Transcript: Dr. SAMUEL RAMSEY on Bee Population in Peril /210
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Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. Today I’m speaking with Dr. Samuel Ramsey, whose enduring interest in insect biology started 23 years ago and shows no signs of waning.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey “We have redeveloped land in so many different ways, that just aren’t always good for bees”
Ayana Young His award-winning research on Varroa biology has changed the standing paradigm on how this parasite ultimately kills honey bees.
He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Entomology from Cornell University in 2011 focusing his research on predator/parasite behavior. His current work, aptly named the Fight the Mite Initiative, was funded largely by the beekeeping community. It focuses on the poorly understood [Trop-ill-A-laps] Tropilaelaps mite which is rapidly establishing itself as the next threat to apiculture globally. He is now based in Thailand studying the biology and behavior of this pest and what it will ultimately take to kill it, ensuring in the event of its arrival in the US, we’ll have the knowledge and resources to respond effectively.
Having earned his doctorate from Dr. Dennis vanEngelsdorp’s lab at the University of Maryland; Dr. Ramsey maintains a focus on how insect research can benefit the public through the development of IPM strategies and STEM-based outreach initiatives.
Well, Dr. Ramsey, thank you so much for joining me today. I am really looking forward to this conversation.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey I'm so glad to be here. Any day I get to talk about bees is a good day.
Ayana Young Oh, wonderful. Well, to start off, this will be a little challenging question on bees or I guess challenging in the sense that they're going through a really hard time and for many years, we’ve heard about the grave danger presented by Colony Collapse Disorder, and most recently, that of widespread insect extinction, but beyond these headlines, we rarely hear any follow up, leaving us to assume the worst...To begin, I wonder if you can give listeners a primer on the status of bees globally, and how they are currently fairing. Is Colony Collapse Disorder still a main threat to our honeybees, or has it become a common misconception? Are other species of bees, aside from honeybees, declining?
Dr. Samuel Ramsey I think the first thing to consider here is that we have developed a focus on bees that I'm really glad to see right now, because honeybees are so integral to the ecosystem, to maintaining the health of plant communities that ultimately are very important for maintaining the rest of the organisms that exist in the environment. So honeybees are incredibly important, as are the native bees. And oftentimes, we have such a focus on the honeybees themselves that we rarely get around to the native bees, our bumble bees, our carpenter bees, our sweat bees, all of them are seeing declines in populations. They are dealing with disease, chemical inputs into the environment, a reduction in their natural environmental conditions from individuals encroaching on their territory. And so there's a lot that all goes into this all at once.
The thing that really seems to have gotten everyone's attention is the colony collapse disorder, that has really become a buzzword as this subject goes forward. Everyone knows colony collapse disorder. CCD is a great acronym and a really frightening subject for a lot of people. But as you mentioned, in your introduction to this, there's been a lot of talk about it, but not a lot of follow up around where things are and what exactly is going on. Colony Collapse Disorder was an issue that kind of showed up around 2006 2007 and it was rather problematic to see that colonies of honeybees were just kind of dropping off the radar.
In order for a honeybee colony to exist in any healthy system, there has to be what we call the super organism complex present where there are tons and tons of bees inside of a colony, and they're all working together with different behaviors that keeps the colony healthy. And what we saw in Colony Collapse Disorder is colonies that normally have 30,000 or 40,000 bees in them all with their own jobs, taking care of the Queen and the young and procuring food and defending the colony, one day, they would look just fine and then the next day you'd return and that colony that used to have 30,000 or 40,000, bees would just have a few hundred, which is not enough to sustain the entire colony. So there’d just be a queen running around and very few bees there to take care of her, or the brood. And this sort of vanishing bee situation that we were seeing there was huge, because for most of us alive, we had never seen anything like it, and we didn't know what to do about it. It seemed to be the canary in the coal mine in the system. So it attracted a lot of attention, but the fact that Colony Collapse has been seen in the past, more than half a decade, hasn’t really attracted nearly as much attention.
Colony Collapse Disorder, it turns out was not the problem. We're still seeing huge losses of bees without that particular terrifying syndrome being a problem. We know that there is a multi faceted issue here that goes beyond Colony Collapse Disorder, it's very possible that Colony Collapse Disorder was just the thing that got our attention, kind of the exclamation point at the end of a very long and very concerning sentence about the state of our ecosystem. It turns out that bees have been dying as a result of pesticides, poor nutrition and parasites as the primary issues. It turns out out of all of these issues, parasites have been the key driving factor in the issues that we have been seeing with honeybee health decline.
