One of the most consistent questions we get is about beekeeping. I am a beekeeper and always learning about it. We asked Molly Keck to come on our show and discuss beekeeping. She taught my class and is full of good information.

Transcript:

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Justin Hill: Hello and Bienvenido San Antonio. Welcome to The Alamo Hour, discussing the people, places, and passion that make our city. My name is Justin Hill, a local attorney, a proud San Antonion, and keeper of chickens and bees. On The Alamo Hour, you'll get to hear from the people that make San Antonio great and unique and the best-kept secret in Texas. We're glad that you're here.

All right, welcome to The Alamo Hour. Today's guest is Molly Keck. Molly is an integrated pest management program specialist with Texas A&M AgriLife Extension. Did I get that right?

Molly Keck: Did. Yes, you did.

Justin: She has a master's in entomology. You and I were at A&M at the same time. I'm '04, but then I went to law school and you stuck around and got your master's in entomology.

Molly: I did.

Justin: She's a professor, adjunct professor. She teaches adult education courses, writes, presents on a wide variety of topics. I saw you do a YouTube video on murder hornets. You taught the beekeeping class that I took at the San Antonio botanical gardens. I wanted to get you on and talk about something that has consistently been one of the most common questions I get since people found out that I keep bees is a bunch of questions about that. I wanted to have you on to talk about it.

Molly: I'm happy to be here.

Justin: Thank you. We had somebody on last week talking about real in-depth media issues about San Antonio's return to work $150 million initiative. This is going to be a much more fun discussion I think.

Molly: Good.

Justin: I always start it with just some general background information. When and why did you end up in San Antonio?

Molly: I never left San Antonio. I was born here. I'm a San Antonio native. I went to Buena Elementary, Rudder Middle School, and Clark High School. My husband is from San Antonio also. His parents are from San Antonio. My kids are a third-generation San Antonian, probably, actually, more than that because actually, my husband's grandparents were from San Antonio as well and I'm pretty sure his great grandparents. We always joke that we don't know where we came from. We're just Texan. I went off to A&M. That was the only time I left San Antonio. Then because my family and life is here, this is the best place to live. We moved back home.

Justin: I've had a lot of people on the show and most people are like, "Me. I moved here 12 years ago, 13 years ago." A lot of people moving in.

Molly: There are a lot of people moving in, but also if I look at the majority of the people that I went to high school with, maybe 15% left San Antonio and the rest of us came back home. When you're born here and you're from here, you don't really want to leave here.

Justin: It's great, it's great cost of living, people are nice, and it's a great secret place in Texas I think.

Molly: It is. It's also a really, really good family town I think. Also, you get the small-town feel in a big city. It's like everybody knows everybody or it's the Kevin Bacon thing. Eventually, you'll figure out a way that if you meet a stranger, you have some ties somehow.

Justin: When we did our beekeeping class, we did fill [unintelligible 00:03:03] I think that was at your house.

Molly: It was, yes.

Justin: You're in the Northside of San Antonio. You also have chickens. Do you keep any other animals?

Molly: Just pets. The only livestock we have really are chicken and bees. Then other than that, dogs, cats, and a parrot. Yes, dogs, cats, and a parrot.

Justin: How many dogs?

Molly: We have three dogs, we have two cats, and we have one parrot. My dad is a vet. I've never not had a house full of animals. It would be very unusual not to hear animals everywhere.

Justin: I'm going to butcher all of the words wrong today. I'm going to say bugs instead of insects. I'm sure. Is he a general vet or is he a livestock vet?

Molly: He's a small animal vet. He's semi-retired now, but what he really did was emergency veterinarian with small animals.

Justin: I spent a small amount of time in Houston and Gulf Coast Veterinary Clinic is there. I had a friend who had an open account because apparently, people will fly their animals in from around the world for that place and you just set your account limit. I thought that was the craziest thing that you just say, "Here's the max I'll spend." You're an entomologist. What is entomology and why did you get into that?

Molly: Entomology is the study of insects. I got into it by accident I think like everybody gets into whatever their profession is. I started out school in science because my mother's a nurse and my dad's a vet. I really didn't understand that there were other careers other than science. I took an undergraduate class, an elective in entomology and I just got it. It just made sense, I really liked it, and I thought, "Well, maybe I'll stick around and get a second degree in it." To be very honest, I got really lucky that this position opened up at the time when I was finishing up my master's work. I was very blessed to be able to come back home and be able to stay here.

Justin: We're going to talk a little bit about that because y'all get to do a lot of different things in your AgriLife Texas and Agro Extension program it seems like.

