Lunch with Randy Oliver

The centennial National Honey Show event took place in October 2023, at Sandown Park, in Esher. I managed to grab Randy Oliver for a quick chat over lunch at the nearby Subway. I had something called a ‘Tuna Kahuna’ and coffee. I squeezed my walrus frame into a corner opposite Randy, who was wearing the sandals (no socks) that he wears in sunny California. It was not sunny. Anyway, here is what we spoke about:

Drifting workers

SD: Last time I saw you, you were doing a drifting experiment.

RO: We are repeating it this year. Last time, there were not enough mites drifting inwards to pull good data. We were getting less than 5 mites per week coming in. This time we brought in 12 strong ‘mite donor’ colonies and allowed them to collapse from varroa mites, and that did get the numbers up in the ‘mite receiver’ hives. I just took the final mite counts on the day I left to fly here.

SD: I read what you wrote on your website about the previous drifting experiment. It ended with “not enough mite immigration to detect a difference due to treatment.”

RO: Right. I have now hooked up with a data geek, a guy I met at Apimondia. He volunteered to help out. His obsession is to take hard data sets and pull out good information. So, he is eagerly awaiting the data from this year’s experiment.

Breeding Varroa Resistance

The big thing in our operation is that we are finally seeing success in our selective breeding programme for varroa resistance. It looks like we may be getting to a tipping point. We’ve got a friend who is a very large commercial queen producer. He approached us to ask if we can start selling our stock. This has really motivated my sons.

SD: That’s not Ray (Olivarez), is it?

RO: It is Ray. He’s a producer who I fully trust to do things right and work with me to ensure proper mating of the queens.

SD: So, what you are saying is that the daughters of your varroa resistant breeder queens are also varroa resistant?

RO: I wouldn’t say that yet, but we’re getting better heritability each year. It’s up to the 50–70% range now, so we are not claiming mite resistance yet. Ray asked for a couple of paragraphs for advertising, which Eric (Randy’s son) wrote. I said to Eric, I suggest writing this up as a story; we are in the process now; we are not claiming mite resistance, but there’s about a 50% chance that a queen’s colony will be. I would rather our buyers were buying into the programme, and being part of the journey, than already expecting the end result. The results will be in a few years yet, but buying queens from us now motivates us to really kick on with the process.

SD: You’ve been doing that, what, five years?

RO: This is our seventh year now.

SD: And you religiously select only around 30 breeders from 1,500 each year?

RO: Yes, we replace all of our queens with daughters from only the 2% that were not only strong colonies, but the most mite resistant.

SD: And with all that, you are only just beginning to see real progress?

RO: I did a chart on our progress yesterday, and it looks like an exponential growth curve, rather than linear. That’s why I’m thinking that we may have hit a tip-point.

Ray pays for beekeeping rights on a 20,000 acre ranch. We can set bees up on there and make sure that only drones from varroa resistant queens populate the area. That’s a huge step-up for our drone pool because currently the drones are a mixture from both resistant and non-resistant stock.

SD: Wow. As I understand it, the point is to show other queen producers what can be done so that they follow suit?

RO: Well, they can do it themselves, if they want to wait 8–10 years, or they can start off with breeder queens from any resistant stock, and take it from there, following the same methodology as us to maintain the stock. It’s all about how to maintain continual strong selective pressure for mite resistance over time. This is not a pitch for my stock, but rather a demonstration project for the benefit of queen breeders and producers worldwide.

SD: And these are bees that can literally thrive without varroa treatment?

RO: Yeah, varroa never increases in the best colonies.

SD: That’s the dream, really.

RO: Yeah, it’s “back to the good old days.”

SD: What about, not just after one year, but after two years, or three…

RO: We don’t keep queens beyond two years. The majority of our breeders, in the second year, still maintain low mite counts. A few of them are not so good in the second year, and mite levels start going up. With one treatment in the winter, they would be fine. Resistance is not a black or white thing; there are degrees of it. So what if we got down to just one treatment per year?

Safely Using Formic Pro

SD: Well, that’s great. On another subject, I saw something online about Formic Pro. Somebody who knows you said she never loses queens, but most people were saying it kills them. Personally, I really like it because it’s so quick, and it doesn’t seem to kill that many queens. Anyway, she was saying that she uses one Formic Pro pad, then another about 10 days later, and never loses queens. I just put both pads on at once and blast them.

RO: If you place the wrapper over the tops of the pads, that seems to reduce that first day ‘flash-off’ and greatly reduces queen loss.

SD: In this country, if you don’t use amitraz, people tend to use thymol. I think thymol stops queens laying for a week or two, which isn’t necessarily what I want.

RO: That’s the advantage of that application method that I demonstrated yesterday.

SD: Is that on a sponge or something?

