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| All right, I’m not seeing anyone else trickle into the attendees list, so let’s go ahead and get started. Hi everyone, I’m Bri Price. I’m the Extension Coordinator with the WSU Bee Program. Thank you so much for coming to this webinar today. I know it’s a really nice day outside. I just have a couple of announcements before we begin. The WSU Bees and Pollinators Program is a cornerstone of the College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Science, abbreviated CAHNRS, that is dedicated to fostering resilient ecosystems in Washington and beyond. Our mission intertwines innovative research, community engagement, and education to safeguard pollinators that are pivotal to our food security. And environmental health. In partnership with the CAHNRS Resilient Washington Initiative, we’re committed to advancing sustainable practices and pollinator-friendly landscapes and ensuring a flourishing future for agriculture and natural resources. We have 3 more upcoming webinars after this one. Our next one is in August, so for more information about that, please visit our upcoming events page on our website. Bees.wsu.edu. There will be time to answer any questions you have after the presentation today, so feel free to type any questions in the Q&A box anytime during the presentation. After this webinar, and before you close your browser, you should be prompted to answer a short 5-question education and outreach impact survey. Your participation in this really helps us understand our outreach efforts and make them more tailored to what attendees are wanting to learn about. Today’s speaker is Dr. Ryan Kuesel. Ryan is a postdoctoral researcher at Washington State University in the Department of Entomology. Originally, he is from Holland, Michigan, and he earned his doctorate degree at the University of Kentucky. Studying pests of blueberry, raspberry, and blackberry. At WSU, Ryan is now studying commercial honeybee colony health by inspecting hives from partnering commercial apiaries for signs of disease and monitoring their growth or collapse. His research efforts help identify when and why a foul brood, European fowl brood, becomes symptomatic. The webinar today is titled, Landscape-Driven Stressors During Migratory Pollination. How does the movement of honeybee colonies for commercial pollination and honey production affect what floral resources are available to bees? Wildflowers on unmanaged land and crop flowers on managed farmland contribute pollen and nectar sources that colonies need to survive and grow. This webinar will explore floral resources and surrounding landscapes when commercial colonies are moved from California almonds and to. Different crops around Washington. Washington tree fruit, canola, holding yards, and honey yards. Ryan, you can go ahead and share your screen and get started. I will hide my video. | Woman in grey shirt on screen wearing glasses and a Washington State University Logo in the background. |
| All right. Yeah thanks so much for that great introduction Bri and thanks everyone for being here today to learn a little bit about how the landscape surrounding your honeybee colonies can affect their health. | The Washington State University Honey Bees and Pollinators Logo. The first slide heading reads, Landscape Driven Stressors During Migratory Pollination, Dr. Ryan Kuesel, Hopkins Lab, Washington State University. Beside the text on the right, are the logos for the United State Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service and the Technical Assistance for Specialty Crops grant. |
| So we’ll start this off with one of the major topics that’s always surrounding bees unfortunately and that’s colony loss because colony loss is a huge problem for beekeepers. and it remains quite unpredictable from year to year. More than likely you’ve heard that last year in 2024 and into the winter of this current 2025. Commercial beekeepers lost an average of about 62% of their colonies over that year and that’s a staggering loss that’s hard to keep up with. | The next slide heading reads, Colony Loss, and shows a queen, drone, and worker bee. |
| Now a majority of those commercial colonies that we’ll talk about today are managed both for crop pollination in spring and early summer. Like Bri was saying though if we moved down typically to almonds in at least before February when the almond bloom begins, they’re moved on the backs of semi-trucks in order to pollinate those almond crops. And nearly every commercial colony in. the United States is moved to Central California in February for that almond pollination. The paths that those colonies then take especially depending on their operation and what state they’re originally from then differs but after that they’ll typically move. In March to Major Fruit nut or seed production locations. in California Texas or Florida. In order to pollinate those next crops. And then they’re moved back up to typically where the operation is based. So maybe over to the east coast or up to Montana North Dakota Minnesota or back to Washington and Oregon for seed production or honey production in that late Summer and fall. They can be put on those croplands that need the pollination or moved to rangelands with open floral resources to produce that honey. | The next slide heading reads, Migratory Beekeeping and shows a map of the United States of America. California, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Florida are highlighted in yellow. Double-sided arrows point between those states, Maine, Texas, and Washington depicting the movement of commercial colonies across the season. The major crops that depend on honey bees for pollination are written in a key below the map including alfalfa seed, almond apple, avocado, blueberry and more. |
