One sunny July morning I noticed a swarm of bees were making a home in my garage wall.
My grandfather and father were both beekeepers, so I called dad and asked what he thought about urban beekeeping.
He said “with your level of experience I don’t reckon you should do it”.
Now I’m definitely keeping the bees.
My friend Jon and I borrowed some bee suits, and proceeded to relocate the bees into a beehive I’d also borrowed, and balanced on a ladder…
20,000 stinging insects and a ladder, what could possibly go wrong Dad?
Wearing a bee suit is a lot of fun - it’s all your childhood dreams at once You’re feeling half way between an astronaut… and a ghostbuster. Fortunately for the bees and my neighbors, the bees happily came with us and took to their new home.
From the outside they looked ok, but this bee colony was going to die.
The colony was Queenless, and had been for some time.
These bees were doomed to become part of the 30% of hives that died out that year, and have every year since 2006.
I know bees don’t look like puppies or kittens, but I was pretty attached to them, and I watched them every morning in front of the hive with my cup of coffee.
I started paying attention to the bees, because I wanted to understand and help them.
About 15 years ago my Grandfather, I call him Pa, learned something was wrong with his heart and he needed a valve replacement
They opened him up for surgery to more issues - he needed a triple bypass as well.
Pa was lucky & recovered. Now he has a great quality of life and just turned 94.
Pa now checks his heart rate and vitals almost every day.
By paying close attention he can proactively address issues before they become severe.
When my friend Paul, a beekeeper of 40 years, asked me to count the bees flying out of a hive so he could get a sense of the colony health, I had an epiphany. Could monitoring bee flight activity be just like proactively monitoring Pa’s heart? Could paying more attention to the bees help us save them?
My day job and background is in medical robotics technology - I help doctors treat patients remotely through robots. So I started trying to make a robotic assistant for beekeepers
- As you do -
What a glamorous robot. I wanted to teach the robot how to see bees
In the real world, bees live outside, this meant putting a laptop in a bucket pointed at a beehive. Even more glamorous.
But I did teach it to see and count bees, and the bot was able to watch the beehive all day every day and graph the data.
The robot’s computer vision accidentally discovered this bee flight activity pattern.
You can see there’s a giant spike!
No one had noticed this before.
Nobody had measured it before.
It’s the collective flight activity pattern of the beehive superorganism.
And it turns out every healthy beehive has this spike pattern.
This is the heartbeat of a beehive
When you observe nature and you see some crazy signal in the noise you have to pay attention.
I showed the data and videos to experienced beekeepers.
One said “I’m surprised that it’s such a spike… and it’s probably orientation activity based on the video”.
Beekeepers check their hives about every 2 weeks by pulling the lid off and seeing what the bees are up to.
We aim to see whether there are signs of pests and disease, and if the bees have enough food - both honey and pollen.
Sometimes looking inside a beehive I feel like I'm a guest in nature's cathedral.
The colors of pollen reflect the variety of local flowers the bees have been visiting. It reminds me of stained glass.
Just as we make bread, bees have fermented pollen to make bee bread for millions of years.
Bee bread is more nutritious than even pollen, and the bees make it to feed their baby sisters
Not bad for a creature with a brain the size of a sesame seed.
Bees need flowers to get that pollen protein. What you might see as “weeds on your lawn”, bees call family dinner.
Inside the hive beekeepers also looking for pests. The Varroa mite to bees is the equivalent of a bloodsucking tick the size of a backpack to us. They spread diseases between bees, they start by attacking the baby bees. Imagine having a parasite stuck to you for your whole life. Sounds like a b-grade horror film. And now people are spraying poison on you and your food. Bees have it rough.
During inspections we’re looking to whether we can see evidence of a healthy queen The queen herself, eggs, larva and baby bees.
Unfortunately inspections are like a minor surgery to the bees. The bees use propolis to seal gaps in their hive, it’s like skin of the colony superorganism, and we’re breaking it. We’re as gentle as possible, but the process is disruptive and stressful to the bees, and the hive won’t get back to normal for a couple of days. We wouldn’t want to operate on Pa every day. What’s shocking is that many beekeepers I have spoken to would tell me they would inspect a hive, find it to be healthy, and two or three weeks later come back and find the hive had died. What happened in that in-between time? Are even beekeepers not paying enough attention to the bees?