And so as we consider what we're going to do about this, we have to think of this as a multi faceted, multi pronged approach. Because if we only tackle one of these issues, we really can't get our bee populations back to where they were. And with that in mind, as we focus on the honeybees, because a lot of the focus has been on honeybees because of how intimately connected they are with our food systems, how we are able to sell their honey, how a lot of people keep them intentionally in their backyards or on their farms, that connection with them has brought us into this subject with a focus on the honeybees, but our carpenter bee species, our bumblebees, our sweat bees, our leaf cutter bees, the wool-carter bees, there's so many native bees out here that are also suffering, and our efforts need to focus on them as well. So that's my deep dive into Colony Collapse Disorder as things currently are.
Ayana Young Well, thanks for that. That makes a lot of sense. And now you’re most notably known for your work on the varroa mite, which is much less talked about by the general public, but has arguably completely reconfigured beekeeping over the past couple of decades. What does this parasitic mite do to the European honeybee population and what are the impacts worldwide? Will beekeepers ever get a handle on varroa, or is it just a matter of mitigation?
Dr. Samuel Ramsey Great questions. Varroa destructor is just a crazy parasite. And I mean, even when you hear the name, Varroa destructor, this is what the scientific community decided to call this creature when it was officially named in the year 2000. Because for a while, we were confused about the existence of this organism altogether. We thought that we were looking at a totally different species. We thought that it was varroa jacobsoni, and when we realized that this was actually a totally different species entirely. We named this one Varroa destructor because it is so much more destructive to honeybees than parasites that we had seen in recent years.
It was clear to the beekeeping community, to the scientific community that this organism was kind of a next level sort of parasite because we've dealt with things like tracheal mites, we've dealt with parasitic organisms like Nosema ceranae, which is an intestinal parasite of the bees, and the honey bee tracheal mites are a parasite of the breathing system of the bees, and while both of them cause a number of issues by themselves, they weren't able to destroy the feral colonies of honeybees that existed in the US at that time. The bees had learned somehow to exist in their presence, and they weren't driven to the brink of extinction with these parasites alone, but if we look at our bees that are just existing in the environment, what we call feral bees, these are bees that are not being managed by a beekeeper, they're not inside of those boxes that you can see in people's yards or on farms. These are bees that are existing in the knotholes of a tree, in a stump somewhere, and we've had plenty of those for years and years and years and years and years throughout the US, but when Varroa destructor arrived within 10 years of its arrival, it had driven these bees, their populations down more than 99%. And even now, where we find bees that are inside of a tree hole or something, it's oftentimes a swarm from a beekeepers colony from that season, they tend not to be able to survive an entire year in the face of this parasite. So we know Varroa destructor is something else entirely. It's a type of brood parasite. And so when we talk about honeybees, they have different stages to their lifecycle. They exist originally as an egg, that egg develops into a larva, that sort of this white worm like thing, no legs, no eyes, no wings, it looks nothing like what we think of as a bee. And in order for the bee colony to get those helpless little worms to be adults, they feed them, a lot of food, brood, food, royal jelly, bits of pollen, honey, all of that comes together to form a diet that allows these bees to grow up big and strong. And then right when they're transitioning from being a juvenile into an adult, there's a pupil stage where they don't move at all. They just sit there and over the course of more than a week, they're developing. Eventually, they develop eyes, mouth, parts, wings, sexual organs, and they start to look like what we think of as bees. But during this period of time, they are totally defenseless. And so the bees themselves, in order to signal to the rest of the colony, “We no longer need to feed this bee, it's not going to move or grow any more than it has now” they put a wax covering over the cell that they raised that be in and for the next several days that bee develops under that wax covering where it's protected from all the other inputs that could go into the system. The varroa mite bro destructors figured that out and learned that it can creep into the cell right before the bees seal it, and as it's inside of that cell over the course of several days protected from the rest of the colony, protected from from prying eyes, sealed in there with a good source of controlled humidity and temperature, it's able to raise its family, that entire family of mites will feed on this bee.
The oldest mite will pierce the exoskeleton, the mother of all of these mites, and she'll start laying eggs, and all of the babies will feed through that hole. Unfortunately, in the process, they are harming this bee, so they're causing damage to it. They're also withdrawing tissue from the bee that's very important to the development of that bee into an adult. Now for years and years, we thought that this might was just withdrawing a small amount of the bee's blood. And while that seemed problematic, it didn't seem that problematic. It seemed more like a mosquito or tick the way that it will draw some blood out of you. And if it doesn't inject some sort of bacterium or virus into your body in the process, you're probably fine. Right? Well, with Varroa we thought something similar. But it was work that I conducted as a graduate student at the University of Maryland College Park, where I found out that this parasite is actually removing a tissue from the bee called the fat body. And this tissue is a lot like the liver of the bee but it does a lot of other functions as well.