| Now here you can see the estimated percent losses for the commercial beekeepers in this. Past year … starting in 2024 and then through February. You can see Wisconsin Iowa Nebraska Nevada and Utah were all hit pretty hard this past year. But overall the estimates from this US beekeeping survey were showing that large percentage of colonies all around the U.S. were lost in that year. More colonies were lost in this production year than in any other year on record. | The next slide heading reads, Preliminary Results from the 2024-2025 US Beekeeping Survey: Honey Bee Colony Loss and Management. A map of the USA depicts each state as a colored hexagon. The states are colored on a gradient that shows what percent of honey bee colonies were lost that year. The logos for Auburn University, the Apiary Inspectors of America, and Oregon State University are shown above the map. |
| Now in an older study a 2017 study by Dr. Kelly Kulhanek. Her and her co-authors surveyed beekeepers about what caused their colonies to die. And you can see here that there’s numerous reasons why a colony can die and that’s one reason why it’s so hard to predict colony health and colony death from year to year and even across the year. You can have any… anything from queen failure to starvation, the Varroa mites. The external parasite Nosema the internal gut parasite, small hive beetles, poor winters, and pesticide exposures. And in reality, colonies are probably dying due to more than one of these stressors simultaneously harming the colony. One stressor will make the colony weaker and then another. One or several stressors can cause the collapse of that colony. | The next slide reads “A National Survey of Managed Honey Bee 2015-2016 Annual Colony Losses in the USA. A bar chart is shown displaying the relative frequency of 15 causes of colony mortality as reported by backyard, sideline, and commercial beekeepers. The causes are queen failure, starvation, Varroa mites, Nosema parasites, small hive beetles, poor winter weather, pesticides, weak colony, colony collapse disorder, disaster, don’t know, mismanagement, other or viral disease, other pests, and other. The bar chart is from a publication Kulhanek et al. 2017 in the Journal of Apicultural Research. |
| I’m looking at these stressors as an effective landscape that surrounds the colony is one way that we as scientists are trying to make colony health more predictable for the future. So we’ll start with the most important question of the afternoon. What is a landscape effect? Landscape effects refer to how the structure, composition and configuration of the surrounding environment influence in this case honeybee populations behavior and health. And those effects of that landscape can be positive or negative. Depending on the type and the quality of the landscape. as a whole whatever organism we’re looking at will tend to look at six things: habitat diversity like what wildflowers or crops, forest, grassland, or surrounding that colony versus a monoculture or urban areas of cities or towns. Next is floral resource availability. So the & quality and then seasonal timing or floral phenology of the flowers. in that surrounding area that might affect. The ability of the bees to forage and to provide themselves with the adequate nutrition. Next is landscape fragmentation. Fragmented habitats can tend to isolate bee populations. It’s especially true of other organisms a little less so for honeybees since we’re actively moving them from location to location where they have good food sites. Pesticide exposures are very variable and are influenced by this landscape depending on where you put your bees down if they’re in an area at a time where local crops that they might forage on are going to be sprayed with pesticides then they can get higher rates of pesticides and in this case, we’re mostly concerned about insecticides. And then some fungicide as well affects the bees. As well as urbanization so we can know what sort of diverse gardens are going to be in the area. Whereas we’ll see what sort of pollution is present in that area that the bees are placed. So the landscape can look very very different. That first image here shows some central Washington with our irrigated crop systems pretty diverse. A lot of different crops growing at any given time along with some fallowed land. ere more western Washington, where you have a lot of forest land. And then some a mixed… small-scale agriculture maybe more of the specialty crops are grown here versus the commodity crops in the large-scale irrigated land. versus here. this is actually