Beekeeping Around the World: India

- Okay.

Welcome everyone to "Beekeeping Around the World." It's March 6th, 2025.

And today we're on the fifth of our six webinars as part of the series for 2025.

So if you would like to see any of the recorded webinars from the 2025 series or the previous series, you can go to extension.psu.edu and type in the search terms, beekeeping around the world.

And each of those webinars is available for viewing for free.

Just how you registered for this webinar, the same button will have switched over to Watch Now instead of Register.

So you can watch them there.

And I hope you'll register and join us for next Thursday's presentation about keeping stingless bees in Brazil.

And that will end our series for this year.

So keep in mind that this presentation, of course, is being recorded.

It will be published online.

And if you have any questions for our speaker today, you can put them into the chat.

And when she's done speaking, I will ask her those questions.

So today, we're lucky to have with us Dr. Priya Chakrabarti Basu.

She's an Assistant Professor in the Department of Entomology at Washington State University.

Priya is also a courtesy faculty at Oregon State University.

Priya studies the interactive impacts of multiple stressors on bees; for example, poor nutrition, pesticides, environmental stressors and diseases.

And she uses a wide array of multidisciplinary techniques across fields such as physiology, toxicology, functional biology, multiomics-based approaches and neuroethology to address her research questions.

She also enjoys teaching and working with stakeholders, policymakers, and the general community to protect bee pollinators and raise pollinator awareness.

Priya is also a children's book author to help spread pollinator awareness among young readers.

So lots to watch for out of Priya.

And today she's gonna talk to us about her home country of India.

So I'm very excited to hear about beekeeping in India.

- Thank you so much, Robyn!

And I'm really excited to talk about beekeeping in India.

I left India towards the very end of 2016 but India has always had a very special place in my heart, not only because of, you know, India being my home country, but I truly believe, once I started learning about American beekeeping, how unique, different, and how resilient I think the Indian beekeeping industry is at this point.

And when you start seeing these differences, you truly start to appreciate things even if they were right in front of you.

So today I am very excited to talk a little bit about beekeeping in India, the challenges and the types of beekeeping practices that are found in India, the honey bee species that are found in India.

And I will sort of end with some of the research and extension work that I have done in India.

So, we are no strangers talking about what are the different stressors that are affecting all bee species.

And as Robyn mentioned, we look into a lot of these stressors.

So we know that there are pests, parasites, pathogens, poor nutrition, diseases, environmental stressors, whatnot.

All of these are either acting alone or they're interacting with each other to cause further stress.

And this is what primarily my lab we study.

So we are not only looking at the various nutrients that are available in the landscape, we also look at how these shape bee health.

We are also interested in examining how pesticides in the landscape impact bees.

We study the different aspects of the environment and the stressors that it can cause on bees.

And, most importantly, we study the interactions between all of these different stressors.

So, as Robyn mentioned, we of course are not only looking at the individual bees but we're also looking at the whole colony.

We are studying their physiology, the colony health, their gut microbiome, their behavior, their pollination efficiency.

So we are truly trying to tackle it from these multiple aspects.

But at the end of the day, our main focus is, how do we translate this for the general community and for our stakeholders, and what can we do to counteract such stress?

So having given you this brief background about what we currently do, let me dig into the honey bee species that are found in India.

The first honey bee species, which truly, if somebody asks me which is my favorite insect or my favorite honey bee, I would probably name this first, is Apis dorsata.

Apis dorsata is the giant honey bee, also called the rock bee.

They are typically around 17 to 20 millimeters long.

These are pretty large bees.

And there are still some people in Asia who can sometimes get confused between Apis dorsata and a giant hornet because- - [Robyn] Priya, I'm sorry, you're not sharing your slides yet.

- Oh! (Robyn chuckling)

Wait, I thought I was.

- [Robyn] I wanna see pictures of these beautiful giant bees.

- Okay, let's, I'm sorry, I did hit Share.

I'm not sure why it did not happen.

Let's see, can you see my slides now?

- [Robyn] I can.

You just have to do the slideshow and then we'll see it. - How about now?

- [Robyn] It's Presenter View, so you can see your next slide also.

- Okay, I am going to swap and share.

Ha! Didn't we practice this Robyn, right?

- [Robyn] We did. (chuckling)

It's okay. - How about now?

- [Robyn] Yes. Perfect.

- So these are the giant honey bees, sorry, Apis dorsata.

So essentially, these are giant honey bees or rock bees.

They form these giant open nests.

These are all single comb nests.

You can find them, you know, built on high locations usually, under tree limbs, cliff overhangs, or even in cities under building ledges.

These are completely wild and they cannot be domesticated.

And so, I have spent four, four and a half years, during my PhD trying to at least have a, you know, a small lap colony started or keep them in cages for a little while.

It really didn't work out.

I've just spent all of that time trying to tame them somehow, but I never could.

So these bees are completely wild.

And they continue to stay wild, as of now.

The next honey bee that I wanted to show you is Apis cerana.

These are Eastern honey bees also called the Asiatic honey bee or the Asian honey bee.

They are found across India.

They actually have a different subspecies for the lowlands compared to the Lower Himalayan regions.