It's integral to the metamorphic process, that the beach transitioning from being a pupa into an adult, this tissue is actually intimately involved in rearranging all of the tissues that used to exist as the larva's body into the complex organism that is the bee. And as the mites are removing these nutrients, they're removing chunks of this tissue. They are reducing the capacity of the bee to metamorphose into what it needs to be. And they are creating problems in this process that can lead to deformities and these bees that they will have for the rest of their lives. They weaken the bees, they're moving proteins at the same time, introducing bacteria and creating a hole that bacteria and viruses and things can easily enter through. And so they cause a lot, a lot, a lot of problems. They also reduce the capacity of the bee to deal with xenobiotics and outside chemicals that can come into the bees body. So when that bee emerges as an adult, it's a lot more vulnerable to chemical pesticides. It has less fat storage ability, and so it's a lot more vulnerable to poor nutrition. And so as researchers have been finding that the bees are dying as a result of what we've been calling the three P's, parasites, pesticides and poor nutrition, what they found is that the parasites are driving the issues with the other two. The vulnerability to pesticides, the vulnerability to poor nutrition are being driven by these parasites that are destroying a tissue that would normally allow the bees to contend more easily with these stress factors. And so Varroa destructor is quite a link in this chain of declining honeybee health issues that we've been seeing over the past couple of decades.
Ayana Young Oh, thank you for explaining that with such detail I was with you the whole time hanging on every word. And it's really fascinating and disturbing to understand this better. And I want to talk a little bit more about the use of pesticides, and it’s frequently cited as a contributing factor to insect decline. In fact, authors of a scientific review on insect decline wrote that a comprehensive reduction in pesticide use could prevent the extinction of over 40 percent of the world’s insect population. And so I’d like to talk a bit more about pesticides, but perhaps you can speak about it in context to Varroa, as well. Your work has shown that varroa is so detrimental because it targets the fat bodies of the bees, and it’s this same fat body tissue that allows bees to detoxify from pesticides...What role are pesticides playing in observed honeybee health decline and how can we reduce chemicals that are put into colonies, miticides included?
Dr. Samuel Ramsey Yes, that's a great question, because it's not simply the agricultural insecticides going into colonies are the insecticides that are being used for home and lawn care. But it's also these pesticides that are being intentionally put into the colony to reduce the parasite itself that's driving this issue. And so it almost seems like a situation where it's just impossible to win, because if we want to reduce our dependence on pesticides, right now, one of the one of the effective means at our disposal to get rid of the organisms that are causing these issues is a chemical that we're putting into the system itself.
So it's, unfortunately, a situation for which there aren't actually super easy answers here. Everything has unintended consequences. There's a balancing act going on here. Because within agricultural systems, there are a lot of insects that are feeding on crops, they are integral parts of the environment themselves, they are just doing what it is that evolution over time has trained them to do. They found all of these incredible crops that we've been growing, that exist as a source of food for them and normally, they just don't exist in numbers like that. They're not so densely packed in one area. But by creating a system where they're densely packed, they're all typically monocultures. So they're all the same genetically. It allows for these organisms to get into the fields and just kind of run wild there, populations can grow huge. And unfortunately, the way that we have industrialized the system without the input of chemicals into it, in its current form, it is unsustainable. And so agriculturally, as we use these different sorts of chemicals, they end up in more than just the leaves of the plant that a lot of the insects that we're trying to get rid of are eating.
A lot of these chemicals are now systemic. And while that allows for the agricultural system to exist in a way where we're not as frequently needing to fly a plane that just releases this plume of insecticide as it goes, which was just putting so much chemical into the environment. Now, chemicals are typically coated on the seed itself when it's planted into the ground in there, and there are fungicides here that are keeping the seed from rotting in the ground and being attacked, attacked by different fungi. There are pesticides, insecticides that are getting rid of, or producing chemicals that will eventually get rid of caterpillars and things that try to eat the leaves. There are herbicides that are killing different weeds that would grow up to compete for nutrients with those plants. And while we have found that the doses that are present in the pollen in the leaves, the doses that our pollinators are typically exposed to are sublethal levels, one of the issues here is that as these chemicals all come together, we don't have as much data as what we’d like to allow us to form this cohesive picture of what exactly goes on under those circumstances. Because being able to say, for this particular chemical, in the amounts that are found in pollen, it'll provide a sub lethal dose to the bees and so under these circumstances, the bees won't be exposed to enough to kill them. That's one thing. But how do we know about that chemical in the face of a fungicide, in the face of an herbicide, in the face of a pesticide, all together in that same dose of pollen, we don't know all of the competing and interacting effects of those different chemicals on the brains of the bees and the digestive system as the the bees on their immune systems. And we're seeing more and more papers coming out where we're learning more about that. But it's almost impossible to fully account for all of the competing dynamics there, it will be like an individual being on 13 different pharmacological drugs, all at the same time in this individual's body, it's very difficult to predict all of the different interactions that those chemicals will have.
