{"id":1155,"date":"2026-04-21T12:59:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T19:59:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/?page_id=1155"},"modified":"2026-04-21T12:59:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T19:59:13","slug":"webinar-monocropping-systems-and-bees","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/extension\/webinar-monocropping-systems-and-bees\/","title":{"rendered":"Webinar: Monocropping Systems and Bees"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Monocropping Systems and Bees\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/tgYtVDN04Xg?start=1&#038;feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Webinar: Monocropping Systems and Bees with Janae Becher video on YouTube<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Text Transcript with Description of Visuals<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table class=\"has-fixed-layout\"><thead><tr><th>Audio<\/th><th>Visual<\/th><\/tr><\/thead><tbody><tr><td>All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome to one of our webinars in our 2026 webinar series. My name is Bri Price. I&#8217;m the WSU Bee Program Extension Coordinator. We have one more webinar upcoming in September, once bee season starts slowing down again, so this is our last one for the spring and we&#8217;ll have one more in September. For more information about that one and to register, you can visit our upcoming events page on our website, bees.wsu.edu. Before I introduce our speaker today, I just have a couple of announcements. The WSU Honeybees and Pollinators Program is a cornerstone of the College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences, 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 Connors Resilient Washington Initiative, we&#8217;re committed to advancing sustainable practices and pollinator-friendly landscapes, as well as ensuring a flourishing future for agriculture and natural resources. There will be time to answer any questions you have after the presentation today. Feel free to type your questions in the Q&amp;A box below anytime during the presentation. After this webinar, and before you close your browser, you&#8217;ll be prompted to answer a short five-question education outreach survey, and your participation in this really helps us understand our impact today.<br>Today&#8217;s speaker is Janae Becher. Janae is a PhD student at the Department of Entomology at Washington State University. She studies under the direction of Dr. Priya Chakrabarti Basu. Janae studies unique aspects of honeybee nutrition through several interdisciplinary research projects, including understanding nutritional changes from flower to bee to colony, nutritional quality differences between crops plant and plant varieties, and also focusing on implementing cost-effective and practical nutritional management practices for beekeepers. In this webinar, Janae will be discussing her research on bee nutrition and provide information on the needs of honeybees for forage and provisions. This webinar aims to increase beekeepers and the public&#8217;s knowledge of the macro and micronutrients bees need in a variety of landscapes. So, Janae, you can start sharing your screen, and I will hide my video.<\/td><td>Woman wearing glasses with Washington State University Logo in background. <\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Janae: Okay, awesome. Let me get my Powerpoint and I want to make sure that I&#8217;m presenting correctly, and I want to make sure that you&#8217;re seeing the correct screen. Bri, would you be able to confirm for me that you are?<br><br>Bri: Looks good.<br><br>Janae: Yay! Perfect. Well, as you just heard from Bri, I am Janae Becher, and I am a PhD student under Priya, and I&#8217;m going to be talking to you guys today about monocropping systems and bees.<\/td><td>Screen is shared. Title reads &#8220;Monocropping System and Bees&#8221;, Janae Becher, Ph.D. Student. www.bees.wsu.edu&#8221;<\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So just to start off, a quick little thing about me is that I came from Wazoo actually with Priya from Mississippi, where she was a professor before that, and I am originally from Minnesota, so I love the snow, as you can see by my dog here. This is Kira. She&#8217;s a golden doodle and she loves getting in the snow. I&#8217;m also still a part of the French Horn Ensemble here at WSU. And involved with our Graduate Student Association for Entomology, our entomology club for graduate students. So, lots of opportunities and things that I&#8217;m trying to get going in, and also keep going in, and having my passions rooted in WSU. Alrighty. <\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So back to monocropping systems. Let&#8217;s go.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So first off, what are the challenges in the monocopying systems? When we&#8217;re in a monocropping system, like the name entails, it&#8217;s mono, meaning one. So the bees, while they&#8217;re out there for the most part, only have one source of nutrition while they&#8217;re out pollinating.