These are medium-sized bees.

And if you're looking at them side-by-side, they are slightly smaller than Apis mellifera, the European honey bee.

So they are actually a little smaller than those bees.

These, however, prefer cavity nesting, like the European honey bees.

These are found in the wild in India.

These can also be domesticated.

They tend to do a little better than dorsata when it comes to domesticating them.

So there are a lot of beekeepers, especially around the southern region in India, who tend to keep Apis cerana for commercial beekeeping.

These colonies, however, are relatively small and there are only about 6,000 to 7,000 workers typically in these wild colonies.

Another honey bee species that is also found in India is Apis florea.

These are found completely in the wild.

They are the smallest of the honey bees in India.

These are called dwarf honey bee or red dwarf honey bee.

They are typically about 7 to 10 millimeters long and their coloration is overall red-brown.

But because of their distinct reddish brown color, these are called the red dwarves.

These, like Apis dorsata, they have open nests and their colonies also tend to be pretty small.

Apis mellifera, the Western honey bee or the European honey bee, was also introduced to India, like the rest of the world, and it started during the colonial era about 1880s, towards the later half of 1800s.

But slowly, beginning in the 1900s, much larger scale domestic importation started happening of Apis mellifera.

So we had more and more colonies that were moved into India, or rather the Indian subcontinent, during 1920s, '30s and '40s.

And after India gained independence, a lot of the colonies were also then brought in to try and revamp the beekeeping industry within the country.

Many commercial operations tend to use Apis mellifera these days because they produce a lot more honey.

They are also easy to manage.

However, there are concerns over these bees outcompeting Apis cerana.

So if you look at that landscape and you're just looking at honey bees, and I'm not even going into the hundreds of species of wild bees that are found in India, so if you're just looking at the native honey bee species, Apis dorsata, Apis florea and Apis cerana, the florea ones are the smallest.

But when it comes to domesticating and using honey bees for commercial operations, mellifera and cerana are sometimes used.

So in regions where beekeepers tend to keep mellifera, cerana seems to be outcompeted.

So now there are beekeepers in an area, they will only keep cerana and make sure that nobody else is bringing in mellifera because of this fear of competition between the honey bee species themselves.

And let's not forget, India is also home to more than 30 species of stingless bees belonging to the genus Tetragonula, or which is also commonly called trigona.

These are stingless bees or sweat bees.

They are also important pollinators.

And they do produce honey.

However, the amount of honey that they're producing is much smaller than what the honey bees do.

And I did hear at the beginning of today's session that you have another speaker coming in who's going to talk about the stingless bees in Brazil.

So I'm super excited about that because these are amazing bees.

Just to give you a personal sort of experience, when I was working with honey bees, I did come across multiple stingless bee colonies in the wild.

And the local beekeeper had told me that these bees, they don't sting because these are called stingless bees.

And that was the first time I actually encountered their colonies in the wild.

So the first thing I did was go open it up and put my hand in to see what's happening.

What he forgot to tell me was that these bees could bite like little gnats all over my face.

So I had now a bunch of bees and I was trying to swat them off from my face.

So that, that is hilarious.

I mean they can be small but they can be mighty.

Just because they don't sting doesn't mean that they are completely defenseless.

So, moving on from the different honey bees and other bees that can produce honey in India, let's take a little look into the farming practices of India.

So if you are in the United States or in Europe, any of the developed countries, probably when you're thinking about farming, you're imagining hundreds or sometimes thousands of acres of monocropping that might happen.

In India, it is not that large scale of farming.

There are some large farmers where they have a few hundred acres perhaps.

But what you're going to expect is actually very different.

A lot of these farmers do different types of subsistence farming.

They may do crop rotation, they may have multiple crops growing in the same plot.

And the picture that you see in the middle is what typical, a small scale average farmer's land might look like.

That's how small it might be.

And if you have a farming family where everybody's practicing farming through generations, you might have that same piece of land broken up between brothers or sisters who now have an even tinier section of land to farm.

So often, rice is cultivated.

And then once rice is harvested, that same plot could then be used for a different crop, which might be then changed out in winter to have some of the winter crops.

So it really depends on the region, the season, and what type of farming practices the farmer has.

And when you're looking at it, say for example the third picture right here, this is actually a picture from my PhD group and these are some of the people that I've worked with in the past.

Basically what you're looking at here are tiny little plots owned by multiple farmers in that same region.

But each plot has a different crop growing.

Or sometimes the same plot might have different crops that are grown.

And while commercial pollination is a massive industry in the US, India is still to catch up on that.

India primarily relies on honey production.

And paying beekeepers for moving colonies between cropping systems is still not that commonly practiced if you're looking at say, for example, a country like the US.

So beekeeping in India, it has been mentioned in a lot of these ancient scriptures and any of the books that we have discovered throughout the years.

So the Vedas are supposed to be the oldest scriptures that were written in India.

Even Buddhist scriptures as old as 2000 BC.

There have also been rock paintings during the Mesolithic era that were found in this particular northern state of Madhya Pradesh.

It's central north India.

And it actually depicts honey collection and this is about 20,000 to 10,000 years before Christ.