And so we're kind of in a, in a world now where we're on what's called the pesticide treadmill. When you're running on a treadmill, it's difficult to get off because if you slow down, you'll kind of be swept away, and you have to keep up a certain rate of speed to remain on it. And we're kind of on this chemical treadmill, where there are all these chemicals that we have developed a reliance on. And even though we're seeing different ways that these chemicals are causing different environmental impacts that are problematic, it's difficult to get off of that treadmill because of our reliance on it. There are foods that we would not be able to grow in the huge volumes that we have been able to if we weren't doing something to reduce the pest pressure that we see in these fields. And so with Varroa brought into the system as it's reducing the capacity of the bees to deal with these chemicals that they're dealing with on a regular basis. When the FDA is approving different chemicals that are going to eventually be used in cropping systems, we have to then think about, well yes, the bees under normal circumstances this would be a sub lethal dosage, but Varroa is present in nearly 100% of bee colonies, which is a mind boggling statistic. But this parasite is ubiquitously distributed in honeybee colonies. And so it really doesn't work with things as they are, to talk about the sub lethal dose to a healthy bee that's never been exposed to Varroa, when over the course of their lives, most honeybee colonies are going to be exposed to some level of pressure from Varroa and if we don't know what their capacity is to deal with those chemicals in the face of that parasite that we really don't fully have a solid grasp of what exactly is the sub lethal dose for beet?
Ayana Young Yeah, your response is making me think about, like neonicotinoids that have been linked to, of course harm in bees and other pollinators, as well as the developing human nervous system. There is a report on bee mortalities released by Canada's pesticide regulatory body, the Pest Management Regulatory Agency and it “concluded that current agricultural practices related to the use of neonicotinoid treated corn and soybean seed are not sustainable.” And then I also think about, you know, awful, just awful things about human made pollution, always targets the ability to teach future generations of species how to survive. Like I think about the noise pollution, preventing whale calves from learning how to hunt. And similarly, glyphosate, when assimilated by young bees, alters their appetite behavior, from their ability to detect sucrose to their ability to learn and remember where food sources are located. So it's really such a bigger domino effect than just the pesticide or insecticide itself, it's, you know, it's potentially going to be assimilated into the evolution of these species. So yeah, I'm just kind of sitting with that a little bit and feeling a little overwhelmed. I would love to hear your thoughts on that.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey I greatly admire ecologists, because ecologists have to have a working knowledge of so many different fields in order to fully grasp what's going into an ecosystem. And so, as an entomologist, I am really focusing primarily on the insects and how they are a piece of the puzzle of this ecosystem. And I try to learn as much as I can about all the different things that could impact those elements. But as we expand outward more and more and more, the picture gets more and more complicated, because it is easier to simplify the story and just say that pesticides are the problem, let's move on. And then when we find out “Okay, so the pesticides in combination with the parasite are the problem,” okay? And then we expand out more and we say, “Oh no wait, invasive species are a problem because that parasite is an invasive species from Southeast Asia,” which then doubles us back to humanity. Okay, so then human beings are what helped to bring over that invasive species from Southeast Asia, the human beings are a huge input of these chemicals into the system. But then we think about matters like poor nutrition and how we have kind of reformatted the world around us to make sure that it works best for us. But we don't always have a broad enough view of how that's going to impact the rest of the world.
We have redeveloped land in so many different ways that just aren't always good for our bees. I was thinking of what people would probably think of as a fairly innocuous commercial that I saw a lot. In the 90s when I was a kid, there was a gentleman sort of looking over the fence and judging his neighbor for not having a pristine green lawn, because there was this one yellow dandelion that it cropped up. And turns out that it was an advertisement for a weed killer that can be applied to lawns. And the idea of the commercial was to emphasize this idea, in the minds of specifically men, they were trying to, to appeal to the masculinity of a gentleman, and to have their lawn and be an extension of their masculinity. If you can't get rid of these weeds growing in your lawn, how can you truly call yourself a man? And it caught on and individuals have thought of these pristine green lawns as an extension of their masculinity, they are not taking care of their house, how can they take care of their family if they can't even take care of their lawns?