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>And that&#8217;s usually what we want as beekeepers, you know, because we&#8217;re trying to pollinate this one crop, usually for a grower who has hired us for that service or has made an agreement with you where you&#8217;re like, okay, I will get a benefit by feeding my bees and making honey, and then they&#8217;ll get help by making their yield hopefully increase. But with that, it&#8217;s still only one, it&#8217;s only one crop. And just like us humans, we can&#8217;t eat french fries every day. That&#8217;s not always the best thing for our diet. We need variety. So, with that, there&#8217;s a lack of pollen diversity, so that can cause, just different effects within the bee. Depending on the crop you&#8217;re on, you can have lack of pollen quality, which is like what we see in blueberries and carrot seeds. You can have different nutrition profiles based on the cultivar that they&#8217;re on. So even within one plant system, like for me, I have canola up here. Depending on the canola cultivar or known as variety, that nutrition profile can change as well. There might also be some insufficient nectar flow, so maybe more plants versus other species, different monocropping systems might have different nectar flows. So the bees might need to go to more plants to get that same amount of nectar, and also there can still be that pesticide residues in the drift, and I know that that&#8217;s something us as beekeepers are always watching out for, but that&#8217;s something that we can&#8217;t always control, just because we might not be notified, even though we should, of when these pesticides are being sprayed, and we want to move the bees, but there still might be those residues, and we don&#8217;t always know about it. So that&#8217;s still something that we encounter just within these monocropping landscapes.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So with honeybee nutrition. These honeybee, these landscapes differ by the plant and the crop variety, kind of like what I just said on the other slide. And it&#8217;s especially seen in some past studies within the monocropping systems and flowering regions. So I&#8217;ll bring the next slide to show those kind of data.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So within blueberries, what I mentioned, beekeepers have kind of been seeing those losses of colonies through the blueberry pollination. And we&#8217;re trying to figure out why. Is that because of pesticide poisoning? Is that the nutrition and the farming practices? Because, blueberries don&#8217;t always make the best pollen, and you&#8217;ll see that on my next slide. But also, is it because of disease? And that&#8217;s where European foulbrood has kind of been a question around that, and that&#8217;s where OSU, MSU, UC Davis, WSU, all are collaborating on this big this big grant to try to figure out if what are these issues? Is it European fat breed? Is it the nutrition? And just looking at all those aspects to try to really understand the underlying problem.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So, like I said, pollen production in blueberry cultivars can be different even between just 2 of them. So here we have Duke and Elliott, and you&#8217;ll see that the average weight of the pollen produced by the flower in milligrams. It&#8217;s very significantly different between Duke and Elliott. And again, when we look at the sterile concentrations of specific measured sterols. Again, certain ones are very different. We have our brassica, we have Delta 5. You can see how these graphs are very stark differences just between those two different cultivars of Duke and Elliott. This might determine what kind of things do you need to do as a beekeeper to make sure that you are properly feeding your bees while in this monocropping landscape.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So another thing I mentioned was those vegetable seed pollination. So within carrot seeds, and I have a picture here of Riley, which I think his talk is the next one in September. So he&#8217;ll give some good talk, good research on updates by then, carrot seeds, because nutrition kind of differs again, they don&#8217;t always have the sufficient nutrition, so they will travel far to try to get their food during that seed pollination. And that&#8217;s not ideal for the seed producers, because then they get mixed results of their varieties. They don&#8217;t get a pure set of their seed. So it causes issues just within, maybe not necessarily for the bees directly. I mean, the bees do have to travel farther. But it does still cause issues for those growers. So Riley is looking into what changes with the distance, looking at waggle dances, seeing how, , where they&#8217;re going, if he can change where the bees are located in the field, if that will change how far they&#8217;re going. Maybe trying to consolidate them to that field, maybe also giving them supplemental food, seeing if that keeps them on the field that they want. Just seeing how that all kind of plays in with each other, like, how do we affect that nutrition to keep the bees where we want them?<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Okay, so now moving on to pesticides. Again, this is just, like, going through all of the things that we&#8217;re seeing within monocropping systems of different aspects within the monocropping systems that we have for the bees. So, here we have pesticide exposure effects, and as you can see, I have different papers here showing exposure and how that affects the body of the honeybee, or the physiology, and it causes motor issues, it can cause issues in royal jelly production, it can cause oxidative stress in the honeybees and apoptosis, which is the dying of cells. So just based on those pesticide exposures, a lot of things can internally start to occur in those honeybees, which we know a lot about, but kind of going into a lens, we got to look at how nutrition might impact that pesticide [exposure].