Without pollination, it’s hard for farms to grow crops. Without bees, it’s hard to do pollination. These two guests conducted the research that has revered an alarming drop in the nation’s population of honeybees. For their work, they’re finalists in this year’s Service to America Medals program. Jay Evans and Judy Chen are researchers at the Agricultural Research Service, and they join the Federal Drive with Tom Temin to discuss more.

Interview transcript: 

Tom Temin  Without pollination, it’s hard for farms to grow crops. Without bees, it’s hard to do pollination. My next two guests conducted research that has reversed an alarming drop in the nation’s population of honey bees. For their work, they’re finalists in this year’s Service to America Medals program. Jay Evans and Judy Chen are researchers at the Agricultural Research Service in Beltsville, Maryland, and they join me now. It’s good to have you both on. And let’s begin by setting the scene here, the importance of honey bees to the agricultural economy. Give us a sense of the numbers and the scope of bees and agriculture.

Judy Chen  Bees are incredibly important for several reasons. They play critical role in pollinating many of food crop we rely on food contributing to about one-third of our food supply. Without bees, many fruit, vegetable and nut would become scarce and expensive. The pollination service provider bees are valued at $18 billion annually in the U.S. Additionally, honey bees produce honey bee wax, royal jelly and other high product worth $150 million. Bees also support the growth of a variety of plant which absorb carbon dioxide for air, a powerful tool in fight against the climate change and also provide habitat and food for other animals, maintaining biodiversity and the healthy ecosystem.

Tom Temin  Okay, so we need bees to grow crops, and they do a lot of other good things. And Jay, what has been the trend with bees? I think there have been books published about bee population dangers 20 years ago.

Jay Evans  Yeah, that’s true. And to add to the tension of the importance of bees, as Judy mentioned, it’s been harder and harder to keep a beehive alive over, especially over the winter in this climate in the mid-Atlantic and the northern states. So, we have a standing crop of honey bee colonies that commercial beekeepers maintain that’s almost exactly as many as are needed for pollination of crops like almonds and blueberries and cranberries, these really critical high value crops. So, we’re nervous any time that the bee losses are higher, because if they drop below that threshold, we won’t get as much fruit and nut production.

Tom Temin  And how does it work? I mean, you have a blueberry farm here, or some kind of a fruit tree farm there, and there are beekeepers. How do the bees know where to go? Sounds like a naive question, but like, how does that work?

Jay Evans  So, the bees can go two miles from their homes, so that’s not very far when you’re talking about American agriculture. So, the beekeepers do the hard work, and they drive their beehives across the country, back and forth at the whim of the farmers. So, if a farmer requires pollination for apples or cranberries or almonds, the beekeepers put their colonies on a truck, bundle them up and follow that. So, they’re following a bloom of agriculture, literally back and forth across the country.

Tom Temin  So, the implication there is that beekeeping is a skill and craft unto itself. Otherwise, farmers would have a barn full of beehives.

Jay Evans  That’s right, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s not economical generally for the farmers to maintain so many beehives year round.

Tom Temin  Sure. All right, let’s talk about what’s happened to the bees that led and sparked the research you’ve been doing for some time now. What’s been going on with the U.S. population of bees and beehives?

Judy Chen  Well, since 2006 on average, about 32% to 35% bee colony have been lost each year in the U.S., which is much higher than 15% to 18% loss rate that is considered economically sustainable. So, bee losses has been a very serious problem.

Tom Temin  All right, and tell us about the research, then. How do you go about beginning the search for what is causing, and when bee collapses, that is a box of bees or a hive, just one day, they’re all dead?

Jay Evans  That’s right. And we’ve traveled, Judy and I have traveled to California, Florida, Pennsylvania, following these events, and collected samples. And our specialty is really on disease. So, we see the world through that lens, I would say, more often than not. And so we’ll collect them to check for viruses and gut parasites and bacteria, things like that, being fully aware that there are also pesticide stresses on bees and nutritional stress. So, when you get a big collapse, like a commercial beekeeper losing most of their hives, it’s usually a combination of things. The last trigger is often a disease of some sort. And Judy was the first on the scene, and I’ve followed her into viruses, because viruses are there more often than not, and we really think they’re vital in the losses of honey bee colonies.

Tom Temin  We’re speaking with Jay Evans, he’s a lead scientist, and Judy Chen is a research leader at the Agricultural Research Service. They are both finalists in this year’s Service to America Medals program. And Judy, tell us about then how you go about the research. You take bees and put them under a microscope, dissect them? Tell us about the research.

Judy Chen  So, we consider ourselves as a bee doctor, so we diagnose a wide range of bee diseases, including viruses, bacteria and the fungi. So, we utilize advanced technology such as PCR, but also, you know, microscope, genetic sequence and the other microbiological assay. Those methods allow us to understand their impact on bee health and develop a target treatment and the management strategy to ensure the well being of honey bees.

Tom Temin  So, there is a genetic component to this research. You can see resistance and so forth in the genetic makeup of a bee?

Jay Evans  Certainly in the genetic makeup of the viruses, that’s a lot like the SARS COV-2 virus. There’s variants of these viruses that are more virulent, more harmful to the bees than others. And so we use the genetics to say, uh oh, you have this flavor. And that helps explain some of the losses, I would say.

