FEATURED IN SKIPJACK REVIEW, ISSUE #2
For this special, Bugs-themed issue of Skipjack Review, we set out on a quest to have a heart to heart with an Ozarks entomology expert. But where to start? We’re happy to report that there are a surprisingly many incredible humans up to some fascinating and niche studies and discoveries in the realm of bugs, many of which directly affect our own world more than we know. It’s unsettling how experiences we depend on but know nothing about shape our very lives. Too often, life goes on and we’re none the wiser. Not today!
Without further ado, here’s our interview with Dr. Jon Zawislak, a man out standing in his field playing with bees.
Jon, you’ve written about agricultural pesticide use in the southern United States, the extensiveness of pesticide contamination in honey bee diets, and general honey bee hive management practices. These are very specific and fascinating inclinations, conversation we’re glad to know people are having. What is it about bees that first caught your interest?
My first introduction to honey bees was a horrible experience. When I was young, our neighbors had some bee hives. One of their kids wanted to show me the hives up close, and I remember immediately getting stung several times. I quickly ran off, wondering why anyone would ever want to keep bees on purpose. Years later, just out of college, I took a summer job as a technician in an entomology lab. That turned into about eight years working for that professor, during which I helped with a lot of research projects and learned a lot about insects. I was also introduced to honey bees again, and I became hooked. They are fascinating. Bees have their own complex society, with language and culture. They plan for the future. They respond intelligently to their environment, and can adapt resourcefully to changes in their surroundings or respond quickly to perceived threats. Honey bees have been both feared and revered by people since prehistory. They provide us with unique products (honey and beeswax) – which author Hattie Ellis calls “sweetness and light.” They have also been used as weapons of war, described by Jeffery Lockwood in his book Six Legged Soldiers. I guess it was gradual… there was no single epiphany moment when I fell in love with bees, but the more I learn about them, the more I want to learn. And when I decided to get a masters degree, I chose the bees to work with. I was just about out of school again when all the headlines began predicting gloom and doom for bees, and the end of the world as we know it without pollinators. Suddenly everyone wanted to study bees, but I was a couple of years ahead of the curve. There was a new job opening with the UA Cooperative Extension Service for a honey bee specialist. Talk about being in the right place at the right time with exactly the right credentials!
In the parlance of our times and the Almighty Google, the way we seek and even process information has changed. Interestingly, with the fastest internet connections ever literally at our fingertips, the sky, thus, the limit, people appear to be less interested in the world around them than ever. We know, say, that bees are good—that they perform some service, so to speak. We know what pollination is, at least conceptually. But what else do we know? Can you tell us a little bit about the importance of honey bee education?
Pollination is by far the most important service that bees provide. It’s been estimated that insect pollination adds more than $30 billion to the U.S. economy every year by improving the quantity and the quality of crop yields… fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. And honey bees – just one species out of about 20,000 types of bees – do the vast majority of that pollination work on many important crops. They are the only species that we can manage on the scale necessary to meet the needs of modern agriculture.
Bees also provide us with honey. This was just about the only sweetener humans had for most of history, until widespread cultivation of sugarcane began. Even though there are many sweeteners available now, honey remains special. There is no one single flavor of honey. Every batch of honey is a blend of the nectar from millions of flowers. It takes on the flavor and aroma of the place it’s produced… what a wine afficionado would call terroir. Fresh raw honey is as complex as it is delightful. Think of it as the distilled essence of a field of wildflowers. It doesn’t need to be processed or pasteurized; it’s pure and naturally antiseptic straight from the bee hive.
Beeswax, too, has long been a valuable commodity. It was used in candle making, or course, but also many other traditional industries as a lubricant, for waterproofing, for casting metal objects, and making wood and leather polishes. It has a high melting point compared to many synthetic waxes, so pure beeswax can be made into tall tapered candles. Most of the scented candles you see are poured into jars because they are made with inferior waxes that have a much lower melting point. Beeswax was traditionally used to hold the reeds in place inside of accordions. So, you know, no polka music without honey bees! A lot of beeswax today goes into pharmaceuticals because it’s nontoxic, although it has no nutritional value.
Pollen itself can be another valuable commodity. Besides spreading these miniscule particles from flower to flower, bees collect a lot of it for their own use. Pollen is high in carbohydrates and lipids, as well as proteins, amino acids, vitamins and other nutrients. It’s got everything a growing bee needs, and the colony needs a lot of pollen to keep making more bees. Many people consume pollen as a dietary supplement or seek out locally collected pollen for relief from seasonal allergies.
One of the fiction pieces in this anthology involves bees. Specifically, a swarm of bees displays rather odd behavior. Over the years, I’ve read that bees have personalities, for lack of a better word. What can you tell us about the behavior patterns of bees?