<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>\u00a0<br>So now moving on to the net nutrition. We know a little bit about agroecosystems and nutrition within these different landscapes. And a good review paper that kind of summarizes a bunch of this data is the paper that I have up here that was published with ESA, and I believe it is open source. So you should be able to find it, and it is talking about all these different all the data that we have available at that time when that review is made of these different crops and what their nutrition is, or what nutrition data was available for bees in that crop. So I&#8217;ll show the next slide, kind of summarizing that. So, there was two tables. We have the crop type, and then how much acreage was in the United States, what type of pollination; Is it wind pollinated? Does it need insect pollination? Does it self-pollinate? All that kind of stuff. What kind of nectar percentage? So like this is brix percentage, which is like percent sugars, and there&#8217;s also a pollen protein percentage. There&#8217;s also pollen lipid percentage. And then we, at the end, we have pollen lipid ratios, which are abbreviated to \u201cP:L\u201d, and then there&#8217;s notes and references actually showing those papers directly, so you can able you&#8217;re able to look them up.<br>But on here, I tried to point out certain ones just because I&#8217;m in the Pacific Northwest, and my research is about canola. I&#8217;m looking down at the bottom here, and canola\u2026 Total acreage, a pretty good amount, and entomophilic, meaning it likes having the bees. Personally, I know that it doesn&#8217;t need to be pollinated by insects, but it does do better when it is and it has a very high sugar content. You see up there that it&#8217;s around the 80%, 70%. Every canola that I&#8217;ve gotten has been above 70%, which I think you as beekeepers might be aware that canola does crystallize pretty quickly when you&#8217;re producing honey.<br>And then again, we have our pollen proteins, 26, and then protein lipids, 25, and you can see that 1 to 1 ratio within canola. But as my research is looking up, we&#8217;re trying to see if there actually is always that one-to-one ratio. There seems to be a few little variations, actually. And as my research progresses, we&#8217;ll see more with that.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Okay, so again, I just have another table here. We have our tree nuts. So almonds is in this table. You&#8217;ll see that almonds has still 30% nectar sugar content, which is still pretty good compared to some other species, especially within the monocropping systems. And lipids, proteins, you&#8217;ll see that those ratios do vary a lot depending on the crop that your bees are on. And, yeah, this is, again, a table that is available to you all and this can help you understand what nutrition is available to your bees while they&#8217;re in a certain system.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Alrighty. So again, I&#8217;m back to more pollen nutrition in agroecosystems. So we&#8217;re looking at on these 2 papers. They&#8217;re looking at what pollen are these bees collecting while they&#8217;re in these monocropping systems, because the bees are not going to just stay always on that one crop. Yes, that will probably be the majority of what they&#8217;re going after, especially honey bees, because of their floral fidelity. But, if there&#8217;s other stuff in the area, especially with floral buffers or maybe some trees in the area, or like a little bit of a wetland, like a water barrier, or maybe creeks for tiling and everything like that. There could still be those plant barriers that have other stuff in it. Also, what if you&#8217;re by another field that&#8217;s growing another crop? The bees might still go in between those different plants. So what these are looking at is what pollen are they bringing in while they&#8217;re in this system of a monocropping agricultural ecosystem. So they&#8217;re trying to see, okay, what is this nutrition that&#8217;s available to the bees and how does this really affect what we as beekeepers might need to do or what other kind of research should we be looking into.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Okay, again, more about these different pollen nutrition and agroecosystems. Again, I&#8217;m kind of pointing out that there&#8217;s a trend that there&#8217;s a lot of research out there and available. I don&#8217;t know if all of these\u2026 I&#8217;ll have to look up again if they&#8217;re all public source. But you can always look up these titles and see if you can read them in abstracts and also there&#8217;s still a lot of information out there if you&#8217;re not able to get this one paper. And you have educational resources, so you can always reach out to us, too. Within this, it kind of talks more about how again, sustainable agriculture, pollination, ecology. How does this affect the honeybee performance while they&#8217;re in an agroecosystem, especially with the different crop diversities. There&#8217;s actually different statistical models that are out there as well that kind of talk about how we can kind of predict, in a way, of what will be, the effect of us putting those bees in there, and what will be available to them. <\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So now I&#8217;ve kind of talked about what is all available. So now we&#8217;re going to shift to what can we do, because we have all this information, and we know all these issues. We can keep doing proper maintenance of our hives, just like with any disease or problem we have with our bees. We need to keep our bees healthy just from the start by keeping their hives dry, keeping them ventilated, make sure that they&#8217;re fed to prevent any colony stress and disease, within that, we also have our residues of