Dan Weaver
Reel 4219
TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEWEE: Dan Weaver
INTERVIEWER: David Todd
DATE: September 26, 2025
LOCATION: Navasota, Texas
SOURCE MEDIA: MP3 audio file
TRANSCRIPTION: Trint, David Todd
REEL: 4219
FILE: HoneyBee_Weaver_Dan_Navasota_Texas_26September2025_Reel4219.mp3
David Todd [00:00:02] Good morning. I am David Todd, and I have the privilege of being here this morning with Dan Weaver. And with his permission, we intend on recording this interview for research and educational work for a small nonprofit called the Conservation History Association of Texas and for a book and a website for Texas A&M Press and for an archive at the Briscoe Center for American History, which is at the University of Texas at Austin.
David Todd [00:00:31] And I want to stress at the outset that he has all equal rights to use this recording. It’s his to play with if he so desires.
David Todd [00:00:40] And with that kind of set of caveats, I just wanted to find out if that’s okay with you, Mr. Weaver.
Dan Weaver [00:00:47] Oh, yes, of course. That’s fine. Sounds good.
David Todd [00:00:50] Great. Well, let’s get started then.
David Todd [00:00:53] It is Friday, September 26, 2025. It’s about 9:10 a.m. Central Time.
David Todd [00:01:01] My name, as I said, is David Todd. I am representing the Conservation History Association of Texas, and I’m in Austin. We are conducting a remote interview with Dan Weaver, who is in the Navasota, Texas area.
David Todd [00:01:17] Mr. Weaver is a prominent honey bee expert. He’s a beekeeper. He is an attorney. He is a biologist. He’s a geneticist. And he is part of a family who’s been in the bee business for, I think it’s four generations, since 1888. so,deep roots in this business, in this kind of interest.
David Todd [00:01:41] He manages Bee Weaver Honey Farm, which produces mead, honey, queens. It provides pollination services. It offers tours and seminars. I think it’s hosting a big festival tomorrow. So,lots of activities regarding bees.
David Todd [00:01:59] The business’s bees, as I understand, have a mixed genetic heritage, track back to the Buckfast line and include some input from Africanized bees.
David Todd [00:02:10] He has helped organize the Honey Bee Genome Sequencing Project. And has led efforts to find sustainable and chemical-free ways to deal with threats from Varroa mites and other pests.
David Todd [00:02:23] One last encomium is that he has served as the president of the American Beekeeping Federation.
David Todd [00:02:30] This just scratches the surface, but I hope it gives a flavor of his background.
David Todd [00:02:34] Today we’ll be talking about Mr. Weaver’s life and career to date, and especially focus on what he can tell us about honey bees.
David Todd [00:02:45] With that introduction, thank you so much for doing this.
David Todd [00:02:49] I wanted to just start with a question about your early years. Were there any people or events in your childhood that might have gotten you interested in bees or wildlife and nature in general?
Dan Weaver [00:03:03] Yes. Happy to be here, David.
David Todd [00:03:04] Thank you.
Dan Weaver [00:03:06] So, my early years: my first memories of bees and beekeeping, I was about a year old, I think, when, maybe a year and a half old, when I can remember going out to the queen bee apiary that was behind the house where I grew up, over off FM 2, Farm Road 2, a place called Silver Hill, where my mom and dad had built a house on land that had been gifted to them by my grandfather.
Dan Weaver [00:03:44] And as soon as the house was up, my dad installed a queen mating apiary in the backyard. So, I got to walk out the back door of the house and literally into a queen yard. And I think there’s some images somewhere of me like bending over pointing at the entrance to a mating nuc, at bees coming in and out of the entrance hole.
Dan Weaver [00:04:08] And my grandfather was still very active in the business while I was growing up. And I worked after school and on weekends beginning about the time I was nine or 10 years old, helping with the family business and I became fascinated with honey bees pretty early on.
Dan Weaver [00:04:31] So, I think that undoubtedly my dad and grandfather had a huge impact on my appreciation of wildlife and the environment.
Dan Weaver [00:04:49] I’ll just add that I also can remember my great grandmother a little bit. And she was Florence Summerford before she married my great grandfather, Zach Weaver, who were the parents of my grandfather, Roy S. Weaver Sr.
Dan Weaver [00:05:08] And Florence, Florence’s brother, Frank Summerford, had given Zach and Florence 10 hives of honey bees as a wedding gift when they got married in 1888, 137 years ago.
Dan Weaver [00:05:24] At that time, Zach Weaver was known for baling hay in the Brazos River bottom and loading it on rail cars in Courtney and selling hay interstate. And he was quite a handy guy, apparently. Made his own hay baling machine that was, of course, operated by mules. And it was quite a rig, but apparently he could bale a lot of hay in a hurry.
Dan Weaver [00:05:54] But he quickly gave that up for honey bees because they became so fascinated with it.
Dan Weaver [00:06:00] And of course Frank, Florence’s brother, was a great teacher. And my grandfather and great grandfather knew all the prominent people in the beekeeping industry during that pivotal time when the Langstroth movable frame hive was becoming the standard and beekeeping was really booming and zooming as a backyard industry for so much of agrarian America at the time.
Dan Weaver [00:06:37] And I caught that buzz myself and I was lucky enough to have my grandfather take me out when I was a kid and he’d drive me around in his Scout, his International Scout. And he made me learn how to identify trees and brush and flowers so that I knew where the bees were going and what were good honey plants. And I got a fairly comprehensive education thanks to the knowledge and patience of my dad and grandfather and uncle and cousins and everyone else who was involved in the beekeeping business at that time.
Dan Weaver [00:07:30] And from there, you know, I don’t know where you want to run with this, but I can remember meeting Brother Adam sometime in the late 1960s, right about the time that I was in junior high school. He came to visit us shortly. I think he came to visit us in ’67 when we struck the deal to start producing Buckfast bees in America.
Dan Weaver [00:08:00] And I’ve got to say that my family was pretty forward-thinking in preparing for threats to the beekeeping industry. So, they recognized in the ’60s that it was almost inevitable that the acarine mite, Acarapis woodi, would get to the continental United States. And that it would be great if there were bees that were available that were genetically resistant to that exotic parasitic mite that had wrecked havoc on European beekeeping.
Dan Weaver [00:08:33] And Brother Adam at Buckfast Abbey in England had taken the handful of colonies that had survived what was then called the Isle of Wight disease because that’s where it first erupted. It killed off all but a handful of colonies. But he started breeding queens from the survivor stock and incorporating other lineages of bees from a variety of places around the world.
Dan Weaver [00:09:05] He was already quite renowned for having helped develop a population of honey bees that were remarkable in many ways in terms of their resistance to parasites and disease and their gentleness and their honey production capacity and their ability to overwinter in harsh temperate climates. It had long winters.
Dan Weaver [00:09:33] So, anyway, my dad and my uncle and my grandfather struck a deal with Brother Adam and he shipped queens to Canada. We had a cooperative agreement with the University of Guelph in Ontario. They had a honey bee quarantine facility. There was none available in the United States. So, Brother Adam shipped queens to the quarantine station at University of Guelph. The bees were kept there and examined meticulously, excuse me, over a period of a couple of months by a variety of entomologists and bee experts from the Canadian agricultural industry and the Canadian agriculture department, USDA, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, and they decided, “Yep, there’s nothing here that we have to be afraid of.”
Dan Weaver [00:10:27] So, they released the queens to us and we began to produce Buckfast stock here in Navasota, Texas.
Dan Weaver [00:10:36] From that time forward, we would occasionally get, every year or two, we’d get drone semen in from Brother Adam who’d collected drone seman, and we would artificially inseminate a few more queen honey bees to try to keep the stock as close to what Brother Adam had produced as we could.
Dan Weaver [00:10:55] Although there was definitely some out-crossing because none of our mating areas are completely insulated from the influences of feral honey bee colonies. The feral population in this part of the world at that time was completely dominated by Weaver Apiaries’ bees and queens, and the genetic makeup of that particular population, which was already quite diverse.