out in Montana where you have a large swaths of mostly unmanaged land where cattle are raised and you can have wild crops without much pesticide spray. But since bees are limited in how far they fly to forage usually up to a maximum of 6 kilometers about. That’s a little over three and a half miles. And on average they only forage about 100 meters from the colony which is about half a mile. It can be really useful to study. All those metrics at both that. Average foraging range if those bees have adequate forage they’ll tend to stay within that smaller area. As well as at their maximum range to know that if these bees are starved and need to fly as far as they can that they might be getting effects of the landscape at that larger scale. | The next slide heading reads, What is a Landscape Effect? An aerial photograph of irrigated dryland agriculture in central Washington is depicted. A worker bee is shown in the corner. As Dr. Kuesel talks about how landscapes can look very different, the photograph changes to another aerial image of a green forested area in western Washington. The photograph changes again to another aerial image of mountainous land. |
| So here we’re looking at 4 different chunks of land at a 5 kilometer radius. And you can imagine that the colonies in question might be right here in the center of each parcel of land. You can have parcels of land with a high diversity of irrigated crops again versus pasture. Here you can see the highly urban on the border of highly urban versus not irrigated cropland versus highly forested with that river as well. And that can really shape what resources are available for these bees. | The next slide heading reads, Different Landscape Composition. Four circles of aerial photos are shown. They are labeled High Crop Diversity, High pasture, Highly Urban, and Highly Forested. |
| So we can observe some of these features of the landscape from these satellite images. But it’s often hard to tell what crop is growing in each square. You’d have to go out and ground truth it yourself, see what’s growing and since that’s such a large area of land to cover that’s pretty much impossible. But luckily the USDA National Agricultural Image Program creates a map of crops that are growing on each parcel in each year based on polls of the farmers who own the land as well as using satellite, special satellite imaging techniques to determine what crop is growing there. Here you can see that this is California. Much of the land Is almonds (green), and then grapes in purple. Now with a little bit of corn production down here in yellow. That was a 2023 location that we surveyed these at for a project. | The next slide heading reads, Powerful Tool: Geographic Imaging. Two square maps are shown with red circles overlaid on them depicting 5 kilometers of radius. The left map is a normal aerial photograph. The right is the same photograph colored with vibrant colors indicating the crops that were grown on each land parcel. The logo of the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service appears over the maps. |
| So the crops that are included in that we call it NAEP Program are wide-ranging. Everything from alfalfa to almonds apples to apricots, all the way down through corn soybean spelts. And then even the non-agricultural areas like woody wetlands. Forest deciduous forest and coniferous forest. And then 3 different levels of developed area developed at a high intensity. That’d be like downtown Seattle. Medium intensity maybe like Spokane. and then a low intensity like Pullman where you have some hardscaped ground some concrete and houses. and then a mix of non-hardscaped area that has plants growing. | The next slide heading reads, Crops Included in NAIP Crop Coverage. A list of crops is written out in alphabetical order beginning with alfalfa, almonds, apples, and apricots. |
| And so here’s actually some data that was collected by myself and my colleagues at WSU and a study that was funded by the USDA Foreign Agricultural Services Technical Assistance for specialty crops Grant. We call it the TASC grant that funded this work. This graph shows the land coverage surrounding a group of colonies that we tracked in 2022 and 2023. This is the 2023’s data from when they were in almonds down in Central California in February. You can see that on the Y-axis is the percentage coverage. How much of this area is covered by almond production versus grape? versus that medium intensity sort of city, small-scale city, and then walnuts winter wheat pistachios tomatoes. Quite a bit of diversity but the majority of this area is almonds and the majority of the resources that’ll be available for these bees are coming from those almonds. | The next slide heading reads, Average Crop Cover Within 3.1 miles (5 km). A bar chart of different crops depicts the average land cover in Dr. Kuesel’s February survey. Almonds, grapes, medium intensity development, walnuts, and winter wheat are major constituents. |
