Try @ TXST

Giselle Kowalski:
Hi, everyone. My name is Giselle, and I'm the digital marketing strategist here at Texas State University. You're listening to Try @ TXST. Today's episode, we're talking about bees.
Intricate, a bit scary and endlessly interesting, bees are the backbone to our ecosystem. There's roughly around 4,000 different bee species in the U.S. and about 800 of them are native to Texas. These little creatures are adaptive, independent and more creative than I ever gave them credit for. I got to sit down with Christopher Miranda, a Texas State student and a member of the Bobcat Buzz Club, to understand the bees a little bit better.
Hi, Christopher. What's up?

Chistopher Miranda:
Hi. How are you?

Giselle Kowalski:
I'm good. For those that don't know you, please tell me your name, your major and what you do with Bobcat Buzz.

Chistopher Miranda:
My name is Christopher Miranda. I'm a pre-radiation therapy major and I am the president of Bobcat Buzz.

Giselle Kowalski:
Awesome. We met a couple of weeks ago, when we went out to go film the Try @ TXST with AnaBelle.

Chistopher Miranda:
It was good.

Giselle Kowalski:
We had a really fun time. She got stung.

Chistopher Miranda:
Yeah.

Giselle Kowalski:
But otherwise, it was a good time. I had a good time. I loved seeing the bees and meeting y'all. Let's start from the beginning. What got you involved in the bee club to begin with?

Chistopher Miranda:
Well, like any freshman, I was just trying to find where I could fit into Texas State, as I didn't know anyone here. Moved over 500 miles away from home, so I was just trying to find somewhere to fit in. I've always been interested in agriculture, I grew up in a farm, kind of. The bee club just fit, it just called to me. It was really fun.

Giselle Kowalski:
Where are you from?

Chistopher Miranda:
I'm from El Paso, Texas.

Giselle Kowalski:
OK, so you are far away. OK.

Chistopher Miranda:
I'm from as West Texas as you can get.

Giselle Kowalski:
I'm going to ask you, why are bees important? Because we hear a lot of people in the media talking about bees, but a lot of us don't know why we need them.

Chistopher Miranda:
You hear the Save the Bees movement, but it's not exactly the bees that you're thinking about. When you think about bees, what's the first bee that comes to mind?

Giselle Kowalski:
A honeybee.

Chistopher Miranda:
Honeybees are the most successful bee species in the world. They're originally from Europe and now they're basically everywhere else. The bees that we're talking about when it comes to Saving the Bees movement is more native pollinators, like native bee species. There's leaf-cutter bees, there's these little burrowing bees and stuff. Those are the bees that we're mainly trying to promote saving. Of course, the honeybee is the poster child because everyone just knows what a honeybee is. When it comes to saving the bees, it's those bees because we use pesticides, we no longer promote wildflower spaces, we lose our meadows that support a lot of that wildlife. Those are the bees that we're actually talking about, when it comes to Saving the Bees movement, but the honeybee is our poster child.

Giselle Kowalski:
For Bobcat Buzz, what kind of bees do you guys have in specific?

Chistopher Miranda:
OK. We do maintain the poster childs.

Giselle Kowalski:
OK.

Chistopher Miranda:
We do support native bee species, but we can't really keep them the same way. Native bees are solitary, they don't live in colonies like honeybees. But the ones that we have, we have five honeybee hives between here at the main campus and the Freeman Ranch Center.

Giselle Kowalski:
OK. Do you guys harvest honey, too? Where can people get that honey?

Chistopher Miranda:
OK. Yes, we do plan on harvesting honey soon. Unfortunately, right now, four of the hives are brand new. We haven't been working on them for that long, so we don't have honey yet. But once we do get started, we will do our best to promote it and get it out there to our fellow Bobcat students.

Giselle Kowalski:
That's awesome. OK, walk me through the colony. I know that there's a queen bee and I know that there are worker bees, but that's pretty much the extent of my knowledge. For those that don't know, give me a rundown of the colony.

Chistopher Miranda:
OK. We have the queen bee, the one everyone thinks, as you know, the head honcho, when in reality it's not really her, it's more of the worker bees. There's queen bee, worker bee and drones. The queen bee, her only responsibility is to lay eggs. That is her primary function. The workers, they control the entire hive. They decide where the queen bee will be, when they'll go get food, when to heat the hive because it's getting too cold. They control every function of the hive.
Then when it comes to drones, a lot of people think they're there to protect the queen bee. Quite the opposite. All they're really there for is to mate. Then once they mate with the queen bee, they die. Their reproductive organ rips out from them and they actually just die right after that. They go up into a mating frenzy, the queen bee will go up to little space where other male bees are at, and a bunch of them will mate with her. Once they're done mating, they will die. Once winter hits, all drones are kicked out of the hive because they serve no purpose. They're just taking up space, they're just taking up food. There's no purpose for them, they will all be kicked out of the hive and basically left to die.