Dan Weaver [00:11:21] Curiously enough, Frank Sommerford had made friends with the first guy in Texas, if not the U.S., to import Apis mellifera ligustica stock from Italy into the U.S. And had some of that available in Grimes County.
Dan Weaver [00:11:39] And the bees that had been here in this part of the world prior to that were all Apis mellifera mellifera, the northern European honey bee or the German black bee.
Dan Weaver [00:11:49] And so, there was already that sort of hybridization going on back in my great-grandfather’s and grandfather’s day.
Dan Weaver [00:11:56] My grandfather brought in bees from the Middle East.
Dan Weaver [00:12:00] So before we got the Buckfast bees here, we were already fairly genetically diverse, having representation of three of the four major subspecies of honey bees.
Dan Weaver [00:12:14] And then subsequently, and we’ll get to this a little later, of course, I came back into the family business as an adult after practicing law for a while and going to grad school and doing a number of other things.
Dan Weaver [00:12:27] And the year I got back was the year that Varroa mites and Africanized bees both arrived in Texas.
Dan Weaver [00:12:33] So, we now have representation of Apis mellifera scutellata to some extent in our stock as well, although we’ve done our darnedest to make sure that we’ve mitigated and avoided the negative behavioral traits that are associated with Africanized honey bees or the New World African bee.
David Todd [00:12:55] Could I stop you there just a moment.
Dan Weaver [00:12:57] Of course.
David Todd [00:12:57] You know, it’s really interesting that it sounds like a lot of your education in the bee business was from people you knew and not just random, generic people, but intimate family members. And I’m wondering if there was any kind of media influence, you know, books, magazines, journals, TV shows, radio shows, or any particular schooling you took. Or is this, that just wasn’t a factor.
Dan Weaver [00:13:29] No, you know, my, my family was already a prominent part of the commercial beekeeping industry in the U.S. And we subscribed to “Gleanings and Bee Culture”. That’s what it was known as at the time, “Gleanings and Bee Culture”, where, in fact, the only firsthand account of the Wright brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, was published by A.I. [Amos Ives] Root, who was the only reporter there to see that happen.
Dan Weaver [00:14:03] So, “Gleanings and Bee Culture” was, you know, on the table or in the office at Weaver Apiaries. And I got to read that.
Dan Weaver [00:14:12] I got to read the American Bee Journal as well.
Dan Weaver [00:14:16] And my family advertised in both of those, advertising that we sold queen honey bees and so-called package bees, which are literally artificial swarms created with two or three pounds of bees and a queen placed in a wood and wire shipping cage. And we would sell hundreds of thousands of queens and tens of thousands of packages every year.
Dan Weaver [00:14:44] Yeah, and I got to go to, starting when I was a little kid, I would occasionally get to go to beekeeping meetings in other states, even the National Beekeepers meeting from time to time.
Dan Weaver [00:14:57] So, then there were presentations delivered at those conferences by the honey bee scientists that operated out of the USDA Bee Labs and other academic institutions that had departments of entomology that did work on honey bees as well.
Dan Weaver [00:15:16] So, no, there were a variety of things that contributed to my understanding and education with respect to honey bees and social insects.
David Todd [00:15:30] OK, that helps a lot.
Dan Weaver [00:15:33] The other thing I was curious about is if you could sort of place the bee for us in the natural world. I mean, I think a lot of what we’ve talked about to date is the industry and the business. But it sounds like bees, from what little I know as a layperson, have a huge role in pollinating and other sort of ecological services. And it’d be good to get a little introduction from you about what their role is there.
Dan Weaver [00:16:07] Right. Well, this is a this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, and you’re going to have to probably stop me because I might just ramble on and on about this. But honey bees are fairly unique as a pollinator species in that they’re super-generalist pollinators. They are not discriminant in their choice of pollen sources, pollen being, of course, the reproductive material that plants produce. And for honey bees and other bee species, it provides the protein and lipids that they need to sustain the colony and life.
Dan Weaver [00:16:48] And honey bees are social insects. And so, they build up huge nests comprised of tens of thousands of worker honey bees and typically one queen and during times of the year when swarming might happen or reproduction is possible, during the pollen flow, as we like to think about it, when bees are collecting pollen, there’ll be a thousand or more drones in a colony as well.
Dan Weaver [00:17:18] So, I think it’s been a huge mistake. So, I’m going to run off on a tangent here, but I’ll circle back to why honey bees are so important as part of this, I don’t want to think of it as a diatribe, but it’s a critique of some people who are championing native bees because Apis mellifera was brought into this country by the Spanish and later the English and the French. And, but honey bees have been established in North America for a very long time.
Dan Weaver [00:17:55] The native bee species people – I think particularly of some organizations that have chosen to demonize honeybees, like the Xerces Society. They really are barking up the wrong tree.
Dan Weaver [00:18:14] Honey bees and native bees have a lot more in common. And there’s no reason that we need to be antagonists of one another. Their, their take on honey bees is that honey bees threaten native bee species, and I would point out that if that were the case, the damage was done 350 years ago and it has nothing to do with what’s going on right now, except to the extent that there are some honey bee viruses and honey bee parasites that could also cause problems for other pollinators too.
Dan Weaver [00:18:47] But again, that’s already, that already transpired. It’s not something that, you know, poses an ongoing threat to these solitary bee species that the Xerces Society and some other organizations champion so frequently.
Dan Weaver [00:19:02] And more importantly, if it develops that some of these solitary bee species are unable to sustain sufficient populations in the wild to propagate the handful, oftentimes just a single plant species that they pollinate, we don’t want to see those plants go extinct. Honey bees, being super-generalist pollinators, are available to provide backup pollination services to sustain those populations.
Dan Weaver [00:19:38] And honey bees, of course, are the only bee species that can develop large populations early in the spring to provide pollination for some of the important agricultural crops that bloom fairly early in the year before there would be any native pollinators available to provide those services.
Dan Weaver [00:19:55] So, the pollination service that bees provide in this part of the world is, uh, is extremely important and ever, ever more important because of the threat that indiscriminate herbicide application poses to, um, pollinators in particular. Not, not just pollinators, but, you know, a variety of wild and introduced species of plants as well. They’re part of the natural environment in Texas and elsewhere.
Dan Weaver [00:20:34] So, um, I think that we’re silly to try to fight among ourselves as people who champion pollinators about whose pollination services are most important. They’re all needed and they’re all required. We all face the same threats from exotic mites, viruses, herbicides, pesticides, landscape change.
Dan Weaver [00:21:02] Landscape change is huge. I’m looking out at the landscape in the vicinity of BeeWeaver Apiaries here right now. And it’s not nearly so heavily wooded as it once was. And I think that a big part of that is because so much pressure is being put on the environment and so much landscape change is being fostered by people who move out of the city to escape the city life, move to the country and, you know, buy their 10 acres, and the first thing they do is bring in a bulldozer and they clear nine of those acres off and they cut down everything except a handful of mature trees and then they plant monoculture grass. So, it looks, it looks a lot like a golf course.
Dan Weaver [00:21:56] And you know that is not a healthy environment for any pollinator. And it’s not particularly good for the propagation of those plant species that were once so prevalent.
Dan Weaver [00:22:08] And once again, um, you know, without pollination services, you’re never going to get the reproductive potential of the remaining plants optimized to be there to provide the resource necessary to provide replacement stock, once those old mature trees die, as they do.
Dan Weaver [00:22:30] And, uh, and so that’s the other part of it. Pretty soon you end up with just a prairie.
Dan Weaver [00:22:36] And I’m lucky enough to have grown up in a really, really interesting ecological zone where there’s a, it’s where the Big Thicket and East Texas Piney Woods meet the coastal prairie and the Post Oak Savannah and the Blackland Prairie all come together right here, in this neck of the woods.