| What it’s important to remember too that since the highs are constantly moving from yard to yard across the year on the back of trucks, that those landscapes are always changing for the bees. on the left is that February graph truncated to just the most commo crop types or landscape types. And on the right is in April and May when they were moved back up to a central or Western Washington where on average they were surrounded by apples. Some shrubland grassland pasture alfalfa developed. And cherries – some of those hives went to cherry production that year. | The next slide heading shares the previous heading of Average Crop Cover Within 3.1 miles (5 km). Two bar charts sit side-by-side depicting the average land cover in Dr. Kuesel’s February and April surveys respectively. Apples, shrubland, grassland, alfalfa, and low intensity development are major constituents of the April graph. |
| And then following up in June or July, they were mostly out pollinating some of the seed crops. like alfalfa as well as in shrubland getting ready for that honey production. They’re packing up the honey. Then finally in August and September nearly all of them are on open rangeland getting nectar for honey production. It’s also important to remember that across the year these landscapes are changing as well. So if these hives were to stay in this one area say if they were in the apple production, in May those blooms will give way to maybe just wildflowers and have less resources for the bees across the year. | The next slide heading shares the previous heading of Average Crop Cover Within 3.1 miles (5 km). Two new bar charts sit side-by-side depicting the average land cover in Dr. Kuesel’s June and August surveys respectively. Shrubland, alfalfa, evergreen forest, grassland/pasture, and winter wheat are major constituents of the June graph. Shrubland, grassland/pasture, alfalfa, hay, and winter wheat are major constituents. |
| So from this crop cover data though we can make some assumptions about factors that’ll impact the bees, you can make assumptions about how many and what type of pesticides are applied to that cropland. As well as what we see here is dividing the land up into different crops that’ll provision pollen for the bees, pollen and most likely nectar as well. On the left you have crops that’ll provision pollen versus crops that don’t on the right. And then also sort of… areas of wild plants like deciduous forest or mixed forest that might provision variable amounts of pollen and nectar for these bees. | The next slide heading reads, Crops Included in NAIP crop coverage. The previous list of crops has been broken up into crops that provision pollen for honey bees, crops that don’t, and wild plants that provision pollen. |
| And that leads us to nutrition. | The next slide heading reads Nutrition and shows a queen, drone, and worker bee. |
| Bees need a diversity of pollen and we’re learning more and more each year about how complex of interactions, having a complex diet of good pollen from multiple plants, actually does improve honeybee health. Pollen is the male reproductive cells of flowering plants and plants have co-evolved with many different species of pollinators including honeybees to encourage the collection of pollen so that their flowers can produce seeds when they’re pollinated. Pollen provides the protein that bees need to grow especially in their immature larval stages as they’re growing and getting ready to pupate to adults. And much like how we as humans need nutrients from our food that we can’t produce on our own like vitamins and minerals in our case, pollen also provides lipids and sterols like cholesterols. that bees can’t produce on their own. And those are nutrients that they need to support their healthy metabolism healthy growth and maintain a healthy colony. | The next slide heading reads, Bees Need and Diversity of Pollen. The words “source of protein, lipids, sterols” overlay photos of a canola field, blackberry bloom, milkweed flower, a white blossom, and pink, orange and yellow pollen in a pollen trap. |
| But plants don’t exactly want their pollen to be digested by the bees. Their ultimate evolutionary goal is to have that pollen used for pollination to produce seeds and expand their own fecundity. So plants will actually defend their pollen in various different ways like tough pollen walls, the X line layer is produced for all pollen and it can be of various thickness with different spikes on the outside. That are make the pollen durable it protects that DNA inside from the environment and also from bee stomachs. So in the case of pollen like sunflowers they have a thicker tougher layer of hard wall on the outside that makes it a little harder to digest. And some have chemical defenses some will pack in toxic or deterrent compounds in the pollen like alkaloids, or phenolics or protonase inhibitors, and those chemicals can reduce the digestibility of the pollen and can even harm the gut of a microbiota and bees might discourage them from consuming too much pollen… oop. ignore where it says pollen packing for blueberry although; they do a little bit of pollen packing. Blueberry’s known to have fairly highly acidic pollen that can we think impact the ability of the bee’s gut to digest that pollen and it’s also quite low in protein versus a pollen packing. So some species, especially milkweeds, are really highly evolved in their ability to pack their pollen