I suppose you could say that bees have personalities. However, any bee you happen to meet outside the hive has, at most, a couple of weeks to live. The likelihood you will encounter and interact with the same bee more than once is pretty slim if you aren’t a beekeeper yourself. Having worked with many colonies of bees over the years, I can definitely say that the colony unit tends to have its own personality. Any beekeeper will agree that some colonies can be less pleasant to work with than others. Some colonies simply tend to be more defensive – I don’t like to use the word aggressive – towards the ways we interact with them in their home, which they might naturally perceive as a threat to their families. Bees respond to their environment, but there is also a genetic component to their behaviors. Nature versus nurture, as they say. And if you replace the queen bee, within about a month the personality of the colony will usually change, as the genetics of the queen’s offspring shift. Sometimes for the better, but there are no guarantees.
We are all storytellers. From the moment we wake up in the morning, we tell ourselves and others stories. Sometimes the story is a romance. Sometimes it’s a story about revenge. Often, it’s a suspense. When looking back over the chapters of our journey through this ever-changing world, usually we can pinpoint moments when our lives changed course. More often than not, these changes are marked by dark moments of realization that shock us to the core. Was there ever a moment in your research about the effects of pesticides on the environment, whether in the classroom or out in the field, when you discovered something that began to define your research thereafter?
I started looking at the effects of pesticides on bees in response to the prevailing popular idea that a single class of insecticides, called neonicotinoids, were the sole (or most important) cause of what was called CCD, or colony collapse disorder. This group of chemicals represents the largest slice of pie — over a quarter of all chemical pesticides sold and used worldwide. Their adoption into agriculture and other uses coincided with the public’s awareness of pollinator declines, so it seemed to fit. There were lots of protests around the country in front of big box hardware stores demanding that they stop selling these chemicals in the name of saving the bees. In reality, the amount of neonics sold to consumers is a small drop in the bucket of worldwide use. Demanding that homeowners stop using one class of chemical is not going to reverse this trend. It would only cause the agriculture industry to shift to using other chemicals. The current state of pollinator health reflects the state of overall environmental and landscape health. We are living in the Anthropocene Era, and people have been making the world into a less friendly place for bees and other wildlife in a lot ways for a very long time.
Some of my research looked specifically into pesticide contamination of bees and bee hive products. Honey bees sample the environment all around their hive, and pretty much anything present in it will make its way back to their home. With sophisticated tools you can measure that contamination in beeswax, in honey, in the bees themselves, and in the pollen they collect. Once in the hive, there is no way to tell when or where a specific compound may have come from. But loads of pollen can be sampled easily, directly from bees returning from their flights outside. So pollen is ideal for sampling a specific place at a specific time. We can also determine exactly what plants the bees have been visiting. I conducted a study in the middle of an intensive agricultural area, where more than 80% of the land was under cultivation with a few crops. I collected pollen at regular intervals from multiple bee hives all season long. What I found was that the bees pretty much ignored the crops for most of the season, concentrating instead on the succession of many “weeds” flowering along the edges of the fields. Except for a few weeks in the late summer when it gets really hot and dry, and irrigated farm fields are about the only thing in bloom, bees took very little pollen from the cultivated fields. This behavior helps to limit the exposure of bees to a lot of the insecticides that farmers may be using on crops. And as for the neonicotinoids that were at the center of the controversy, they were practically absent from any of the samples we took. But what I did discover was high concentrations of herbicides showed up in the pollen samples all season long. They are used to burn down unwanted vegetation prior to planting seeds, and then used repeatedly throughout the season to control weeds. Most herbicides and fungicides are relatively non-toxic to bees, but they can interfere with the complex of beneficial bacteria that live in the bees’ digestive tract, and are important for their health.
All kinds of information is coming to light about the harmful effects of pesticide use, especially in regard to large-scale food production. However, are we seeing any progress in correcting this? Which is to say, is the world seeing—or can we expect to see anytime soon—a responsible response from the biggest culprits?
You can think of herbicide use as a proxy for habitat loss. Where you see the most herbicides being sprayed, you generally will see the lowest abundance and diversity of pollinators. And you can generally follow that pattern up the chain. Where there are fewer pollinators there will be fewer insects and spiders in general, and few birds and other things that feed on invertebrates or on the seeds and berries that pollinators help provide, all the way up to the bigger predators. The exception to this pattern are pest insects. These are the minority of creatures that have evolved to thrive on the one crop that is being grown in a vast quantity, and where many of their natural predators are now in short supply. These same pests have been responding to heavy pressure to become resistant to pesticides over many generations, making them harder to control.
In Europe, where public pressure effectively led to banning the use of neonicotinoids on most flowering crops, populations of pollinators have not dramatically recovered. Insect populations worldwide continue to be in peril. Most published scientific literature agrees that there is no single cause, but multiple interacting factors. And most agree that habitat loss is at the top of that list, with pesticides and pollution below that, and then biological factors (such as pathogens, invasive species). The big picture is complicated. Ecosystems are complicated. All of those factors influence each other. Whenever you have living things interacting, it’s nearly impossible to predict all the ways that one part can interact with so many others.