Giselle Kowalski:
Oh my God, that's brutal. I have so many jokes in my head, but I'm not going to utilize them in this moment. I was going to ask you, what are the physical attributes of these bees? Can you tell? I know that the queen bee is larger.

Chistopher Miranda:
OK. This is going to sound so wrong, but the best way to identify a queen bee is just she has a big butt. You'll see it, it's insane. Once you see a worker bee and then you see the queen bee, you're like, "Oh my God."

Giselle Kowalski:
It's obvious.

Chistopher Miranda:
It's obvious.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah.

Chistopher Miranda:
You just know because her-

Giselle Kowalski:
Her behind.

Chistopher Miranda:
Her behind is just so big, compared to the other ones. You can literally tell. It's crazy. Also, she always has a deeper, richer color, more amber. Depending on the species, too. They could be just darker. You can just tell that it's the queen. She has that glory about her.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah. No, I get it.

Chistopher Miranda:
What's that called? In our hives, we've only seen the queen bee twice. Every time, we were just like, "Oh my God, it's the queen."

Giselle Kowalski:
Really?

Chistopher Miranda:
It's crazy because you almost never see her. There's thousands of bees just covering her, so there's a really good chance you'll never see her. Then when we do see her, we're like, "Oh my God."

Giselle Kowalski:
It's like a celebrity.

Chistopher Miranda:
Yes. It's like, "Oh my God, there's the queen."

Giselle Kowalski:
There's the queen, it's the queen! That's funny. If the queen bee dies, does that just mean the hive is dead?

Chistopher Miranda:
No. What happens is the worker bees, they will get last eggs or the last larvae that came from the last batch, and they will start feeding them a special food called royal jelly. They will try to make as many as they can, but they will feed them a royal jelly. It's different from honey.

Giselle Kowalski:
A what jelly?

Chistopher Miranda:
Royal jelly.

Giselle Kowalski:
Royal?

Chistopher Miranda:
If you ever look into hair products or creams, you can see royal jelly because it supposedly has a bunch of beneficial properties. I don't know exactly what those properties are.

Giselle Kowalski:
OK, OK.

Chistopher Miranda:
But I know it's marketed that way. But basically, the babies are fed that royal jelly. Then once they become ... You can tell that it's going to be a future queen because of the cell, where they hatch from, it's huge. Then what happens, all those queen bees, the first one to hatch will try to kill the other queens that are in development to try to make sure that she's the only queen because they are going to compete for it. Then if there's too many queens, the hive gets split and that could endanger them to maybe not make it. Because if they feel like there's too many queens, sometimes one queen will take a bunch of the workers and they'll just fly off.

Giselle Kowalski:
Oh my gosh.

Chistopher Miranda:
It could either make or break the hive. Either way, they could succeed and just make it, or they could just not recover from, what's it called, not having the rest of their workers. Sometimes, maybe their queen that they were left with didn't mate, so it was maybe a waste of time.

Giselle Kowalski:
Dang. This sounds Machiavellian. As you're describing it, I'm like, "Whoa."
We were talking about weather. What happens to bees during the heat? What happens to them during the winter? What's their season?

Chistopher Miranda:
During the spring and summertime, that's when they're most active because that's the only time where they have flowers available to them to collect pollen, and then of course make honey, which is what they need to survive the winter. Texas winters are really bad, too. But during the heat of it, they're active. Obviously they're out there. The colony is at the height of their capacity, there is a ton of bees. As you guys saw, there's a lot of bees right now because it's spring, they're active. The queen is active. She's laying non-stop. There's thousands of bees.
When you open them up in the spring and the summer, they're going to be a little more aggressive. They're going to be not too happy that you're exposing them, that you're getting into all their business, so they are going to be a little more aggressive.
Oh, when you guys came out to do the Bobcat Try, the reason why were just a little on the edge about opening the bee hive is because it was raining. What could happen if water or too much moisture gets into that hive, they heat it up. Bees, they maintain their hive at a certain temperature. With that heat and that moisture, that creates a problem for mold and fungus, and possibly even bacteria. We've had incidents before where a hive got exposed to water, and entire frames of honey and wax are just molded over.

Giselle Kowalski:
Oh, no.

Chistopher Miranda:
That can be really bad for them because if they're breathing that in, they get sick and then they could die. Then the hive on the main campus that we have here, it's our oldest hive so we're very protective of it. It's our little baby, it's the first one we have. We were just like, "Let's not open it up in the rain." Then the rain let up and we were all good.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah.