And unfortunately, it’s promoted this consistent push for lawn care insecticides, lawn care herbicides, to get rid of the weeds and of course different kinds of insects, but to get rid of weeds that are growing in people's lawns. But these weeds have turned out to be some really, really important elements of the honeybees diet that have been eliminated. And as a result of this, some of the earliest plants that bees are known to rely on early in the season, things like dandelions that used to be ubiquitously distributed all around now have become a lot rarer for the bees. And because when the bees first emerge early in the spring, there aren't a lot of flowers blooming, there are certain ones that they've had to rely on over time. And we've reduced that dramatically, and instead created these spaces that are just jade wastelands where there's nothing for the bees to eat.
And it's entirely because this is something that we want to see in this system. I'm hoping that we can reformat the way that people think about this and consider that, honestly, it's a lot more difficult to make flowers grow than it ever was to maintain these pristine green lawns, like all you have to do is run a lawn mower over it. But it's actually really involved and really fascinating to create a pollinator garden, to plant certain kinds of seeds that are really good for our bees. And in putting that kind of focus there, learning how to, to really decipher what sorts of plants are available there that can be helpful for our bee populations. That's actually a lot cooler, in my opinion. I think that that is a much better connection with the world around us and much better connection with the environment in the ecosystem. And I'm glad that those sorts of things, those attitudes are changing now. And I hope that they will continue to progress in that direction.
The other direction I was going with that is that it's not simply all the things that we have just discussed, one of the things that's turned up in reports by the United States Department of Agriculture, and just in general, as we look at beekeeping in the US, we have noticed that there are socio-economic factors that actually factor into why we are seeing some of the health declines that we've seen in bees and some of the changes in numbers that we've seen with bees. We have so many honey bees that are in the hands of the same groups of people. And while things used to be the case that there was a distribution of honeybees around the US in all kinds of different communities, now we have honeybees that are primarily in the hands of just certain people. When I go out and I give my presentations about bee health to different beekeeping groups, the primary individuals that are consumers of this now as the primary individuals that are keeping bees are from a particular demographic, they are older, Caucasian men. And you'll find that as a result of the introduction of parasites, like nosema, Varroa destructor, or tracheal mites, beekeeping has become more and more expensive, because it's required more and more inputs from the beekeeper, as a result of the need to reduce the numbers of parasites, they need to get rid of different intestinal issues. And bees need to constantly be going into these colonies is a requirement of time and the money for these chemicals. And so it has been priced outside of the reach of a lot of people who used to be beekeepers. And so now we're seeing individuals who are more privileged, be able to maintain bees. And I'm really happy to see that there are initiatives now to help in areas that have been economically hard hit by issues with the downturn of the economy, issues that are sometimes more focused and localized to particular communities, bringing in bees, and bees fill vacant lots. The ways that this generates the larger green spaces and causes more individuals to be connected with the plight of the honeybee, but also understanding the lifecycle the connections there is actually better not just for the bees, in that they are present in more areas, they're connected with more people. But it's also helpful for the people involved in this situation, because they have an opportunity to, to make money, to learn about these organisms. STEM initiatives can then be brought to bear from the backs of these, these organisms. And so there's a socio-economic connection that people oftentimes overlook, in favor of just the biological connections.
Ayana Young Before we move on from varroa mites, the mycologist Paul Stamets has been working on helping support the bees immune system to fight off varroa, I believe from the exudates of medicinal mushrooms. And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on this, if you think this is beneficial, or yeah, just thoughts critiques interest that, that you think that this potentially it could be something that could help boost that bees immune systems to fight off these parasites?
Dr. Samuel Ramsey Absolutely. So fungi have been used in medicine since the dawn of humanity. They are fascinating, fascinating things, organisms in general, there are so many chemicals that they manufacture, just over the course of being a fungus that there's a lot that they have to interact with as they're breaking down, decomposing things and dealing with all the the bacterial communities that are involved within everything else.
And so fungi are actually just an untapped world of pharmacological connections that are really fascinating. And so it's not even remotely surprising that considering fungi are consistently, they're consistently interacting with microbial communities because some of the most competitive decomposers are microbes, all sorts of bacteria and other microbes are constantly breaking down the things that the fungus itself wants to be able to break down and eat. And so sometimes those bacteria have to be able to release chemicals that can deal with those microbes that can reduce the populations of those microbes so they can then benefit the fungus and allow it to compete less with other organisms as it's growing.