Pesticide use is a low-hanging fruit that people find easy to criticize — especially people who don’t produce anything to eat. As a society we enjoy cheap and plentiful food. We like to have access to tropical produce any time we have a craving… bananas, pineapples, chocolate, coffee… We like being able to eat fresh strawberries in the winter because there is a vast system of production in place to bring them here from thousands of miles away, and burn fossil fuels to do it. If you eat almonds or drink almond milk, you are subsidizing the commercial beekeeping industry, which trucks nearly 2 million hives of bees to California each spring just to pollinate to estimated 80% of the world’s almonds that are grown there. Afterwards, bees are moved to other crops, all over the country. No place that produces the large quantities of food we take for granted is able to maintain vast populations of pollinators needed to produce it. If we want avocados and fresh oranges in the Ozarks, they come to us from California or Florida or even farther. Unless we hunt, gather or grow all our own food within walking distance of our off-grid homesteads, we are all culpable to some degree or other. All we can do is try to limit our individual impacts as best we can.
Our journal aims to highlight art, environmental writing, and spiritual currents from all over the world, but Dorothy Gale was right: There really is no place like home, is there? (And she lived in Kansas!) We at Skipjack camp have a soft place in our hearts for stories about these hills and hollers, poetry of the stillness between autumn and winter and the juxtaposed expectation between winter and spring. And then there’s spring and summer: the lushness and green of thriving life, insects galore, a whole wide world reveling in it in its own time. People planting gardens, mowing lawns, making hay while the sun shines. More and more, in the spring and summer, we see the tell-tale series of boxes in people’s yards–people raising bees. What advice do you have for people interested in cultivating bees? Anything interesting we haven’t touched on?
Beekeeping is great. It’s an enjoyable hobby for many people. Bees are fascinating creatures, with a truly alien society all their own. After more than two decades with bees, I can still get lost in wonder by opening up a hive and trying to guess at what’s going on in that little world. Keeping bees healthy and productive is like a long road trip. A lot of it is on cruise control – the bees do most of the work for you – but you still have to keep your eye on things and give them a little nudge in one direction or another to keep them pointed in the right direction. Most of the difficult things about keeping bees are seasonal challenges. You have to be ready when mother nature decides it’s time. Beekeeping is challenging because it has a steep learning curve to feel like you have a grasp of it. It’s a craft, a blend of both science and art. I’m still learning after all these years. I can teach you a lot of the science and biology of bees, but you will still have to get out there and wing it on your own. But for anyone who enjoys a challenge, beekeeping can be very rewarding. I also enjoy things like gardening and woodworking. It’s certainly easier to buy produce or furniture in a store, and it’s cheap and easy to buy honey. But when you taste your own fresh honey, from your own hives in your own back yard, it’s magical! It’s like comparing a ripe, juicy homegrown tomato to that tough pink spherical thing you have to settle for in the supermarket this time of year… there’s really no comparison at all, right? It’s a completely different experience. Once you have had honey warm, right out of the hive, you can’t ever go back to store-bought stuff. Consider yourself warned!
Are there any specific articles, writers, or resources you’d like to recommend to our readers for further information on these topics?
The Lives of a Cell was a book that had a profound impact on me. It’s a collection of essays by Dr. Lewis Thomas, published in a medical journal in the early 1970s, which touch on a number of subjects, but collectively underscore the interconnectedness of people and our environment, and really everything that is alive. Another book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by the entomologist E. O. Wilson explores similar themes, using concepts from natural science to connect many other fields. One of his students at Harvard, Thomas Seeley, also became very influential in the field of beekeeping. His brilliant book Honeybee Democracy explores the processes through which a colony of bees divides itself by swarming, then must set forth into the world and, in a few short days, representatives of the group must discover and evaluate potential home sites in distant hollow trees and other cavities, then debate among themselves which is best, and then lead the group to take up residence this space.
The film My Garden of a Thousand Bees documents the revelations of filmmaker Martin Dohrn, who explored the diversity of tiny life in his own backyard during the pandemic lockdown, using sophisticated camera equipment and techniques and lots of time of his hands. (https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/my-garden-thousand-bees-about/26263/)
For those who are interested in keeping honey bees, visit our Extension website: http://uaex.uada.edu/bees. I have a brand new publication called Beekeeping in Arkansas that is available for free: https://www.uaex.uada.edu/publications/pdf/MP577.pdf.
We also have a complete beekeeping short course online as a series of videos for anyone to watch. These will introduce you to everything you should consider before investing $1000 in bee hives and equipment, and show you what’s involved in the first couple of years of beekeeping: http://uaex.uada.edu/bee-class.
For more in-depth exploration of particular subjects, the Beekeeping Essentials series by Dr. Larry Connor can bee good reads. I have helped to edit and illustrate a number of books he publishes through his company, Wicwas Press (https://wicwas.com/).
If you still want to help “save the bees” but don’t think you are up to managing honey bee colonies, then just plant more flowers. Gardeners can also cultivate mason bees and leafcutter bees, which are great native pollinators that don’t require excessive care. You can simply provide them with good habitat and nesting sites and let nature take care of her own. There is lots of great information available from the Xerces Society of Invertebrate Conservation (https://www.xerces.org/) and the Pollinator Partnership (https://www.pollinator.org/). Locally, check out the resources from the Arkansas Monarch Conservation Partnership (https://www.arkansasmonarchs.org/) to see how you can help create, improve and conserve habitat for all kinds of pollinators.
the water and the gills 