Consider a mother of two young boys, afraid of “bugs” for most of her life, who becomes a honey bee drone lover. Taking a beekeeping course on a whim in 2007, Julia Mahood fits this uncommon profile. And if that isn’t enough she’s a graphic artist who appears to be on track to also becoming a published scientist and an able pilot of another kind of drone, an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Julia concludes, “something about these often disparaged boy bees sparked an interested that has only grown over the years.”
Her entrance into drone study was, to say the least, problematic. After hearing a discussion at the 2011 Young Harris Beekeeping Institute on something called “drone congregation areas” (DCAs) and their relationship to helium balloons, she found herself in the grocery store purchasing a Mylar® birthday balloon, and baiting it with artificial queen lure. Walking around her neighborhood in hopes of attracting drones, “like a crazy lady,” netted nothing more than some askance looks.
Drone congregation areas are specific geographic spaces conducive to gathering male honey bees. When flying queens approach, drones chase them in “comets” and mate with them in the air. Research on DCAs has always been challenging because flying honey bee males following a lure are hard to track. Pioneering studies using balloons and/or radar have generally been used.
After procuring an actual weather balloon and enlisting a helper, Julia spent some time walking over “obvious spots” in her neighborhood (open fields with a wind break)– a soccer field, parking lot, and a particular back yard lined by trees. Unfortunately, she didn’t attract a single bee with her balloon. Sadly, she reports her helium balloon was dead on the ground the next day, forcing her to conclude there had to be another way.
Fortunately, she found a substitute technology, the UAV, which is becoming ubiquitous, but can be daunting and expensive. Her neighbor, David Kraft, was a professional pilot and by coincidence was a beginning beekeeper and so a partnership was born. She mentored him in bee culture while he taught her to pilot a UAV. She reported that it was David’s suggestion to use thin thread to hang the mating lure from, so that if it gets caught on something you just lose a few bucks worth of lure and don’t crash your UAV. Julia concludes: “To be honest I was terrified to fly the thing. If it gets out of your sight and goes down not only are you out some expensive equipment, but what if it crashed into a car? It’s hardly a toy! So I ventured out with baby steps. At first David piloted the drone and before long I had the hang of it. I have been flying ‘solo’ ever since.”
Meanwhile Julia has continued her training working toward becoming one of Georgia’s Master Craftsman beekeepers. According to Dr. Keith Delaplane, this is the highest grade in the University of Georgia’s beekeeper training program. He concludes, “she has quickly outpaced me or any of her other science advisors, and I can vouch for Julia’s persistence and understated expertise on the matter of drone congregation areas. As a layperson, she has tutored herself exhaustively on the original scientific literature and done the hard work of trial-by-error to figure out how to monitor drones with UAVs. It’s exciting to see someone like Julia recognize a knowledge gap, and boldly insert herself into the process of discovery.
“I think her results will ultimately be publishable in the scientific literature and make a real contribution to our understanding of honey bee mating and, by extension, colony genetics and ecologic robustness against pests, parasites, and habitat disturbances.” Jennifer Berry, also at the University of Georgia Honey Bee Laboratory, has helped Julia in her studies and agrees with this assessment.
Julia concludes from her studies so far that looking for a DCA can feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. “I remember telling Dr. Delaplane that I just didn’t think it would work, but he encouraged me to keep at it. The first DCA I found was actually just one lot away from the soccer field that should have been the textbook DCA! One day, after yet another unsuccessful flight over the soccer field, I noticed that this lot next to the field was just over a small hill (depression in the landscape—one of the cues) and thought it was worth flying over. Eureka! Watching the drones zipping around the lure was like magic and I was absolutely over the moon and eager for more!
