help themselves through their own behaviors. |
| 1:34.8 | Oh, so what are some specifics? What things do you have to do to make sure that bees are healthy out there? |
| 1:40.6 | Well, there's, there's, it's kind of all of the above and I think the best model I've seen for for |
| 1:46.4 | sort of colony health is is actually just you know looking at interactions of the stress factors from could be |
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