pesticide exposures. That&#8217;s, again, working with your growers in the area as much as you&#8217;re able to, because I know that that&#8217;s not always something that you have full control over, and it&#8217;s definitely an anxiety going out into the field and being like, well what&#8217;s going to happen? But again, when you have those built relationships with your growers, they usually want to make sure that your bees are going to survive while they&#8217;re on your crop. Otherwise, that&#8217;s a bad relationship for both of you. Okay, feeding. Kind of like the main thing that I&#8217;ve been talking about. They&#8217;re supplemental or substitute feeding that the bee diet can have while pollinating and poor nutrition. It doesn&#8217;t replace everything, but it definitely will help your bees while they&#8217;re in that pollinating system that might not be the best for their health because I know that we have to do a kind of a cost-benefit analysis of the health of our bees versus the profit that we&#8217;re going to make and that&#8217;s definitely understandable. If you want, you can also collect pollen and honey from a nutritional crop earlier in the season or store for later in the season, or for maybe another time where you have dearth, which is when you don&#8217;t have enough nutrition. So you&#8217;re just collecting extra stores that later. This is already stuff that they put energy and time into creating for themselves that you can feed back to them later, and give them those resources to help them thrive, even when they&#8217;re in that poor nutrition area, and that kind of goes into the other point below, is you can feed those resources to bees during other poor nutrition cycles. And that&#8217;s even if you don&#8217;t, collect the pollen and honey yourself, that&#8217;s where certain beekeepers, there is stuff out there where you can buy pollen, and you&#8217;re able to mix it in with a feed. You can also make your own patties, but I&#8217;ll get that in just a second. You can also plant flower buffers in pollination crops if possible. So again, this is where having a good relationship with your growers, especially if this is a \u00a0every year kind of thing that you&#8217;re doing with your grower, and it&#8217;s a really long partnership, this might be something that&#8217;s available to you all, where you add those plant buffers, on the sides, maybe. And that can give some more nutrition availability, especially in those crops that might not give as much good nutrition.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Okay, so again, reducing pesticides. You&#8217;re following the label. You&#8217;re making sure that your growers are following the label as you can. Avoid spraying whenever the bees might be out flying. So we&#8217;re trying to spray at night, or right when the bees are coming in, or making sure that it&#8217;s not, during a bloom, and I know that that can be hard, especially with different, plants, just because that might be when that pest is out. So it&#8217;s hard to do that timing and also avoid spraying and standing water, just because that pesticide can stay there, and how it breaks down into the into the water table and into the ground will be different than when it was sprayed on a foliar when it was done in a foliar application or maybe out in the air or anything like that, it will have a different chemical breakdown and process.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So again, just a brief thing again of just showing what this label looks like for protection of pollinators and the specific sign that you would see on the bee hazard icon for any pesticides that would indicate a threat to bees. So this is something with your grower, so you could maybe indicate to them and ask them if they have this symbol on any of their pesticides, and they can try to make a plan, make sure that this is sprayed during an appropriate time. Maybe find alternatives. Just those kinds of things where, again, you and the grower want to communicate about these issues and make sure that you are keeping your bees safe and you are and you both the grower and you are responsible.<br>Okay. Why isn&#8217;t it such? Oh shoot. I guess my slides are a little. Can you hear me? I&#8217;m sorry my slide advancer stopped working.<br>Bri: Yeah, we can still hear you. You can stop sharing and reshare if you&#8217;d like to troubleshoot.<br>Janae: Okay. I&#8217;ll try to do that quick, guys. Stop sharing. There. Okay. Let me see if I can start this thing right back up where it was. I&#8217;m going to try sharing my screen again. Microsoft Powerpoint share. And I&#8217;m going to present, continue to share. And Bri, can you confirm that we have the proper slide? And it&#8217;s on the correct screen, not my notes.<br>Bri: Yes, it looks. It&#8217;s on the EPA advisory box side.<br>Janae: Awesome.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Alrighty. So nutrition and pesticides again. So kind of like what I was talking about earlier, they go together. There is dependence with each other of dietary phytochemicals and honeybees exposed to pesticides, and we can see that in other micronutrients as well, how, , if you have poor nutrition, that can also cause synergistic effects, where that neonicotinoid pesticide stress can cause reduced survival in your bees. So if you don&#8217;t have good nutrition. Your bees are going to suffer more from those pesticides. Let&#8217;s see. And then genomic analysis, we look at how those interactions between the pesticides interact with those bees that have nutrition. Again, looking at how the synergistic effects of poor nutrition versus good nutrition. And we&#8217;re looking at how the better your bees are with their nutrition, or, like, the more stress they have because they don&#8217;t have good because they don&#8217;t have good nutrition, we see that trend line of a synergistic effect, which means that it will be even worse combined together than if they were a part where you had bad nutrition, your survival would be at one rate, and your pesticides survival would be at a different rate when you combine them, they reduce survival, that death rate goes down a lot faster. And then, finally, again, we have another thing just showing in honeybee colony level exposures in realistic settings, how this application simulates the residues in corn pollen. So we&#8217;re looking at how even if we had residues on corn pollen. How does this affect that nutrition and pesticide relationship?