Sweet Talk: All about Honey Bees with Jamie Ellis
Finding Genius Podcast
Richard Jacobs
4.4 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 27 March 2024
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It's estimated that 20% of our food is dependent on honey bee pollination. Meanwhile, recent news has highlighted concerns like viral diseases of the honey bee to mites to invading "killer" bees. It's hard to keep straight where honey bee diseases and treatments stand. This conversation does the trick, leaving listeners with a clear and fascinating vision of what's up with the honey bee.
Listen and learn
- Where do our current North American honey bee populations stand and where do they fit in the larger picture of bees worldwide,
- What pests and diseases of the honey bee and control measures are entomologists most involved with, and
- How do these concerns fit within agricultural, ecology, and the backyard beekeeper.
Jamie Ellis is the Gahan Endowed Professor in the Entomology and Nematology Department at the University of Florida. Fascinated with bees since childhood, he took care of his first honey bee hive at age 12 and hasn't looked back since.
He's not alone: humans have been interacting with honey bees for thousands of years.
While there are 20,000 of bee species worldwide, only 9 of those species are honey bees.
Even more daunting, 8 of those 9 are specific to Asia. That remaining species is the one we're familiar with and it inhabits Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. Honey bees are actually not native to North America; rather, Europeans brought them over hundreds of years ago.
Are the populations of this one honey bee species that inhabits such disparate regions the same? Well, while it is the same species, entomologists divide it into about 30 subspecies or races, such as the African bee, which the press has misnamed the "killer bee." North American honey bees have been facing population struggles lately because of a mite, and Ellis describes various pest control and pest management plans, including nature's own adaptation through honey bee evolution.
He also helps listeners with the big picture of the many reasons to raise honey bees. While many are familiar with bee hives used for honey, pollination services are also a tremendous business. Others raise colonies to sell and some keepers specialize in raising queens.
For more information, including resources on your own bee keeping, see the University of Florida Honey Bee Research and Extension Lab page.
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Episode also available on Apple Podcasts: http://apple.co/30PvU9
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Forget frequently asked questions. |
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| 0:07.0 | 95% of people in any profession are good enough to be qualified and licensed. |
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| 0:13.0 | They become very good at what they do, but only 0.1% are real geniuses. |
| 0:18.0 | Richard Jacobs has made it his life's mission to find them for you. |
| 0:22.4 | He hunts down and interviews geniuses in every field. |
| 0:25.2 | Sleep science, cancer, stem cells, ketogenic diets, and more. |
| 0:28.8 | Here come the geniuses. |
| 0:30.5 | This is the Finding Genius podcast. |
| 0:33.1 | The Richard Jacobs. |
| 0:37.6 | Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius podcast. |
| 0:41.3 | I have Jamie Ellis. |
| 0:42.7 | He's a gay-hand and dad professor. |
| 0:44.9 | There's honeybee research, part of the Extension Laboratory. |
| 0:47.9 | The entomology, pneumatology, is all part of the University of Florida. |
| 0:51.6 | So I don't know much about them yet, but I'm learning and we're going to talk about honeybees. So, Jamie, thanks for coming. Hey, Richard, thanks for having me. I really appreciate the invitation to be on the show. Yeah. Yeah, what got you interested in bees? It wasn't many years ago. Yeah, so that's a good question. So when I was about six or eight years old, I got interested in bees. and my parents, you know, we're not from a beekeeping family. So it took me a little bit of convincing to get my parents to get me a colony. It took about four years, in fact. So around 12 years old, I started keeping bees as a hobby. And I kept bees throughout middle school and high school. And then I went to University of Georgia. I'm from the state of |
| 1:27.9 | Georgia and while there I worked in the bee lab at the University of Georgia, essentially for the type |
| 1:32.4 | of lab there that I run here at Florida and it just kind of just got into my soul. I like keeping bees. |
| 1:39.1 | I like research and so I'll kind of put the two together and did a PhD in entomology overseas at Rhodes University in South Africa. And then shortly thereafter, I found myself as a faculty member at the University of Florida where I'm able to run my own bee program. So that's a bit of my bee history. Very cool. I mean, what is it that attracted you about bees when you were little? And now, what do you study about them that fast? Oh yeah. You know |
| 2:01.7 | the question about it when I was little that is it's simple childhood curiosity honestly that's |
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