Tom Temin  And that poses the difficulty of, how do you find a counter to a virus? Because antibiotics for something that’s not virus, you know, a microbe is one thing, but finding something to stop a virus, as we know, that’s not so easy.

Judy Chen  Well, yeah. So, we’re treating bee virus using several novel and the environmentally safe approach. They include using natural products from plant. Those have antimicrobial effect, can help boost the honeybees immune system, directly combating pathogen. So, we also use architecture gene sinus technology called on the eye to silence a specific gene in pathogen that infect bees. Those methods involve, you know, introduce some double stranded RNA into the bee, which trigger honey bees’, you know, antimicrobial response, effectively neutralize the pathogen without the harm in bee.

Tom Temin  Right. So, this is not an antibacterial treatment, but an antiviral treatment that you’ve developed.

Judy Chen  You know, for the natural product, they boost the honeybee’s immunity, so they actually help honeybees to combat various capacity including bacteria and the viruses.

Tom Temin  And did you also look at mechanisms for getting these developed substances into the beehives? Because there’s an infrastructure issue, right, for the bee industry?

Jay Evans  Yeah, that’s true. Everything we test and attempt to treat with we have to one, know it’s safe, of course, for bees and humans. But the next step is, how do you deliver it? And fortunately, beekeepers are used to feeding bees kind of an icing sugar, a patty of sugar that goes on top of the hive when there’s a dearth of flowers, for example, or they’re traveling, and we found that we can mix these medicines into that, and the bees will gobble it up in a day or two, even, and hopefully get it presented with the medicine. But it’s, yeah, that’s a big challenge. You know, the primary one is, of course, to make sure that that what we’re developing is very safe for the bees and for us.

Tom Temin  Yeah, you’ve answered one question I have, what is it bees eat? And they eat sugar, basically?

Jay Evans  They would prefer honey or nectar. Yeah, so their diet is built around pollen and nectar, and that has been for millions of years. Beekeepers have found they can supplement that with pollen supplements or protein supplements, even that aren’t pollen based and sucrose, regular sugar. So, it is possible to keep them going. They’re not as happy as they are when they’re eating their own plants.

Tom Temin  Right. So, often the honey is extracted, though, for commercial purposes. So you have to, in other words, fill back in what the bees would eat when you take their honey for putting in little squeeze bears.

Jay Evans  Yeah, you’re ready to be a beekeeper. That’s exactly what happens.

Tom Temin  All right, so what has happened? How far has the treatment program gone, and what’s the state of the bee populations now?

Judy Chen  So, beekeeper has the way to pull back the bee population by releasing the colony into two, and then introduce a new queen, but it’s just the cost increase the beekeeping industry.

Tom Temin  Well, but a population collapse, has that stopped? And are they stable now?

Judy Chen  Still, the winter bee losses and also renal summer bee losses, both are very serious situation.

Jay Evans  It is true that the beekeepers have maintained the same population for decades now. That’s with a lot of labor, a lot of hard work, but they have met the pollination demands our worry, as you recall 20 years ago, the worry was that this was a downward slide that we couldn’t escape, that the bees would go, if not extinct, to low levels. But thanks to the beekeepers, really, they nurse them back to health and build them at least enough to manage the minimum of pollination.

Tom Temin  Right, so the desire, or the goal, would be for less effort to keep up the same bee population.

Judy Chen  Exactly.

Tom Temin  A lower rate of replacing the dead bees with fresh ones. And if you get more out of the bees you have, it would be more efficient.

Jay Evans  Precisely. Yeah, and Judy and I have several excellent colleagues who are also looking at contagion within the hive. So, how do these viruses move? And so instead of medicines, if you could, you know, they’re not going to wear a mask, they’re not going to self isolate, but if you could get them to remove the members of the hive that are sick, or actually have them remove themselves, that is another avenue that we’re really hopeful for that will lead to fewer bees infected and lower levels of infection as as they go through their day.

Tom Temin  You can actually affect bee behavior that way?

Jay Evans  You can, or you can select for bees that are hygienic, is the trait, and they will do it more eagerly than other bees. The behavior is more on the beekeeper side, which would be to remove vectors which are other, especially a mite that moves virus, and then also the way they split the colonies and manage that can be done a bit better to reduce disease.

Tom Temin  And one final question, at the Agricultural Research Service, do you have your own bees to work on and research, or do you have to use all the bee colonies that are out there?

Judy Chen  We do keep bees in the lab. Just like I sais, we have over 200 beehives distributed in more than 20 apiary side on campus for serving various research purposes.

Tom Temin  And all that honey, do the employees get to take it home?

Judy Chen  We don’t take it home, but we can consume honey at work. We also, you know, give it to our friends when they visit us.

Tom Temin  All right, I’ll be out there myself. Congratulations. We’re speaking with Jay Evans, he’s lead scientist and Judy Chen, research leader, both at the Agricultural Research Service. Thanks so much for joining me.

Jay Evans  Thank you so much for your time and supporting the beekeepers. It’s a great trade.

Tom Temin  And they’re both finalists in this year’s Service to America Medals program. We’ll post this interview along with all of our Sammy interviews, plus a link to more information about this particular work, at federalnewsnetwork.com/federaldrive. Subscribe to the Federal Drive wherever you get your podcasts.

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