<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>And then I think I have even more! So we&#8217;re looking again here now at the microbiome, and looking at bee bread, and how bee bread displays adaptations to distinct features in the hive. So, like, this is how we&#8217;re kind of adapting with our nutrition and how that helps our bee health. And then we&#8217;re also looking at variations in pesticide toxicity when they consume again those phytochemicals, just like in that other paper. And how this might be different within their honeys versus &#8211; not necessarily versus &#8211; but, in our honeys as well, in addition to those other studies that we&#8217;re looking at, the pollen. And then we also have increased longevity, especially against that pesticide toxicity, because they&#8217;re getting those dietary phytochemicals. So it&#8217;s, again, helping them within that, aspect. And then one more. Honeybee immune system responses, to these trace concentrations of clothianidin. You have to look past those macronutrients found in the artificial diets. So I&#8217;ve been talking a lot about phytochemicals, minerals, all those things. Those are the small micronutrients. They are really important, just as we see with our macronutrients, which is like your pollen, your lipids, your carbohydrates. Like, those are your needed energy sources that they help increase your fat bodies on your bee. They give you the energy, but then those small phytochemicals, your phytosterols, your minerals, they all are helping important systems within different glandular systems &#8211; royal Jelly, vitellogenin &#8211; all these different things that really keep your bees at a stable level and improve their overall longevity.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>So with that, the honeybee Health Coalition put together a comprehensive best management practices for hive health. And I actually have a QR code that will bring you to their website, which is where this big long PDF is located that you can download, and it gives you a basic introduction to all stuff beekeeping, brings you about a bunch of personal safety. Just like with the stinging, and also tools to keep you safe (PPE). But then also we talk about apiary maintenance. So that&#8217;s talking about what you need to give your bees at specific times, how to minimize the risks of pesticides, and also integrative pest management for your Varroa. So not only am I talking about nutrition, but in here, this whole introspective booklet is giving you all of this information that you will love as a beekeeper.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>It&#8217;s all in one spot, and it gives you a bunch of sources, and then on this next slide, you&#8217;ll see that it gives you a seasonal summary of how to feed your bees, and what to give them when so it tells you about sugar feeding their water, pollen supplemental feeding, what time of year you need to do what. If you want to stimulate your brood, what do you need to do for that? If you want to get good splits, if you want to get feed up and build bulk up your bees. All of that is available to you all.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Okay, other things that kind of talk about management of bees. So in the book foraging behavior of the Honeybee, Apis mellifera. Priya and Ramesh both worked on chapter 8 of this book. Where they&#8217;re looking at managed foraging for honeybee and crop pollination, and looking at honeybees and livestock. So, similar to that, Honeybee Health Coalition, they&#8217;re again giving these full, comprehensive data on what you should do to properly manage your bees. And then I have another paper, , both Ramesh and Priya, are on this again, but we also have Anthony. If you know a lot of these researchers, we see them a lot at all of our big conferences, so you know we&#8217;re doing our best here. And it&#8217;s it should be a very standardized practice and methods for pollinator research. So we&#8217;re really trying to make a standardized procedure to help understand and do research in within the bee field to give you this, just like we have our managed practices, we also have our research practices. So we have to make sure that we&#8217;re consistent when we&#8217;re giving you all that information.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>\u00a0<br>Okay, so kind of talked about this a little bit. We have the macronutrients versus the micronutrients. Diverse forage is important. You can&#8217;t get everything from just your pollen patties and your sugar and syrup, or from your supplemental diets and your substitutional diets. They are not the same as natural forage, like your pollen or your nectar. They are able to get close, especially when you&#8217;re not in a good system for nutrition, but you need to make sure to keep, getting your bees the forage that they need at least eventually when you&#8217;re able to, because I know, again, cost-benefit analysis. How are you going to make your bees the healthiest possible for the most benefit to you?