Hello Friends!
OK, so after several months, I am finally getting around to writing about my experiences at the 46th meeting of the International Apicultural Congress called APIMONDIA. This is the big beekeeping conference where honey bee researchers, commercial beekeepers, industry professionals, sideline and hobbyist beekeepers and all manner of freaky beeks get to converge and mind-meld. It was a fantastic experience that I have been looking forward to writing about- so here goes!
Apimondia happens every other year, with each meeting taking place in a different country. The 2019 Congress was held in Montreal, Canada in early September. I was lucky enough to arrive several days in advance of the meeting with my *new* husband, Tim. We were married in July, and this trip was one of many “mini-moons” or “multi-moons” we plan to take. Tim’s family is from Bangor, ME so we convinced his parents to make the drive from Maine to Montreal and stay with us for a few days to explore the city. Nothing like going on your honeymoon with your in-laws, right?! Tim’s mom speaks fluent french, so it was fun having her be our translator and watch the cute waiter at the French bistro flirt with her.
Once the congress began, Tim and his parents went back to Maine for the week, and my dear friend and beekeeping mentor, Rob Keller of Napa Valley Bee Co., and his girlfriend took the place of Tim and his parents at our airbnb. We did all have one night together, however, which we spent at O.Noir-- an immersive dining experience in which you eat in complete and total darkness with a blind waitstaff. It was quite a funny and memorable experience to share.
Ok, now onto the bee talk! It’s hard to even know where to begin. Whenever I am at conferences and bee meetings, I prefer to hand write my notes, as I feel like I can connect with the information better in the moment and focus on the speakers without having technology between us. When I returned home, I typed up my notes, which ended up being 14 pages! At some point soon as an addendum to this, I think I’ll post my notes to the blog separately as a stand-alone piece…
There was a whole lot of amazing information presented at the congress, and also a whole giant expo area with people selling beekeeping equipment, honey, books, you name it. Before the congress began, my father-in-law asked me why I come to these kinds of meetings. I told him it was 50% keeping up on current research and 50% networking. Reflecting back, I think that’s still very much true.
I will say one thing that has stayed with me in reflecting after the conference were the friendships I strengthened and new connections I made. This was the first time I was at a beekeeping conference where there were actually bee professionals numbered in the 10s in my age cohort AND my gender! Shoutout to Melanie Kirby, Tucka Bee, Ang Roell, and so many more! This is a big deal to me. For a long time there has been a serious lack of young beekeepers and an even more serious lack of young female beekeepers. I was thrilled to get to meet a good number of other young female beekeeping entrepreneurs and researchers; that was mega inspiring. I do wish there had been more P.O.C. and L.G.B.T. representation as those are also lacking sectors in the bee world, but there were a few notable exceptions that are forging that path and I am glad to see them represented and giving presentations.
Regarding the research that was presented, the track I went for was mostly treatment-free, queen rearing/breeding programs, locally adapted stock/darwinian beekeeping, VSH behaviors, and issues pertaining to keeping bees in the agricultural landscape (pesticide exposure, monoculture, etc). There were a lot of presentations on detecting fraudulent honey, products of the hive, apitherapy, commercial beekeeping, and community/development projects which I would have loved to attend but weren’t as pertinent to my niche.
Some of my biggest take-aways were around pesticide/fungicide exposure and the most glaring thing was that even a lot of those research results were contradictory or seemed to present different conclusions. This was a little disheartening, because I feel like for a long time, there has been a lot of misinformation coming from the companies that make both pesticides and the miticides that are used as in-hive varroa treatments. For a while, the narrative has been “it’s a mite issue” rather than “it’s an environmental issue, due largely to agricultural chemicals”. The jury is still out on how bad agricultural chemicals are for insect pollinators, but we know they aren’t good. It’s really hard to study bees in a lab, and there are too many variables to control in field tests, but what we do know is that these chemicals accumulate and persist in fat soluble hive products (wax and pollen) and there are likely synergistic effects. The effects have been noted to range from neurotoxic effects to endocrine disruptors to affecting the ability of bees to process and digest tainted floral resources. In conclusion, not great news.
Rufus Issacs gave a great keynote on the need for Integrated Crop Pollination. He made the astute point that since the 1960s, more and ore of the crops we are growing are pollinator dependent, and many are grown in monoculture. Land diversity is not increasing as quickly as our dependency on insect pollination is increasing, and this is a problem. In a time when our current food system needs pollinators more than ever, we are continually losing biodiversity and available “clean” pollinator forage in the landscape. Wild bee abundance has been mapped, and it is very low in intensive agricultural areas. We need to think about an IPPM approach, an integrated pest AND POLLINATOR management approach, on our farmland if we want to start moving in the right direction.
Some of my other favorite presentations were about hygienic behavior. This is a hot topic, especially among treatment free and “Darwinian” beekeepers. The research came out of Dr. Marla Spivak and researchers from her lab, as well as research out of Dr. Thomas Seeley’s lab. The main take-away from Dr. Spivak’s talk was about the hygienic uncapping that house bees will do when they smell mites reproducing underneath capped brood. The kicker, however, is that some colonies are more hygienic than others. We all know that bees are fastidious workers, and they found that some bees will re-cap infected pupae rather than clear it out of the hive. This is a net negative as it creates extra work and does not remove the viral pathogen source from the hive. Research from Peck and Seeley concluded that as much as 50% of infested cells were recapped in hives they were monitoring! So, needless to say, that uncapping behavior doesn’t always mean that the infected/infested pupae are getting removed from the hive as swiftly as we would like. I also learned through the work of Marla Spivak’s lab that the signal that indicates the presence of mites/parasitism and primes the uncapping process is called tritriacontane. It is my understanding that tritriacontane is the signal emitter from the scent of the varroa, and the signal receiver to do the uncapping process resides in the nurse bees.
As I noted earlier, it was a 50/50 between inspiring info and inspiring people. It was also just a lot of fun! I got to spend a good amount of time at APIMONDIA with my good friend Aidan Wing of Wings of Nature Bees. He lives fairly close to me and is both my local queen breeder/nuc supplier and a favorite queen rearing-collaborator. (I actually made a cameo on his poster presentation on Developing Regenerative Queen Breeding Programs at the congress!) Anyways, as we were both at the airport in Montreal about to fly back to the SF Bay Area, he said to me something along the lines of “This was the best week of my life!”. While I know this was hyperbole, there is still a lot of truth to it. It is hard to make a living keeping bees. But, for us truly dedicated folks who “caught the bug”, our lives have been touched by our winged friends in a way that can be hard to explain to non-beeks. We are a bit of a rare breed and there are definitely some odd ducks along us. When we get the chance to meet other like-minded beekeepers, especially those of us early in our careers, there is a certain kind of magic that happens. To anyone who is serious about keeping bees, I would highly recommend attending a future APIMONDIA congress. I do not think you will be disappointed!
And in the words of my friend Sam Comfort: BEST IN BUGS!
Much love,
Emily