And so the idea that an exudate from a mushroom would have pharmacological benefits that could then be extrapolated and used for bees and people, it’s not even remotely far fetched. Looking at some of the work that Paul has been able to advance here, it's just really exciting to see that individuals aren't just looking in one area for how we can help our bees because there are too many different issues for us to only focus on just one or two different things, we have to be able to, to expand out our thought processes in this. And so I've been really excited about what I've seen from Paul, and I'm looking forward to larger tests that can show the impact of these chemicals from this mushroom. On bees more broadly at the colony level and then even farther out to the population level to show just how it helps these bees deal with their own microbial communities. Because one of the issues that we see with Varroa destructor is that it introduces a number of different viruses into the bees body. And because the breakdown of the fat body tissues that the mites are consuming also impacts the immune system of the bees, these viruses proliferate out of control, you get huge titers of virus in the bee's body. And while the exudate from the mushroom doesn't kill the mites directly, it seems to be able to boost the immune capacity of the bees to be able to deal with the one of the primarily, the deformed wing virus, which is one of the worst viruses that the bees deal with in this process and one of the most widespread and so I'm looking forward to seeing exactly the impact that this has brought out to broader levels.
Ayana Young Yeah it’s something that seems really fascinating, and I hope to learn more about that in the coming years. Now I would like to move on to your current work which focuses on Tropilaelaps mites, which are not in North America yet, but it is widely accepted that because of globalization and our somewhat poor track record when it comes to dealing with invasive species, it is just a matter of time before they are widely present in honeybee colonies. In comparison to Varroa, what are the new threats posed by Tropilaelaps?
Dr. Samuel Ramsey So this parasite is just a weird one. It's not strange just its behavior, its life cycle, it's weird mouthparts, it’s strange body's structuring, it’s connections to other organisms, but it’s name is difficult for everybody to get with. And it took me a while just saying it over and over. And in Thailand, because the name Tropilaelaps is structured in a way where it puts together a bunch of letters that typically are not brought together in Thai, we’ve just been referring to it as Troppi.
But something really important to consider about the Tropilaelaps mite is that it's actually a really odd system that we're seeing here. Because we are watching evolution in play in the moment. When we look at Varroa destructor, we see a parasite that's actually pretty well structured over time to be a parasite, elements of the shape of its body, the refining of its life cycle to be connected with the bees life cycle. You see all of those things after tons and tons and tons of evolutionary time has been able to, to work things out.
And so Varroa used to be a parasite of Asian honeybees, and then it transitioned over to the European honeybee. And that's now why we're seeing it become a lot more damaging to the bees themselves. But that connection has been going for some time.
Tropilaelaps has actually had a more brief connection with the bees and as a result, we see an even heightened imbalance there of its detriment that it brings to its host. And that may seem weird for me to say, I'm talking about parasites like they're not supposed to be too detrimental to their hosts, but in some ways, they're not.
Parasites, for the same reason that you don't want to burn down your house, a parasite doesn't want to kill its host because that host is its source of food. That host is it's home. Oftentimes that host is its incubator for its children. And so over evolutionary time, parasites typically become less and less detrimental to their host, and eventually achieve a level of balance, where the two of them are able to live in some strange set of, of harmony if that can be said, while the parasite is learning to siphon fewer nutrients from the host, it only needs to siphon as much as it needs to live, it doesn't cause all of these negative health impacts that will eventually result in the host dying. And if the parasite doesn't have the ability to find a new host then the parasite itself dies.
Now, in the wild, of course, you can see evolutionarily that would be an immediate problem for the parasite. But we have a system set up with our bees, where unfortunately, we are not developing that balance in the ways that you would think that it would show up, you would think that if we just leave the system to itself, eventually we'll have either a balanced situation emerge where the parasite will go away entirely, if it kills enough honeybee colonies, it'll eventually just kind of work itself out. But unfortunately, that doesn't seem like the direction that things are going and the reason is because the way that it works in the wild, parasites like Varroa destructor, and Tropilaelaps, if they were to kill their bee colony, they would die too as a result of that, because they don't have wings, they don't have the ability to move themselves to a new colony for the most part because colonies are distributed much farther away from each other than we typically show in our systems.
In our systems, in our apparies, we put colonies right next to each other and so we have removed that negative impact of killing the colony and replaced it with sort of a reward. If you kill this colony, this allows you to have as many babies as you want to, cause as much damage to your host as you want to, because there is no drawback here. Now you actually have the benefit of being able to move right next door to the next colony and cause all the same damage to that extent.
And so you see that with Tropilaelaps, an organism that used to be distributed in just Southeast Asia, just on Asian honeybees, the giant honeybees, has now moved to this honeybee, the European honeybee that we have distributed all around the world. And it's allowed for this parasite to go from colony to colony, country to country, region to region. And now it's distributed throughout much more of Asia. We're also finding it in regions of Asia where we never thought that it would be able to live the coldest reaches of China, the coldest areas of Korea, where we expected the populations of this organism would not be able to survive outside of the typical tropical environment that allows for honeybee brood to be reared year round, we found that this organism is a lot more resilient than we thought and that there are elements of its genome that have allowed it to be able to deal with those cold temperatures, that have allowed it to be able to deal with the typical lack of brood that's present in it’s colleagues.
