If you registered, you do get an email pointing you to the recorded webinar, but if you didn't register, you can still find it on the Extension website.

During Laura's presentation today, please feel free to put questions in the chat, and we will ask her those questions after her presentation.

So first, I'd like to introduce you to Laura.

Laura McHenry grew up in the foothills of the Virginia Appalachians.

As an undergraduate at Kenyon College, she translated her lifelong interest in the natural world into a degree in biology, with a semester spent in Kenya and Tanzania studying wildlife management and ecology with the School for Field Studies.

Thereafter, she moved to Portland, Oregon, where she worked in science education and curriculum development with the Audubon Society of Portland and the Oregon Zoo.

Ultimately feeling drawn to return to research in conservation science, she returned to East Africa in 2018 as an interim with the Elephant and Bees Project, working with rural Kenyan communities to protect small farms from elephant crop raids using beehive fences.

There she caught a fascination with bees that led her to complete her PhD in entomology at Virginia Tech, where she graduated in December.

And Laura told me that she went with a love of elephants and came home with a love of bees.

So welcome to the swarm.

And Laura, I will let you take it from there.

- Thank you so much for the introduction, Robyn, and thank you so much also for the invitation to join you all today.

I will go ahead and share.

Is that looking good?

- Looks great.

- All right. Thank you all so much for having me today.

I could not be more excited to share one of my very favorite bee-related conservation success stories about elephant and bees.

So thank you so much, Robyn, for the introduction.

I wanna share a little bit more with you about who I am so you know who I am to speak to you today on this topic and where I'm coming from.

So again, my name is Laura. I use she/her pronouns.

I'm a daughter, I'm a sister, I'm a partner.

I am the descendant of Irish and English immigrants to North America.

I'm from Virginia, and I am also a cat mom.

And I have been studying honeybees full-time for four years as part of my PhD work at Virginia Tech, from which I just graduated in December.

And today, I'm talking to you a little bit about my journey to get there, which was with the Elephant and Bees Project.

So I'll kind of zoom through here 'cause Robyn covered a lot of it.

I started my work in biology as an undergrad at Kenyon College.

I worked with black-capped chickadees, which you can see I'm holding one here as part of that work.

After my undergrad, I spent some time in Morocco working with barbary macaques.

Here's the picture for me in my role at the Oregon Zoo that Robyn mentioned.

So for a couple years, I was that person who would come to your elementary or middle high school classroom with a rabbit and a snake and a ball python to do a science-based, conservation-oriented program with students.

So I did love that, but thereafter, I decided I wanted to get back into research, and I worked with the Elephant and Bees Project that ultimately inspired me to pursue my PhD at Tech.

And so I'm talking to you today about that internship, that research experience with the Elephant and Bees Project, which is a part of the larger organization called Save the Elephants.

So an important note today is that I'm speaking to you from my experience as an intern in 2018.

I spent six weeks there, and so I can share what I know and what I learned about the system from that vantage point.

But I wanna be clear, I'm not an employee of the organization, I can't speak for the organization in any official capacity.

But what I can do is share what I learned on one of my favorite success stories in conservation.

So this is beekeeping around the world, and today, we are going to Kenya.

So Kenya is an East African country, highlighted in red here, and it takes quite a long time to get there.

First, you have to get to the capital city of Nairobi.

This is a picture of me extremely jet lagged.

It's a quite a long flight.

Nairobi is a modern dynamic city.

It's home to a population of about 5 million people.

And this is not always, I wanted to show you this because this is not always what everyone thinks of when you think of East African developing countries.

So you fly into Nairobi, and then as you go out into the rural areas, you will see, there is absolutely an urban-rural gradient, for sure.

As you move out into the more rural parts of this country, infrastructure gets much more catch-as-catch-can, as you see here in this picture that I took on the border of Kenya and Tanzania.

And then you also get some traditional, a lot of traditional building techniques as well.

So there's a big divide between urban and rural in this country, as there is in so many places.

So from Nairobi, you'll take the standard gauge railway, the Madaraka Express to Voi town.

So here in the middle, you'll see this map.

So we flew into Nairobi.

Let me see if I can get my laser pointer.

Oh, wow, look at that. We flew into Nairobi.

So we take the train south down to Voi town.

And Voi is a smaller town.

It's got a population of about 45,000, which is kind of comparable to my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia.

From there, you get in a car or on a bike.

We took a car to Mwakoma Village.

Mwakoma is a collection of dwellings and small shops that is too small to have a presence on the internet.

You can pretty much only find Mwakoma referenced in the Elephant and Bees website.

Finally, you turn off that paved road and take the dirt road all the way to the research center.