So, if you consider honey collection or beekeeping, it has been mentioned for centuries even before we started the modern scientific methods of beekeeping.

However, with the importation of European honey bees, with more and more information coming in, beekeeping, as a scientific method, only started towards the late 19th century.

And there are quite a few museums in India.

For example, I actually picked this picture from a museum in Southern India in a town called Ooty where it's called the Honey and Bee Museum.

And they have a lot of these unique things that have been used for honey hunters in India or anything that has to do with bees and honey; honey production, honey collection or beekeeping.

So this is one of those baskets that used to be used for harvesting honey by honey hunters.

So in India, we can find a traditional as well as a modern type of beekeeping.

And the traditional beekeeping is mostly practiced in the forest and the rural areas.

They tend to use these traditional hives like clay pots, empty wooden boxes, woven bamboo baskets.

Bees are usually collected from these wild colonies and the boxes are kept in the fields or just around the house.

And honey is also often collected from these wild colonies.

Modern beekeeping on the other hand is very similar to what you would expect from a modern beekeeper anywhere in the world.

The honey bees are actually kept in man-made hives.

The Langstroth hives are now coming into more and more practice, which can be used for commercial honey production.

The colonies are also periodically replaced to ensure continuous production of honey.

If you have not looked up FAO Stats, I strongly suggest you do.

Because I love their website.

It is by United Nations and they have information from any and all countries in the world, as long as that country has reported.

So you could look at say, for example, honey production; you could look at crops grown; you could look at pesticides used.

So FAO Stats is really a storehouse of all of these important data sets for any country that you're interested in looking up.

So according to FAO Stats, in 2018, India produced about 67,442 tons of honey.

And roughly, if you want to compare it, 1 tonne is equal to about 2,000 pounds.

So you can imagine the amount of honey that India had produced in 2018.

And the major markets for Indian honey are usually Germany, US, UK, Japan, France, Italy and Spain.

And right now, India is about eighth for global production of honey.

And there are quite a few ag universities in India who've been trying to also collect data and keep everyone updated.

So according to them, the crops that are benefited by bee pollination in India usually include fruits and nuts like almonds, apples, apricots, peaches, strawberries, and a lot of citrus plants and other fruits.

There are also vegetable and seed crops such as cabbage, cauliflower, carrots, cilantro, that are pollinated by honey bees.

Then we have oil seed crops such as sunflower, niger, rape seed and mustards.

And then we also have clovers, and alfalfa, which is lucerne, that are also pollinated by a lot of bees.

So they actually did this study in some of these cropping systems and they found that when honey bees were introduced or other pollinators were introduced into those farming practices, they had anywhere between say 17 to 48% yield increase in the crop.

And for onions, for example, surprisingly, they found 93% increase in yield when pollinators were introduced in the cropping systems.

So a lot of these studies are now actually coming up, which are trying to emphasize the need for not only honey bees but also other pollinators for increasing yield production in the cropping systems.

But also how can beekeeping as a profession generate revenues for people?

So there are some government loans and subsidies, for examples, that are available such as the National Honey Board of India, the Khadi and Village Industries Commission, which is a cooperative.

There are also subsidy programs and national banks who are now willing to provide loans to start beekeeping operations.

And the Khadi and Village Industries Commission by government of India, they are very thorough about publishing what their initial target is and what their efforts have yielded.

So, for example, if you look at this table here, they had initially targeted that they are going to try and reach 16,535 people across a span of three years and distribute bee boxes and beekeeping equipment to not only encourage starting beekeeping as a profession but also to help generate revenues in a lot of these families.

And then based on that same report, I think they did pretty well.

Given all of the challenges that you can face in trying to do this, they were able to reach about 13 and a 1/5 thousand people and they were able to distribute 135,000 boxes to start and encourage people with beekeeping.

So beekeepers in India, they're mostly extracting honey.

But as I said, the things are slowly changing.

Wax and pollen is also being collected.

Pollen is a massive industry now, pollen collection in India.

And a lot of beekeepers are also now trying to see how commercial pollination can also generate revenues for their beekeeping practices.

So this article that was actually published very recently in 2023 has kind of summarized what I want to be able to tell you.

India has a potential of over 200 million bee colonies, but we only have about 3.4 million colonies at present.

And this obviously includes both cerana and mellifera.

And for a small country as India, that is quite a few colonies if you compare the number of colonies we have in the US.

However, when you're looking at this, it only provides employment to just over 6 million rural families.

If we are able to organize honey collection, use modern techniques, and can provide additional honey as well as beeswax that could generate further revenue, this can provide additional employment to maybe another 5 million tribal families.

So which is why this impetus has been on improving livelihoods by using beekeeping as a measure.

The Indian agriculture market reached about 28,394 million rupees in 2024, which is a lot of money that it was able to generate.

So looking forward, there have been a lot of initiatives in trying to see how we can increase this in another 10 years, and maybe have a growth rate of close to 10% during '25 to '33.

So there is a growing demand of honey and also bee products and the increasing awareness of the health benefits that honey itself has.

And there is also this need of organic food products in the market.

This is also slowly driving the need for having better beekeeping practices, and also an increased number of beekeepers in the Indian subcontinent.