“It took many weeks of flying to find the first one, after that I think I found 3 in a week! One surprising thing I discovered is that drones in my part of the world fly later, starting at 3 or 4 pm and are still flying sometimes at 6:30 or 7 pm in summer months. The books say 1-4 pm but I have yet to see them flying in a DCA at 1 pm, even though I’ve seen drones leaving the hive at noon. One of the fascinating things about the DCAs that I’ve found is that often I see the drones flying over trees, not in ‘open areas surrounded by wind breaks’ as the books say. I think the fact that you are limited when using a pole or weather balloon might have limited folks to thinking that DCAs are primarily in open areas when that might not be true.”
Another Jennifer (Leavey) at Georgia Tech has provided Julia with resources, including research papers, encouragement and ideas with respect to Julia’s website. Dr. Leavey is a Principal Academic Professional in the School of Biology and the College of Sciences. She is the Director of the Georgia Tech Urban Honey Bee Project, an interdisciplinary educational initiative. The major goal is recruiting and retaining students in STEM careers through the study of how urban habitats affect honey bee health and how technology can be used to study bees
Dr. Leavey is also working with Julia on a project tagging drones with RFID (radio-frequency identification) chips to monitor when they come and go, giving comprehensive data on how long drones live, when they start flying and how long they are gone. Dr. Leavey has been incredibly helpful in other ways as well: “When I mentioned how there’s not much new data on how long drones live and when they fly and she immediately said ‘We can study that!’ Now we’ve got the equipment and hopefully it’ll happen next spring.”
Since there’s not a lot of data on DCAs, Julia took another step to find out more about them by creating a Citizen Science project website entitled Map My DCA . “Reading about other Citizen Science initiatives made me think that perhaps collecting this data might be worth something. I was a little intimidated, but I got a grant from the Georgia Beekeepers Association to pay for the initial website coding. I’m a graphic artist so I designed the logo and set up the look of the graphics, and wrote the copy. Making the map was the tricky part. It took a fair amount of back and forth with the coder to get it right, and I’m still tweaking it. I have made changes whenever users give me feedback, and am soliciting more from visitors to the site.” She featured her website and research activities in the recent Fourth International Hive and Bee Monitoring Conference, a virtual event produced by Dr. Jerry Bromenshenk and colleagues at the University of Montana.
With reference to the Citizen Science project, she reports “owning a fairly nice UAV but I don’t want purchasing an expensive piece of equipment to be something that keeps folks from participating. I ordered a $50 UAV from Amazon to see if one that inexpensive would work. It came with the most awful instructions, and was not calibrated to the controller. So up it went but when I used the controls to bring it down it just kept going, hitched a ride on some wind, and left my line of sight! I found it two doors down, buzzing in my neighbor’s shrubbery. I was so glad it didn’t cause a car wreck!
“Some googling showed me that it has to be calibrated first (but no instructions how to do so are available). I also realized that you have to have a UAV with a controller (can be a smart phone) with a screen so you can view footage as it’s flying. This one had a camera but you have to land it and take the SD card out to watch the footage. That really won’t work, you need to see what is happening in real time. I am continuing to investigate inexpensive UAVs to be able to suggest reasonable resources when asked.
“The main goal I have at the moment is to get the word out about this project and encourage folks to find DCAs and pin them on the site’s map. I have been speaking at bee clubs every chance I get, and lots of people have registered on the site, but only a handful have pinned locations. I think it’s a big leap from wanting to hunt for DCAs to making the time to do it, and sticking with it when it can take awhile to find them.”
For more information on this topic, listen to the January 22, 2019 podcast by Mandy Shaw , and access the presentation at the Montana monitoring workshop noted above, entitled “Game of Drones.”
Beyond her activities with DCAs another of Julia’s passions is education. In her case, it’s teaching beekeeping in prison. This is her fifth year at Lee Arrendale State prison, the largest women’s facility in Georgia, housing around 1,700 inmates at all security levels. She began with a class including inmates with a range of sentences— some who would be getting out shortly and be able to possibly carry beekeeping into their new lives, and others with life sentences that would be around “for a minute” as they say, and become mentors for new classes.