So as you can see here, this profusion of greenery only kind of just popped up right before I arrived.

I arrived right at the beginning of the rainy season.

So before that, this would've all been really dry, brown vegetation.

And here in the background, you can see this big hill.

This is called Sagalla Hill, and it is the most important geographical landmark in the region.

It kind of rises up out of the Savannah, the flat, hot, dry Savannah and has a much cooler microclimate on top and a community that lives there year-round.

So we finally arrived to the foot of Sagalla Hill, and here's the research center.

So here we are in southern Kenya.

The first people that you'll meet are not actually people.

They are the camp dogs, very important community members.

On the left is Socks who is always on top of the table that we used for meals and meetings and everything else.

In the middle is Winky, whose favorite thing is to lie down on top of your clipboard in the field so you can't finish collecting your data until you find it.

And then on the right is Tsavo, who is named for the national park that is adjacent, Tsavo National Park, who is the sweetest and also most simple dog that I have ever met.

This place would be nothing, of course, without the human community.

So this is a picture of some of the community partners that Elephant and Bees works with in the area.

So now I kind of wanna get into the rural livelihoods in this system.

So the livelihoods of these folks really depend on agriculture.

Most of the folks here are subsistence farmers, growing a mix of cow peas and other legumes and often maize as well.

And since they are growing primarily for their own survival, for their own subsistence, each growing cycle is really, really important to their livelihoods and also to their survival.

One word that you'll hear me say is a shamba.

This is a key Swahili word that means small farm or garden.

And so when we zoom out on the landscape a little bit, the landscape is really a mosaic of shambas and bush or wild, more natural areas.

In addition, of course, to the human communities, we also have the wildlife community using these landscapes.

So this area is home to all the classic African megafauna that we think of when we tend to think of the African continent.

We've got giraffes, elephants, lions.

On the top here, you see water buffalo resting in a lake bed.

And of course, we wouldn't be here without the bees, right?

So today, I am gonna talk to you more about Apis mellifera scutellata.

These are the African honeybees, not Africanized, the African bees that are native on this landscape, living their wild lives.

These ones, of course, that you see are in a Langstroth box, and we'll be getting more into the role that these bees play in this community as we go on.

So this country, really, if we zoom way out to the country level, is also a mosaic along the urban-rural gradient.

What we're looking at here is a map of the country of Kenya.

In yellow are conservancies, which are kind of what you might think of, like, as a wildlife refuge.

There's some hunting and other management allowed on these places, but functionally and primarily, they're wildlife reserves.

And then in the teal, these areas are national parks, which are all about wildlife conservation and management.

So you can see this whole country is really a patchwork, and there's consequently a lot of area where people are living alongside and adjacent to wildlife communities.

So here, see this little red dot in the bottom.

I added that.

That is the location of the research center and Mwakoma village.

And these big teal areas, these parks, this one on the right is Tsavo East National Park.

And then this one that kind of curls around is Tsavo West National Park.

And this area is one of the biggest centers of elephant populations in the world.

So you can imagine the people living in this area, farming in this area, are living alongside a heck ton of elephants.

One of the other really important kind of aspects to living in this area is that both people and wild communities are living to the rhythm of seasonal rainfall.

And this will be very relevant as we go on.

So I wanna take you through it a little bit.

So instead of having four seasons, like spring, summer, winter, fall, we have dry seasons and wet seasons.

So at the beginning of the year in January into, kind of, mid-March is a dry season.

And the dry season, this area that you would see would look almost entirely brown, really desiccated, dusty, maybe a little bit of green hanging on in the trees.

But for the most part, brown sticks is the name of the game in the dry season.

Then at the end of March, around the time that I was arriving for my internship is the start of what we call the long rain.

It's the two-month, or so, rainy season.

And as you can imagine, the rainy season is really important for people and wildlife.

The people who are growing their crops are really dependent on the rainy season to provide water for their crops.

And so the crops grow throughout the rainy season.

And then as the dry season commences again, this is when farmers are kind of using the last of their stored water to help get the crops over the finish line to be ready for harvest before things dry up too, too much.

And then finally in October, we get another shorter rainy season before, at the start of December, it goes back into that first dry season.

So this one kind of loops, the December into March is one dry season there.

So in addition to being really important for farmers, this seasonality is really important for wildlife.

So in the wet season, forage is plentiful, there's lots to eat.

So this elephant is actually wading through what was like a big mud puddle that has been, like, burst forth in this profusion of greenery.

So the elephant looks stuck. The elephant is fine.

The elephant is wading through forage, basically.

And in this season, of course, water's also abundant, and it's abundant out in those park areas, like in Tsavo East, Tsavo West.