Dan Weaver [00:22:59] So, there’s a tremendous variety of landscapes available, but the predominant feature of all of them is becoming, you know, much like the rest of suburbia, which is of considerable concern to me.
Dan Weaver [00:23:15] I think there needs to be much more, much more concerted effort made. Uh, and I applaud some of the organizations that are involved in trying to preserve natural habitat, because I think more focus needs to placed, and more, more time and money and effort need to be spent on trying to maintain those things.
David Todd [00:23:38] I hear you. Yes.
David Todd [00:23:42] So aside from bees’ pollinating role, I’ve heard that some people find them helpful for Multiple Sclerosis treatment.
David Todd [00:23:58] Is that a fact?
Dan Weaver [00:24:02] Yes. I can only share with you some anecdotal evidence that I’ve got to bee venom might well have an important impact. I’m not going to say that it needs to replace any of the [pardon me, tickle in my throat] that it needs to replace any of the conventional or innovative medical treatments that are available for that condition.
Dan Weaver [00:24:27] But we’ve had people come to us to get honey bees so that they could administer stings to themselves in the hopes that it would help with their MS, Multiple Sclerosis. And we’ve had a number of success stories that we’ve been able to witness firsthand. I think in particular, of one woman in her middle age, who when she first started getting bees from us, couldn’t get out of her car. We’d have to bring the bees out to her in a cage.
Dan Weaver [00:24:57] And after she’d been using apitherapy, bee venom therapy, for her Multiple Sclerosis, two or three years later, she was climbing the stairs to the second floor office and grabbing her bees from us, you know, and able to walk.
Dan Weaver [00:25:20] So, who knows. Maybe there’s some powerful placebo effect that’s at play there. But the evidence that I have seen suggests that there might be something to that and, you know, perhaps it’s time to do some controlled trials and document that with best available techniques, so explore that as a therapy for more people.
David Todd [00:25:46] OK.
David Todd [00:25:47] Well, so I gather that tomorrow you’ll be having many people, hundreds of people, coming out. And I was wondering if you could sort of talk about not just the products that you might sell them, the mead or the honey, or the bees themselves, but also just the education and entertainment that people find in learning about bees and being with bees.
Dan Weaver [00:26:15] So, I resisted moving in this direction for a long time, but it became increasingly evident that there was a real hunger among people to learn more about bees and the environment and honey and apitherapy and all that sort of thing.
Dan Weaver [00:26:42] So, we gradually decided to expand more into the business of bee education, agritourism and invite people out to learn about honey bees and bee keeping and apiculture in the environment.
Dan Weaver [00:27:10] And so, we do have a number of events that we sponsor throughout the year. We have a variety of seminars that we’ll hold from time to time where we try to provide more in-depth exposure to and introduction to some of the things that we do as a beekeeper – you know, producing queens, producing honey, harvesting honey, using honey in a variety of different food stuffs and sweet stuffs.
Dan Weaver [00:27:44] And, it’s really grown, you know. I’ve been amazed. I was skeptical that we’d be able to make a business out of that, but it’s turned out to be quite popular and we have tours that come out. And we now host free hive tour events. And if people want private experiences, well, we can set that up or if they want to bring a larger group out, a school group out or a bunch of their friends or a church wants to have an event out here, well we can set something up for them and provide a place for that to happen.
David Todd [00:28:27] And then, I imagine most people, when they think of bees, they think, a delicious jar of honey, but, it sounds like you’re also moving into other products like mead. And how’s that come about?
Dan Weaver [00:28:43] I was lucky enough to have some good friends in the beekeeping business that were excellent mead makers. I developed a taste for the stuff and I’ll have to say, right off the bat, that most of the meads that you encounter, or at least used to encounter were not really very well done in my opinion.
Dan Weaver [00:29:05] And, I had an idea about the kind of mead that I wanted to produce one day, but I never felt like I quite had the bandwidth to devote myself to another sector of the industry, like producing mead because, you know, it’s a full-time job to be a mazer, which is what you call a mead maker, a mazer.
Dan Weaver [00:29:28] But I decided, you know, maybe, maybe I can use the Field of Dreams theory and get this thing off the ground. So, I applied for the federal license to manufacture mead, and I got the Texas license to manufacturer mead.
Dan Weaver [00:29:41] And I hadn’t had those licenses in hand more than about 10 days, when I got, I was contacted by Jeff Murray. And he said, “You don’t know me Danny, but I was about to set up a mead-making operation. I saw you’ve got the licenses in hand. May I come up and show you what I can do?”
Dan Weaver [00:29:58] And Jeff arrived with a couple of large satchels full of the product that he was able to produce using honey and fresh fruit and yeast and water as the only ingredients.
Dan Weaver [00:30:11] And wouldn’t you know it? He was making exactly the kind of stuff that my friends had made in the past that had so impressed me. And I thought, “Well, we ought to be able to do a deal.”
Dan Weaver [00:30:21] And sure enough, we have. And it’s, we’ve gotten it off the ground nicely. We recently had to expand to a second tasting room and a larger production facility because we couldn’t get big enough tanks in the first building we built. So, it’s taking off, I think.
Dan Weaver [00:30:39] Um, but again, I couldn’t do that without the help of many other people. The same thing goes with the agritourism and beekeeping education and the other programs that we offer. I’m blessed to have really, really talented group of employees and friends who work with me. And I couldn’t do it without them. That’s for sure.
David Todd [00:31:05] And I guess you have this, this wonderful stream of services and products from, you know, the educational, entertainment, agritourism side of things, to the mead and the honey and the queens. But, I guess all of that is vulnerable to these mites and diseases. And, I think that that’s something you’ve been really involved with for decades trying to mitigate. And I was hoping that you could talk to us a little bit about the Varroa mite. You kind of mentioned it in passing with the Buckfast story that you told earlier, but, can you talk about the mite and, you know, just what it does and why you worry about it?
Dan Weaver [00:31:50] Yeah, I’ll just, I can. I’ll try to embark on another, you know, reasonably condensed narrative, which you might have to stop me if I wander too far off field or go on too long.
Dan Weaver [00:32:01] But I was lucky enough to practice law in Austin with some really good attorneys and they wanted to make me a partner and I decided, “You know, I, I don’t know, I think, you know, the family beekeeping business is looking pretty attractive. It might be, it might be equally stressful, but in a different way.”
Dan Weaver [00:32:25] And, so I left the practice of law in Austin, moved back home to Lynn Grove, south of Navasota, and got into business with my dad.
Dan Weaver [00:32:36] And the year I came back into the business, Varroa mites, Varroa destructor was discovered in Florida. And the same year the New World Africanized bees crossed the Rio Grande into Texas. And both of those things changed beekeeping forever, especially when it comes to queen breeding and bee and queen production. But it also has a huge impact on honey production too.
Dan Weaver [00:33:11] So, I’ll talk about the Varroa mite first, but there’s a reason why I mentioned Africanized honey bees too, is because they are going to play a role in the story as well.
Dan Weaver [00:33:22] So, immediately, well, there were quarantines put into place. They tried to stop Varroa mites from being moved around the country by controlling migration in and out of the affected parts of Florida, but they weren’t terribly effective.
Dan Weaver [00:33:39] In fact, there were some renegade beekeepers who, despite those quarantines being in place, picked up their bees, put them on semis and moved them across the country.
Dan Weaver [00:33:53] And as luck would have it at that time, we had a operation in North Dakota where we moved about half our colonies during the summertime, when it got to be typically too hot in Texas to produce much honey and we’d produce a second honey crop in North Dakota.
Dan Weaver [00:34:11] Well, in 1989, one of those beekeepers in Florida moved in several truckloads of bees right on top of us, into our part of North Dakota and ignored the regulations that were supposed to keep other beekeepers that didn’t have registered locations out of the area altogether, much less bees from Florida.
