Washington University’s beekeeping club president and junior Kane Koubsky isn’t afraid of a little bee sting. Having once been chased down the street by a swarm of bees, decked out in his full protective beekeeping suit with Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive” blasting from his phone, Koubsky has grown more than comfortable caring for tens of thousands of bees at a time, or as he lovingly refers to them, “small, furry animals.”

“It’s not great, but it’s also not terrible,” Koubsky said about getting stung. “It’s just kind of a rite of passage with beekeeping, to be honest. None of the people who go out with us to beekeep have gotten stung, but all of the exec members, when we go out we get stung… We’re a little bit more confident with the bees. We’re more likely to be a little bit rougher, I guess.”

Curran Neenan

The WU Beekepers’ beehives in a plot behind Fraternity Row. Junior Kane Koubsky founded the club two years ago, and it now attracts 20-30 students to its monthly meetings, from hobbyists to experts.

After spending the summer after his high school graduation working alongside a retired beekeeper, Koubsky was disappointed to arrive at Wash. U. and learn that the beekeeping club had become inactive.

“So I decided right then and there that, one way or another, I’m beekeeping in college,” Koubsky said. “I’ve gotten invested, I really enjoy it, and there should be a beekeeping club at Wash. U.”

Now, about two years after its founding, the club, called WU Beekeepers, attracts 20-30 students to its monthly meetings, during which Koubsky and fellow members provide information about beekeeping as well as organize fun activities such as beeswax lip balm making and honey tastings. The club also visits its hives located next to Sumers Recreation Center every Saturday during warmer months.

While sophomore and club treasurer Josh Nobel didn’t have beekeeping experience before coming to Wash. U., he decided to sign up “on a whim” at his first Activities Fair. Once he visited the hive for the first time, he was hooked.

“It was a really cool and surreal experience because I just fell in love with beekeeping,” Nobel said. “And I’ve been doing it ever since.”

The club purchased its first hive, which Koubsky named “Ambrose,” in the spring of 2018 from a local beekeeper. The hive lasted through the summer and early fall until the bees died of starvation soon before Thanksgiving break.

“So last year, we got fairly weak bees, unfortunately,” Koubsky said. “…They didn’t gather very much honey, they basically just ate what we gave them and didn’t store much of that either. The queen was pretty weak; she didn’t lay very much, so, unfortunately, that hive just stayed very small.”

Koubsky also noted that diseases and pests such as hive beetles infiltrated the hive, putting “additional strain” on the colony, which Koubsky estimates could have ranged from 20,000-80,000 bees. According to the University of Maryland, United States beekeepers lost 40.7% of their colonies between April 2018 and April 2019.

Wash. U. Associate Professor of Biology Yehuda Ben-Shahar, who has conducted extensive research on bees, noted that the likelihood of a bee colony lasting through winter “varies a lot.”

“[Colony loss] can be for a billion reasons,” Ben-Shahar said. “…If your colony is kind of weak towards the end of the summer, there’s less likelihood of surviving, right? So usually people will survey their colonies and and try to boost them, or sometimes you can give them more bees. But it all depends, you know.”

In order to prevent starvation going into 2019, the club took precautions such as providing a slab of thick fondant for the bees to eat in case they didn’t gather an adequate amount of honey during the summer. This winter, although they did not starve again and lasted about a month and a half longer than in 2018, the club’s two hives, called the North and South Colonies, eventually died during winter break. Koubsky believes that this was due to extreme temperature fluctuations in St. Louis.

“You know how it kept switching from hot-to-cold and hot-to-cold?” Koubsky said. “So when it’s warmer during the winter, bees like to fly outside of the hive to go to the bathroom so they don’t go to the bathroom inside the hive. And if the temperature drops too quickly before they can get back into their cluster to stay warm in the hive, then that’ll kill them. And even if there are some bees that got it back in time, they’re sufficiently weakened that they can’t maintain that temperature and then they freeze to death.”

Ben-Shahar noted that Missouri’s weather fluctuations are “particularly bad,” as “we get these enormous shifts” in temperature. The club’s faculty advisor, Campus Life Facilities Manager Kellie Mandry, also experienced colony loss in her own hives in Hillsboro, Missouri this winter. Although the club’s bees have not been able to last the winter, Mandry noted the benefits that WU Beekeepers is providing for the St. Louis community with its work.

“Even if the colony is not maintaining itself beyond a year or two, I still think it’s a great service to have an active hive that is helping pollinate things in the area, Forest Park, on campus,” Mandry said. “Those hives are doing good for the period of time that they are active.”

Looking forward, Koubsky hopes to obtain additional equipment to help regulate the temperature of the hives as well as provide more treatment for viruses caused by the Varroa mite, one of the main causes of honey bee colony deaths. The club is also planning to create an outreach program in St. Louis schools.

“We’ll go into classrooms to help teach kids about bees and beekeeping and hopefully get some people to start a long-lasting interest… and actually turn them into the next generation of beekeepers,” Koubsky said.”

However, he is sure not to introduce this generation to one of many people’s favorite pieces of bee-related work: The “Bee Movie.”

“There’s just so many things wrong with [the movie],” Koubsky said. “There’s so many stupid things when it comes to like, they are bees essentially in the fact that they live in a hive, they produce honey, and they look vaguely bee-ish. And also as a freshman, the first semester that I was running the club, we had a movie showing, and that was just so much work and it wasn’t a particularly successful event. I was expecting double the number of people to show up. And I guess that just kind of put a bad taste in my mouth for the ‘Bee Movie.’”