While we talk about all the things that we can achieve, through having better accessibility as well as modern techniques for Indian beekeeping, Indian beekeepers are still facing a lot of challenges.

The first is, of course, subsistence level challenge.

In India, beekeeping has been mainly forest-based or migration-based.

So there is a severe lack of forage and I still have a lot of collaborators in the country and this is the first thing that they always talk about; severe lack of forage, especially during the rainy season or the monsoon season.

They have no choice but to only keep feeding bees just plain sugar syrup.

The commercial diet industry, as you're going to expect in the US, is still not that expansive in India.

So they're often then relying on buying pollen from other companies in the country and trying to feed that back to the colonies.

There is also a lack of sometimes awareness as well as applied research into what works well for these colonies given these certain conditions.

So the production and the productivity continue to remain low and the beekeepers are still unable to meet the rising demands.

And then there, of course, are death and diseases.

European Foulbrood and Thai sacbrood, they are both on the rise.

And if the beekeepers tend to buy infected packages or colonies from another supplier, then that disease spreads throughout their apiary.

There are also problems with Varroa mites and Tropilaelaps mites, but a lot of research has to be done to be able to understand.

So the beekeepers are complaining that they have mite problems and they are buying very limited chemical options that are available in the market.

But this is definitely an avenue which could be expanded upon, which could be investigated further.

And, of course, pesticide poisoning is also a severe problem.

There was inadequate institutional support up to some point of time.

But that is also slowly changing.

So when it comes to institutional support, primarily livestock extension services were focused on.

So cattle and poultry, these were the different industries that were receiving a lot of these benefits.

So when things have started changing, now there are initiatives to help beekeepers choose right areas, locations for beekeeping, help them learn how to choose quality bees, how to monitor and detect diseases early, how to use modern techniques for extracting honey, and also how all of these different products that they could generate from that colony add further value and can generate revenue for them from the market.

So now there are plenty of government agencies, nonprofits, universities and research institutions that are working together or in tandem to help increase support for the beekeepers.

We are still facing this lack of awareness though.

Which is why a lot of these efforts are underway to increase awareness of the pollination requirement of crops, diversification needs for beekeeping, using modern technologies for honey extraction that are all over the world, and to make these resources more affordable and available for these beekeepers.

So I just listed a few institutions, whether government or nonprofits, that are actually actively doing that.

And I have worked with a lot of them and I'm still continuing to work with some of these agencies.

So there is this government of India initiative through the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, we have the National Bee Board, we also have the Integrated Beekeeping Development Centers, Under the Mango Tree, V.Sivaram Research Foundation, that is there.

Then we have ICAR based in Pune, the Agricultural Research Universities that are now focusing on apiculture in a lot of different states.

There are also cooperatives and other state government initiatives that are working together to train, educate, and distribute bee boxes among, primarily, the rural and the tribal communities.

So before I move on to just talking a little bit about my research and extension activities, I wanted to thank my mentors and my current collaborators and also all the colleagues, the friends, the funders, the beekeepers and the growers that I've worked with in India.

Without any of their support and their passion, we really can't do anything.

And it's the same in the US, it's the same in India.

We need a lot of passionate people who are willing to work together and help each other out to make this initiative successful.

So my research was focused on Apis dorsata and Apis cerana.

I primarily worked on the wild colonies and I focused on two Eastern Indian states of West Bengal and Odisha.

So this is where I studied the wild colonies for both of these honey bee species.

Then my extension efforts, through much larger projects that were in the lab that I was part of, that sort of spanned across four states in India.

So I am going to briefly talk to you about the research that I did on the Indian honey bees.

So, my main focus was to understand the impacts of pesticides on these wild colonies of Apis dorsata and Apis cerana.

To do that, I had to first verify pesticide residues and establish an agricultural intensification gradient.

So I would have these locations in multiple states along this intensification gradient.

So there would be some locations that are least intensive in the forests, in the tribal communities, where hardly or no pesticides are used; and then there would be these sites, these locations, in very ag-intensive areas where multiple pesticides are used often in conjunction.

So we did a lot of land use surveys, we built all of these maps.

We did a lot of grower surveys.

We also collected soy and honey bee samples and we tested them for pesticide residues.

So that is how we were able to establish these gradients across the two states where I conducted my research.

And this paper is now open access, it was published in 2014.

If you're interested, you can look this up and read more about this particular study.

And actually as a part of this study, we were also interested in looking at how bee physiology was changing.

There is not much information available on these wild colonies.

And honestly, if you ask, so I teach honey bee biology and every time I ask my students every year when I teach it, "Are honey bees native or are they invasive?" everybody almost, they answer, "Oh they are invasive." But that's not true!

These bees are native.

You just have to see where they come from.

So, for example, dorsata and cerana, they are very native and wild to the Indian subcontinent.

And when I started working on this project way back in 2011, there was really not much information available on any of the bee species in India.

Most importantly on the wild colonies of these honey bees.

So as a part of this particular project, I was also interested in understanding how pesticides can impact their physiology.

And we did find that pesticides, at least in these locations, in these wild colonies, they were inducing oxidative stress in both species of honey bees that I worked on.

