I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire

In the Bee Lab, we do our best to make sure that the data we collect is usable and accurate and to isolate and eliminate confounding variables when they arise. One such confounding variable came up recently, and was (at least temporarily) a source of great stress for those of us in the lab for the summer: a fire.

While driving home from the store on Thursday May 18, I noticed a cloud in the sky that didn't quite look right. When I rounded the corner onto Foothill Blvd. I saw that it wasn't a cloud, it was smoke, and part of the Bernard Field Station was on fire. I went and parked back at Mudd, but I pretty quickly descended into a state of panic; we had just started research that week, and already we had to deal with a fire? From the vantage point I had, it didn't seem like it was burning our observation area, but was alarmingly close to the honey bee hives that we keep on the West side of the field station. Having nothing that I could do but let the firemen take care of it, I simply worried for the rest of the night while receiving messages from many friends asking if the bees are okay, something I wouldn't know until the next day at the earliest.

When we got into the lab the next day, we were greeted with the information that we would be allowed to go on the grounds and check to see how our bees were doing. As we walked through with the field station manager and got closer, it was a surreal sight, at least for me. We were the first non-firefighters on site after the fire, and they were still doing clean-up and prevention work (in case another fire were to break out) as well as moving around piles to make sure there were no smoldering remains left behind. I was truly in awe of how hard these guys were working to make sure that our little plot of land didn't have any more issues. Once we got past a small hill, we walked out to where our hives were sitting, and here's what we saw:

Image 1: The view as we walked over the hill (The two white boxes on the table are our beehives).

Needless to say, it was a scary sight but as we got closer, we saw bees buzzing around the entrance! While digging out a fire trench to try to stop the fire, the firefighters had noticed our boxes, decided they were probably something worth protecting, and dug around them for us! As a result, our bees were just fine, though probably more than a little stressed out by so much smoke hitting them. I asked one of the people that seemed to be leading the recovery work if I could do a drone flight over the burned area, and they agreed, so I immediately got to work and did a little preliminary flying (I intended to come back with a pre-planned flight using GPS but the camera on our drone has since broken down, so that's to come later). One of the things I was most interested in for the flight was exactly how our hives looked from above, so I took the drone over from above and got some video of the burn area. We came very close to disaster:

Image 2: The view of the hives from the drone flight I did when we reached the site.

From this picture we can see that the fire came extremely close to the bees, probably in the range of 5 to 10 feet. Losing the hives would have been sad, but it actually wouldn't have been a devastating loss to the main research project for the summer, which is focused on how pollinators choose among different flowers. Since there are plenty of feral beehives in the area, the loss of a couple of our own hives likely wouldn’t have changed the number of bees we observe on natural flowers out at the field station. My project, however, exploring different solutions to automatically monitor the weight and activity of our hives, logically requires some hives to test with. Without that trench and the firefighters who dug it, that project would most likely be ruined for the remainder of the summer, and perhaps until next spring.

There is one small upside, I suppose, to this fire. Fires essentially clear out an area, make it nearly brand new and that allows researchers in the 5Cs to study the recolonization of the burned area. This is rather nice for us in particular because it tends to be small flowering plants that recolonize an area first, so we will have a bit more area to study that's not just shrubs and trees. In fact, right now we are pretty much exclusively working in an area of the field station that burned about 3 years ago, since that area has lots of plants that bees love, like white sage, yerba santa, California buckwheat and penstemon.

Finally, one might ask what we know about the fire. Well...not much. It started at the west-most side of the field station right next to the fence, so it would be logical for it to be human-caused. The fire department is still investigating what exactly the cause might be, but at least at the lab we don't really have a solid idea as of yet. We may never know, but we do know at least one thing: our bees are okay for now and still happily going about their business, pollinating flowers.

Media Credits:
Images by Matthew Crane

Further Reading:
Article from Emeritus Professor Nancy Hamlett. It primarily discusses the fire fighting effort for the most recent fire and information about conservation in the face of fires.

Article from the Pomona College website. Discusses the aftermath and study of the fire that happened at the Bernard Field station in 2014