talk v2.0

Core: We measured the heartbeat of a beehive, and bees are the heartbeat of our environment.

One sunny July morning I noticed a swarm of bees were making a home in my garage wall. 
I grew up with bees, my grandfather and father were both beekeepers, 
So I called dad and asked what he thought about urban beekeeping. 
He said “Sorry, you don’t have the skills and I reckon you’d better not risk it”.
Now I’m definitely keeping the bees.
My friend Jon and I borrowed some bee suits, and proceeded to dismantle the garage and relocate the bees into a beehive I’d also borrowed, and balanced on a ladder…
20,000 stinging insects and a ladder, what could possibly go wrong Dad?

Wearing a bee suit is a lot of fun - I feel half way between an astronaut… and a ghostbuster.
From the outside they looked ok, but this bee colony was going to die.
The Queen was long gone. 
These bees were doomed to become part of the 30% of hives that died out that year, and have every year since 2006.

I know bees don’t look like puppies or kittens, but I got attached quickly. If you pay attention to the bees, or practice beekeeping, you begin to appreciate how amazing these creatures are.
I went from a terrified-wary-excitement, to curious; to connected to some kind of bee zen. These bees connected me to every single person with a garden within a 3 mile radius in my city- and every other person within a 3 mile radius was connected to them. For better or worse.
We need to pay more attention to the bees. 

When something- or someone- is in trouble, you pay close attention. You do everything you can to keep a close eye on their health- recording, measuring, observing everything you can. You want to know every update, no matter how small. I know I did when my Grandfather was in trouble.

 About 15 years ago my Grandfather, I call him Pa, learned something was wrong with his heart and he needed a valve replacement
They opened him up for surgery to more issues - he needed an emergency triple bypass as well. 
Pa was at the limits of life support, and he recovered. He’s doing great and just turned 94. 
Pa now checks his heart rate and vitals almost every day. 
By paying close attention he can proactively address issues before they become severe.

When my friend Paul, a beekeeper of 40 years, asked me to count flying bees so he could get a sense of hive health, I had an epiphany. 
Could monitoring bee flight activity be just like proactively monitoring Pa’s heart?
Could paying more attention to the bees, help us save them?

I have a somewhat unique experience and background in healthcare- I work in medical robotics - helping doctors treat patients remotely through robots.
So I started trying to make a robotic assistant for beekeepers. (As you would). Maybe the bees need a nurse like Pa did.

What a glamorous robot.
I needed to teach the robot how to see bees 
In the real world, bees live outside, this meant putting a laptop in a bucket pointed at a beehive.
Even more glamorous.
I taught bucket-bot to see and count bees, and the bot was able to watch the beehive all day every day and graph the data.

The robot’s computer vision accidentally discovered this bee flight activity pattern.
You can see there’s a giant spike! 
No one had noticed this before.
Nobody had measured it before.
It’s the collective flight activity pattern of the beehive superorganism.
And it turns out every healthy beehive has this spike pattern regularly.
This is the heartbeat of a beehive and the robot nurse had just taken this hive’s pulse.

Traditionally Beekeepers check bee health by opening their hives every few weeks.
We aim to see whether there’s evidence of a healthy queen bee, how well the colony is managing pests and disease, and if the bees have enough food - both honey and pollen, it’s routine bee surgery. 

Sometimes when looking inside a beehive I feel like I'm a guest in nature's cathedral. 
The colors of pollen reflect the variety of local flowers the bees have been visiting. It reminds me of stained glass.

Bees have fermented pollen to make bee bread for millions of years. 
Bee bread unlocks more nutrition than pollen alone.
Not bad for a creature with a brain the size of a sesame seed.

Bees need flowers to get that protein rich pollen.
What you might see as “weeds on your lawn”, bees call family dinner.

Another thing I look for when doing beehive surgery is the varroa mite. The Varroa mite to bees is the equivalent of a bloodsucking tick the size of a backpack to us. 
They spread diseases between bees, they start by attacking the baby bees.
Imagine having a parasite attached to you for your entire life. Sounds like a b-grade horror movie.