So my next question was, "How is this impacting honey bee behavior in these wild colonies?" So the first part that I was interested in is understanding their olfaction or their sense of smell.

This is published in another paper from 2015 if you're interested in looking it up and I listed it at the left bottom side of the slide.

So what we did was that we conducted some morphometry studies.

So we were measuring the sizes of the bees, their antenna, their legs, just to see first, is there a size difference in the same species of honey bees but between the pesticide zones and the control zones?

We then also conducted scanning electron microscopy and we looked at these different sensilla in honey bee antennae.

So these are microscopic structures present in honey bee antennae that help with their sense of smell.

So they are basically receiving the smell, these molecules, and they are transferring them, passing the signal on to the brain.

So this is what we wanted to see if these sensory structures were damaged because of repeated pesticide exposures.

And then we also looked at some of their brain physiology to dig further into what was happening.

And we also did some experiments on their behavior called proboscis extension response, which basically told us how many times they were able to correctly remember and identify a particular smell by seeing how long they could learn.

So to explain proboscis extension response, I would go back to the Pavlovian dog experiment.

If you remember, Pavlov trained his dog by ringing a bell offering food and the dog would salivate.

Eventually when just the bell was rung, the dog would show those behavioral responses.

So similarly with honey bees, you can expose them to a smell and then you could also give them a drop of sugar syrup at the same time.

And after a few instances of training them, these honey bees are able to extend their proboscis in response to the odor alone, even in the absence of sugar syrup.

So the whole idea was to test and see if the pesticide-exposed bees were able to remember that and perform that behavior, as well as the controlled bees.

And we were certainly seeing differences in their olfactory behavior.

Another thing that we also looked into was their vision, how well they could see.

So we were finding changes in their physiology, we were finding changes in their ability to smell.

So our next idea was to look at how well they could see.

Once more, this is also published in a journal called "Chemosphere" in 2019.

And if you're interested, I have listed the paper to the bottom left.

So what we did was that we similarly had these pesticide-exposed bees and unexposed bees.

So we trained them through these feeder discs with different colors, with and without sugar reward.

And we would then releasing them into these Y mazes where we exchanged the colors on the arms, and we were trying to see how well they would remember and how many times they were correctly choosing the right color.

We also looked at their visual proteins, we looked at the ultra structure of their eyes, and we were finding subtle changes.

So, the last thing that we did was, we looked at the populations themselves.

If these colonies have been surviving in these pesticide locations for generations, is that somehow changing the overall makeup of the colony itself?

So we did find increased heterozygosity in these colonies, which basically, the different things that we had tested in these populations, it actually told us that these populations were becoming more resistant in these areas when they were being repeatedly exposed to pesticides.

And the interesting thing is that in a lot of these studies, dorsata seemed to be more resilient than cerana in the wild colonies that we were studying.

So as a part of my PhD project, we also did a lot of extension and outreach programs.

I was very lucky that the lab where I did my PhD, we also had a lot of collaborators from Europe.

And we received the Darwin Initiative funding, which helped us further sort of give back to the community and also extend some of these beekeeping resources to the colonies.

So one part of that has been published in 2017 in this journal called "Biological Conservation," which is also open access if you're interested in looking up this paper.

So when we talk about our audience, in this case, our stakeholders, as beekeepers, it definitely varies.

And what I was saying at the very beginning of my talk, after coming to the US, I truly started appreciating the severe challenges in Indian beekeeping and how resilient the growers and the beekeepers are in trying to learn, adapt and survive.

So when you look at it, the audience certainly varies.

We have these multiple small cropping plots, these little plots; we have multiple pesticides that are being used in the area.

There are challenges in growing cerana.

What you're actually seeing here in this picture when my cursor is right here, you are looking at a small frame of Apis cerana right here and a small box of Apis cerana.

So there are challenges in what you're trying to domesticate cerana.

Or you're trying to manage mellifera.

Then you also have these farmers who would like to keep bee boxes in their cropping systems as an additional source of income.

But how do we reach out to them?

And how do we make them understand that sometimes we also need to have better management practices, not only in terms of beekeeping, but also how and when we are spraying pesticides and managing the crops.

So throughout my career so far, I have always worked at the interface of both crop protection and bee protection.

Because I recognize that growers need to protect their crops just as much as beekeepers want to protect their colonies.

And this whole foundation was truly built because I worked closely with the growers and the beekeepers in India, especially from these very rural and tribal communities where you see firsthand how important it is for them to survive any and all challenges that are thrown to them.

So which is why this has been built into my foundation, that how we can incorporate these multiple stakeholder communities and work together to benefit all.

So, a lot of things that we had to consider when we were reaching out to the stakeholders in India is, of course, literacy rate.

Not all beekeepers or growers had a chance to go to school.

They are making sure that their children went to school.

But a lot of them may only be able to barely sign.

So we had to overcome that.

And I'll talk about it in the subsequent slides, what did we do to do that?

Then we also had to consider their education degrees.

A lot of them had no choice but had to drop out of school because their family needed them to work.

And, you know, sometimes when you're working in a lot of these rural communities, poverty could actually be a driving factor in how far a person can actually study or pursue education in any form.

