There's plenty of buzz at the Dalhousie Agricultural Campus in Bible Hill, N.S. these days, as a student in the environmental studies course has turned a childhood fear of bees, into a favorite field of study.
Sawyer Olmstead is like a kid at Christmas when a new shipment of live bees comes into the lab. However, the fourth year student didn't always feel that way.
“I was scared of bees when I was a kid,” says Olmstead. “But after taking an entomology class and learning about bees and then I started to pay a lot more attention to bees, and now I absolutely love them.”
Olmstead's love of bees has turned into an interesting research project.
A lot of research has been done on insect toxicology and the effects of pesticides on honeybees. It turns out, spraying a blueberry field doesn't mean the bees will all be killed too.
“Not necessarily, super high doses, you can, but low doses, in some insects, it can actually cause beneficial effects,” says Olmstead. “So we're seeing if that same response happens in bumblebees, which are important pollinators.”
Robyn McCallum is working on her PhD in biology, looking at pollinators and beneficial insects. She worked with Olmstead last summer on field collections, with the help of blueberry farmers across Nova Scotia.
McCallum says it's wonderful to see someone else bitten by the bee bug.
“He's so keen. He's taken all these entomology courses,” says McCallum. “He's from a farming background like me, so we relate to that practical, how important pollination is to agriculture. So he's an extremely incredible student and it's really nice to work with someone like that.”
Olmstead likes how bees work together to achieve a common goal.
“They're super important, there's world-wide problems with them and they're just an all-round cool species,” says Olmstead.
Olmstead has eight hives of his own on the family farm and he hopes to have as many as 20 by next fall. He believes the future of bees is looking sweet.
With files from CTV Atlantic's Dan MacIntosh