And so as it's been moving to more and more of the world, it's been killing colonies, destroying them with a level of impunity that you typically only see when a natural system has in some way been undermined. And so because our system of dealing with the bees allows for this parasite to spread far and wide, we need to do everything that we can to make sure that we don't end up with this parasite in our area.
So right now in North America, South America and most of the world, this parasite does not exist. But if it were to arrive, it would create a system that our bees have never really seen before, where they have to deal with Varroa and Tropilaelaps all in the same system. And all of the damage that the Tropilaelaps might cause us, along with all the damage that the Varroa mite causes is just issues stacked on top of issues that would make it so much more expensive and difficult to be able to keep our bees healthy. And it's the same concern that we're worried about with these Asian giant hornets. Because the thing that is the most the period of time that is the most important when an invasive species arrives, is the period right after its arrival, because you have the opportunity in that time to eradicate this organism. If you miss that window, and the organism then becomes established in the ecosystem. Unfortunately, after that your chances of eradicating that organism drops so low that they're pretty close to impossible and we don't want that to happen with the Asian giant hornet because then you have another organism here that is is a threat to our bees, is a threat to to human beings and is creating all kinds of issues in its wake, that we don't even know all the details of just yet. And then we have that same set of concerns for the Tropilaelaps mite when it first arrives. The worst time to be trying to figure out what your plan is, for an emergency, is when your house is on fire, you should already have a plan in place. And so my goal was to go over to Asia, to learn about this parasite to know everything that we would need to know about it in the event of its arrival in the US so we'd understand what sorts of things we could use to kill the parasite, we could learn how the parasite moves from colony to colony, and it's this set of knowledge that can then be utilized to get rid of this parasite.
Ayana Young That makes a lot of sense. And I just have two more questions for you. Although I probably have many more, but you've given us so much time and, and it's, I'm just sitting with it all. But in preparing for this interview I learned that studies are now showing how rising carbon dioxide levels lower the nutritional quality of our foods and when it comes to bees, we are specifically seeing that the protein content in pollen is declining, and bees, unlike other insects who will eat more to compensate a decline in protein, only eat a certain quantity of pollen, regardless of its protein content. In closing, I’m curious how you think global, wild, and native bee populations will fare under changing climate regimes? Are the impacts of stressors like parasitic mites and pesticides going to just grow stronger because bees' food sources are losing nutritional value? Is it possible in the future we will cease to see bees in hotter climates?
Dr. Samuel Ramsey So I don't want to paint too much of an apocalyptic picture, but unfortunately, we have not been making that easy for scientists, we have made it very difficult to talk about science as it is without painting an apocalyptic picture of where things are going in a lot of ways. Climate change is problematic. Climate change is problematic in more ways than we originally were able to determine. And because there are so many elements, this is why I was talking about earlier with ecology and why ecology is such a fascinating science because it takes into account chemical inputs, it takes into account the organisms, how they interact with each other, how they interact with their environment, how the environment interacts with the organisms. Changing weather patterns have so much to do with the nutritional content of plants that we consume, with the proteins, with the different chemicals that are present in the leaves of the plant, and the pollen of the plant and the roots of the plants and for bees with the ways that they get their nutrition and the fact that those proteins are integral to developing the next generation of bees, because the adult bees primarily are consuming carbohydrates, they need a lot of energy from from the sugar water that they consume. Or I shouldn't say the sugar water from the nectar that they consume, which is a lot of sugar. And it's really the pollen that's brought back as food for the brood that is concerning here because as they are feeding this pollen to the developing bees, that next generation if it doesn't get that full complement of proteins that it needs is going to be a bit weaker than the generation before it. And eventually we end up with concerns for what populations several generations in the future will look like because the next population isn't really going to show that much of a difference. But is then the next one. The next one. The next one. The next one. And the problem there is that it's very similar to the frog in the pot kind of analogy that people have discussed is that organisms, if you expose them to the same set of stimuli for a long enough period of time, even if that stimulus is detrimental in one way or another, if you continuously expose them to it, they eventually will get used to it because the human brain has to be able to take in new stimuli, organisms have to be able to take in new stimuli. And so they will eventually set a new ground state. That is that level of stimulus into the system. And as the ground state goes up more and more and more, eventually, you do reach a point where all of those negative stimuli coming together can cause problems for creatures. But those creatures can sometimes be unaware of just how much of a problem it's called us. Because it's been a slow burn, I think it's been a slow enough burn for human beings, that we haven't even really taken the time to notice what has been happening here.