Then the other thing that of course we had to consider was the scale of beekeeping practice.

Is it a farmer who just wants to keep one box next to his cropping systems?

Is it an actual commercial beekeeper who might have 500 colonies?

Or it could be a small beekeeper who has 20 colonies but want to understand how he can maximize their revenues.

Then the farmland acreage is also something that we need to consider because large scale farmers are far and few in India.

Most of the farmers are small scale.

And then, we also had to dig into the actual financial support from these multiple organizations.

So we had a grant that could support us for three years, but what happened before that?

What would happen after that?

Could this be a sustainable solution that we could start with?

And we were only working in a few locations in that vast country, so what happens in the rest of the country?

So we also had to kind of consider all of these options.

And then, of course, let's not forget basic resources.

In a lot of places where I have worked, electricity is a luxury.

Sometimes in a lot of these tribal villages, when I worked there, there was no electricity.

So we also had to consider that if they are thinking about honey production, they do need access to electricity if they want to use modern technologies.

Or if it's a small scale tribal beekeeping operation, could we provide them with hand-cranked honey extractors, which could get their work done much faster?

So these are a lot of things that we have to consider.

But at the end of the day, our main goal is, how can we best reach our target audience?

What can we do to be able to overcome all of these challenges, work together, and reach out to the community?

So even though I keep saying that the audience varies, if you actually look at beekeeping on a global perspective, does it really vary?

Bees still need our help, the beekeepers still need a solution, and we still need to translate our research and help the community.

Which is why flexibility, adaptability, and the willingness to learn has always been these three core mantras in my life when it comes to research or extension.

Because we really need to be flexible and adaptable when we are working with very different target audience.

If you're in India, you can find honey bees everywhere.

If you're looking.

You can find them in the wild landscape, you can also find them in urban environments.

And dorsata is extremely resilient.

They are very adaptable and they do build these giant hives, even in big cities.

So you can actually find bees anywhere if you're looking.

So how can we make beekeepers aware and how can we make growers aware?

And so what we did is, you're actually looking at, not only me, but a lot of my fellow PhD students from the same cohort.

We worked in the project with my advisors, with our collaborators, and all of our partner agencies across India.

So what we did was we went out and we conducted these surveys.

We worked with growers, we worked with beekeepers, we worked with any villager who was interested in starting beekeeping as an operation.

The main thing was we were actually serving them, but we also brought these pictorial flip charts with us; minimal writing.

We worked with the local agencies and we translated everything from English to the local state language or to the local tribal language.

So that if they could read, they would understand it because it's in their local language.

And we brought these flip charts.

And as we were going through them, we were also trying to tell them that not every insect that they see on their crop is a pest.

It could be a beneficial insect, it could just be a different bee species, if not a honey bee.

And then we also went through these pictorial charts and we also talked to them about the benefits of beekeeping.

We had a lot of these events where we also arranged for breakfast and lunch.

We encouraged them to bring their entire family because if they were attending their events, it actually meant they were losing out on one day worth of wages for their family.

So we made sure that we were able to compensate for that.

And we encouraged a lot of these villagers, tribal communities, to come participate.

We also had these cultural activities where their children could participate in a lot of these learning activities.

And we gave out bee boxes and we tried to sort of induct them into the practice of beekeeping.

And for farmers, we tried to make them more aware of the variety of insects that they are going to encounter; pollinators, beneficial insects and pests.

And we also spoke to them about safe pesticide use practices and the importance of managing bees if they would like to have one in their cropping systems.

So essentially, overall, accessibility was the major thing in our mind when we were working through all of these projects.

So, what's the literacy rate?

What is the local language?

We used flow charts, flip charts.

We made sure we had interpreters with us when we were working in these tribal communities.

If you are here online today, and if you come from India, you know what I mean.

For the rest of us, India is a country with a million languages, cultures, and so many different types of communities.

So it's really important that we have someone with us who is local, who can speak.

At least one of us is able to speak his language so that he can then translate what we're trying to say to the local communities.

Then we also needed to understand the scale and the need of beekeeping.

We were working with the farmers to not only develop trust before the surveys, but we also made sure that we went back and we followed up even after the surveys were done.

And then of course the gender, the age group, and the economic background, was always there in our mind when we were conducting any and all outreach and extension activities.

So with that, I am going to end my talk about beekeeping in India, my research and extension experiences in India.

I'm sorry you could not see the beginning of the slides, I really had a nice video to show you towards the very beginning of my slide.

But I have listed my lab website.

I also have a QR code here which will take you to my lab website.

I still have to update it, so forgive me for that.

And here is my email and my X handles.

So I will be very happy to answer any questions you may have and please do not hesitate to reach out to me for any ideas for potential collaborations or anything.

A couple of my collaborators in India, V.Sivaram Foundation as well as Dr. Firake based out of ICAR, Pune, they are really doing some amazing work in India trying to not only improve the pollinator habitat, but also working with women beekeepers, tribal communities and the rural areas to help improve livelihood.

So I truly believe that there is a lot of wonderful work being done in India.

We just need more focus on that perspective.

Thank you so much.

- Thank you, Priya.

Do you wanna go back to the beginning and show us the video?