These elephants have plenty out there in the wet season.

So wet season is really a time of plenty for everybody.

In the dry season, however, things are really different.

Wild forage dries up out in those natural areas.

So this is a picture of Lake Manyara in Tanzania that I took.

So we're in a lake bed, we're in a dry lake bed, the water is gone, and this fisherman has just come out to check on his boat and is now trudging back to town.

So in this dry season, it turns out that the shambas where crops are just getting ready, almost to be harvested, become the best buffet for wildlife.

And so what happens is elephants that have been way out, far away from human habitation and the parks, they run out of forage out there, and they come to mingle in the shambas.

So this is a picture from the Elephant and Bees website, showing elephants moving across the road between shambas or between farms.

And so as you can imagine, the rural infrastructure is really not elephant-proof.

And so what can happen is that elephants can actually really destroy a shamba.

What we're looking at here is another picture from the Elephant and Bees website.

An elephant has physically torn down the wall of this house.

They're so incredibly strong, and all it was doing was trying to access stored water that this family had inside of their house.

So the elephant is trying to make its living, just like the people, but in the process, it's proving very dangerous and very destructive.

Another element to the elephant danger in these communities is that school children are really vulnerable on their commutes.

Kids walk to school in these communities, and in the dry season, when elephants are being kind of pulled in towards humans' food sources, parents and guardians often will opt to keep their kids safe at home rather than risking them running into an elephant on their way to or from school.

So this is an impact to education as well.

Because elephant encounters can be so devastating to livelihoods, farmers in this community really put themselves on the line.

And for a long time, what that looked like was having to stay up all night to guard their shambas from elephants.

And if an elephant did come, it's like your choices are shouting, banging pots and pans, firing gunshots into the air or even at the elephants.

And this is bad for everybody involved, and often, there were instances of injury or casualties both to elephants and to people.

So as you can imagine, even though wildlife tourism is a huge, huge fuel for the economy in this region, and even though elephants are truly amazing animals, you can imagine why elephant conservation in these communities can be a really tough sell because the elephants here are viewed as crop pests.

And honestly, who can blame them? Rightly so.

So we've talked a lot now about elephants, and here is where the bees come in.

Here's where the Elephant and Bees Project comes in to this system.

So this is an organization that protects human and wild livelihoods with a clever application of bees.

So what you see here on the left, these yellow boxes, each one is a beehive, is a Langstroth box.

And they're strung together in a beehive fence that is surrounding a shamba.

So why on earth would this work?

Well, it turns out that elephants are actually afraid of bees.

This picture shows a family group of elephants retreating very quickly.

If it were a video, you would see very quickly they're retreating from just the sound of disturbed bees.

And so how do we figure this out?

How do we even know this?

I'd like to introduce you to Dr. Lucy King.

This is Dr. Lucy.

She is a scientist who grew up on the African continent.

And for her PhD work many years ago now, she demonstrated that, indeed, if you play back the sound of disturbed bees to a group of elephants at rest, not only do they make a quick retreat, they also produce a special infrasonic rumble vocalization that warns the group members and other elephants, like, "Eek, bees, there are bees." So in order to take advantage of this existing ecological relationship, this project and Dr. Lucy developed this idea of the beehive fence for this region to prevent human-elephant conflict.

So how are they made?

They're made with floating Langstroth boxes.

So that's the Langstroth box that you'll most likely be familiar with if you work with bees.

And the way it works is that multiple hives are strung up adjacent to each other, with about, you get maybe, like, 40 feet between them or so, maybe a little bit more.

And they're connected to each other, ultimately, with strong wires.

So what will happen is an elephant who wants to enter the shamba or enter the farm will come up to the fence and push against the wire with its chest.

And this will cause all the beehives on that side of the fence to swing back and forth.

This disturbs the bees, the bees buzz, and the elephants hear this.

And if they keep going, they're most likely gonna get stung.

And you would think an elephant wouldn't be bothered by that.

But they do have quite sensitive skin on their trunks, around their eyes, on their ears especially.

And so a stung elephant is a very unhappy elephant, and it turns out that beehive fences deter elephants successfully 80% of the time.

So this is a huge win for elephant conservation, for reducing human-elephant conflict, for protecting rural livelihoods.

And just to toot Dr. Lucy's horn a little bit here, this project has been awarded several prizes.

Here on the left is Dr. Lucy receiving the St. Andrews Prize for the Environment back in 2013.

And she also now has a TED Talk about this project, which I would encourage you to visit, if you're interested, afterwards.

So back to the beehive fences, as any beekeeper knows, right, as soon as you get your operation up and running, you can just set it and forget it, right?