Bees are incredible, selfless creatures. Most of a honeybee society is female, here’s the story of one bee. Right after she was born she got her first job - nursing her baby brothers and sisters. She then took on other roles in the hive - building wax comb, making the bee bread, and storing tiny jars of honey in each cell of the comb. When she first set foot outside the colony she took careful small flights to orient herself and learn where she lived so she could find her way home. After her orientation flights, she literally flew out every day looking for pollen and honey to help her bee community. She would visit hundreds of flowers a day up to three miles from the hive, and in her lifetime, have gathered enough nectar to make one quarter teaspoon of honey. In her middle age after non-stop flights we find her now, her wings have worn out, and in her final act of selflessness she has flown away from the hive to die alone, returning to the soil.
When you see a bee, she is going to the grocery store to get food for her younger sisters.
You’re the last thing she wants to sting. Remember she will die if she stings you.
Be calm, and leave her be.
Wasps on the other hand, are jerks, they will sting you mercilessly.
You don’t have to teach your children that bugs are yucky or to be feared. They’re around when the environment is healthy.
When you buy organic food a little bit nibbled by a bug, it means it hasn’t been drenched in poisons.
You can thank the bug for confirming the food is safe to eat.
Good enough for bugs, good enough for bees, good enough for me.
Bees have a crucial role in pollination for many plants. If it has a flower, it probably depends on a pollinator. I’m talking about apples, squash, tomatoes, almonds, peppers, pumpkins - it turns out of 1 in three bites of the food we eat depends on bees. The food bees don’t pollinate directly, like the grapes to make a glass of your favorite wine, depend on the nitrogen plants pollinated by bees help put in the soil. Cheers bees.
So let’s come back to that activity pattern that looks like a heartbeat.
We learned that the orientation activity pattern is the baby bees flying in front of the hive, learning where they live.
They make little figure 8 flight patterns seeing the hive at different angles so they can remember how to find home.
The spike is because apparently most of the baby bees come out do do this around the same time of day.
We found that hives without baby bee heartbeat patterns were telling us they were in trouble.
We started to monitor beehives in our own community and around the world. We saw the orientation spike occurs around the world
We saw a pattern for when a strong beehive is robbing a weak beehive.
We saw the pattern for swarming was three times as big of a spike as the orientation activity.
We saw patterns where a beehive’s activity and heartbeat would flatline.
Because we paid attention, in some hives were able to intervene and save the bees. In one flatlining colony, we found no sign of a queen so we transplanted eggs from another healthy hive. A little like Pa’s valve replacement. Sure enough they recovered by raising a new queen from the replacement eggs.
Paying attention to the heartbeat pattern can help Beekeepers save an individual bee colony
We can proactively intervene before it’s too late.
We can save an individual beehive with the help of technology, but when so many individual colonies are dying, it means that something is fundamentally wrong.
Systemically wrong.
Bees aren’t just tireless pollinators important for our food. Bees are an indicator species for what’s going on in the environment. They’re the canary in the coal mine. The point is the things that are killing the bees, are also wiping out our wealth of biodiversity. The things that are harming the bees are also harming things you may care more about - your dog, your cat and even your kids.
Biodiverse systems are way more resilient than monocultures, they tend toward balance over a single point of failure. In a resilient environment the native bees would happily do some of the pollination if there are no honeybees. Unfortunately the latest studies are showing 1/4 of our native bee species have already gone extinct or are at severe risk of extinction. The point is we don’t have a plan B.
So what does it mean to even save the bees? If we’re able to keep alive the honeybees but the rest of the ecot is broken, diversity has gone, and isn’t able to recover, bigger picture, we haven’t saved anything, we’ve just got another feedlot animal.
Most of us have had someone we care about suffer a heart attack or acute issue like my Pa did, all of us understand that we need to pay attention to our heart health.
So I’d like to update the canary metaphor
Bees are like the heartbeat for our environment’s health.
We need to pay more attention to the bees.
There are four horsemen of our beepocalypse - Pesticides, Pathogens, Pests and Poor Nutrition. Pesticides and poor nutrition are liked to unsustainable monoculture farming, but they’re also linked to our own backyard. If you have a lawn or garden and you’re using a pesticide or herbicide to ‘keep it perfect’, consider this: The things that are killing the bees are also harming other things we care about.