Dan Weaver [00:34:34] And we ended up with Varroa mites in some of our colonies. They spread with just incredible velocity.
Dan Weaver [00:34:48] They, you know, the Varroa mite reproduces in the brood of the honey bees, in the hive, in the comb. But once the adult female mites emerge, some of them become phoretic and take up residence on the adult honey bees, the worker honey bees in particular.
Dan Weaver [00:35:10] And then when those honey bees fly off, the mites can hop off on the flowers and if those bees in the colony that’s infested with mites end up collapsing from Varroa mites or the viruses that Varroa vectors, then other bees from other colonies will come and take the remaining stores back home that were left behind by the dead colony.
Dan Weaver [00:35:33] And the robbing bees that come to take that honey and pollen away will pick up the mites that are left behind in the colony when there no more available hosts in that hive alive.
Dan Weaver [00:35:48] And so, anyway, by the end of the summer, that first year we identified a handful of Varroa mites and we willingly participated in this surveillance effort by the North Dakota Department of Agriculture. And upon the mites being detected, they contacted the Texas authorities and they, Texas Apiary Inspection Service and the North Dakota Department of Agriculture decided that my bees had to be quarantined.
Dan Weaver [00:36:21] And the Texas authorities declared that we couldn’t bring any colonies back to Texas unless they were in apiaries areas that were [pardon me] more than five miles away from any apiary in which we had detected any Varroa mites.
Dan Weaver [00:36:41] And we had to kill the rest of them off, so that year we had to exterminate several thousand colonies in North Dakota. We were only able to bring back about a thousand colonies.
Dan Weaver [00:36:55] But as luck would have it, Varroa mites were found in Texas just as we were bringing our bees back. They didn’t come from the bees that we brought back from North Dakota. They were already showing up in Texas via other routes of invasion.
Dan Weaver [00:37:19] Tremendously futile and expensive effort to stop the spread of Varroa mites. And it proved inevitable that they actually showed up in every corner of the U.S. within a couple of years.
Dan Weaver [00:37:33] And they are, they’re aptly named “Varroa destructor”.
Dan Weaver [00:37:41] The original honey bees that beekeepers were taking care of during that time frame were very vulnerable, and an infested colony would die within months unless it was treated with some very toxic acaricides, which are also pesticides, which means that they’re toxic both to the mites and to the bees, the difference being the dosage level required to kill mites is typically less than would kill bees, but it still has deleterious effects on honey bees.
Dan Weaver [00:38:19] And I participated in some research pretty early on that showed that there was a dramatic impact on the reproductive fitness of colonies that were treated with conventional acaricides.
Dan Weaver [00:38:34] And so, for the next couple of years, we were having to introduce toxins, chemical toxins, into our colonies in order to control Varroa mites.
Dan Weaver [00:38:48] And I very quickly became disillusioned with that as a beekeeping management practice and decided that I wanted to embark on an effort to select bees that were genetically resistant or genetically tolerant, at least, of Varroa mites, so that they could survive without introduction of these control chemicals into the colony, which, you know, pose the threat of contamination of hive products and the deleterious impacts of those toxic compounds on the colony itself.
Dan Weaver [00:39:27] Many of those products would be bio-concentrated naturally because of their chemical composition, and particularly in the wax that bees synthesize and construct their comb from.
Dan Weaver [00:39:42] So, yes, that’s the other thing that would happen is those compounds would be concentrated in the wax and before you know it, there were very, very high levels of some of those acaricides showing up in beeswax.
Dan Weaver [00:40:01] I decided, and I was not the only one trying to do this either, there were research groups at USDA Bee Labs that were also working to develop honey bees that were resistant to mites.
Dan Weaver [00:40:14] We took slightly different approaches. Many of the investigators attempted to find some surrogate marker of Varroa mite resistance, for instance, killing brood with liquid nitrogen and then testing whether bees could detect and remove the dead brood in a proxy measure of how they might deal with Varroa mite infested brood.
Dan Weaver [00:40:45] I decided to employ slightly more direct approach and instead I left the first year a thousand colonies untreated. That is, I did not attempt to control Varroa mites using chemical compounds, and I left a thousand colonies untreated.
Dan Weaver [00:41:06] And the results were astonishing. Of those thousand colonies, I think I only had nine that survived to the following spring that I could consider using as breeding stock. And of those nine that survived, it later became evident that four of them that survived had somehow, they only did so because they had miraculously managed to escape a heavy infestation of Varroa mites because their offspring were no more resistant than the previous generation of bees.
Dan Weaver [00:41:42] The other five queens seemed to produce offspring that were a little bit more resistant to Varroa mites, had a little bit higher survival rate, but only marginally so, than the previous generation.
Dan Weaver [00:41:57] But I decided to forge ahead and so every year I would leave more and more of our colonies untreated.
Dan Weaver [00:42:05] By ’97, it looked like I had finally gotten to the point where there was some real traction in the sense that a significant portion of the queens that we reared that year survived without a acaricide treatment.
Dan Weaver [00:42:25] Now, I’ll say survived, but they still were not thriving with the same level of productivity as bees prior to Varroa’s arrival. So, it was clear that I wasn’t quite there yet.
Dan Weaver [00:42:41] But at that point things really zoomed along. By 1999, I was able to go to the Apimondia Congress in Vancouver and deliver a talk where I showed colonies of honey bees that we’d moved to North Dakota that had honey supers stacked on them higher than I could reach when I was standing next to the colony. And none of those colonies had been treated with acaricides in years.
Dan Weaver [00:43:10] And you know, I thought that perhaps this was going to be some sort of great triumph and I would be recognized for my efforts. And instead, I had people stand up in the audience. This is an international congress of beekeepers and there were thousands of people present. I had to people stand up in the front rows of the auditorium and call me a liar and say that this was impossible. This was clearly fabricated. There’s no way that I’d managed to develop these could survive without chemical treatment and produce that kind of honey crop.
Dan Weaver [00:43:45] And that sort of skepticism, unfortunately, is still fairly pervasive today. I’ve got a number of people who bought queens from us for the last 25 years who have become true believers because they’ve seen it for themselves. But there are still many other commercial beekeepers that are still doing exactly what they did 25 years ago.
Dan Weaver [00:44:12] And unfortunately, the dosages that are now required to control Varroa mites are proving acutely toxic to the honey bee colony itself. And that’s having a deleterious impact and contributing, in my opinion, to the colony losses that are being experienced.
Dan Weaver [00:44:31] We can’t lay all of Colony Collapse Disorder off on Varroa mites.
Dan Weaver [00:44:37] All the Varroa mites and the pathogens, particularly the viruses that Varroas vector, seem to be one of the major players, perhaps the predominant player.
[00:44:47] There are many other things, including those acaricides that are introduced into the colony by beekeepers, the herbicides and pesticides that are now ubiquitous in the environment that most honey bee colonies are operating in, whether they’re in agricultural areas or not. It’s very, very difficult to find parts of the country where they could avoid exposure to those altogether.
Dan Weaver [00:45:13] And the landscape change that I mentioned.
Dan Weaver [00:45:15] They’re all interacting to make it much more difficult to keep colonies alive than it once was.
Dan Weaver [00:45:21] And I’d like to think that the genetic solution that I’ve helped deliver is at least part of the more sustainable long-term answer to this problem that hopefully others will carry forward.
David Todd [00:45:38] You know, this breeding approach sounds so interesting, and I think I’d read that you attributed some of your success with it to the fact that you had these many strains. There was a lot of diversity in your colonies. Can you tell us about that?
Dan Weaver [00:45:57] Yes, so thanks for thanks for leading me. Yes, thanks for leading me back to that other part of the story, because I was going to get there eventually. But let me just jump right into it.
Dan Weaver [00:46:05] I really do think that there was a silver lining to the problems that Africanized bees caused us. And believe me, they were huge problems. I’ll go into that more detail later if there’s time.