(panelists chuckling)

- Sure!

I feel like my 2-year-old now.

(Robyn chuckling)

I am so sorry.

And this is hilarious.

And we practiced this.

- It's not a problem.

- So I just wanted to show you some of the amazing people that I've worked with in the past or who are currently working in training and improving beekeeping resources in India.

And, of course, I had a video which basically talked about the different things that we do in our lab.

So we not only look at bee nutrition in the landscape and their impacts on colony health, we also study the pesticides in the landscape, we look at the environmental stressors in the landscape, and, of course, most importantly, how all of these stressors, they interact with each other.

And most importantly, as I kind of, I have been emphasizing throughout, we use a lot of different approaches; both basic and applied sciences to be able to address a lot of our research questions and give back to the community.

So we work not only on individual bees but also with the entire colonies.

And I'm gonna go back and stop the screen share.

Thank you, Robyn! (chuckling)

- That was a very cool video, I love that animation. - Thank you.

- So cool.

Okay, so we do have some questions and I think a lot of people were very interested in other species other than Apis mellifera.

And there were three separate questions that I'm gonna put together.

So, are stingless bees kept in man-made hives?

Are giant honey bees kept by beekeepers?

And are boxes used to keep dorsata?

So that's three species, kind of the same question, yeah.

- Great questions.

Stingless bees, they are mostly in the wild.

There are some beekeepers who are trying to manage them.

It's a lot like here in the US when you catch a swarm and you put it in a box, that's what a lot of beekeepers are trying to do.

Because they are, we don't know much about managing them, to be honest.

As a commercial pollination system, honey bees are still primarily focused on.

So what a lot of beekeepers are doing is they are, if they could, they would grab one of these wild colonies and put them in a small box and try and see if that works.

That was the first box that I had actually encountered, which is why I opened the lid and put my hand straight in without realizing that they would bite me.

But the wild colonies that I've seen, sometimes they're pretty hard to spot.

And I wasn't an expert on bees.

My background was zoology.

I heard about colony collapse disorder happening in the US and that's what got all of us interested in studying bees and pollinators in India in 2011.

So I have primarily encountered them in the wild.

Apis dorsata cannot be domesticated at all.

Nobody even tries doing it.

They are pretty large.

Which is why sometimes, if you ask a random person, they might be confused between a hornet and a dorsata.

And from personal experience, their stingers go through bee suits.

And I have been, at one particular occasion, I have been stung over 50 or 60 times.

It was a sampling that went wrong.

So essentially, nobody wants to mess with dorsata.

There are a lot of brave local beekeepers who collect dorsata honey.

It is sold at a premium price in India.

They do collect dorsata honey and kudos to them.

They are supermen.

- Great!

So, since you brought up honey, what varieties of honey are most common?

I guess it matters maybe which bee they come out from, but also which plants, right?

- In India, wildflower honey is often quite commonly sold.

Citrus, like oranges, especially in the southern part of India, it's sold pretty commonly.

Then if you're looking at dorsata.

Dorsata build their hives pretty high.

They are able to forage throughout the day at even odd hours compared to other species of honey bees.

And they do go to other resources sometimes.

And not just floral nectar, they could also go collect saps as well as a fruit exudate.

So you might get some mango exudate into those honey, or dates, depending on the season.

There are many parts of India where it's not freezing cold, so you will continue to see honey bee activity during the day as well, even in winter.

So there are multiple generations happening even without a brood break, in winter, depending on which part of India you're looking at.

So the mangrove forests in the Sundarban region, which borders India and Bangladesh, a very different type of honey sourced from there, if you're looking at anywhere else.

Northern Himalayas in Nepal and the regions in Himalayas in India, which sort of border that part, we also have dorsata high up in the Himalayan belt.

And a lot of local tribal villagers collect rhododendron honey, which has high grayanotoxins and it is sold as mad honey.

So it really depends what you are kind of looking at.

As Robyn said, you know, what time of the year, what plants that they are collecting from?

- I wanna try honey with mango.

(panelists chuckling)

- It's delicious.

My best honey ever though was orange honey, orange blossom honey.

- Hmm!

Okay, so most beekeepers in the US understand that we're only allowed to keep Apis mellifera.

If Apis cerana was found here, we would have to kill it.

So why do you think that is?

Can you explain, like, what do you think would happen if somebody brought in Apis cerana colonies to the US?

- That's a great question.

I'm thinking of the different possibilities.

Apis cerana, there are two subspecies in India primarily.

I think, depending on which part of the US, the southern belt could sustain both species but the northern belt subspecies, sorry, the northern belt, it will only be able to sustain the Apis cerana subspecies that is found in the Himalayan belt, in the Lower Himalayan belt.

Because otherwise, it's too hot for them.

I guess with any invasive honey, any invasive species, there is always this tendency to, you know, kill them, get rid of them before they can spread any other diseases.

Which is true!

Because Apis cerana has been in the wild for centuries in India, for hundreds of years in India in the wild, even before anybody started domesticating them.

They have their own strategies.

They know how to bond and kill a hornet.

They know how to specifically allow Varroa mites to grow in the brood cells, but they will aggressively cap off any of the worker cells if they sense mites.