<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>And then again, floral diversity. We&#8217;re talking about this constantly. Floral diversity, abundance, and availability. You need to make sure that these bees have available resources to feed on. This means that you need bloom all year round, that they&#8217;re able to go to. They need to be able to find a lot of it. It can&#8217;t just be a few flowers here and there, and it needs to have a variety of different species. Because, again, they need to find the nutrition, the proper balance. They need to have their salad, not just their french fries.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Okay, so how can we improve the bee habitat? Well, like I mentioned, we have our flower buffers. We also have flower mixes. You can buy seed mixes. Make sure to check with your local pollinator plant recommendations. So that&#8217;s, like, with your local community. Usually there&#8217;s conservation groups that you can look up and find what is native to your area. Also, lots of university extension resources. So to show that here&#8217;s a flower buffer example. Flower mixes Project Apis M actually has a few different seeds for bees mixes. And for extension resources, I put out here Oregon State University&#8217;s Garden Ecology Lab, and I also have the Master Gardeners of Washington on here. And they have their websites talking about the bee sources and how we can give them, pollinator resources native to their area.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Okay, so flower buffers. I have this photo again, kind of showing that we have our flowers here, and then we have that monocropping system right next to it. And there&#8217;s a paper here showing almond pollination service and the inter row crop cover cropping, and how this improves, or how this affects the colony strength and performance of the honeybees, and then also landscape enhancement of floral resources for honeybees in agroecosystems. So exactly what we&#8217;re talking about here, and this is another paper that&#8217;s available in Apidologie, that again talks about how these flower buffers interact with these monocropping systems.<br>Okay, even more papers. So I have one from actually Gf\u00f6, which is the Ecological Society of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. So they have things about integrated crop pollination in buffers for the spatial and temporal variability within the pollinator activity, because pollinator activity is not always constant. So we need to keep that again, that diversity, the availability. There&#8217;s also a paper which is about native habitat mitigating that feast famine conditions where we have honeybees in agricultural landscape. They&#8217;re getting a lot of food, and then all of a sudden that bloom kind of ends. And then they&#8217;ve already built up their levels of bees to be kind of higher. So they&#8217;re expecting to still get that same amount of food, and then all of a sudden, it goes. So you need to have, again, diversity, abundance, and different yearly different plants blooming all year round.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Okay, so again, I mentioned Oregon State. So this is the Garden Ecology Lab. And this is for the \u201cfor gardeners\u201d page, but it has resources for bees, biocontrol with your native plants, diet for specialist bees, so certain bees only want certain flowers, they need certain ratios, so they&#8217;ll go after, and you&#8217;re able to provide exactly what they need for them. Leafcutter bees, if you didn&#8217;t know, they like to make their nests sometimes out of petals. And also out of leaves, so it gives you preferences with that. And also different microbes that are in the ground that actually help both your plants, but also maybe help with that nutrition eventually, too, for your bees.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Okay, so then again, I&#8217;m going with those seed for bees mixes with Pam. And 1st off I see that pollinator brassica, and I want to point your attention to Priya and Ramesh again evaluated these nutritional compositions of these seed mixes from Pam. So there is a paper out there evaluating these seed mixes for their nutrition, so if that&#8217;s something you&#8217;re interested, you can look that up and actually see the data on how these seed mixes produce certain nutrition for your bees. Then we also have our Nitro Builders, that&#8217;s, like, again, for nitrogen fixation. We also have our bee yard short, so, like, just a mix of a whole bunch of flowers, and then beard tall, so we&#8217;re kind of talking bee yard, we&#8217;re talking short flowers versus tall flowers. So depending on what you want around your bees, if you want to have easy access versus you want to go through a jungle. It&#8217;s up to you.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Okay, grasses. Why are grasses important to have in our flower mixes? Well, they really help kind of stabilize that ground and really keep that keep erosion from happening, reduce runoff. They dig deep roots, they bring up nutrients from deep in the ground, and they really help the flowers around them. So that&#8217;s where they actually give a recommendation for the amount of plants and everything that you should have as well in there so about 10 to 20% of the pollinator seed mix should be comprised of those grasses. And also, they serve as good habitat. So that&#8217;s where you have your butterfly species kind of laying their eggs on the grasses, and caterpillars use it as food sources. So it creates that integrated pollinator system that we want.