and to Polinia which is a mass of pollen that actually gets stuck to the head or the legs of bees or flies that contains that pollen and then as they go to another flower hopefully that mass of pollen will dip onto the answer of the flowers and pollinate that milkweed. That makes it a little bit harder for the bees to pack that pollen away as well then nutritional imbalance is often the case for pollen, and that’s one main reason why bees need a diversity of pollen. They need multiple sources of protein and those sterols in order to have a healthy hive. | The next slide heading reads, Pollen is Defended and is Often Nutritionally Imbalanced. A photo of a milkweed bloom and a blueberry flower is labeled “pollen packing”. A sunflower blossom is labeled “tough pollen walls”. |
| So this first study that I’ll go over is one actually from our colleague Zhang and it was a study where newly emerged bees. we’re fed a diet without pollen, with just clover pollen or with Clover and partridge pea pollen. And then also with just chestnut pollen. And the bees were inoculated with 6 different types of viruses. The acute bee paralysis virus, black queen cell virus, deformed wing virus, Israeli acute paralysis virus, Kashmere bee virus and then the sac brood virus. And while clover and partridge pea were common. Pollen sources in Iowa where the study was done that’s why those were picked. And then the combination of different pollens was thought to satisfy a nutritional need that actually did boost the immunity of these bees and allowed them to survive better. So that Clover and Partridge pea as well as chestnut provided the nutrients that they needed in order to survive and beat these viruses. So this shows that one of many reasons why you need a diversity of pollen in the surrounding landscape in order to keep your bees healthy from these viruses that are oftentimes spread by that varroa mite. | The next slide heading reads, Bees Need a Diversity of Pollen. Dr. Kuesel reads the slide. |
| Oh but bees need nectar too and while most pollen-bearing plants also provision nectar. Strong nectar flows are quite sporadic across the year because a bountiful fields of any given flower are spread across the landscape. And any one species of flower just flowers for a short period of time. So having more diverse landscapes can really help to support those bees across the full Spring and summer production. You can think about canola. Canola’s blooming just for a couple weeks around the hills here. We get a really pretty bloom. I can look out and see the yellow and you know the bees are out there foraging for those couple weeks where you have a strong nectar flow. But as soon as that canola gives way and starts producing its seed pods, you want to hope to have other wildflowers in the area that can support those bees. Or especially if you’re out on the west side of the state you can have that Blackberry flow that comes before the canola that can really act as a stopgap between crops. | The next slide heading reads, Bees Need Nectar Too. Text on the slide reads, nectar flows vary across time (based on flower phenology). Photos of a canola field, blackberry bloom, milkweed flower, a white blossom are shown. |
| So colony losses also tend to be lower in states with higher levels of rangeland. This is a study from Naug 2009 where she used census data of honeybee hives between years across states in the continental U.S. as well as that NAS Geographic imaging data in order to survey colony losses, differences in colony numbers within the states and compare that to how much rangeland they have. So here you can see the hills and Walla Walla that you can imagine that it’s rangeland for cattle where there’s not much crop production. And they found that 5 of the 10 states with low colony numbers declines between years including Nebraska, New Mexico, North and South Dakota. We’re also in the top 10 states that had the highest proportions of rangeland in the area. So these rangelands really seem to be supporting diversity of flowers and allowing the bees to forage for the food that they need. Whereas states with the highest colony declines in that year. Florida, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania had some of the lowest proportions of rangeland. Seemingly there’s low levels of that more natural area where wildflowers are growing for those bees to forage on. | The next slide heading reads, Colony Losses tend to be Lower in States with High Levels of Rangeland. A photo of rolling hills from Lynn Suckow in Walla Walla, Washington is show. Dr. Kuesel reads the slide. |
| And then in another study in 2021 in Michigan that was honeybee colonies benefit from grassland or pasture while bumblebee. Colonies in the same landscape benefit from non-corn or soybean croplands. This corroborated that finding and found that high levels of open rangeland across these smaller parcels of land in Michigan. Really correlated with higher weight gain of the colonies. Meaning that these colonies are doing better producing more larvae more bees, collecting more honey and pollen and the hive overall is growing when they’re in areas with more rangeland as opposed to forest. Which actually didn’t influence weight gain in this study. So perhaps those rangelands are more beneficial for the foraging and the health of bees compared to those forests which are harder to forage within. | The next slide heading reads, Colonies Thrived in Area in Michigan with High Levels of Rangelands. The same photo of rolling hills is shown. Dr. Kuesel reads the slide. |