Yeah, you can just kind of let them do their thing.

No, absolutely not.

So the beehive fences take a lot of maintenance and monitoring.

So here you see Emmanuel, one of the Elephant and Bees project staff conducting a, kind of, a non-invasive hive inspection or a beehive fence inspection.

There are several things that we check.

The first one is occupancy.

Are there bees living in there?

Now we're gonna get into a little bit of the, one of the more unique aspects of how these colonies in the beehive fence context are managed.

So we do not make splits, we do not install bees ourselves into these colonies.

Instead, hive occupation is seasonal with the rains.

So what happens is that when rains begin at the start of the rainy season, wild colonies out on the landscape will begin to build up, they will swarm, and then those wild swarms will find and move into the Langstroth boxes that are part of the beehive fences.

So this happens kind of on a seasonal basis.

As the rains begin, we get an increasing wave of nest box occupations.

And then we'll get into this more a little bit later, but as the dry season comes in, resources disappear, many of those colonies will then abscond, which is, as we know, different from just a colony death.

They actually eat up as many of the resources stored that they have as they can, and they peace out and they find a new home.

So you have kind of this seasonal ebb and flow of nest box occupation.

So first we check, okay, is the colony occupied?

Do we have bees in there?

Next, you'll see this second arrow is pointing to a water bottle.

It's just a plastic water bottle, and it's got water, often a dilute sucrose solution stored in there.

Because this part of the world is so hot so much of the time, providing the bees with a really close-by source of water helps them thermoregulate.

We also provide each colony with a sunshade.

So we check, is that sunshade in need of maintenance?

One of the other really cool aspects, I think, of this design is these fence posts, which you will note are alive.

They are living trees.

So these posts are made from a local species of tree called Commiphora.

That's C-O-M-M-I-P-H-O-R-A, Commiphora.

And they have a reputation for being really good at self-rooting.

So if you just whack off a big post-sized chunk of Commiphora and stick it in the ground, more often than not, they will root on their own and turn into another living tree.

So that makes these designs really resilient 'cause you don't have to, you know, replace your posts that have been eaten by termites every year.

They're also very prickly, which has an added benefit of being an additional deterrent.

Finally, you'll see that each of these posts has this big, sort of, sheet of metal on it.

What's that about?

In this system, honey badgers are actually major hive pests.

There's nothing that a honey badger loves more than to come and totally destroy one of these beehives.

And so these metal sheets work as a honey badger deterrent that gives them a little bit harder of a time to get up here and into the colony.

All right, so when we've had good rains and the colonies have had a lot of time to build up and we have good occupancy, then it is time for hive inspections.

And this is a photo of sunset in Sagalla.

And why am I showing you pictures of sunset?

I thought we were talking about hive inspections.

Well, it's because in this system, all be keeping work takes place at night.

This is a big difference for many of us for whom this would be, like, totally nonsensical.

There's a couple reasons why you only suit up to go into your colonies at night.

The first reason is that in the heat of the day, the heat of the day combined with the heavy layers of protective equipment that you need would make heat stroke really an immediate risk for humans.

There's only a very short amount of time that you could have enough protective gear, being out in the sun before you would be in danger for your health.

And of course, heat stress is also a concern for the colonies.

Stressing the colonies out in the heat of the day is also not great for the bees.

Sometimes if you disturb a colony enough, they will just abscond.

They will just say, okay, this place is not hospitable, we're out.

And that's a bummer. We wanna avoid that.

So I do wanna share a little bit about the process for getting ready.

And unfortunately, I have no more pictures of this because the protective gear needed to work with African bees, which are extremely, extremely defensive, very, very quick to defend their colony, is a lot.

So at sunset, we would get ready to do beekeeping work, whether it's colony inspections to check for pests or see whether a colony's ready for a superbox, or be it for honey harvest time.

At sunset, we get ready.

So first goes on a full, like, full mechanics suit, so, like, a full body cloth layer.

Next goes on your full body bee suit, and then on your feet go, like, heavy rubber rain boots.

And then on your hands and arms go heavy rubber gloves, like, really heavy.

Like, not dish washing gloves, thick rubber.

And then around the tops of your boots, thick layer of duct tape all the way around to prevent bees from working their way down into your boots to try to get you.

And the same for the gloves.

So around your elbow, thick layer of duct tape around both elbows.

So getting ready for work was a lot of, like, already being gloved up and trying really hard to, like, manage a roll of duct tape to, like, tape up somebody else's elbow, getting tape stuck everywhere, it was a whole process, but full of lots of fun and camaraderie too.