Chistopher Miranda:
They were not happy about it either way, but they were OK. They were OK. We were not expecting them to be as mad as they were when you guys went out, they're usually are our nicest hives. They're the nice hive. We've had people go out there all the time.

Giselle Kowalski:
It made for good content, don't worry.

Chistopher Miranda:
Sure. It was a little stress-

Giselle Kowalski:
Sure.

Chistopher Miranda:
Sure. It was a little stressful.

Giselle Kowalski:
It was a little stressful.

Chistopher Miranda:
We were like, "Oh no, she got stung." We gave y'all our best suits.

Giselle Kowalski:
I know.

Chistopher Miranda:
The strongest ones.

Giselle Kowalski:
You can't prepare for everything. The other thing was is that you guys were very helpful and very on top of it whenever she did get stung. Everything ended up being totally fine.

Chistopher Miranda:
By the way, how is she? I haven't really-

Giselle Kowalski:
She's fine.

Chistopher Miranda:
OK.

Giselle Kowalski:
She's OK. It definitely hurt. She was talking about how bad it hurt. Her neck was pretty swollen. But otherwise, she just said that it itched for a long time afterwards.

Chistopher Miranda:
Getting stung by a bee, if you're not allergic, it's a weird feeling because at first it hurts really bad. It's just a piercing pain. But then, it either just goes away ... Here's the thing. The venom can travel and it could go somewhere else entirely. I got stung in my finger the other day, and the next thing you know, it traveled up to my middle finger, which makes no sense. I was like, "Why is my finger swollen? Why does it hurt?"

Giselle Kowalski:
Oh, that's so interesting.

Chistopher Miranda:
It was weird. We don't know why that happens but it just does. The main finger that I got stung wasn't really effected, other than when I got stung. The next day, my middle finger was swollen and in pain.

Giselle Kowalski:
That's so, so strange. That's weird. OK, so it travels. Do bees have different personalities?

Chistopher Miranda:
Yes. Back to this hive. We named it Beelzebub. They're just mad all the time.

Giselle Kowalski:
Why are they so mean? Are there reasons for bees to be temperamental?

Chistopher Miranda:
It's genetics.

Giselle Kowalski:
Genetics!

Chistopher Miranda:
I don't know if you heard. Scientists one time, they crossed European honeybees with African honeybees. African honeybees are notoriously aggressive. But those hybrid bees, they escaped. They have been spreading throughout the local populations. What happens when they breed with our regular honeybees, those aggressive genes get passed on. Of course, since again, the queen's cycle every five years, there's usually a new queen after a while and they have to go mate. When they mate with a male with the aggressive gene, they get those aggressive genes. Then the generations after that are all super aggressive. There's a really good chance that most of our hives are Africanized and we're just working with it. Until we can raise more funds, with just stuck with those queen bees, because believe it or not, queen bees are expensive.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, I can imagine. They know their worth.

Chistopher Miranda:
Yeah, yeah. They're over 100 bucks each.

Giselle Kowalski:
Oh, wow.

Chistopher Miranda:
And that's on the cheap side, actually.

Giselle Kowalski:
That's crazy.

Chistopher Miranda:
It depends on the variety that you want. There's Italian bees, there's a bunch of American brands that now exist. Basically, you're paying a ton of money for a queen bee with really good genetics. But here's the thing, the hive can reject her. They could kill her.
What you're supposed to do, they have this little special cell that protects them from the outside and you insert them into the hive. Once they accept her, they release her from it. They'll eat this little candy film and let her out. But if they don't like her, they'll eat the candy film and kill her.

Giselle Kowalski:
Drama.

Chistopher Miranda:
Yeah.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah.

Chistopher Miranda:
Then it's just a waste of $100 or $200.

Giselle Kowalski:
Oh my gosh. It's all up to them. That's wild. I'm going change directions from killing bees.

Chistopher Miranda:
OK.

Giselle Kowalski:
And the murderous traits that these aggressive bees have. But is there something that you wish more people knew about bees that they don't? Whenever you're talking to someone, like a layman like myself that doesn't know anything about bees, you're like, "Oh, I wish you knew this?"

Chistopher Miranda:
I wish people knew more about native bee species because they're just so cool. Wild bees have such a crazy life. They live solitary lives. Then when they mate, it could be either really aggressive or just whatever, it's just another day. But what I think is so cool is that some of these female solitary bees, they create these little tunnels. What they'll do, they'll lay one egg, give them a special little ball of pollen, and then make a layer, like a mud layer or a leaf layer. Then, the next egg. It's a whole little chain. It looks like a fancy little necklace, with a little ball of pollen, a little white gem, that's the egg or the larva. What happens is the queen will sadly die after that, but then her babies are all left behind. They will eat through that pollen that she left them and that's how the next generation starts.
People just think that all bees live in colonies, it's not true. Some of them live by themselves and they create these beautiful, intricate nest systems. You see the little mud architecture on the walls. They have so many different structures, when it comes how they reproduce, how they create the next generation.