Dan Weaver [00:46:19] But I will say that it became fairly obvious early on that Africanized colonies, New World African bees, were more resistant to Varroa mites than the European honey bees that had been the population that was here in the US and been in the U.S. since the 1600s, and up through the 1800s and into the 1900s when this was happening.
Dan Weaver [00:46:56] So, and it was almost inevitable and unavoidable that there was some genetic introgression from Africanized honey bees into our breeding stock.
Dan Weaver [00:47:06] One of the things that Varroa mites did was it decimated the feral population. The feral population, of course, is the wild population that is not being managed by beekeepers. And in this part of the world, in particular, there were, the feral colony density was tremendous – like in the tens to hundreds per square mile of feral colonies living in hollows of trees principally. And those Varroa mites eliminated all that.
Dan Weaver [00:47:40] And so, that greatly reduced the competition for pollen and nectar resources that were available. Because those feral bees were no longer there.
Dan Weaver [00:47:53] So, Africanized bees had this tremendous advantage in that they were moving into a landscape that was so depleted of feral colonies that there were plenty of resources available for them. And it only helped perpetuate their natural tendency to swarm repeatedly, multiple times a year.
Dan Weaver [00:48:17] And so, typical European honey bee swarming behavior would be to swarm once, maybe twice a year, throwing off one or two large swarms, sort of like cellular division, with young queen, old queen being produced, and old queen stopping the laying. And once she stopped out of position, she’ll shrink down and can fly again.
Dan Weaver [00:48:45] And so, either the old queen, or sometimes the old queen and one or more of the virgins, would fly off with part of the bees in the colony and go elsewhere to try to find a new place to live.
Dan Weaver [00:48:54] Of course, beekeepers try to do everything they can to suppress swarming because you don’t want to lose bees or potential colonies to that.
Dan Weaver [00:49:03] But Africanized honey bees swarm multiple times a year. And instead of throwing off one or two large swarms, they would throw off swarms the size of your fist, just little bitty handfuls of bees and a queen.
Dan Weaver [00:49:20] And so, originally, I had assumed, based on some of the work that had been done by beekeeping scientists, that the biggest threat that Africanized bees are going to pose to our population and the way that genetic introgression was going to work, was mostly going to flow in from the drone side, from the father’s side, because honey bee queens mate in the air.
Dan Weaver [00:49:38] And so, we were very fearful that, you know, unless we did everything we could to suppress Africanized honeybees, that they were going to be producing sufficient numbers of drones that they were going to be interbreeding with our queens and that we would get Africanized behavioral traits that we didn’t want -the extreme defensiveness and stinging – in our honey bees, because of that.
Dan Weaver [00:50:01] Well, in addition, that, in fact, did happen.
Dan Weaver [00:50:05] But in addition to that, all these little miniature swarms that the Africanized bees threw off, they would go and ingratiate themselves at the entrance to our existing colonies. And the attendant workers that were there with the virgin queen and those little miniature swarms would ingratiate themselves to the guard bees by delivering gifts of pollen and nectar.
Dan Weaver [00:50:31] They would sneak the, they’d eventually get their sister queen inside the hive and, being a virgin and more nimble, would almost inevitably win in a stinging battle with the existing queen in the colony.
Dan Weaver [00:50:46] And before you’d know it, that colony would be converted to a New World African colony with all the negative traits that that brought along with it.
Dan Weaver [00:51:05] So, the silver lining to that cloud was that through that genetic introgression that we confronted and tried to suppress as best we could, we were getting some degree of Africanization in our own bees and queens that we were producing.
Dan Weaver [00:51:22] And I’m convinced that [forgive me] that was the silver lining to the Africanized honey bee cloud. Because of that genetic introgression, it accelerated my ability to develop honey bees that were naturally resistant, genetically resistant, to Varroa mites.
Dan Weaver [00:51:50] And the methodology that I used was really just the James Bond approach to queen breeding, “live and let die”. So, that was picking the survivor stock, trying to make sure that the survivor’s stock that I picked didn’t bring along too many of those negative Africanized traits like swarming propensity, stinging behavior, being the two main things.
Dan Weaver [00:52:23] But I was happy to have the help with the genetic resistance.
David Todd [00:52:31] And so, it helped you as you were trying to cull those beehives that were not resistant or didn’t have the behavior to pick off the mites? I’d be curious, and this may be an aside, but do you think it was sort of a resistance to the disease that the mite brought? Or was it like a cultural thing where they learned to clean one another? What was it?
Dan Weaver [00:52:59] That’s a really interesting and very complicated question that you pose there, and I’m happy to talk about that. It was all those things and more.
Dan Weaver [00:53:12] So, I’ll say this as we get started on that discussion, I had noted by about 1995, maybe in the end of ’94, but certainly by 1995, I had learned that if I saw any evidence of deformed wing virus in a colony, and by that, I mean young, newly emerged bees being born, if you will, eclosing out of the capped cell in the adult form with deformed wings or other deformities or reduced size, that that colony was going to inevitably die. It was doomed.
Dan Weaver [00:53:53] Even though I couldn’t see it in terms of the Varroa population present in that colony, if I was seeing deformed winged bees, I knew that that colony wasn’t going to make it.
Dan Weaver [00:54:06] So, I was able to accelerate my selection, I’m convinced, because I didn’t have to wait for Varroa mites to reach levels where it was obvious that there were way too many phoretic mites on bees in a colony.
Dan Weaver [00:54:21] Instead, I could observe just a handful of deformed wing bees and know like, “No, this queen needs to be culled from the breeding population. It needs to replaced. I need to requeen that colony.” That’s what beekeepers call it, requeening. I needed to requeen that colony immediately.
Dan Weaver [00:54:41] And so, by doing that, I also was selecting for genetic resistance to deformed wing virus.
Dan Weaver [00:54:54] And we now have published studies that show that, in fact, my bees are more resistant to deformed wing virus than others. And they have a variety of traits that contribute both to Varroa mite resistance and to the resistance to the viral pathogens that Varroa mites transmit.
Dan Weaver [00:55:20] So, Varroa is part of the problem.
Dan Weaver [00:55:23] But the thing that actually kills the colony most of the time are the viruses, principally deformed wing virus that Varroa vectors.
Dan Weaver [00:55:33] And so, my honey bees, they do groom their sisters more avidly. They’ll grab mature mites. They’ll chew them. Although they do not have the kinds of mouth parts that some other more voracious insects have. They are able to, with great effort, chew legs off of mites, for instance, so they can’t walk as well, otherwise damage their exoskeleton.
Dan Weaver [00:56:03] And my bees will even like grab the mite and fly off with it and fly out of the colony with it. So, there’s that going on.
Dan Weaver [00:56:14] The other thing that having honey bees that got a little bit of Africanized influence in them, some of that Apis mellifera scutellata signature, is my bees have a slightly shorter development time than European honey bees.
Dan Weaver [00:56:29] And that’s important because the Varroa mite, the foundress mite, reproduces inside the brood. And if the brood emerges before that next generation is mature enough to survive outside the brood cell, then the next generation of Varroa mites won’t be as big. The Varroa population won’t grow as quickly if those bees are maturing more rapidly because there’s less time for that foundress mite to produce offspring inside the cell.
Dan Weaver [00:57:09] There are other things that work as well. I think, my bees are, I don’t just think this. We now have very substantial evidence that my bees are immunologically different. They mount a different immune response to viral pathogens than other honey bees do.
Dan Weaver [00:57:40] And how do we know that? Because we have observed that the genes that are expressed at the highest levels in my honey bees after infection by deformed wing virus are different than the genes that are typically overexpressed by honey bees infected with deformed virus.
Dan Weaver [00:58:00] And curiously, it’s very, it’s a very interesting thing because many of the genes that are expressed differently are a subset of the immune genes in the honey bee.
Dan Weaver [00:58:26] So, the immune response in honey bees is very energetically expensive. It takes away the ability of the honey bees to do some other things that they might be capable of doing if they weren’t having to melt a robust immune response to an infection.