| So both studies hypothesized that those diverse wildflowers allowed for a diverse nutritional landscape for these bees and they were able to support their growth. Interestingly, they also knew that from previous studies that these open areas allow for more effective recruiting bee foragers to the larger land that has those abundant blooms. Well that’s based on if you’re a bee out foraging. You can more easily see and access that area. You’re not going to bump into trees, you’re not going to have your vision obscured by trees, so those scout bees that are out looking for a great spot to forage on are can more easily discover that area. And then advertise that area too to other foragers with the waggle dance back at the nest. These areas have fewer physical obstructions like trees and let them fly through open paths better and make easier return trips when they’re loaded up with nectar and pollen. It allows for that effective communication by waggle dance. when the forager returns from that open area with a good resource the waggle dance is more likely to be vigorous and convincing leading to greater recruitment of nest mates out to that site And also bees really value their time so they want to have a large open area with . A large number of flowering plants that are providing good nectar and pollen. So they actually perceive these open areas to have greater foraging value. So we’ll see these open patches it’s more profitable due to having more flowers and easier access. | The next slide heading reads, colony losses tend to be lower in states with high levels of rangeland. A photo of a wide-open prairie is shown. Dr. Kuesel reads the slide. |
| Alright so there’s plenty more of the literature on the benefits of a diverse diet. There’s always more to come as well so keep watching as we make more findings and I’ll hope to summarize them again in a later webinar. So next up is actually pesticides. | The next slide heading reads Pesticides and shows a queen, drone, and worker bee. |
| Agriculture really does survive on pesticide applications. We need them to grow food and keep our human populations healthy but they can also inadvertently harm bees, either by coming into direct contact with bees that are directly foraging on those sprayed crops. Or if those pesticide sprays drift onto nearby wildflowers where the bees are then going to come forage or maybe already resting on flowers and they can come into contact with that. | The next slide heading reads, Agriculture Survives on Pesticide Applications. A tractor equipped with a boom sprayer is shown applying pesticides to a low-growing crop. Dr. Kuesel reads the slide. |
| Through studies on the ground in North Central California in this case by Ward et al. and their colleagues. This study was pesticide exposure of wild bee and honeybees foraging from field border flowers and intensively managed agricultural areas of California. We know that those Bee Attractive field border plants. In those agricultural areas like those growing in wild hedgerows or purposefully planted forage, flowers for the bees can harbor pesticides that the bees can come into contact with those bees in the study were exposed to low levels of neonicotinoids.Especially imidacloprid which is a really common neonicotinoid. and a mixture of other pesticides including the pyrethroid bifenthrin. Both of those insecticides can have negative effects on the honeybees that stop short of death. In this case none of the bees were exposed to high enough levels to cause death. But instead, it can cause issues that we call sublethal effects. In this case bees that are exposed to low levels of these toxic insecticides can have neurological or cognitive impairment where it’s harder for them to move harder for them to move out and forage it can actually impair their memory and navigation making it harder to remember where to go back to forage and how to navigate following the waggle dance of other bees to go back to that area. It can alter their foraging behavior because of that. and results in less frequent flower visits, poor pollen collection and then that disrupted communication via the waggle dance. They can also impair brood development, especially some chemicals that inhibit the ability of the insects to produce they’re chitin their outer shell can result in lower brood size and actually cause larval mortality. So even if these chemicals are rated that’s safe for honeybees. they’re only really tested on the adult bees and some of them can have those negative effects on the larva that need to be taken into account. And then it could also weaken their immune system. Neonicotinoids especially are known to suppress immune function and makes them more susceptible to pathogens like Nosema and then the viruses transmitted by Varroa. These bees in those attractive field-bordering plants. We’re also exposed to fungicides and herbicides as well as part of the spray drift. And we’re learning more and more every year about how sublethal effects can also come from fungicides and have negative impacts on bees. | The next slide heading reads, Pesticides found on Field Border Plants. The same tractor and boom sprayer is shown. Dr. Kuesel reads the slide. |