Though these bee inspections are routine and sometimes very necessary, they are like surgeries in that they are invasive and disruptive to bee life.
The bees use propolis to seal gaps in their hive, it’s like skin of the colony superorganism, and we’re breaking it everytime we open them up.
We’re as gentle as possible, but the process is stressful to the bees. The hive won’t get back to normal for at least a couple of days.
We certainly wouldn’t want to operate on Pa every day.
What’s shocking is that many beekeepers I have spoken to would tell me they would inspect a hive, find it to be healthy, and two or three weeks later come back and find the hive had died.
What happened in that in-between time?
Are even beekeepers not paying enough attention to the bees?

Bees have a crucial role in pollination for many plants. If it has a flower, it probably depends on a pollinator. 
I’m talking about apples, squash, tomatoes, almonds, peppers, pumpkins - it turns out of 1 in three bites of the food we eat depends on bees.
The food bees don’t pollinate directly, like the grapes to make a glass of your favorite wine, depend on the nitrogen plants pollinated by bees help put in the soil.
Cheers bees.

So let’s come back to that activity pattern that looks like a heartbeat.
The orientation activity pattern is the baby bees flying in front of the hive, learning where they live. 
They make little figure 8 flight patterns seeing the hive at different angles so they can remember how to find home. 
The spike is because most of the baby bees come out around the same time each day, like a school lunchtime of bees.

We started to monitor beehives in our own community and around the world. 
We found that hives without baby bee orientation heartbeat patterns were telling us they were in trouble.

We saw a pattern for when a strong beehive is robbing a weak beehive.
We saw the pattern for swarming was three times as big of a spike as the orientation activity.
We saw patterns where a beehive’s activity and heartbeat would flatline.

In one flatlining colony, we found no sign of a queen so we transplanted eggs from another healthy hive. A little like Pa’s value replacement.
Sure enough they recovered by raising a new queen from the replacement eggs.
Paying attention can let us proactively intervene before it’s too late.
We can save an individual beehive with the help of technology, 

But bees aren’t just tireless pollinators important for our food. 
Bees are an indicator species for what’s going on in the environment. They’re the canary in the coal mine.
When so many individual colonies are dying, it means that something is fundamentally wrong. And what’s going wrong is within a 3 mile radius of each of us.

In a resilient environment the native bees happily do the pollination if there are no honeybees. 
But recently hundreds of our native bee species have gone extinct or are at severe risk of extinction. 
So what does it mean to even save the bees? 
If we’re able to keep honeybees alive on life support, we’ve just got another feedlot animal. We can “save” them just as we’ve saved cows, pigs and chickens.
As the rest of the ecosystem is polluted with poisons, diversity fails, bigger picture, we’re still at risk of a systemic failure.
And we won’t have a plan B.

Like Pa, all of us understand that we need to pay attention to our heart health, but what about the health of the world around us?
We measured the heartbeat of a beehive, and bees are the heartbeat of our environment.

There are four horsemen of our beepocalypse - Pesticides, Pathogens, Pests and Poor Nutrition.
Pesticides and monocultures are linked to unsustainable farming, but they’re also linked to our own backyard. 
If you have a lawn or garden and you’re using a pesticide or herbicide to ‘keep it perfect’, consider this:
The things that are killing the bees are in direct contact with other things you may care about - your dog, your cat and even your kids.

We need a shift in perspective. Why teach your children that bugs and bees are yucky or to be feared? They’re around when the environment is healthy.
When you buy organic food a little bit nibbled by a bug, it means it hasn’t been drenched in poisons. 
You can thank the bug for confirming the food is safe to eat.
Good enough for bugs, good enough for bees, good enough for me. 

Progress is being made as modern farmers reintegrate sustainable practices like crop rotation, organic principles and integrated pest management.
The rest of us can help by creating bee sanctuaries in our cities.
What does that look like? It looks like a meadow of flowers in your front yard rather than a lawn.
It looks like thousands of ladybugs to protect your orange tree rather than spraying poisons.
It looks like the kind of world most of us want to live in, and want our children to inherit.

I see a future of monitoring bee health - we have to. They are the heartbeat of our environment.  
Next time you see a bee, pay attention to her. 
Ask yourself if your choices at the grocery store and in your own backyard are supportive of a better future for both you and the bees.
Let’s pay attention to our environment and observe it’s vitals.  Let’s pay more attention to the bees. 
After all, Healthy Bee Healthy Me.