Dan Weaver [00:58:46] So, it typically reduces bee longevity fairly dramatically. And that can have a negative impact. So, if your bees are not so affected by deformed wing virus by having to mount this maladaptive immune response that most honey bees mount, but it’s ineffective in controlling the virus, well then you’ve got a win-win. You’ve got a more effective immune response and it can happen quickly and then the virus is cleared. You don’t have to worry about it anymore. So that’s another way.
Dan Weaver [00:59:27] That’s not the entire story, but I think I’ve tried to illustrate therefore to you a variety of ways in which my honey bees are different from the average bee that’s out there and commercially available.
David Todd [00:59:44] Would this be a good time to talk about your role with the Honey Bee Genome Project and just your efforts there to understand more about the genetic makeup that you’ve been, I guess, working on with these breeding and culling projects?
Dan Weaver [01:00:05] Sure. Yes. Happy to do that.
Dan Weaver [01:00:06] Well, once again, it’s not something that I did single-handedly, but I was one of about six honey bee scientists, researchers, if you will, that got together and submitted a white paper to the National Institutes of Health, asking them to make the honey bee the first non-model organism to be sequenced. That’s, so after C. elegans [the nematode worm], Drosophila melanogaster [the fruit fly], the mouse, the rat, the human, the next species to be sequenced was the honey bee.
Dan Weaver [01:00:53] We had, so we got together and we pushed for that, and we got other scientists to join us. There were some other beekeeping scientists that were convinced that it was a terrible mistake to mark down that pathway, that it would soak up all the research funding for any other honey bee science being done, and it would all be diverted to the honey bee genome sequencing effort.
Dan Weaver [01:01:17] But quite the opposite proved to be the case. In fact, it gave birth to a honey bee research renaissance – more honey research being done than at any time before. And multiple sources of funding, not just USDA funds, which had typically been the only money available for doing honey bee research. Suddenly bee research scientists were getting money from the National Institutes of Health. And the National Science Foundation contributed some research funding for honey bee science. But there certainly have been a lot more of that happening since the genome sequencing effort.
Dan Weaver [01:02:03] And, you know, the goal was to try to help us understand more about honey bee biology, which you need if you’re going to be trying to do everything possible to help honey bees and not just honey bees, but other bee species too.
Dan Weaver [01:02:24] I’ll say that going back to what I had mentioned earlier, the honey bee sequencing effort has proved extremely helpful for understanding the biology of other species. We’ve now got innumerable other bee species sequenced as well.
Dan Weaver [01:02:43] So, we’re now able to approach understanding the bee biology from a genetic and genomic perspective that was unreachable previously. So, I think that’s going to be an enormous help going forward, not just with the research enterprise, but with environmental stewardship, both for other bee species and the plant communities that they sustain.
Dan Weaver [01:03:22] And I had, I can name some of the names of the principal collaborators. I should do that. So, Richard Maleszka from Australia, Hugh Robertson from South America, who was then working at the University of Illinois. Gene Robinson, also at the University of Illinois. Jay Evans, from USDA. Those were some of my partners in the Honey Bee Genome Project who played a huge role in getting that work done. And I think Hugh is now retired, but Gene and Richard and Jay are all still working and doing research and making important contributions, not just in genomics, but in many other aspects of bee biology as well.
David Todd [01:04:25] And can you give me an example of how this sequencing might have occurred within the genome project and what your role was in contributing to the project?
Dan Weaver [01:04:38] Well, the source material for the bee that was sequenced was one of the queens that I had in my queen yard. And fortuitously, she proved to be one of the longest-lived queens that I was ever aware of. I think she survived for more than five years and that’s almost unheard of. I think she lived almost seven years, And so, it took a long time to get to the goal line, and I would have to collect additional drones from that queen and send them off to other research scientists who were doing other aspects of the sequencing effort and I had to make sure that there were plenty of those drones stored away in various places where they could be accessioned later if they were needed for follow-up studies.
Dan Weaver [01:05:37] So, that queen was a naturally mated daughter of one of the queens that I had gotten from the USDA Baton Rouge Bee Lab. And my friends over there had been working on developing bees that were genetically resistant to Varroa mites too. So, that queen had signatures, both of the breeding program at Baton Rouge. And her colony was a bit more like my population too, because she was open-mated with some of my drones.
Dan Weaver [01:06:22] But because we were collecting her, we sequenced the drone because the drone, the male honey bee, is haploid, it only has one set of chromosomes. So, it’s got reduced genetic diversity. And it was still fairly computationally difficult task in those early days to put together a genome assembly if it was too diverse. Far better to be represented by a single individual.
Dan Weaver [01:06:54] But in those days we didn’t have the techniques available to be able to get enough DNA out of a single honey bee to do it from a single honey bee. So, it had to be pooled DNA from drones. And because this queen had been reared in an environment where we knew that her genetic diversity was limited, her drones were going to have even further reduced genetic diversity, not just the haploidy which would have done part of the work, but anyway, that was to simplify the genome assembly.
Dan Weaver [01:07:34] And then, from there, you know there were many other ancillary studies that we tried to carry out at the same time. One of the things that I was involved with was trying to characterize the genomic signature of honey bees from various parts of the world. And in the course of that effort, five of my queens or their offspring, of those queens, were sequenced.
Dan Weaver [01:08:09] And there were also a number of studies done using single nucleotide polymorphisms in bees from around the world.
Dan Weaver [01:08:20] And all of that evidence coalesced to show that the honey bees that we produce are extremely genetically diverse. You know they’ve got signatures of Apis mellifera mellifera, Apis mellifera ligustica, Apis mellifera caucasica and Apis mellifera scudalata.
Dan Weaver [01:08:37] So again, I think that’s one of the things that has helped with developing resistance to Varroa mites and pathogens is that extraordinary genetic diversity is present in my population.
David Todd [01:08:55] OK.
David Todd [01:08:55] So, I wanted to kind of circle back if you don’t mind and talk a little bit about the Africanized bees. And while you’re certainly not raising them intentionally I guess that’s been one of the problems you’ve had to face and I understand that those Africanized bees started in South America with some breeder that was working in the ’50s. And I don’t really understand the whole story. I was wondering if you could give us a little origin story for those Africanized bees to sort of put what you said earlier in context.
Dan Weaver [01:09:38] Well, there was a fable that dominated the story of Africanized honey bees early on, that they’d only imported a handful of queens from South America and they had them in an apiary where they were being harbored in such a way that they wouldn’t be able to escape, they wouldn’t be able swarm. And one of them somehow inadvertently did get away. And that one queen yielded an entire invasive population that swept across South America and up through Central America and Mexico and got to Texas.
Dan Weaver [01:10:19] It subsequently emerged that in fact those queens had been brought over deliberately because it was felt by some beekeeping scientists that they were tropically adapted, they would do particularly well in South America because it would be more like their native habitat.
Dan Weaver [01:10:39] And so, they were actually rearing daughter queens from those imported Africanized bees and selling them throughout Brazil and other parts of South America.
Dan Weaver [01:10:52] So, while it was true that the invasive front of the mega swarm of New World African bee was an unbelievable natural phenomenon, it did not originate with a single queen that had escaped captivity and then reproduced wildly in South America.
Dan Weaver [01:11:19] Instead it was aided by a lot of deliberate, if misguided, breeding efforts in South America.
Dan Weaver [01:11:29] But by the time I moved back here to resume beekeeping operations with my father, it was evident that they were going to be a problem, and we began developing plans about how we were going to contend with them when they got here.
Dan Weaver [01:11:47] But they turned out to be much more trouble than anticipated. And I have a number of stories that I can tell about that.