| Now taken all together on an extremely broad landscape scale. in this case it’s the county level and it looked at every county in the continental United States, this study by Douglas et al. In 2020 looked at the county-level analysis and how it reveals a rapidly shifting landscape of insecticide hazards to honeybees on U.S. Farmland. They found that bees are exposed to higher levels of toxins. Especially where seed crops are grown. These images on especially on the right, are a synthesis of how toxic loads would be expected to be encountered in each U.S. County and this is in 2012 based on data that they had of pesticide application in 2012. You can see that especially in the heartland of America here where there’s a lot of wheat and soybean production. They have high levels of this oral toxic load. When this oral toxic load is a combination, you could think of it almost as a multiplication of the amount, of pesticide applied the area that it was applied to and then the toxicity of that chemical. In this case they reported that the neonicotinoid insecticides we’re by far the largest contributor to this toxic load calculation, in that about 98% of the. Risk of toxicity to bees was happening because of those neonicotinoids. And neonicotinoids are a group of systemic insecticides that came into use in the mid-2000s. You might have heard of them recently especially because they’re getting a lot of press for their potential to impact beneficial insects especially bees. That’s because neonecotinoids can be absorbed into plants through their cells. through their roots through their stems and leaves and then it can become active throughout the plant for long periods of time. Neonicotinoids are applied in many different ways. They can be sprayed directly onto the plant. They’re often sprayed into the soil and absorbed through the root or then you can treat the seeds with a powder coating before planting and you might see photos of corn covered in sort of a red powder. That’s most likely neonicotinoid seed coatings. And it’s used really heavily in corn and soybean production hence why we see that high toxicity load in the heartland here and in this case mostly the oral toxicity even more so than our contact toxicity there since the bees aren’t really coming into contact with that those seed coatings. Instead they’re being exposed as the plants are producing nectar there’s evidence that the neonicotonoids are also making their way into that nectar and the bees are consuming that nectar and having exposure to the neonicotinoids through that oral route. The contact exposure is more likely driven by those bees being on the crops at the time that the soil drenches are applied or the direct applications are applied. Those neonics are also used in wheat and canola production used in a lot of our large-scale ag so you can see, right where I am here in the Palouse and Pullman we’ve got a lot of wheat production and canola production that has a little bit of a hotspot there for the risk to bees. | The next slide heading reads, Bees Are Exposed to Higher Levels of Toxins Where Seed Crops are Grown. Two maps of the United States of America are shown. The left map shows a heatmap by county of the contact toxic load of agrochemicals applied in 2012. The right map shows a heatmap by county of the oral toxic load of agrochemicals applied in 2012. |
| Alright now finally is, I think an unexpected one for a landscape effect, and that’s air pollution. So you don’t really think much about air pollution affecting honeybees. | The next slide heading reads Air Pollution and shows a queen, drone, and worker bee. |
| But a recent study by Nico Coallier and his co-authors using statistical and machine learning. Procedures combined with data from large-scale commercial beekeepers. Those are beekeepers who use the Nectar application to track their hive strength their dead oats and their hive locations. They found that poor air quality resulted in higher mortality of honeybee colonies on that risk was really driven strongly by reported levels of ozone so high levels of ozone and high-reported readings on the air quality health index that are influencing that poor air quality. And what’s super interesting is that there’s aspects of a landscape that can actually mitigate. These effects of poor air quality, much like how we know that vegetation in urban areas can help remedy air pollution and heat problems, the effects of this air pollution was substantially reduced. And hives were able to survive through high levels of air pollution in regions that had greater vegetation availability and that means that if there’s high levels of leaf coverage as calculated by the normalized difference vegetation index then they were able to sort of scrub the air and allow those bees to thrive despite that air pollution at the more larger scale. That NDVI normalized difference vegetation index is another incredible tool. It’s actually been around for quite a while but it’s being used more and more now in landscape analyses that’s calculated again from satellite photography. | The next slide heading reads, Air Quality Impacts Bees and Vegetation Mitigates. A heatmap of the United States of America shows the risk of poor air quality as calculated by the scientist Nico Coallier. Dr. Kuesel reads the slide. |