Finally, another benefit of working at night is that even though the full foraging workforce is back home, so there's more bees to kind of emerge and defend the colony in the dark, it's actually a little bit easier to get away from the colony once you're done doing whatever it is that you need to be doing, whether that be an inspection or a honey harvest.

So because these bees are so defensive, often, each person involved in the bee work would have, like, between one and two baseballs worth of bees, like, just glommed, like, onto the side of your veil usually.

And so what we'd have to do is take, like, 10 steps away from the colony, and then everybody turns out their red headlamps.

And we wait for, like, a minute.

And then we take soft bee brushes to brush off everybody, to brush all the bees off of everybody.

And that can take, like, a couple of minutes.

And then we turn out the lights, and we walk another 10 or 15 steps.

And then we wait, and then we brush, and we brush and we brush.

And then we turn off the lights again, and then we walk away, and we wait.

And we would often do this between 5 and 10 times in order to lose enough of the bees to be able to get back in the car.

And even so, we wouldn't take off any of our protective gear until we were back at the research center.

And even then, sometimes you'd have a handful of really, really angry bees still buzzing around to watch out for.

So as much work as this is, it's all worth it for the elephant-friendly honey.

So we do get a pretty sizable honey harvest from these colonies, especially the ones that get started, kind of, early in the rainy season.

And not only is this honey really prized by the local community, it's also a really high-value, value-added product.

And so the honey actually is a source of income diversification for the farmers that are participating in the project.

So it takes the edge off a little bit in terms of relying solely on their harvest.

One of the other products that I got to help make in my internship experience there is elephant-friendly lip balm, for which we used the some of the wax produced by the colonies as well as a little bit of the honey and some other really basic ingredients as well.

I think I'm still working through the stack of these that I brought home.

So to sum up some of these key benefits of the beehive fences, they're offering protection from crop-raiding elephants, pollination benefits.

Like, yes, a lot of the crops like the cow peas, the maize, and the sorghum, they're primarily wind pollinated, but the bees are also, they are in those crops.

They're also harvesting pollen, so they're not hurting anything for sure.

You get these diversified income sources from the honey and from other products, and you get safer commutes for school kids and for community members.

So these beehive fences in the system are really a win-win-win-win-win.

Now, I wanna get into a little bit of the challenges associated with maintaining and managing these beehive fences for the reduction of human-elephant conflict.

So the thing is, elephants are really smart.

And if the boxes are empty, if there's no bees in there, the elephants learn really quickly, oh, this is not a problem, I can just push through this fence.

So as we know, we learned that seasonal absconding drives occupancy.

So when the dry season comes, recall that colonies that don't have enough resources in their vicinity will abscond.

They'll pack up, and they'll find a new home.

So one of the long-term research aims that Elephant and Bees had at the time I was there is trying to answer this question: How can we maximize hive occupancy in the dry season to get the maximum benefit out of these beehive fences?

So during my internship, Elephant and Bees was laying scientific groundwork to be able to answer these questions.

So first, we wanted to know what pollen resources are available on the landscape?

And what are seasonal patterns of nectar and pollen availability?

Ultimately, we wanted to be able to ask this question, so, which colonies end up staying put through the dry season?

'Cause some do.

Some of those colonies seem to be hardy, for some reason, and they stick around right through the dry season, but we don't know what goes into that.

What makes a colony that stays versus a colony that goes?

So I wanna show you, really briefly, some of the other things I got up to during my time there with Elephant and Bees.

So I worked to expand the pollen reference library.

So here's me sitting in the middle of a shamba.

I'm holding two microscope slides that are holding pollen samples in fuchsian gel, like what you see here on the right.

So my job while I was there was to collect as many pollen samples as I could during that rainy season for which I was there.

So I would kind of tag along with whoever was going out with my plate of fuchsian gel.

And whenever I saw a flower species I hadn't seen that I knew wasn't in the collection, I'd get out my little kit, and you get a tiny little nubbin of fuchsian gel, and you dab the anther of the flower onto it to collect pollen.

And then you would actually melt the fuchsian gel on the slide by passing a flame under it from a lighter.

And then to flatten it out, you kind of press the top with a pencil eraser.

That worked really well.

Sometimes mess up, though.

I accidentally exploded these ones, and I'm showing them to you because they kind of look like Pac-Man, which I enjoy.

I also got to participate in collecting data for a flowering plant calendar.

So this is kind of getting at that question of, well, what floral resources are available when?

What's even blooming in the dry season, if anything?

So here on the left, we're on their way out to field work.

That's one of the project staff, Gloria, and two of the camp dogs.

They would come with us all the time, which I loved.