Dan Weaver [01:11:57] One of the first encounters that I had with Africanized bees occurred in South Texas just months after they first arrived and crossed the Rio Grande into South Texas. I drove into an apiary at first light with one of my right-hand beekeeping employees, Bobby. We were in a Freightliner truck with a bobcat, and we were there to take off honey. I moved bees into that part of the world because the Southwest Texas brush honey has a number of unique characteristics and is particularly flavorful and wonderful honey.
Dan Weaver [01:12:39] So anyway, we pulled into the bee yard right as dawn was just beginning to yield first light. And as we drove into the bee yard, I remarked to Bobby, “Oh look, remember that hive we put the green super on top of so that we could come back and see if we over-superred?” We added that extra super right at the end because we weren’t sure she’d be able to fill that many up. In fact, we thought that colony was particularly productive. “We got to remember and check that out.”
Dan Weaver [01:13:09] And I stopped, turned off the truck. And we looked over and we looked at that colony again. I said, “Bobby, look! The whole thing is black. What in the world is going on? You can’t even see the green super anymore.”
Dan Weaver [01:13:22] And then seconds, literally seconds later, suddenly the mostly white beehive with multiple supers on it, and the green super on top, was visible again. And the bees that had covered the outside of that colony and turned it black were trying to get into the truck to sting us.
Dan Weaver [01:13:44] I mean, so we’re not talking about 10 bees, 10 angry bees. We are not talking 100 angry bees. We’re talking about tens of thousands of angry bees trying to getting in the truck, to get to us.
Dan Weaver [01:13:55] We didn’t have our protective gear on yet. We hadn’t let our smokers. And luckily, we did both have on, you know, long pants, pants tucked into our boots, T-shirts, long-sleeved shirts. And we could put our veils on quickly. And then, you know, got our gloves on as quickly as we could.
Dan Weaver [01:14:16] But we were, we were getting hundreds of stings through our clothes. It was just unbelievable.
Dan Weaver [01:14:21] And one of the things that beekeepers sometimes use to help in the honey harvest process is to put a bee repellent on a fume board. You can use benzaldehyde, for instance, which is like the almond flavor, almond smell. And if you put that on a fume board and put that on top of a colony, it will chase the bees out of the hive, or out of a honey super, so you can take off the honey supers without taking lots of bees with you.
Dan Weaver [01:15:04] But it was it was becoming so untenable to stay in that apiary and continue to work. We couldn’t even get our smokers lit, we’d been stung so badly. I ended up having to take some of that compound which was in a jug, a metal container, that was fire-proof and damage resistant. I had to take some of that over there and dump it on top of the colony and set it on fire in order to control the those bees and keep us from getting stung to death.
Dan Weaver [01:15:40] It was remarkable and it was truly shocking.
Dan Weaver [01:15:45] And we didn’t routinely employ that methodology. We didn’t kill colonies and burn colonies. But we did have to requeen colonies repeated, sometimes two or three times a year, if we were trying to keep them in South Texas where Africanized bees were incredibly prevalent.
Dan Weaver [01:16:11] And the first few crosses with the Africanized bees when they arrived were the most offensive. After that, things began to mellow out a little bit. I think there was some introgression from the other direction too, some European honey bee influence. You never today see colonies that are as defensive and so prone to stinging as we routinely encountered back in the early ’90s to mid ’90s.
Dan Weaver [01:16:42] You still see New World African bees out there that are objectionably defensive and will sting repeatedly and still cause human and animal mortality, but nothing like the intensity with which they would sting in those early years. So, that’s a relief that we don’t have to contend with quite that level of threat when we’re out keeping bees.
Dan Weaver [01:17:10] And the feral population has mellowed out too. You can still encounter feral colonies that are objectionable, Africanized and will sting without much provocation at all. But again it’s, it wasn’t like it was in the beginning when people who operated heavy equipment in woods and brush, if they weren’t prepared, could easily be stung to death by unintentionally disrupting an Africanized colony.
David Todd [01:17:43] Can you talk about some of the strategies to try to control these Africanized bees. I understood there were ideas of checking hives to avoid feralization, and requeening aggressive hives and siting hives in kind out-of-the-way places. Maybe you can talk a little bit about some those ideas and how you followed through on those.
Dan Weaver [01:18:10] Yeah. So, the research that had been done prior to the African bees’ arrival in the US suggested that you couldn’t really requeen colonies effectively, that Africanized colonies resisted requeening, and would instead rear daughters from the queens’ developing embryos and first instar and second instar larva that she left behind and would reject the queen that you introduced into the colony.
Dan Weaver [01:18:44] But we very quickly discovered that that was bad information, and we could requeen Africanized colonies quite successfully. And we embarked on a program that if we felt like that colonies were at all objectionable and were exhibiting stinging behavior that was intolerable, we would get rid of that queen and introduce one of our own.
Dan Weaver [01:19:08] And as I mentioned previously, in the early years, we sometimes had to do that two or even three times a year. So, it’s a good thing we were a queen breeder, because it would have been very, very expensive for other beekeepers to deal with Africanized bees that way.
Dan Weaver [01:19:26] Some of the other things that people tried to do is that they would put queen excluders on the entrances of their colonies to prevent queens from getting in. But you had to have, you had have almost new, perfect equipment to make that work, because if you had any gaps, holes, breaks, cracks, entrances available, they would find a way to get in. Those little miniature swarms would find those holes and sneak their sister virgin queen in and she’d take over the colony.
Dan Weaver [01:20:07] And there was an effort to trap swarms and eliminate Africanized swarms. I don’t think that is ever being done with sufficient numbers of traps to have any kind of meaningful impact on the overall New World African population. There was, there were some efforts made along those lines as well.
Dan Weaver [01:20:30] But requeening is what we relied upon.
David Todd [01:20:32] I see. Okay. All right.
David Todd [01:20:35] I’m going down through the laundry list of things you’ve had to contend with, and I hope I’m not reminding you of lots of headaches and struggles, but one of the things I wanted to talk to you about is how you confront insecticides and glyphosate, which I understand can interfere with bees’ ability to navigate, fly. Is that, is that correct, and what the response might be.
Dan Weaver [01:21:06] I mean, unfortunately, the newer generations of agrichemicals, while they are substantially safer for mammals than earlier compounds that were widely applied, these neonicotinoid pesticides that are so prevalent today have very alarming impacts on honey bees, even at sub-lethal doses.
Dan Weaver [01:21:44] They can interfere with neural function in the honey bees, so that bees can get a small dose of neonicotinoid pesticides and they lose their ability to navigate. It may impact their ability to communicate accurate information to their nest mates. As you know, honey bees dance in order to tell their sisters, they dance on the comb in the dark. Other sisters can decode that dance language and use the trajectory of the dance across the face of the comb and then compare that, or translate that, into an angle with respect to the incident polarized light from the sun when they’re outside the hive and fly to the nectar source with some, some accuracy.
Dan Weaver [01:22:44] So, but all that’s very sensitive to the ability of those dancing scouts to be able to get back to the colony to begin with, and then dance accurately to transmit that information.
Dan Weaver [01:22:58] And it looks like neonicotinoid pesticides interfere with that.
Dan Weaver [01:23:03] It looks like it may have some impact on their ability to contend with other threats, makes them perhaps more susceptible to the insults of fungicides or pesticides.
Dan Weaver [01:23:19] And fungicides and pesticides and herbicides can all interact synergistically to cause a whole host of effects that you would never observe with any of those single compounds alone. And that’s increasingly something that is encountered by honey bees in the environment as these compounds are now used ubiquitously and you know they’re just a feature of the environment in much of the U.S. now.
David Todd [01:24:00] Well, you know you have had to confront a lot of challenges in this business and I’m curious if you could talk about one other that a lot of us are dealing with in the hominid world and that’s climate change. I mean you mentioned that for years you took your hives North when it got to be too warm here. And I was wondering if the longer summers, maybe the more volatile weather, has any impact on beekeepers like yourself.
Dan Weaver [01:24:35] Oh yeah. It has a huge impact.
