Many beekeepers know of or have heard from Dr. Jerry Bromenshenk, now retired from the University of Montana, recognized by his unorthodox research based on using honey bees as environmental monitors. Over the years, characterizing honey bees as “flying dust mops,” Dr. Bromenshenk has carefully and convincingly shown that these insects are efficient organisms to use when looking for environmental air pollution.
Dr. Bromenshenk grew up on a farm in Billings, Montana. His father was the first to dabble in field corn in the region, which may have influenced his son to also become an innovator. As he was growing up, besides working on the farm toting 100 pound bales of hay, Dr. Bromenshenk also worked for a time as a seasonal naturalist in Yellowstone National Park , where he met his wife , Gail, a respected nature photographer. Thus, it seemed reasonable that I should visit them after my first visit to the Nation’s first national park.
Dr. Bromenshenk completed his Ph.D. at Montana State University in 1973, and wrote his dissertation on Grasshoppers and their control in range land situations. He, like myself during the early 1970s, had not been involved with honey bees. Both of us, it seemed were to get “bee fever” in the course of our academic studies, but our careers were to take very different routes.
During the energy crisis of 1973-4, Dr. Bromenshenk participated in a team looking at the effect increased coal burning (sulphur dioxide emmissions) might have on short grass prairies, along with Clancy Gordon, a well-known author and researcher at the University of Montana. Dr. Gordon was a national expert on the effects of fluoride emissions, and a witness in many legal cases and adversary hearings brought against polluters during the 1960s and ’70s. He founded the University’s Environmental Studies laboratory in 1963 (named for him after his death) and helped establish the Environmental Studies Graduate Program. The Clancy Gordon Environmental Scholarship is awarded each year to graduate students for use of scientific knowledge in resolving environmental problems.
Since Dr. Clancy was botanist involved in air pollution primarily, he hired Dr. Bromenshenk to look at insects. An entomologist, Dr. Bromenshenk also saw beehives everywhere in the Fort Union Coal Basin ; there were about 6,000 colonies in his study area. He conducted a literature search, found a history of studies showing adverse impacts on honey bees in environmental monitoring situations, and began actively employing colonies as environmental indicators as an alternative to other techniques then being employed. Since there was limited funding for this work, he was forced to rely on beekeepers in an effort to obtain sample sites (colonies). A discussion with a commercial beekeeper, Bob Talcott, concerning grasshopper control in alfalfa seed production, resulting in a bumper honey and seed crop, converted Mr. Talcott into a valuable ally and colleague. As a consequence, Dr. Bromenshenk was able to learn honey bee colony management directly from a successful commercial beekeeper, which was to serve him well the rest of his career.
Linked up with colleagues at the University of Montana in 1974, Dr. Bromenshenk was not hired as a regular faculty member, the route most scientists take. Instead, he embarked on a 30-year career as a staff member garnering so-called “soft money.” This means all his funding, including salary, was totally dependent on writing grants to study specific projects, rather than being supported by a University position. He was so successful in this endeavor that he was made Research Professor, forging a unique path to becoming recognized as a faculty member. One advantage of this was that Dr. Bromenshenk could concentrate on his research and not have to contend with the distraction of teaching formal courses. Instead he has pioneered another teaching technique, training and coaching undergraduate students to actively participate in his ground-breaking research.
As a pioneer in environmental monitoring using honey bees, Dr. Bromenshenk has raised considerable awareness in this field among scientists and beekeepers. The current emphasis on this in Europe, culminating in “The Honey Bee as an Environmental Sentinel” being made the official theme for the 41st Apimondia Congress in Montpellier, France, was in great part influenced by Dr. Bromenshenk’s work. His initial studies in the coal fields of eastern Montana were followed by several grants from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to examine effects of power plant and smelter emissions in the Seattle, Washington area on honey bee colonies. This led to other grants monitoring cleanup and remediation of superfund sites, including several U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory sites, and then U.S. Department of Defense sites, including the Aberdeed Proving Grounds in Maryland. All this set the stage for further investigations, providing a path toward what has become an overall plan of action, developing ways to use “precision agriculture” in beekeeping.
According to Wikipedia.org, “Precision farming or precision agriculture is a concept relying on the existence of in-field variability. It requires the use of new technologies, such as global positioning systems (GPS), sensors, aerial images, and other tools used in geographic information systems (GIS) to assess and understand these variations. Collected information is used to more precisely evaluate optimum sowing density, estimate fertilizers and other inputs needs, and to more accurately predict crop yields. It seeks to maximize cropping potential, regardless of local soil/climate conditions, and is used to evaluate local situations for disease potential. In Dr. Bromenshenk’s words, his vision is to find the beekeeping equivalent of “putting an air conditioned cab on a grain combine.”