And then we had multiple hundreds of individual plants that we would visit twice a week to see whether they were flowering or not flowering.

And the difference between the dry season, the dry season and the wet season was so dramatic.

Like, when I got there, a lot of these tags that you see, like this red tag that says 251, would be attached to what looked like a dead, dry stick.

And I'd be like, "Gloria, I don't think that this is alive anymore." And Gloria would say, "Just wait." And sure enough, the next week, that stick had turned into just a profusion of vegetation and blooms.

Finally, the last thing I wanna share with you is, I got to assist with some aerial conservation monitoring with one of the partner organizations in the area.

So this involved going up in a gyrocopter with a pilot and collecting data in the national park about potentially illegal activities happening in the protected area.

So we were looking for things like agriculture happening inside of the park or collecting wood for charcoal production.

This is the one picture, I think, that I didn't show my mom.

This is the gyrocopter we went up in.

So all in all, I had a really fantastic experience getting to work hands-on with this wonderful bee-related conservation story.

While I was there, whoops, while I was there, we got to live up close with wildlife of all sizes.

So here on the left is a giant African millipede.

And I was really excited about that one because I used to present giant African millipedes in my job at the zoo.

Like, we had those as program animals, and then I saw one in the wild.

And then here on the right is a giant African snail that is blocking me from opening the zipper on my tent.

That being said, more than anything, this experience is where I caught the bee bug.

Just like Robyn said, I went over excited about elephants, and I came back excited about bees.

So when I came back home, I found and joined the the Couvillon Lab at Virginia Tech.

The Couvillon Lab studies honeybee foraging and recruitment in a lot of different ways.

So I spent my PhD experience applying individual name tags to many thousands of bees, which is what you see here on the left; installing them in observation colonies, which is what you see here on in the middle; and training them to visit feeders, which is what you see here on the right, in order to ask questions about their foraging and recruitment and particularly the effect of herbicide stressors on how they find their food, how they communicate, and also on their brain neurochemistry.

Finally, in the last moment, I will not hesitate to do a shameless plug.

I graduated with my PhD in December, and I am on the job/postdoc market.

The elephants, the elephants, (chuckles)

the elements that interest me the most would be behavioral ecology with honeybees or native bees, conservation entomology, the conservation of livelihoods, both wild and human, and ideally, the opportunity to use my R coding and GIS skills.

So if you happen to have an idea or would like to connect with me to chat about anything, I would be more than happy to.

Thank you so much for your attention.

With that, I'd like to thank Dr. Lucy King and the whole Elephant and Bees team, as well as Dr. Robyn Underwood.

Thank you so much for inviting me to be here today.

And with that, I will end and be more than happy to answer your questions, thank you.

- Thank you so much Laura for that presentation.

So many gorgeous photos, and yeah, love to visit.

I guess we wanna stop sharing.

We can see more of your face so we can- - Sounds good.

- All right. Okay.

So the first thing I wanna ask you about, 'cause I get to pick, is that nighttime beekeeping and bee behavior and stuff.

So in our first webinar series, we did do beekeeping in East Africa.

It was a little more general.

And in the Q&A there, we learned about the nighttime beekeeping, right?

But that speaker said that everyone does it naked.

(Laura laughs)

- I wish I would've seen that talk.

- Well, it's recorded, you can check it out.

- But I was like, - Okay, I will.

- Like, if I had to keep bees naked, I would not be a beekeeper, right?

But as you know, like, at nighttime, bees crawl rather than fly.

So they said they didn't wanna get them in and under their clothes and whatever.

So I guess what you did was just prevent that from even possibly happening, right?

- Hmm, yeah, I will say, my experience of, the idea that bees only crawl at night really does not align with my experience of doing this work here in this system.

There were lots of bees flying a lot at night.

So I'm not sure what could account for that difference.

I know for me, even with two layers of cloth, I'd still got stung a couple times.

So I would be really curious to know, kind of, what goes into that difference.

I would not have wanted to do that work naked.

- Exactly, right, so just to keep with the theme then, you reiterated that these are African bees, not Africanized.

So we all think of Africanized bees as being those killer bees and very aggressive.

So African bees as well are aggressive?

Defensive, I'm sorry, that's the proper term.

- Yeah, well, yeah, so I definitely, I try to remember to use the word defensive, because in my experience, these bees will not go out of the way, they will not go out of their way to mess up your day.

However, they are very, very quick to come out swinging/come out stinging.

I will say, you know, I kind of think of a western honeybees as kind of like, your gentle but kind of judgy, old English ladies who, like, you know, if you really mess with them, maybe they'll go tsk-tsk at you, whereas I think of the African honeybee as more of like an Amazon warrior princess.