| You can see here, it’s actually based on how much light is reflected off of the ground or in this case off of the leaves in the red and the near-infrared spectrum because the cells of growing vegetation will reflect mostly that red and infrared light back up at the satellite. And then you can tell what high level or what areas have high levels of vegetation. In this case I think it’s the bright green spots here that have a high level of that light being reflected back up. so you can know that there’s a high level of crops or wild vegetation growing there. | The next slide heading also reads, Air Quality Impacts Bees and Vegetation Mitigates. Two satellite images of the earth are shown. They are colored as a heatmap to show surface reflectance and normalized difference vegetative index respectively. Dr. Kuesel reads the slide. |
| We had kind of a short lecture for today. That’s all I’ve got and let me know if you have any questions for me. Bri: Thank you Ryan. We do already have one question in the chat. It’s more about genetics though so, give it your best shot. I don’t know if you know a lot about genetics; I know I don’t. Would you say other honeybee genetics for example Russian or Caucasian might be better suited to deal with our Washington state climate and their adaptability would better negate colony losses? And then another part of that question is. Would that resistance to Varroa destructor mites and tracheal mites be beneficial to preventing future losses? I know most commercial outfits use Carnelion or Italian honeybees. Ryan: Hmm. That’s a very good question one that I may be not super fit to answer but I can give you the my thoughts. Diversity especially genetic diversity is always good I think for animals plants to be able to survive these issues as we look at breeding bees I think it’s could be important to try those different genetics out and see how how they’re surviving, but to get into the weeds of that, I think we’d have to ask some of our more geneticists or bee breeders here. Bri: Okay do have another question. Please walk us through how we can access the satellite imaging that would show us where crops are located. This person is in southeast Alabama. Ryan: Cool yeah that’s a great question. Let me get that up. Let’s see…I know I’ve got it bookmarked. Alright I can sort of stumbled through it and then find that location. So share…In this case it’s the National Agricultural Imagery Program or NAEP Geohub. They have quite a few different maps. Available and in this case they’re gonna open in an online viewer. If we go to the NAEP Imagery Services or Qgis are two great software suites. I use KeyGIS myself I think it’s easier to use than ArcGIS actually and it’s free. You can download files from Naep and open them up in QGIS or You can use their ArcGIS-based suite here to look at some of that data. In this case we’re just looking at the topographic map right now, so we should try to find the cropland map. We have all sorts of data provided to us. By NAPE Land coverage maps. Okay so in this case if you find these shapefiles of land coverage, and that’ll be just for each state. I think perhaps you can pull up everything. In their online ArcGIS version. Annual coverage by year. It does take a couple years typically for them to get theMaps posted up online. Here you can see the NDVI maps is one option…In the meantime are there any other questions? Bri: Not yet, do you think a better option for this person would be possibly emailing you so you could give a direct link? Ryan: Definitely. Yeah if you reach out to me. I’m at ryan.kuesel at wsu.edu. I can definitely get that to you. Bri: Okay I will put your email in the chat so this person can copy and paste it. Does anyone else in the audience have any more questions? Ryan: Here’s the coverage maps. But yeah reach out to me by email and I can share those coverage maps with you. Bri: Does the mapping that you’re talking about show where insecticides would be applied? Ryan: In this case no. We’ll have to make assumptions based on the typical rate of insecticides applied to that crop given recommendations by the state. So it’s quite complex with the statistical analyses when trying to measure that. Bri: Okay. If there’s no other questions , before you close your browser please answer that 5 question survey, and then I will also send in a follow-up email to all the attendees with the recorded link. So if you have certain content that you’d like to rewatch you’ll be able to see that. I’ll be posting this on YouTube in a few hours. So thank you so much for attending.And I hope you have a great rest of your Saturday! | The next slide show a honey bee worker thinking the word “Questions?” and shows Dr. Kuesel’s email address as Ryan.Kuesel@wsu.edu. |