Episodes
  • Bee Space: Honey Bee Social Behavior with Cameron Jack
    Mar 28 2024

    Bee keeping is an ancient practice: even prehistoric cave paintings in Spain depict a keeper reaching for a hive to collect honey while holding a smoker to calm the bees. Cameron Jack shares some of the more interesting details of this ancient art with lucky listeners.

    Tune in and hear

    • How honey bee characteristics, bee anatomy, and evolution have led to optimal frame and hive size for beekeepers to follow,
    • Why bees are considered a superorganism, which means a honey bee can't survive on its own, and is organized by queen, brooders, and workers, and
    • Why Cameron Jack's prime interest is managing honey bee diseases and pests and what are the main areas of concern.

    Cameron Jack holds the unusual position of one-hundred percent lecturer at the University of Florida. He's still involved in research and extension work, but his full lecturer designation means his beekeeping course list at the University of Florida is probably the most extensive college-level beekeeping instruction out there.

    He teaches seven different beekeeping courses, covering everything from evolution, biology, the annual cycle involved in beekeeping, and more. The courses are complete enough to turn out people who can actively be beekeepers. In this interview, he describes everything from why 3/8 inches is a magic number to how bees find and maintain hives in the wild.

    Honey bee behavioral adaptations of course take center stage. For hive building, beekeepers who want to maximize honey production must learn such behaviors to know why they might, for example, sequester the queen in the lower level. Bees build their combs vertically and are considered a superorganism—"the whole animal is the whole colony," he adds. They are able to determine their hive sizing in multiple ways and if it gets too big, they swarm—one colony becomes two.

    Furthermore, the queen designation doesn't mean ruler. She's a producer, laying as many eggs as she can in a systematic spiral through her level of the comb. Cameron Jack's primary interest is the management of pests and diseases bees face like types of mites, beetles, and even wax-eating moths. While the interaction of mites and bees is the most concerning, diseases even involve microorganisms in honey bees' guts.

    Listen in to hear more about this amazing superorganism.

    For more see the University of Florida Honey Bee Research and Extension Lab page.

    Take advantage of a 5% discount on Ekster accessories by using the code FINDINGGENIUS. Enhance your style and functionality with premium accessories. Visit bit.ly/3uiVX9R to explore latest collection.

    Episode also available on Apple Podcasts: http://apple.co/30PvU9

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    46 mins
  • Sweet Talk: All about Honey Bees with Jamie Ellis
    Mar 27 2024

    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.

    Take advantage of a 5% discount on Ekster accessories by using the code FINDINGGENIUS. Enhance your style and functionality with premium accessories. Visit bit.ly/3uiVX9R to explore latest collection.

    Episode also available on Apple Podcasts: http://apple.co/30PvU9

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    46 mins
  • Honey Bee Threat: Not-So-Sweet Mites and Bees with Zachary Huang
    Mar 26 2024

    It's hard to imagine a world without honey, much less all the fruits they pollinate. That's one reason Zachary Huang's research into honey bee stressors is so important.

    Listen in as he teaches listeners about

    • Primary bee stressors, including parasites, pathogens, pesticides, and agricultural transportation,
    • In-depth information regarding their primary stressor, the Varroa mite and how it harms the honey bee, and
    • Honey bee characteristics that make them especially vulnerable to these stressors.

    Zachary Huang is an associate professor in the Department of Entomology at Michigan State University. He's also an avid photographer of all-things-honey bee, including the plants they pollinate. Honey bees face many stressors and are on the decline. Researchers across the country are trying to figure out why.

    Dr. Huang tells listeners about the Varroa destructor mite, which hitchhiked from Brazil or Asia on bees into North America. These purplish-red mites are about the size of a pinhead and feed on the fat body of the bee. They are an obligate parasite, meaning they are dependent on the bee for their life cycle. However, their bite transmits several viruses, which weaken and affect the bee anatomy and eventually lead to the death of the bee and increased hive vulnerability.

    These types of mites are actually responsible for the death of 35% of honey bees a year. Honey bee social behavior increases mite transmission likelihood.

    They can be transmitted from drifting, if a bee goes to the wrong nest and brings a mite back, or if a new colony takes over another colony's site.

    Researchers have tried several methods to combat these mites, from chemical methods to Dr. Huang's own method of "zapping" the drones and mites, killing them with heat so that infected drones and mites die and the colony is free to recover. Other research explores utilizing honey bee behavioral adaptations like grooming behaviors and hygiene, working on breeding bees with increased habits that will decrease the mite population in their hives.

    For more about his work and to see some of his photography, see bees.msu.edu.

    Take advantage of a 5% discount on Ekster accessories by using the code FINDINGGENIUS. Enhance your style and functionality with premium accessories. Visit bit.ly/3uiVX9R to explore latest collection.

    Episode also available on Apple Podcasts: http://apple.co/30PvU9

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    33 mins

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Deeper clarity on I/R & effects on physiology.

As a person who has recieved a substantial amount of Ionizing Radiation, from military service.
your interview has allowed me to gain insight and connect the dots, as far as the brief exposure and the long term , unexpected & incalcuatable Cell division & change to Biology that from I/R..

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