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>\u00a0Okay, so kind of to bring you to this, the native plants. So in the Pacific Northwest we&#8217;ve had a few studies on native plants and native cultivars, and their plant pollinator traits. So this is where we&#8217;re looking again at. We&#8217;re looking at nectar volume, nectar sugar content, and we&#8217;re looking at how, based on the genus or the genera, which is the plural form, depending on the genera, if they&#8217;re more related to each other in the genera, the more similar they are in their nectar volume. You can see sometimes also in their sugar content, and we can go now to the pollens with their lipid and protein ratios. You see how there might be more similar to each other versus more different. And then even when we plot those protein and lipid ratios, see how clustered the Clarkia are, and it shows like based on the genre, they usually try to, they usually have similar nutrition available. So that&#8217;s why it&#8217;s important to have a diversity of genera in these flower mixes.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>\u00a0Now we&#8217;re at the projects that we, as the Basu Lab are working on. So this is Priya, and there&#8217;s me.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>And we actually are creating the 1st pollen nutrition database for North America. So that is where we are looking to see what is available for the nutritional quality of the habitats chosen for bees in North America. So\u2026 we have over 54 citizen scientists across the US and Canada, and that number is still growing. So if you&#8217;re interested, you can totally get into our project. So far, we only have a fraction of the amount of plants that exist that produce pollen and nectar and everything. So we only have 100 plants collected so far. But again, lots of efforts to keep continuing this. And you see that we have citizen sciences collecting pollen with vacuums. Lauren is collecting some pollen with her vacuum down there. So Lauren actually is originally with us from MSU, and she&#8217;s actually finishing up her PhD right now. She&#8217;s defending very soon. And yeah, many diverse ways for you all to get involved this way.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>We also have the National Pollen Atlas, and this is where beekeepers are our citizen scientists. And that&#8217;s where we&#8217;re tracking the colonies for pollen collection over multiple years, trying to see if that pollen bloom or the flower bloom is changing depending on the aspects of the landscape, maybe the year, maybe we had just different conditions for the plants to grow. So we&#8217;re just seeing how that affects what pollen they&#8217;re bringing in what the nutrition is like for them.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>And then finally, we have the palynology database. So palynology is looking at the pollen grains. So we&#8217;re identifying the species of the plant by the by the pollen grain and we do this via acetolysis. And again, we&#8217;re using those vacuums, and we&#8217;re collecting pollen that way. We&#8217;re taking citizen science groups out, like 4-H has actually been a part of this. Honeybee colonies, we can again collect some pollen from there and it&#8217;s just a way for us to make that palynology database where we see what is the plant based on the pollen, because then you, as a beekeeper, could maybe collect some pollen, be like, what is this? And then we can help identify.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>And actually, going back to that pollen atlas, you see this Pantone color here? We actually match the Pantone, once we kind of have this database made, because we&#8217;ve analyzed the nutrition of these plants, you hopefully, if you bring out a Pantone, you have your pollen, you can identify it by the color and then you could look up and the color should associate pretty closely with a flower species. You&#8217;ll know what flower it is, and you&#8217;ll be able to look up in that database what that flower&#8217;s nutrition is and what is, and what is available to your bees for that time.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Okay. So then we have Allu. Ally is our new postdoc in the lab. She started in January, actually, and she&#8217;s looking at non-crop floral resources, also known as NCFRs, on bees in apple orchards. So, kind of talking about those floral buffers again, she&#8217;s looking at how these flower strips integrate into apple orchards meaningfully increase the diversity and nutritional quality of bee forage. Does this help them? Does it hinder them? Does it bring in more wild bees to help the apple orchard system? Does it distract the managed bees that are already in there? How does it help the health and the performance of two managed species, the honeybees and the blueberries?<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Okay, then we have European foulbrood, which is again, we&#8217;re looking at blueberries, which we kind of talked about at the beginning of this presentation. Mckaela, another PhD student in our lab. She&#8217;s looking at the physiological impacts of European foul brood on honeybees. We have seen that European foulbrood is a serious threat to honeybees, especially within pollinating blueberries. So how does this infect the honeybee physiology? Can nutrition help alleviate these harmful symptoms? And again, this is a collaborative effort between Oregon, California, Washington, and Mississippi. So Mckaela is gathering all these samples to look at how that bee physiology is affected depending on the nutrition, depending on nutrition and the European foul brood disease load or infection load, and we&#8217;re kind of seeing what does that correlate to?