Dan Weaver [01:24:39] So, let me, let me count the different ways in which you can see climate change and experience climate change. And I will say that I feel like beekeepers, for better or worse, are … uniquely positioned to appreciate the enormous effects that climate change is already having on the environment.
Dan Weaver [01:25:04] I’ve mentioned many other problems that are affecting the natural landscape that bees operate in. But none of them is any more important than what’s happened to the landscape around here that’s been caused by increasing numbers of days in the summertime with temperatures over 100 degrees. Some incredible drought years – 2011 comes to mind. There’s still a lot of standing dead timber in forests in this part of the world that dates back as far back as 2011. And even the trees that weren’t killed outright in 2011 succumbed to subsequent heat waves and droughts in the past few years.
Dan Weaver [01:25:56] And I think that is, that is having a huge impact.
Dan Weaver [01:26:01] The ability of bees to cool their colonies is being affected. Water resources are not as widely available, except when it’s flooding. There’s been more flooding going on to.
Dan Weaver [01:26:18] So, it’s not just heat and drought but precipitation events, rainfall events. There have been multiple rainfall events in the time since I returned here to beekeeping in this part of the world that exceeded anything that ever happened previously, except for like the Galveston hurricane of 1900, the great storm, Isaac storm, the hurricane of 1915 created floods like we’ve experienced, what, 10 times in the last 30 years?
Dan Weaver [01:27:04] So, all of that is colliding with beekeeping and beekeepers’ ability to survive really, because honey crops are affected. The average productivity of colonies in this part of the world has been cut in half or more. And much of that I attribute to climate change and herbicide applications and landscape change.
Dan Weaver [01:27:44] So, and those things all interact as well. It’s reason to believe that those toxic compounds that are present in the environment can do even more harm when they are interacting with excessive temperatures.
Dan Weaver [01:28:05] And when I say excessive temperatures, it’s not always heat. One of the things that was so reproducible, predictable, when I was a young guy learning from my father and grandfather was the seasonality of beekeeping and when you could expect, when you could start rearing queens because the colonies would have built up large populations. There’d be drones present to mate the queens. The pollen and nectar resources would be available to propel colonies forward and to allow exponential population growth.
Dan Weaver [01:28:53] I’ll say that another feature there was that we knew when to expect honey plants to start blooming. So, you could prepare for that. And we would know about how long those bloom periods would last. And we would know roughly how much honey would be produced, so that we could appropriately add extra room to our colonies for the bees to store the honey that you’d anticipate.
Dan Weaver [01:29:16] All of that has changed.
Dan Weaver [01:29:18] And now queen rearing has, our ability to produce queens as early as we once did has diminished remarkably. And part of that is driven by cooling events that have happened. Late freezes that historically were quite rare have now become quite common. And because bees need to thermoregulate their colony in order to sustain the development of their offspring, they have to keep the brood nest at 91 degrees Fahrenheit.
Dan Weaver [01:30:07] And if the colony is big and strong and thinks it’s ready to start exploding and the honey flows about to happen, and then temperatures plunge into the teens or single digits for a week at a time, their ability to keep the colony going is, is badly affected because the amount of honey that it takes to keep the colony warm, at 91 degrees Fahrenheit, when temperatures outside are down in the teens and single digits and the wind’s blowing 20 miles an hour, it’s astonishing.
Dan Weaver [01:30:43] And many colonies just are not able to do it. They will run out of resources, because the way they generate heat is to shiver. And the energy that they’re using to shiver is coming from the honey that they are consuming. So, if they can’t keep the colony warm, then suddenly they’re losing a whole demographic cohort of replacement worker bees that are there to supplant and replace the workers that are due to die off at about the time they were set to emerge.
Dan Weaver [01:31:14] So, colony population dynamics are completely different and unpredictable.
Dan Weaver [01:31:25] I think that that’s at least illustrative of how climate change is having a negative impact on beekeeping.
David Todd [01:31:34] Yeah, it sounds like things have just gotten much more volatile and unpredictable. I can empathize. Or sympathize. I don’t know enough to empathize maybe.
Dan Weaver [01:31:52] Probably do.
Dan Weaver [01:31:54] May I ask, David, is it okay if I step away a minute and clear my throat?
David Todd [01:31:56] Absolutely. Yeah. Whatever makes you comfortable.
Dan Weaver [01:31:59] I’ll be right back.
David Todd [01:32:01] No, no, no hurry.
Dan Weaver [01:32:13] OK.
David Todd [01:32:14] Well, I should try to wrap this up, as interesting as it’s been.
David Todd [01:32:20] I’m curious after, you know, decades of doing this, really dating back to when you were a child, what is it about beekeeping that has held your interest?
Dan Weaver [01:32:35] It’s, it’s almost magical the way that you can see how the world, the living world, works together. I think the way that bees interact with the environment, and how the entire spectrum of the plant community around apiaries can affect bees. And you can see bees respond to the environment.
Dan Weaver [01:33:28] The number, and you get, and you can you develop this, I don’t know, it’s sort of like sort of like, I feel blessed to have all the interacting sensory experiences that come with that, because bees bioconcentrate, you know, pollen and nectar in their colonies.
Dan Weaver [01:33:56] So when you’re working colonies you get to see like, “Okay, this is the pollen that’s out there in the environment right now. And this is what that floral source smells like when it’s you know you get sort of this condensed nectar aroma in the colony.”
Dan Weaver [01:34:15] And the sounds that bees make when different things are happening in the hive.
Dan Weaver [01:34:24] And the developmental trajectory of the colony as it changes over time and interacts with the seasons and the changes in the plant community and the weather. All of that.
Dan Weaver [01:34:42] It’s so incredibly complex. And you get to see it and appreciate it on a daily basis. And I just, as I said, it’s almost magical the way it can enrich your life and sensory experiences.
David Todd [01:35:03] You know I’m really struck by the complexity of beekeeping and the long trajectory of trying to manage the hives with all these kind of pressures and impacts on them, and I was wondering how you can sort of pass on this culture of being a beekeeper and you know convey that kind of knowledge and appreciation for bees.
Dan Weaver [01:35:37] Well it’s one of the things that drives us to host those various educational opportunities that we try to provide here at BeeWeaver, because I really do feel like it’s incumbent upon me to try to teach the next generation and the generation after that, if you will, about bees and the environment and all the interactions between them and the weather and how all that.
Dan Weaver [01:36:11] You know, change is accelerating. There’s not a doubt. And trying to anticipate where that’s going to go and what we need to do to deal with the downstream impacts of those things and adjust beekeeping management practices to cope with them and continue to be successful is an ongoing challenge, and will undoubtedly keep me busy the rest of my working life.
Dan Weaver [01:36:47] I’m lucky enough to this year have had my oldest son do exactly what I did back in 1989. And he stopped practicing law in Austin and has moved back here to go into business with me. So, I’m happy to have Travis on board.
David Todd [01:37:04] That’s great. Wow.
David Todd [01:37:09] Well, nice to see this carry on. Boy, you’re into almost 140 years in the business. That’s, that’s remarkable for any venture.
David Todd [01:37:21] Well, I’ve kept you for a long time. I wonder if you have anything you’d like to add before we break off.
Dan Weaver [01:37:28] Oh, I just appreciate what you’re doing David in trying to memorialize some of this. It might come in handy one day. Thank you for your efforts.
David Todd [01:37:38] Well, it’s a pleasure. It’s wonderful to listen to people like yourself that know a lot about something and care really passionately.
David Todd [01:37:45] So, thank you.
David Todd [01:37:48] I can stop the recording if you think that this is timely.
Dan Weaver [01:37:53] Sure.
David Todd [01:37:54] All right, I will do that, and we can speak a little bit afterwards, if you’d like and wrap up anything else.
Dan Weaver [01:38:00] Okay sounds good.
David Todd [01:38:02] All right.
Dan Weaver [01:38:02] Thank you again.