I was recently on a road trip to Wisconsin. And as we're driving up, it was remarkable to me, just how few insects ended up on the windshield. While we hit a few, we never really had to stop and clean off the windshield in order to keep going. And when I was a kid, when my dad was driving us down to Alabama to see our family, I remember there being so many bugs on the windshield that my dad had to stop several times over the course of the trip, just to clean all of them off, we are potentially in the middle of an extinction event for a number of different kinds of insects. The data, data from Europe, data from a number of different sources has shown that populations of so many different insects have dropped. And as we continue to see things like this, we have to be aware that this didn't just happen a few years ago, this has been a protracted situation that we've been seeing for a long time. And now it is a pronounced thing that we can perceive.
And so right now we have a responsibility in all the ways that we can be effective at changing the inputs into the system, to better understand what can we do, to not just slow down this process, but reverse things so that these organisms can exist in it, a set of circumstances that are healthier for them, and allow for them to repopulate and allow for our ecosystem to exist in a way where they can live in it.
Ayana Young Mm hmm. Yeah, I really can relate to just seeing how fewer insects there are. And I think, of course, land degradation and land use change is a huge contributor to that. And, and of course, I think about the monarch butterflies who have lost 167 million acres of their habitat since the 90s. And, of course, bees, you know, they've lost so much of their habitat and are in these mono cropped heavily poisoned lands, which we've been talking about earlier in this conversation. So, even though we've gone through and talked a lot about the threats to these incredible insects, these bees, I think ending on a note of potentially explaining to us how we can or what we can do to foster the interactions and relationships necessary to help bee sas individuals and community members, what are things that you feel like just the everyday person, the folks who are listening right now, who are really dedicated to this planet can do to support their survival and their health into a future that's very uncertain, and full of a ton of threats coming at them.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey So I love to end on that sort of note the, the what can we do sort of thing because when you look at the problems themselves, they can seem so huge, so multifaceted, that it can feel like we can't do anything, it can feel like we are totally helpless to just deal with the world as it is. But there's actually a lot that we can do. From the small to the large.
Planning a pollinator garden is a wonderful thing. It benefits, there like no drawbacks to this. It benefits everybody. It looks wonderful. Planting all these different forms of plants are really great for all kinds of insects. They're great for the honeybees. They are great for native bees, they're great for all sorts of bugs running around. They allow for the typical greenspace that we have in our yards. That's just grass which supports very little diversity in insect life and animal life in general, to this blossoming of ecosystem diversity in having these flowers present.
So if you want to do something right now, there's if you have a desire to go out there and make a difference in the lives of your local bee populations, you can do so by planting a pollinator garden. In addition to that, if you want to join the ranks of the beekeepers, you can do so, but if you're going to do so, please, please please please be an informed beekeeper, learning from the different researchers out there to veteran beekeepers out there, making sure that you are separating the misinformation and disinformation from actual helpful factual information is really important in this process because there is a lot of info out there that is not accurate and is not helpful. I've been asked multiple times about the usage of crystals to get rid of Varroa mites and whether putting crystals on top of your colony can create an electromagnetic field that can keep the Varroa mites out of the colony. I've been asked about sound therapy and whether applying really low level sound to different parts of the colony can get rid of the Varroa mites and none of these things have been shown to actually get rid of mites. Throwing cornstarch in your colony is going to help it be detrimental to the bees is these sorts of things out there that unfortunately, can make it worse for some people to be beekeepers because if their colonies are overwhelmed by disease, because beekeeping is a team sport, because it is a community that tons of different people are connected to, those dying bees with all of their diseases can then move those diseases through the rest of the population of bees. So it's actually better in a lot of ways to not be a beekeeper at all, if you're going to be an uninformed beekeeper who lets disease overrun his or her colonies.
So being an informed beekeeper can be very helpful. In addition to all of that, supporting honeybee research is huge. Making sure that the individuals that you vote for, have an interest in seeing honey bee research move forward and seeing environmental research move forward is very important to the development of research that allows us to better understand what's going on and what can be done about it. And just being aware of the different initiatives out there by different groups and groups like Project Apis.m, that supported my honeybee project when I was a graduate student and it's those sorts of things that are really helpful. And so, going online, finding ways that you can support these different groups can help our bees quite directly.
Ayana Young Well thank you for ending on that note.
Dr. Samuel Ramsey Thanks so much for having me. I love having the opportunity to just talk science to talk about bees and to get these sorts of messages out to as many people as possible.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to another episode of For The Wild podcast. The music you heard today was by Jeff Parker, The Mysterious They, and Gabriella di Capua. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell and Melanie Younger.