Giselle Kowalski:
That's wild. They sound a lot ... The way that you're talking about them makes them sound like people.

Chistopher Miranda:
They have intricate systems.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yes.

Chistopher Miranda:
They related to ants and wasps. You know how ants have intricate layers in their colonies and stuff?

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah.

Chistopher Miranda:
It's basically the same thing, only these are solitary. They still create their intricate little system.

Giselle Kowalski:
Is there anything that we can do as individuals to help protect the bees?

Chistopher Miranda:
Don't use pesticides.

Giselle Kowalski:
Don't use pesticides.

Chistopher Miranda:
Don't use pesticides.

Giselle Kowalski:
OK.

Chistopher Miranda:
Promote organic practices. Plant more native plant species. Just stop using pesticides.

Giselle Kowalski:
OK.

Chistopher Miranda:
Because it'll also effect the honeybees, which we all depend on for our current agricultural model. Without the honeybees, our agricultural model won't really survive because they provide us with all the nuts and fruits that we depend on because a lot of those plants need the honeybees to come and pollinate them, since native bee species don't have the same numbers that the honeybees do. We really on the extreme numbers of honeybees to go out there, pollinate all our food, and then get that plant going.

Giselle Kowalski:
OK, noted. I'm going to try and find some native plants that I can start bringing to my patio. What kind of advice can you give to someone whose trying to get into bees? Because it's a daunting experience, because you can get stung.

Chistopher Miranda:
The reality of beekeeping is you will get stung. It's a given. You cannot get around it. But for those who do want to take a step back and not jump into the hive, we do have things where we'll go out to the gardens instead and you can help us go into the garden, prepare it for the honeybees and all that stuff. If you want to join Bobcat Buzz and you don't necessarily want to go into the hive because you're afraid of getting stung, and it's a valid fear because you might be allergic, you might not be allergic, who knows? You could always just come out with us, join our meetings. Our meetings are usually indoors, so you won't be exposed to any bees. You can just come join us, have a good time. We usually have lessons every two weeks. We go over hive structures, how it works. How a beehive structure works, how to start one, how to feed your hives, how to maintain. Little lessons there to prepare our club members.
People are always welcome to that, they don't have to be out in the beehives if they don't want to. Typically, we will not go out to the hives in our meetings. We will go on separate days, like on the weekends as a team, because one person cannot go alone. It's more of a safety precaution because you never know, something could happen.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah. No, I get you. Then finally, we're coming up to the last question. What is the best lesson that you have learned since taking care of bees?

Chistopher Miranda:
It's a weird one. Don't eat bananas when you're going into a beehive.

Giselle Kowalski:
Don't eat bananas. OK, OK.

Chistopher Miranda:
Don't eat bananas. It's a weird one because when we got that hive, Beelzebub, I ate a banana right before releasing them and I got swarmed. I was the one that got swarmed. There was the gentleman who donated the bees and there was my vice president, Connor, right next to me. They ignored them for the most part. They still got swarmed, but I got swarmed the most. I was covered head to toe with bees.

Giselle Kowalski:
OK, OK.

Chistopher Miranda:
Don't eat bananas when you're around bees. Again, remember how we said it smells like banana Laffy Taffy? It's the same chemical that's in bananas is in that chemical of the pheromone that they release. If they smell banana, they're thinking mad attack. The banana smell was on me, they smelled that, they attacked me.

Giselle Kowalski:
Awesome.

Chistopher Miranda:
Don't eat bananas. Don't eat bananas when you're around beehives.

Giselle Kowalski:
OK, awesome. Well, thank you for that piece of advice. I really appreciate you coming and talking about bees with me. Thank you, Christopher. This has been great.

Chistopher Miranda:
Thank you for having me.

Giselle Kowalski:
Of course.
Thank you so much to Christopher for this conversation, and the whole Bobcat Buzz team for letting us come out and experience the hives in full force. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Try @ TXST Podcast. Make sure to tune in next time to learn more about something else you can try on campus at Texas State. Also, remember to follow us on our social media at @txst.
This podcast is a production of the Division of Marketing and Communications at Texas State University. Podcasts appearing on the Texas State University network represent the views of the hosts and guests, not of Texas State University.
Again, I'm your host, Giselle Kowalski, and I'll see you next time. Bye, y'all.