Feeding Bees Through Diversity

Insects are responsible for pollinating many of our favorite foods ranging from apples to chocolate. In fact, nearly 100 crops globally either require or benefit from animal pollination. Many different animals are capable of pollinating, including bees, flies, beetles, and even bats, but honey bees are by far the most widely used pollinators in agriculture. Honey bees generally work really well with our agricultural system, allowing migratory beekeepers to quickly transport huge numbers of pollinators to a blooming crop and then remove them just as quickly when they are no longer needed. Of course, the delicious honey they make certainly sweetens the pot too!

Unfortunately, this system isn’t quite as good for the bees. Honey bees need a much more diverse diet than they can acquire from a single crop, forcing some of the bees to look for food outside the field or orchard. Normally this isn’t a problem because there are still plenty of bees in the field, but for seed crops this presents a big risk. For example, if bees are placed on a field of carrot seed, most of the bees will still visit the carrot flowers, but some will fly much further in search of other food sources. If some of those bees visit another carrot seed field along the way, they can transport pollen between the fields. This may not seem like a problem, but it can result in unexpected hybrids being present in the harvested seed, lowering the value of the seed.

In the Columbia Basin, vegetable seed growers already try to avoid this by working together to keep their fields at least two miles apart, but that still isn’t a perfect strategy. When they are struggling to find good food, honey bees can fly incredible distances, even as far as 6 miles. That’s roughly the equivalent of someone in Washington state walking to Nevada to buy groceries!

For my PhD research, I am studying how we can better meet the nutritional needs of honey bee colonies during vegetable seed pollination. If we can better meet their needs, we can remove their need to fly those large distances and keep them closer to each field. To do this, I am using both pollinator friendly flowers planted within the fields and artificial feed supplements within the hives. I can then compare where the different hives are foraging by translating the waggle dances they perform after visiting a patch of flowers. These dances tell the other bees exactly how far away the flowers are and in what direction. This is perhaps my favorite part of this research because it is as close to talking to bees as I can get.

The FFAR Fellows Program has been instrumental in my professional and personal development so far. Thanks to this program I have developed a wide variety of new skills, I have developed a much more defined career path, and I have made many new friends. I would like to thank my industry sponsor, Bejo Seed, my advisor, Dr. Brandon Hopkins, and the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research for making my participation in this program possible.