So they have a way of managing and keeping the mite populations down.

If you're looking at India, we have that Varroa jacobsoni, not Varroa destructor.

So it's also a different pathogen, a different mite, that they might bring in.

So these could be some of the concerns.

And I have heard that Apis florea is slowly expanding its territory, so it is going to be considered invasive and a threat if it makes its way into Middle East and then Eastern Europe.

So essentially I think the risk that comes basically is, I am a sci-fi geek so I would probably go to some examples like that, but think of the "Alien" movie.

You bring in something random from outer space and then you're now looking at a disease that you don't know how to manage, you know?

So I think something along the same lines, probably that is one of the reasons why.

But as a honey bee researcher myself, and I do study bumblebees and other bee species, but as a honey bee researcher myself, I always ask this question, "At what point, what time point is that when an invasive species becomes naturalized?" And then you know how to deal with it, right?

So I'm always careful about calling something invasive.

- Right.

That all makes sense.

So, I just have a like a farming question.

So you were showing these tiny little pieces of land that maybe people have to share.

Do they do any like vertical farming?

Because like, you know, horizontally, they don't have a lot of room so maybe they can go up on trellises and things like that?

- Yeah, absolutely.

That's a great question.

So I was basically showing extremes of those scenarios.

In a lot of places, there are also these farmers who use multiple concepts of farming.

So they are using, you know, what we would teach in agroecology.

So they have a small pond, they have fish in there.

Then they built these platforms where they keep a little coop for chickens where the chicken droppings could feed the fish.

The water from there basically waters a tiny little part where they are growing rice.

And then the rest of it, they have these trellises where they might have pumpkins and other things that grow.

And then on the bottom, they are trying to grow other crops.

India primarily has vegetables growing in winter because it's not that hot.

So a lot of our vegetables come in the winter.

- Hmm! Very cool.

I guess you have to be pretty creative.

- Hm-mm, water is always a problem.

Drought and heat, it's only getting worse every year in India.

So that is also a problem.

And I don't want to share the gloom news but if you actually look up papers, you're going to hear a lot about farmer suicides.

Which is why a lot of these government initiatives and nonprofits and other universities, they are now trying their best to help and assist farmers, but also farmers who want to become beekeepers in addition as well as just people who want to get into beekeeping.

- That is very tough.

(Robyn clearing throat)

So is it more common for beekeepers there to be honey producers or do they have pollination contracts?

- More commonly honey producers than pollination contracts.

We must remember that we have these migratory dorsata colonies.

We also have cerana, we have a lot of other bees.

Commercial pollination as a concept is relatively new the last 50, 60 years; after India gained her independence.

Compared to honey collection, which has been happening in India for centuries.

- Right.

And then there was a question about your research.

You were measuring, you know, various parts of the bees.

Someone asked, "Did the size change based on exposure to pesticides?" - Great question.

I will not be giving you all the nitty gritty details because it's all in the manuscript but, as an overview, if you look at the whole bee itself, there was not any overall change to the size or the antenna or anything else to the bees.

But when we started doing scanning electron microscopy, we actually found a morphological aberrations in those antenna sensilla.

We found changes in the number of sensilla.

We also started finding changes in their eye facets.

So if you go back to those papers that I showed, I have pictures of their compound eyes.

So we know bees have five eyes; two large compound eyes on the sides, and three small simple eyes on the back of their head.

The two compound eyes on the sides are made up of tiny little lenses called facets and the whole thing together is called ommatidia.

So if you look at that in that paper, you're actually going to see how we've measured the distance and the diameter of those individual lenses and we actually started seeing differences.

That was brutal!

Sitting under the microscope and counting, but also just looking at these many scanning electron microscopy images and sitting and counting each of them, that was brutal.

But I'm glad I did it.

Because that was rewarding too.

- Well I told people I got my PhD because I'm persistent and I can count.

(panelists laughing)

- I guess! I guess- - Right?

- Yes, I think that's what contributed.

- You just can't give up.

You got to keep counting. - You just can't give up.

- (chuckling) Okay, last question.

We're all hearing about bad, you know, die-offs here in the US.

Do you have any idea how the bees are doing in India this year?

- I wish I could give you a hard number.

It is not as organized as the US industry.

And as I showed you the different challenges when it comes to even doing outreach and extension, it is very hard to get hardcore survey datas.

The surveys that we did, we were there physically ourselves and we were writing things on pen and paper ourselves.

So, just when you think about it from accessibility perspective, it is very hard to conduct some of these surveys in India.

But I'm hoping within the next decade, we'll have a better idea.

Because beekeepers are complaining about colony losses.

My collaborators who work directly in the ground in India, they are also talking about all of these challenges and how people are losing a lot of colonies; depending on the weather, depending on the diseases, and a severe lack of forage, and exposure to pesticides.

I wish I had the hard number to tell you though, but I can tell you it is pretty bad.

It is pretty bad.

- Well that's sad to hear.

But thank you, Priya, so much for your time and for sharing your knowledge about beekeeping in India.

Really great presentation.

We're very happy that you came, thank you.

- Thank you so much for having me and thank you all so much for being present at my talk.

Thank you all.

Bye-bye.