Dr. Bromenshenk’s initial University of Montana research team consisted of Dr. Garon Smith, Department of Chemistry; Dr. Colin Henderson, College of Technology (COT); Dr. Vicki Watson, Environmental Studies; and a number of both undergraduate and graduate students. The overall vision of these projects was aimed at using bees to evaluate environmental impacts as part of an ecological risk assessment. The research primarily involved developing and testing computerized data acquisition equipment to provide continuous, accurate, and precise field and laboratory measurements. It also included development of computer models that simulate the responses of honey bee colonies to environmental stressors. The initial model, PC BEEPOP, was a PC-based model and expert system used for environmental risk assessments, for research, and to teach principles of apiculture, population biology, and ecotoxicology.” An adaptation of PC BEEPOP is called Varroa Beepop.
In the latter part of his career, Dr. Bromenshenk partnered with five other investigators to found Bee Alert Technology, Inc. The firm specialized in contract research, development of new bee-related services and equipment, and had as part of its mission a mandate to transfer technology developed at the University of Montana to the military and private sector, including beekeepers. It was his suggestion that CCD not be named a “disease” as such, which would have been too limiting, but instead a generalized condition or “disorder.”
CCD has recently been highly correlated with a virus known as Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV). This remains controversial, but many investigators and beekeepers believe several honey bee viruses may be a big part of the CCD puzzle. In response to a study in the prestigous publication, Science, implicating IAPV, which developed into a political situation in the Apimondia 2007 host country, Australia, Dr. Bromenshenk wrote the following:
“The authors of the Science paper published their preliminary results and presented their conclusions. Unfortunately, we question the association with IAPV and disagree with comments implying a link to Australian imports. Any talk of banning imports from Australia seems premature.
“As noted by Erik Stokstad, who wrote an overview article that was published in the same issue of Science, our data do not implicate any one virus as being associated with CCD, not even as a biomarker. We have looked at bee samples from across the county. In these samples, we have detected more than a dozen different viruses with as many as 4-6 new, heretofore unclassified and unnamed viruses. In every bee operation, we see combinations of viruses, usually 2-3. But, we have not found a common virus or assemblage of viruses among and across CCD operations, regardless of the origin of the bees (i.e., U.S., Australian, intermixed).
“We have looked at some Australian imports, and we did find viruses, but again, the data does not support a link with CCD colonies. In one Australian sample, we found yet another unknown virus, maybe even two, but these did not show up in any CCD colonies. If CCD is associated with a virus, we would expect to see the same virus showing up in a consistent manner and to see a pattern to emerge, as projected for IAPV by the Science Article. However, as stated, our data does not corroborate this finding.
“To sort all of this out is going to take a better sampling strategy and more samples than the limited sampling being done (by all parties combined). We have been advocating that many samples from many beekeepers and from many different areas need to be screened for a common connection. We have proposed to USDA a national survey and screening program.”At the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, Dr. Bromenshenk found a new technology for investigating viruses, the Integrated Viral Detection System (IVDS), actively being touted by the Department of Defense as a “Technology Opportunity”:
“In response to the high expense and complex logistics associated with the need for costly, specialized, perishable reagents for chemical identification of infectious viruses, the U.S. Army and NanoEngineering Corporation are developing a Real-Time Virus Pathogen Analyzer. The automated instrument is designed to simultaneously find ALL viruses, including unknowns, within minutes without reagents –using a physical measurement process requiring minimal consumables. Samples for IVDS analysis maybe derived from saliva, blood or other biofluids, as well as food, water or contaminated surfaces.”
Dr. Bromenshenk quickly saw the possibilities in honey bee research and teamed up with David Wick, brother of the developer, Dr. Charles Wick (US Army retired), inventor of the IVDS process. With funds cobbled together from a number of industry sources, he and Mr. Wick were able to launch preliminary studies to determine the virus loads in honey bees, including IAPV. This led to developing a start-up business, BVS, Inc.
Dr. Bromenshenk and his team are best known for developing a method to use trained honey bees to detect and identify miniscule amounts of chemical agents. According to the Western Montana InBusiness Monthly article referenced above, this is a sophisticated version of the “miner’s parakeet,” which could be a tremendous tool for homeland security applications. Researchers at the company have trained bees to locate radioactive material, harmful metals and explosives. In the near future bees might also be able to locate dead bodies and meth labs.
Most land mines are plastic and cannot be detected by metal detectors. Thus, the current “gold standard” in land mine clearing, according to Dr. Bromenshenk, is “man’s best friend.” Dogs can be trained to detect the odors of these mines, much as pointer canines are used in bird hunting. This involves handlers on a 25-foot leash. Because dogs may miss some mines, a redundancy is built in using a combination of four dogs and up to two handlers in most operations. Other alternatives exist in some areas, including pouched rats in Africa that are run across land mine fields on tethered lines.
Honey bees are far superior to any other current technology Dr. Bromenshenk says. Instead of only a few detectors, literally hundreds of trained foragers can be sent into a field. This provides a more-than-adequate built-in redundancy. Honey bees can search a much greater area than dogs or rats, and they are not likely to set off the mines during the search.
In retirement, Dr. Bromenshenk has moved into beekeeping education as the primary mover in the University of Montana’s online certificate apiculture program http://www.umt.edu/sell/programs/bee/ and most recently a major informational web site called Bee Health Guru https://www.beehealth.guru/. He is still active in looking at new technologies associated with apiculture and was a principal organizer in several recent Workshops on Electronic Hive Monitoring.
