Penn State Schreyer Honors College

10 Questions with Brian Bates

Schreyer Scholar finds sweet success with honey bee research

4/10/2012

2012 Undergraduate Exhibition

Poster Session: 9:30 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Awards Ceremony: 4:00 p.m.
Wednesday
HUB-Robeson Center

By Megan Dutill '13
College Relations Intern

For most people, bees are something to avoid. For Brian Bates, they’re something to research. And talk about.

Brian will be graduating this May with a degree in geography in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, but he’s earning honors in entomology. The Schreyer Scholar researched honey bees and pesticides for his thesis project – titled “The Honey Bees Next Door” – and will be presenting his findings tomorrow at the Penn State Undergraduate Research Exhibition. Nearly 150 students take part in the poster exhibition each year, showcasing their research projects and competing for the monetary awards given in each category.

We got a sneak peek at Brian’s poster – and a chance to ask him “10 Questions” about his research, the exhibition, and his Penn State experience.

  1. First, what is your research about and how did you get involved with it?
    Brian Bates with Honey Bees poster for Undergraduate Research Exhibition I’m really interested in sustainable agriculture, so I took an independent study course on beekeeping and asked my professor if she thought I could make a thesis out of it. Honey bees are heavily studied right now because they’re declining rapidly and are one of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s top research objectives. The lab my adviser works in is focusing on what role pesticides have in pollinator decline, and my project became a pilot study tangentially related to that. Because honey bees tend to collect pesticides wherever they go, the focus of this project was to use them as hundreds of thousands of little field researchers so we could monitor what pesticides are present in our urban environment. The goal was to see if bees kept in urban environments had the same level of pesticides as those from commercial operations and to see what levels of pesticides were present in those residential areas.

  2. What were your results?
    The good news is there were no non-beekeeper applied pesticides in any of the samples. That was unexpected, because this was inspired by a larger study done by my adviser’s lab which found an average of six chemical residues per sample, with some samples having up to 39 different pesticides. There is a lesson here: If you buy from a local beekeeper in your community, the products you are going to get are much cleaner and healthier than something on a store shelf. The same is true of local tomatoes, beef, eggs, etc. It all carries over.

  3. Why is sustainable agriculture so important to you?
    I’m interested in sustainable agriculture because the question that plagued me my first two years of college was, “How can I have the largest impact in the world in my lifetime?” To me, sustainable agriculture touches every issue. Food affects everybody. I don’t think we can reasonably solve national health problems unless we solve national farming problems.

  4. What made you want to be involved in the exhibition?
    I had a fantastic experience doing this research through the university, and I wanted to share and celebrate that research. To me, this is what research at a land grant university should be – public scholarship, where you facilitate research enabling communities to learn about themselves. In fact, I just had the opportunity to give a talk to the members of Burgh Bees – in Pittsburgh – one of the two beekeeping organizations that I worked with on the project. They helped raise money for the thesis research; so engaging them in an evening seminar was a fantastic capstone experience and really gave meaning to the project. I had a great experience, and I wouldn’t have done this project if I didn’t have to write a thesis – so thanks, Honors College!

  5. What is it like to present at the research exhibition?
    I’m really comfortable with it. I think my research is really important, so that makes it easy to talk about. If you believe in your project, then the rest of it really falls into place. You have to find something you care about, and the rest is pretty easy. It’s kind of like life.

  6. Have you presented your research anywhere else?
    I presented this poster in New York City at the national meeting of the Association of American Geographers in late February. It’s a huge, 9,000-person conference and was a great chance to take this to a non-agriculturally focused community and show a unique application of geography. I got great feedback and had really, really interesting discussions.

  7. Have you always wanted to be a farmer?
    No. I came here to be a landscape architect, and then I hated being in front of the computer. I studied abroad between majors to think about my life, and that reaffirmed my belief that food was the one thing that connected everyone in the world.

  8. You spent a semester abroad? Where did you go?
    I did the Semester at Sea program (through UVA) and took a ship around the world – it was a floating campus. We went to 12 countries, and it’s the best thing I did in college. It was a whole world of learning with new friends in different countries, just traveling by the seat of your pants, and it was fantastic. I think that if the problems facing the world seem overwhelming, then exploring the entire world can make them seem much more manageable. For me, it brought everything into focus a lot more clearly.

  9. So you traveled all around the world – can you pick a favorite country?
    I have a three-part answer for this one: I had the best time in Japan, because it was the first foreign country on the voyage; South Africa was the most beautiful; and Vietnam was my favorite overall. That was a complete surprise – I didn’t know what to expect, and Vietnam was fantastic.

  10. Where are you heading after graduation? What are your future plans?
    I’m farming when I graduate – to walk the talk, so to speak. I’m going to be the assistant farm manager at a 138-year-old, 300-acre organic family farm in Petoskey, Mich. I’m really glad to be part of this newer generation of young farmers trying to shift the paradigm on a small scale. I view all these disparate, local food movements as a super organism, like the honey bees, and eventually we’ll all work in harmony to be the basis of the food supply for the country. That would be a beautiful world.