While some modern farmers reintegrate sustainable practices like crop rotation and organic principles like integrated pest management. The rest of us can help by creating bee sanctuaries in our cities. What does that look like? It looks like a meadow of flowers in your front yard rather than a lawn. It looks like thousands of ladybugs to protect your orange tree rather than spraying poisons. It looks like the kind of world most of us want to live in, and want our children to inherit.
We see a future of monitoring bee health, since bees are like the heartbeat of our environment. We imagine healthy bees to be considered as essential a measure as clean air. So next time you see a bee, pay attention to her. Ask yourself if your choices at the grocery store and in your own backyard are supportive of a better future for both of you and the bees, and find out how the bees are doing in your area. We need to pay more attention to the bees, our collective future may depend on it.
Chickens wouldn't survive in the wild, but farmers keep them alive because they’re commercially useful to us.
I hope the technology isn’t used just to keep bees alive as a feedlot animal.
We figured out a way to help beekeepers keep a patient alive.
But if all the bees are all dying and all the native bees are dying.
Maybe pigs wouldn't survive in the wild, but we can keep them alive because they’re commercially useful to us. I hope technology isn’t used just to keep bees alive as a feedlot animal.
The point is the things that are killing the bees, are also wiping out biodiversity. Bees may be as valuable to us as an indicator of what's going on in our environment, than just as a commercial creature.
Even though you can use this tech to figure out if an individual hive is in trouble, the face that all of these beehives are in trouble is telling us something way bigger. It’s telling us we’ve got a systemic problem. I want people to realize, you’re not disconnected from this. [lawn]
My neighbor runs a plant nurserey, he said that when he started recommending that people keep their lawns and gardens organic rather than applying pesticides, people really pushed back. He said ‘well this stuff is bad to for your kids, do you really want to expose your kids to this poison?’ and then they really pushed back. It was only when he said ‘the stuff that you’re putting on this lawn will also hurt your dog and your cat’, that people responded ‘Oh my god, I can’t possibly do that, ok I’ll stop spraying’. What will it take?
There’s this whole rallying cry of save the bees, but the thing that’s killing the bees is killing a lot more than just the bees. Having monoculture and unsustainable farming is bad news big picture.
It’s the illusion of control. I have a greenhouse where I wanted to produce lots of basil. I got rid of all the other plans and had lots of basil so I could make pesto every week. Suddenly my crop failed, a bunch of aphids got in there, and destroyed the lot. I realized in another spot, the basil that was next to an open area, had a plant that was supporting lots of ladybugs, and so the ladybugs would eat the aphids, and that kept the ecosystem in balance. Biodiverse balanced systems are way more resilient than monocultures. You can’t really control for everything, and when it fails it can all fail, whereas when you’ve got something that’s balanced, it might not be as productive as that one thing, but in the big picture it can be way more productive because it’s easier to maintain and it will survive.
TODO's make that summary speech resonate.
Build up -
- We discovered heartbeat of the beehive
- Beehive is an indicator for the environment
- Bee Health is the heartbeat of the environment
What we discovered is something that can help Beekeepers save an individual bee colony
If you’re monitoring a bee colony we can tell if it needs intervention before it gets to the point of a heart attack and you’re trying to save it’s life.
We need to pay more attention to the bees. Yes we can save an individual beehive with the help of our tech, but when so many individual colonies are failing like this, it means that something is fundamentally wrong.
What I’m trying to drive home is the things that are harming the bees are harming things you may care more about - your dog, your cat and even your kids. The things that are killing the bees harm them too.
So you really should pay attention to the bees in your area, because there’s something in that environment that is toxic.
These things are in trouble because there’s a bigger problem. What does it mean to even save the bees? It doesn’t mean that much for us to individually save those colonies. Because if the rest of the environment is gone, has gone, and isn’t able to recover, bigger picture, we haven’t saved anything, we’ve just got another feedlot animal.
What’s true in the literature is that bees are an indicator species. That means that when the bees are dying it means that all kinds of other things are in trouble. We need to pay more attention to the bees
I want to make fun of that metaphor, because I don’t think it means as much anymore. It’s just a metaphor now. Whereas Pa being on the operating table, is very real