Like, gonna come out and mess up your day.

That being said, I think that, you know, all over the African continent, beekeeping work is done, not just here.

And with the appropriate precautions, it's really not too bad.

- Okay. Let's see.

A lot of people are asking about climate change.

- Definitely. Yes.

- Go ahead and talk about it.

- Okay, great. So absolutely.

So climate change is absolutely at play in the system.

One of the ways that it shows up the most is that the seasonal ebb and flow of the rains, the rainy season, the dry season, those seasons are becoming more extreme.

So the dry seasons are tending to last a bit longer, which kind of puts more pressure on human and wild communities for food, right?

The incidents of drought, extended rainy seasons, or sorry, extended seasons where sometimes you'd skip a whole rainy season, that's becoming more frequent.

And then when the rainy seasons do come, often, the rains that happen are not as gentle.

Folks are tending to get much more heavy downpours, more violent rains that contribute to erosion and can actually harm crops.

So that kind of has the effect of raising the stakes for everybody because the growers in the area have a much harder time ensuring a good harvest, and it increases pressure on the elephants to be able to find food to feed themselves, right?

And so climate change overall is definitely contributing to the severity of human-elephant conflict.

- So do the farmers, you know, utilize ways of impounding water, trying to collect it during the rainy season so they have it in the dry season?

- Yes, great question. They do.

Not every farmer has the resources to do this, but some do.

The soil in the area is really, really full of clay, and this actually helps, kind of, form a not totally watertight, but sort of a watertight layer.

When the clay soil absorbs a certain amount of water, it prevents other water from leaking further down.

So people often have, sort of, collection ponds that fill up during the wet season, and that's what they use to kind of get their crops over the finish line as the dry season comes back in.

And, as you can imagine, that's also a big lure for wildlife and elephants, for sure.

- Right, so does the dry season necessarily mean sunny?

They're asking this in terms of using solar power to have, you know, an electric fence or power some sort of bee buzzing noise.

Do you think the elephants are smart enough to know that that's not actually bees?

- Great question. Great question.

So yes, it is, by and large, primarily sunny during the dry season.

And solar power, you know, if we could get the resources to install and maintain solar power, absolutely, it would be a great fit.

Electric fences are one of the, kind of, primary means of elephant deterrents that were used by those who could afford one before beehive fences came on the scene.

They worked to some extent.

That being said, if an elephant's hungry enough, the voltage is not enough to deter them, most of the time, they're not as effective.

People have also experimented with the idea of doing, like, just playback, so like a motion sensor situation that would play the sound of bees.

The tough thing about that is that because elephants are so smart, they learn really fast, like, oh, I always hear them, but I am not getting stung.

I think it's fine.

It's kind of the same as, like, an empty box.

They learn pretty quickly that it's actually not a problem.

So there's actually this concept of the human-elephant conflict toolbox, and there's a ton of different strategies, including electric fences, including playback, including real beehive fences, and including some other strategies too, like, for instance, planting a perimeter of forage that elephants don't find appetizing to discourage them from coming into farms as well as other things, yeah.

- Amazing. Let's see.

Can you talk a little bit more about colony management?

For example, do you use smoke?

Do you need to treat for Varroa, things like that?

- Great question. We do use smoke.

We use a heck ton of smoke.

Because these colonies are so defensive, smoking them really well at the outset tends to set us up for better success.

In terms of the management that is possible in this context and with this project, the number of colonies out there to manage really far exceeds the number of trained project staff.

Because the success of the beehive fence has been so good, there are a lot of community partners, and so there's a lot of hives out there.

So in terms of management, in addition to, kind of, those basic fence inspections where we're checking for occupancy and any sort of structural maintenance that needs to be done, the management really looks like, okay, we're checking, we're taking a quick look in this colony to see if there's any major pest problem.

Like, the biggest pests that we would encounter would be wax moths and large hive beetle.

I know that Varroa are certainly a concern all over the African continent, but at least when I was there, we were not doing Varroa treatments.

And one of the thoughts that I have about that is that because we have this seasonal pattern of absconding, most of these colonies, really regularly, are having a break in the brood cycle, which is one of the things that can help control Varroa, right?

And so I kind of wonder if that, you know, twice-a-year absconding, coming back cycle is maybe helping keep Varroa in check, such that, you know, we don't have to do Varroa management actively in order to keep these bees healthy.

- Okay, you did mention that these colonies make some honey and then that's great for their income.

What are the common nectar sources, and about how much per colony do you think they make that the farmers can extract and sell?

- Great question, it really varies, colony by colony, in terms of, how much are they producing?