Molly: We do. I always say I'm like a event planner for insect stuff because I get to-- like with beekeeping, I thought that a lot of people wanted to learn about it. I learned about it and then I started putting on classes. We do outreach education to the public, and then whatever industries that we support. Mine is the pest management, pest control industry. We get to listen to the public and hear what they want to know about. I talked to my friends and we have leadership advisory boards and then we base our classes on what people want us to talk about.

Justin: Some of them are taught at the Botanical Gardens, some are taught at facilities you all have around town it seems like.

Molly: We only have just our extension office and we have a very small classroom, but we have a lot of wonderful partners like the Botanical Gardens and even in San Antonio and just other groups that we work with. We can borrow their facilities or get it at a much cheaper venue cost.

Justin: Sure. The Botanical Garden one was fantastic. The classroom was great, the facilities were great, and it's very close for me.

Molly: Yes. It's beautiful there. They're working on a really big event center for giant weddings for hundreds of people. I'm excited to see when they finish that, but we're really lucky to work with them a lot on different programs and partner with them and be able to use the space because they're even on an ugly day, it's not an ugly day there. When you take a break, you can actually walk in the gardens. I think that makes anybody happy to see flowers.

Justin: It's always different. Something's always in bloom different than the last time you were there. Funny question, but do you have a favorite insect? Is there an insect that in your time, you thought this one really fascinates me?

Molly: I have different favorite insects based on different groups. If you asked me what my favorite butterfly is, I like a zebra butterfly. I still get excited when I see praying mantises even though they're like a dime a dozen, but I get excited when I see them. There's weird unusual insects like snake flies that get me really excited. Seeing one of them is like I say is akin to seeing a mountain lion in your backyard. It's just they're there, but they're just not commonly noticed. One day one landed on my shirt and my neighbor was over and he was like, "What is your problem?" You don't understand how exciting this is to have it land on your body.

Justin: Do we have walking sticks here?

Molly: Yes, we have tons of walking sticks.

Justin: I haven't seen one. You did a lot of work in research. You mentioned it in the class, but I saw your CV or bio today on fire ants. What is it that drew you to researching and studying fire ants?

Molly: I got my masters in a lab. My advisor is an urban entomologist. That's really my background. In that lab, you worked on ants, cockroaches, or termites. There was really a project that was available on fire ants, but I wasn't really wanting to do any other insect necessarily. I studied them. Then when I got into beekeeping, I realized I studied the wrong thing. Bees were much more interesting than fire ants, but they're both social insects and they're-- I don't know. I just think they're really fascinating how they're their own little community and they work with each other so much better than humans do and there's just a lot of interesting things about them.

Justin: I ask everybody on the show and you're going to have a different take on this since you're from here and been here so long. Do you have any favorite hidden gems in San Antonio, off the beaten path places that you should check out, but a lot of people don't know about?

Molly: Oh, gosh. The Botanical Gardens, but everybody really knows about that. Mexican Manhattan is a really good one downtown. If you're going downtown, if you're thinking of food, my favorite place to get Mexican food is always La Fogata. I don't know if that one's hidden anymore, but it was at one point.

Justin: Is Mexican Manhattan getting raised? They might be tearing down that whole block I think.

Molly: I think so. I know that they were having some issues and some problems and then when COVID hit, I thought I saw some stuff on social media about having a hard time making it. I don't know where they stand right now, but if they are still around, they are a great place to go there. To me, it's the best Mexican food on the Riverwalk.

Justin: It's a low bar for the Riverwalk though.

Molly: That's true.

Justin: Are you seeing any changes here locally in our insect population? There's a lot of discussion on climate, weather, and all those types of things. Is that relating to changes in our insect populations around San Antonio? Are we having more pests, less pests, less insects, generally?

Molly: It just depends on the specific weather that we're having. What's weird about insects is that sometimes when you have very wet months, you would assume that you'd have more insects, but there are some species that don't do as well. Like ground-dwelling species will have more fungal issues that kill off the eggs. Texas and San Antonio, you cannot ever predict the weather. There's just no telling what's going to come out. It's hard to know what insect is going to be a big issue. I don't think that we have seen populations decrease at all. I think habitat destruction plays a much greater role in that than climate probably. Even just worldwide, I know The Times came out with the thing about how all insects were going to go away at some point. Our Entomological Society of America has worked really hard on trying to combat that article because there were a lot of things that were incorrect about it. It was very Doomsday and not likely to happen in the next several generations.

Justin: Okay. I really care that my yard has a lot of diversity and plants and all kinds of things. Anything normal backyard, I'm a backyard beekeeper, I guess I could say, but do you think just somebody with a backyard could do to increase the diversity of the bugs that they see in their backyard?