RO: A cellulose sound-board.

SD: And that doesn’t stop the queen laying?

RO: Right.

SD: Is it in for six weeks or so?

RO: 21 days. That was in hot weather. For cool weather, it has lower efficacy, but one may need to move the pads to a different area of the hive.

SD: Despite Asian hornets, and that new strain of EFB which you were talking about in Mike’s talk, it’s still varroa that’s the main threat, right?

RO: Yeah, it’s still a big threat.

Disease Variants

SD: What about that new EFB, then?

RO: It’s just like with COVID; all these pathogens continually evolve new variants. Their ‘fitness’ depends on transmissibility. Fitness is like “how many grandchildren did they have; not children, but grandchildren.” So, as with COVID, fitness is not conferred by killing the host but by how well it transmits. The virus has no intent, no plan whatsoever — it’s all about which gets transmitted the best.

It’s the same with the pathogens in the beehive. You get a new variant, and the bees don’t have immunity to that particular variant. Then there appears to be trans-generational immune priming (TGIP) in the bees. Either the queen passes it on in the eggs or the nurse bees pass it via the jelly. After a couple of years, the signs of disease go away, and the beekeeper thinks it’s because they did this or that, but really it’s because the bees did it.

SD: How are your sons getting on?

Economics of Agriculture

RO: They start with over 1,500 colonies each spring and take 1,000 to the almonds the next year.

SD: And is the price still going crazy?

RO: Right now, there’s a glut of almonds. The growers have over-planted, which means the buyers aren’t offering such good prices. In turn, the growers will be less willing to pay so much for pollination, which is not good for us. This is always the case in agriculture; if any crop is profitable, people grow more and more of it, until it becomes unprofitable. This is what happened with the cannabis market in California.

SD: Yeah, because that’s legal, of course, isn’t it?

RO: Some years ago, when I offered my sons the beekeeping business, they said that there is so much profit in cannabis that they wanted to invest everything into a big greenhouse. I told them that the price was not sustainable. It’s a plant that grows as easily as tomatoes — you’re not going to keep getting $6,000 per lb. The price dropped every year, and last year the offered price was lower than the costs of production. That’s what happens in agriculture.

SD: Your sons get a lot of their money from almond pollination, don’t they?

RO: Half. The rest is nucs, and any honey, which is of much lower importance, is profit.

SD: Do you have the same problem as here with cheap imported honey, which sometimes isn’t even honey?

RO: We sell all of our honey locally at a reasonable price. When I was selling honey years ago, my boys would tell me, “Dad, you’re selling it too cheap.” Then, after I handed the business to them, I said, “Boys — you’re selling it too cheap!” They said that they know, but they like their buyers. They sell every drop they produce, and in that scenario you should put up prices, but they love our customers. Because they sell at a reasonable price, they sell every drop. Competition against rice-syrup – ‘funny honey’ – of course lowers the baseline price for honey everywhere!

SD: We have two layers in the market. At my scale (about 70 colonies), I sell everything in jars to local buyers, which is great. The big bee farmers that sell it in barrels are finding that they can’t shift it.

RO: In the US there’s no standard of identity for honey, and there’s not enough enforcement, so when you are competing against rice syrup … there’s no way in the world. The frustration is getting regulation. If you have the word ‘honey’ on the label, you should regulate it and get fined if it is not pure honey. That was a major topic at Apimondia.

SD: It’s all over the world, isn’t it?

RO: All over the world, yes.

Mouth Cancer

SD: I hope you don’t mind me asking, but I think you had cancer at some point?

RO: I did. I had a tumour from the human papillomavirus (HPV) in my mouth. It’s now the major cause of oral tumours in men; not smoking, it’s now from the papillomavirus. The lucky thing is it can be completely cured with radiation treatment. It’s a really brutal treatment, but it looks like I’m completely cured.

SD: I’m glad to hear it.

RO: You don’t ever get all of your salivary function or your sense of taste back. That’s the downside.

New Titration Technique

SD: Is there anything that has changed since I saw you last, in beekeeping? That was back in 2018.

RO: Yeah, I’ve developed this new technique now, using titration to determine the exact amount of oxalic acid residues on bees’ bodies after treatment. I’ll be publishing this technique soon for other researchers. It’s been a tremendous eye-opener. I can treat a hive with sublimation, or trickle, or another method, then go back minute by minute, or hour by hour, to sample 10 bees. I can tell you exactly how many micrograms of oxalic acid are on each of the bee bodies. It’s a whole gear-shift as far as oxalic treatments go. Everybody has been blind up to this point, but I can now tell how much is on every bee, minute by minute. I have tracked it for up to 60 days across different treatments. It’s a monster breakthrough, and I’ve spent a lot of time on it.