Some colonies only arrive, like, partway through the rainy season, and they don't have enough time to build up enough honey that we would feel good about harvesting it.

For the colonies that have maybe stuck through the dry season and get to building up really fast, I would say mostly, per colony, we get, more or less, one super box worth of honey because we don't wanna take too much from them, right?

We want to be able to support them in staying in their home.

And the wet season is pretty short.

So it's not a huge volume of honey, but it is enough for meaningful income supplementation, especially if, you know, if you have tourists from more affluent countries who come through, the price that they're willing to pay for a jar of elephant-friendly honey stretches quite far in the context of the local economy.

There was a part of the question that you asked first that I have forgotten.

Will you remind me the first part?

- Oh, nectar sources for the honey.

- Oh, yes. Nectar sources, yeah.

So when it's the wet season, there are so many flowers blooming on this landscape.

I would say the biggest sources, though, I would conjecture, are the Acacia trees.

So Acacia, shares, actually, the species epithet.

It's Acacia mellifera.

There are many different acacia species, but those trees can get quite large, and they have a profusion of blooms, they smell so good, and the bees are all over them.

I would say that's the big tree source.

In terms of other flowers, I actually don't feel good about saying particular species because that's the question that we were still getting ready to answer when I was there in 2018.

We were in the process of saying, okay, what's even blooming?

And then the next step that happened after the course of my internship was, okay, what are the bees really on?

What are they collecting?

So I'm not totally sure yet, but I do feel comfortable saying acacia trees are a big one.

- Okay, so you mentioned about how the bees, you know, abscond, and then they're somewhere else, and then they come back.

Do you know how far they're going?

- That's such a good question.

We don't know for sure.

I will say that the idea, the idea that we had when I was there and the idea is actually coming from the traditional ecological knowledge in the area, is that the bees are going up on the hill.

So remember Sagalla Hill's this big hill, rising up out of the Savannah, it's close by.

I got to hike to the top of it.

It's tall enough that it's got a really different microclimate.

It stays, kind of, misty and wet up there.

For much of the dry season, there's stuff blooming on Sagalla Hill when it's totally dry down on the Savannah.

And so not too far, I think, is probably the answer.

I think probably a lot of these colonies house themselves up on the hill during the dry season.

- So to get them back, do you put some kind of attractant in your boxes?

- That's a great question.

I think they were not using any attractant at the time when I was there.

That could have changed in the interim, but the Langstroth boxes make a really appealing nest site.

And so often, we would find, you know, colonies would move in on their own really well.

But I think the idea of using an attractant is really great.

Yeah, and as I say, it's been several years since I was there, so maybe they are now, I'm not sure.

- I guess it almost seems like there's so many boxes to choose from, and then if everybody's using an attractant, it'll be back to they're all the same again.

- Right, right.

- So what happens during the dry season?

Are the elephants a problem and there's no bees?

Maybe they've already harvested everything and they're not trying to grow anything, so it's fine for the elephants to do whatever they want?

- Hmm, great question. Yeah.

So I will say the dry season tends to be the toughest time in terms of human-elephant conflict.

Part of that is because when it's dry in the shambas, it's also dry out in the parks.

So the sources of wild forage have dried up, for the most part.

And so elephants get drawn to the shambas where farmers are using their water reserves to get their crops ready to harvest.

So that draws them in in the dry season.

In terms of the time when maybe the harvest has already happened, you do have a reduction in the stakes in terms of, you know, if an elephant comes through your field and your harvest is done, that's not so bad.

That being said, elephants will not hesitate to destroy your house to get at your stores of water and food in there.

And in fact, one of the things that happened, really, around the time that I was there was that a family had an elephant visit their shamba at night, and it was after the harvest, so they had sacks of grain stored under the bed.

And what happened was the elephant actually physically ripped the corrugated metal roof off of their house while they were asleep and was feeling around them with its trunk in the dark to pull the sacks of grain out from under the bed.

So I can only imagine how terrifying that must have been to have this incredibly powerful animal over you in the dark, searching out your food source that's gonna get you through to the next season.

So while the danger of having your plants ruined is certainly reduced after the harvest, the possibility of having an elephant destroy your home and swipe your food stores is still very much present in the dry season.

- Well, this all sounds extremely incredible.

You're so fortunate to have had this internship, and I thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Really fascinating stuff.

I love that bees are doing good for people in other places, and I'm excited to look it up and see what's happening now.

So thank you, again, for joining us and giving this really fun presentation.

I hope everyone at home enjoyed it as well.

And with that, I think we'll close it off, so.

- Sounds good.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

It was a real pleasure.

- You're welcome. Thank you for coming.

- [Laura] Thank you.

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