Molly: They could plant more flowers, and they'll definitely see more pollinators of all different types. When you think of pollinators, you usually think bees and butterflies, but there's lots of wasps which you may or may not want. Lots of native or solitary bees that will come to flowers, flies, beetles. There's a lot of other species that pollinate, so I would plant color, and then just cut back on your pesticide use. People that have those mosquito misters are knocking down a huge fauna of insects that are out there and oftentimes causing more issues because they're killing off a lot of their beneficials that kept the bad guys in check.

I'm absolutely not against the use of pesticides, I use them, we talk about, we teach how to use them properly. I'm just more of the mindset of know who you're trying to kill, don't just do it because you think you might have an issue. Use more of a targeted approach to know who you're killing and do your best to do your research to figure out how to not harm the beneficial or neutral insects that are in your landscape.

Justin: We have a ton of carpenter bees, passion line or I think is what it's called.

Molly: Are they carpenter or bumble bees?

Justin: They're carpenter because they're just like that hard, shiny thorax, right? That's carpenter?

Molly: The abdomen. Yes, so no joke, this is what we learned in school. The carpenter bee has a shiny hiney.

Justin: Okay, well, that's what I looked up because as a kid I saw we had trumpet vines and we had a ton of bumblebees, but I've never seen a bumblebee here in my backyard but lots of carpenter.

Molly: We have bumblebees, I had a lot of bumblebees last year, and then I've seen a fraction of what I saw last year. I don't think I've done anything different and people say this all the time. I had so much and now this year, I don't see anything of whatever insect they're talking about. It's just nature. They move on and sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don't.

Justin: Let's talk about beekeeping. I saw another clip you did where he just generally talked about it. What are the benefits of bees for all of us every day? Why are they important to our society.

Molly: Simply put, we wouldn't have food or we wouldn't have the amount of food that's available to us. We eat a lot of grains and corn, and things like that, but even then we would have a decrease in pork and chicken and maybe not beef as much because they eat a lot of grains. We wouldn't see a lot of meat on our tables either because those things eat fruit and vegetables also. They are not even arguably, they are hands down the most important pollinator for agricultural crops. A lot of people will argue that they're really not that great for flowers and things but that's what our native bees take care of.

Honeybees are super important agriculturally because they have massive numbers, and they can pollinate these huge acres of land and we wouldn't have the Poteet Strawberry Festival if we didn't have honeybees.

Justin: European honeybees were introduced, but before that we just didn't, I guess have the yields of fruits and those types of things in America naturally.

Molly: Right. We also didn't have the amount of people that we have today. Those native bees could handle Native Americans.

Justin: We hear a lot about colony collapse, and I think you talked a second ago about some articles we read how alarmist they can be. Is colony collapse something we should be concerned about on a real long term, macro level, or is that a natural thing that occurs every so many years or something?

Molly: It's a little bit of both. We have in the past seen major declines in honeybee populations. Our honeybee population decline we've seen as a result of varroa mites, and when those were introduced, we just never really got our populations up enough, but I think that there are so many people that are doing backyard beekeeping. If you talk to people who are an older generation, if you talk to your grandparents, they'll all say, "My grandparents did beekeeping." There was a time when everybody kept bees. Then we stopped doing that when we started being more urban and suburban, and now people are doing it again.

I think we're helping the honeybee population and helping with colony collapse quite a bit. Then there's just other organizations that are teaching people about treating for mites and recognizing different diseases because it's pests and diseases that caused the major decline. Colony collapse is not like one single thing, it's a combination of eight different things really, that you see these giant collapses in huge numbers of colonies. You and I won't see it or be able to really diagnose it in 10 or less beehives, but if somebody has hundreds or thousands of hives and they lose 10%, that's a lot of hives, then you can say something weird happen.

Justin: Can mites just hit and knock them out that quick for someone who has that many hives?

Molly: They will if you're not treating, or if you're not monitoring for mites and making sure they're in the proper threshold that they're below the mite load that you want for that time of year, then your colonies will 100% die.

Justin: Okay. I didn't realize this till I took your class, there's lots of different species of honeybees and something I didn't realize was you talked about that if you don't requeen, your hives will likely breed with a what we used to call Africanized honeybees, which was all the fear whenever you and I were kids that people were dying by honeybees. I have one of those hives now that is what you call hot. They just cover me and they're all trying to get me. What are some of the other species of honeybees and what's the most common that beekeepers keep?

Molly: Well, they're all the same species. They're all apis mellifera, but then their subspecies or called races, which are like a hybrid of multiple species, or subspecies, sorry. There's probably the most common one that people can get their hands on are Italian honeybees, and they're very gentle and that's why most people like them. Africanized honey bees are a hybrid of the Africanized bee. They bred with a lot of our European honeybees also, so it's like a muted version of what flew in in the '90s.

I have hot hives too and there's some benefits to having them. If you had a little small backyard and your neighbors were close by you probably wouldn't want those mean bees. I don't have to take care of them very much. They find food very well on their own,