<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>And then we have my research! I am understanding the many facets of bee nutrition under the lens of canola. So optimal nutrition is key for maintaining healthy bees. That&#8217;s kind of the whole theme of this presentation. So how do different nutrients shape different bee species, physiology and colony health? So I&#8217;m looking within bumblebees within honeybees. How do these nutritional aspects differ, especially across a honeybee colony across the season, maybe as well. What is the process of nutritional metabolism from the flower to the bee to the nest? So that&#8217;s where I&#8217;m looking at differences in nutritional composition as the bee collects it from the flower, manipulates it, and then brings it to the hive before it&#8217;s consumed. There&#8217;s some processes there that we need to know a little bit more information about. And then also, like I&#8217;ve mentioned, I&#8217;m looking at different cultivars within canola system. So far I&#8217;ve collected 9 different varieties, cultivars, and seen how they differ within their nectar content, their percent brix, which is like their sugar content. How much pollen they produce, what is their protein contents, what are the lipid contents? And then also looking at how native bee populations change when they&#8217;re in that crop over the bloom period. So from pre-peak and post-bloom &#8211; what is happening there as this resource comes and goes?<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Okay, so thank you all so much for listening. I I&#8217;m very happy to thank all the people that have helped me with this research and of my funding sources as well. And I do want to mention before I forget.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>We do have a survey as well. That&#8217;s a separate survey from what you&#8217;re going to get at the end. But this is the Us. Beekeeping survey for colony loss and management. So this is put on and supported by multiple organizations you see here. And that&#8217;s to help us get information on what we can do and what is happening around us with these bees. And then, yeah, ask your club leaders, your master beekeepers, instructors, and if you can receive public service credits for participating. So, like, it&#8217;s a way for you to try to get some more effort, even if you&#8217;re if you&#8217;re taking those classes, maybe put that effort of doing the survey to that. And that&#8217;s all I have. So I&#8217;m ready for some questions. Awesome. Yeah, Bri, I see your note about all the surveys. Nice.<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><tr><td>Bri: I did put two surveys in the, , in the chat for everyone to see. Dewey Caron, who runs the Pacific Northwest Honeybee Survey was just nudging to say, hey, I mentioned this one too. So both of those ones are in the chat. They&#8217;re very helpful to answer. What&#8217;s cool about Dewey Caron&#8217;s survey, PNW honeybee survey, \u00a0is he can visit beekeeper clubs in the area and talk more specifically about club-level, results, if enough people from a club answer. So if you&#8217;re in a beekeeping club in Washington, I highly recommend taking advantage of that perk. If there&#8217;s any questions about Janae&#8217;s presentation, or what research is happening, feel free to put it in the Q&amp;A box. I will just sit here for a little longer to see if any questions come through or give you some time to type. Otherwise, I will also send a follow-up email with the link to this recording and Janae&#8217;s email. So if you think of questions later on, you can, definitely email or ask her.<br>So, yeah, John, the chat, the chat is disabled for attendees, but your questions will come through in the Q&amp;A box like it has. So you can put anything there that you&#8217;d like to ask.<br><br>[Pause]<br><br>Okay, so I don&#8217;t see any questions coming through. So, like I said, if you think of some questions later on, you&#8217;re welcome to email Janae. We do have one more webinar coming up this year in September. And yes, you were right, Janae, the next one is about Riley&#8217;s research in carrot seed pollination, so that&#8217;ll be very interesting. Before you close your browser, remember to answer that five-question survey. That&#8217;s very helpful for us to understand our impact today, and we really appreciate you attending one of our webinars this year. I\u2019m going to end the webinar. Thank you!<\/td><td><\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Text Transcript with Description of Visuals Audio Visual All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome to one of our webinars in our 2026 webinar series. My name is Bri Price. I&#8217;m the WSU Bee Program Extension Coordinator. We have one more webinar upcoming in September, once bee season starts slowing down again, so this is our last [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8511,"featured_media":0,"parent":21,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1155"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8511"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1155"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1159,"href":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1155\/revisions\/1159"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahnrs.wsu.edu\/descriptive-transcripts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}