SD: What’s the answer, then?

RO: It’s still ongoing research, and very interesting. This year I did a very large trial testing matrices and formulations for the extended release OA. I’m also looking to the future. The Environmental protection Agency (EPA) has a list of ‘minimum risk’ pesticides, which you don’t need to register — you can bring a product to market without registering it. Not many of those minimum risk pesticides show good evidence for varroa control, but there are a very few. Citric acid is one, and also a few of the essential oils are on the list.

I have been testing these but, disappointingly, citric acid is not panning out so far. Even though it has plenty of acidity, it doesn’t have the effect on varroa that oxalic acid does. That’s a big disappointment, but I’m still looking at some essential oils.

Challenging the EPA

Also, I challenged the EPA about whether they are actually following the letter of the law by telling us that we can’t use generic OA, or thymol or formic acid for our own use in our own hives. I sent that letter in July, and they have had lawyers working on an answer. I’ve already had one Zoom meeting with a top administrator in the EPA, and there’s another one coming up in a few weeks. My letter was not asking for any changes in the law, but it was asking if they are following the law. As it is taking so long to get a reply, it looks as if my challenge was a fair one. (Update: they decided that I was right, and are not going to restrict such own use).

It is not mandated in law that they shall regulate unregistered pesticides. The law says that they may do so, but only if it poses an unreasonable risk to man or the environment. In the EPA’s published risk assessment for oxalic acid, it says that it poses no unreasonable risk to man or the environment. Right there, that says that they have no authority to regulate it.

SD: Very good. I hope that it loosens things up.

RO: That would be wonderful. If they loosened the restrictions, it would allow beekeepers to experiment on a much larger scale. The pesticide companies aren’t interested; there’s not enough return on investment to bring new products to the market. If we could use off-the-shelf generic products, and do lots of experimentation, we could figure out better methods more rapidly.

Mite Wash Machine

SD: I’ve just remembered something. You know you showed me your machine that you made for doing alcohol washes more efficiently …

RO: I’ve got the next generation ready to go.

SD: Swienty, a company in Denmark, have brought one out.

RO: Oh, they have? Cool. I have just finished field-testing my next-generation device, and I like it a lot. We use a new type of cup. A friend of mine, who is a manufacturer and a beekeeper, will be bringing a new cup to market. You can use it for shaking by hand or by the machine, and I’m going to ask him to produce the machine. I don’t do this for profit myself, I hand it off to somebody else.

SD: So, we are going to have to wait on the drifting experiment.

RO: Yes, nothing is jumping out, but it’s so hard. Some colonies will always have more immigration. Out of 28 colonies in an apiary, only half were showing enough drift to test, and it’s very difficult to normalise the data.

Too Many Bees?!

In my own county in the California foothills, we beekeepers got a law passed to limit the over-stocking of honey bees. Worldwide, the landscape is being over-stocked with honey bees, so honey production per hive goes down due to the fault of the beekeepers themselves. Our county got ahead of the curve, by limiting the number of hives in any square mile. We are kind of a test case, so I’m waiting a few years to see how it plays out. So far, even though my sons resent that it’s more difficult to find a new location for bees, they are also not competing with everybody else that wants to drop bees in our landscape. This may be a model for other places to follow.

SD: Yeah, they have big problems in London with too many colonies.

RO: That is a case where greenwashing comes up against nature. It may look good to keep bees on the roof, but it’s not good for the bees if there is too much competition.

SD: It still amazes me how, even now, whenever you read anything about bees – articles or research papers – the first paragraph always states that honey bees are in danger.

RO: Yeah, the oft-repeated false claim that “honey bees are in decline.” I read all sorts of research papers and proposals. If the proposal starts off talking about the “decline of the honey bee,” I know this person has no idea what they are talking about. It immediately shuts me off to the entire research proposal. They haven’t done their homework, or are disingenuously trying to sex up their request for funding.

SD: It’s funny.

RO: It’s actually the overload of honey bee colonies in the landscape that is as much the problem.

Working Hard in ‘Retirement’

SD: How is Ray getting on?

RO: His sons are taking over the operation; he’s in the process of handing it over.

SD: So he’ll be taking more holidays?

RO: I don’t know if he’s a holiday type of person, he’s like me. I work much harder now that I’m ‘retired’ than I did when I was ‘working’. Even this summer, doing my research, that was seven days a week, dawn until after dark. I got up at 5am, answered emails, cranked data, designed experiments, typed up a to-do list for the day, then my helpers would show up when the bees started flying. We’d work in the field until 5-6pm, then I’d carry on working into the night. That was my summer.

SD: I remember that you move pretty quickly when you get going.

RO: Yes, I do.

SD: You have a talk in about an hour. It’s been nice to catch up with you.

RO: You bet.