That first year started with six hives on the prison grounds and in the last four years 31 women have passed the Certified test, and six the Journeyman level, which includes the only two Master Beekeepers in Georgia to complete this level while incarcerated! She has two volunteers, Virginia Webb and David Hollomon. Jennifer Berry and Jack Garrison at the University of Georgia travel the state administering the tests at this prison, as well as others in the Association’s prison education program.
In addition to teaching at Arrendale, Julia is the prison program committee chair for the Georgia Beekeepers Association, recruiting volunteer instructors for other prisons in the state and helping new programs get underway. She says teaching in the prison has been the most rewarding work she’s ever done, besides being a parent. These women are so incredibly grateful for the opportunity to work in nature, to learn, to educate others about honey bees, and to have some meaningful work and study to enrich their lives. “I’ve seen that when folks don’t have a lot to work with, they become incredibly creative. One of my beekeepers we call ‘MacGyver’ because she can find a way to use the limited materials allowed in prison to do amazing things.”
An article on the prison program in Atlanta Magazine (July 2018) reports, “ As part of Mahood’s class, the Arrendale beekeepers have learned everything from the scientific nomenclature of honey bees to the various pests that can threaten the hives—all without access to the internet. They’ve formed a honey bee club, which publishes a monthly newsletter called the Nectar Collector on a 20-year-old monstrosity of a desktop computer. And in 2016, the honey they collected from their hives placed second in a special category of the Georgia Beekeepers Association honey contest.”
Besides providing women prisoners with a possible employment opportunity on release, the article concludes: “Tending the bees also provides the women with an opportunity to go outside, collaborate with each other, and learn something new. It’s an antidote, Mahood says, to the monotony of day-to-day life behind bars.
“’They all love the beekeeping,’ she says. ‘And most of the time, I feel like I’m just with some people teaching a beekeeping class—once you get blind to the razor wire and stuff.’ Teaching the inmates and seeing their progress has also been a transformative experience for Mahood. ‘When they’re in my class, she says, ‘they aren’t criminals. They’re beekeepers.’
“‘As the class works together to light the smoker and cluster the humming, buzzing bees, their knowledge and dedication become apparent. ‘Bees insulate their hives with propolis,’ says one inmate, pointing to the comb’s waxy walls. ‘It’s also a powerful antiviral.’ ‘They’re clustering in the center of the hives to keep warm,’ says another.
“The women are as comfortable with the insects as most people are with kittens and puppies and just as nurturing. They sense what mood the bees are in—whether they’re angry, scared, or happy. A third inmate, a member of that first class, notes that bees work together as a community, in perfect harmony, for the good of the queen and the colony. They don’t have ego, she says. Every bee has a job, every bee matters. The metaphor isn’t lost on Mahood.”
Julia has harvested a lot of stories emanating from her experiences in the prison. One is particularly heartfelt: “An inmate got more than knowledge from her beekeeping program. In 2007 she pled guilty to murdering her ex-husband, believing she was protecting her young daughter. She hadn’t seen the then six-year-old daughter since.
“While working on requirements for the Georgia Master Beekeeper designation, the Journeyman students wrote about their prison beekeeping in an article in Bee Culture magazine. As fate would have it, the then teen age daughter, herself a new beekeeper, surprised her mother with a visit after reading the article. Since then they have been enjoying a new relationship, sharing their love of bees.” Julia looks forward to seeing more examples of how beekeeping can enrich and transform lives in numerous ways, especially for the incarcerated.
For a fuller description of the prison experience, consult the podcast by Mandy Shaw on March 30, 2019: . Meanwhile look for more reports from the field including postings to the Map My DCA website . There’s little doubt that Julia will continue her quest to ferret out the details of just one of the numerous fascinating aspects of honey bee behavior she calls “the dance of the drones.”
Originally brought to you courtesy of Bee Culture Magazine (December 2020) leader in experimental electronic beekeeping information, including the award-winning Catch The Buzz
