Atreya Manaswi is saving bees with beer. What’s next? | Central Floridian of the Year Finalist
Every year, the Orlando Sentinel asks community members to help us identify the heroes who make the biggest difference in local lives: The ones whose leadership, innovation and courage provide an inspiration to others. And from these nominees, we choose a group, those whose talents and dedication demand recognition, to honor as Central Floridian of the Year finalists. Over the coming weeks, we’ll introduce you to these remarkable individuals — and at the end, we’ll introduce you to our choice for Central Floridian of the Year.
Every hero has an origin story. For Atreya Manaswi, it started a few summers ago. He was out on a lake with a friend and his grandfather, a beekeeper. The older man was describing the dramatic drop in production from his family’s hives — from the same kinds of problems that are causing a rapid decline in the pollinator population worldwide.
It sparked Manaswi’s interest. And the rest is history: Manaswi developed a new, nontoxic defense for hives. Along the way he made contact with leading bee researchers across the nation, wrote scholarly papers for peer-reviewed journals, attended (and spoke at) national and international conferences and the United Nations, published a children’s book on bees and accumulated a truly impressive number of state, national and international awards, including the Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes, a national competition founded by novelist T.A. Barron. In an October blog post, Barron singled out Manaswi and another of the 15 winners for their dedication: “These remarkable young minds and their groundbreaking innovations serve as a beacon of hope,” he wrote.
As Barron noted, Manaswi was just 12 years old when he first learned about the plight of the bees. Now he’s 17, a junior at the Orlando Science High School and founder of a nonprofit organization that encourages youth toward STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers. The non-toxic, organic solution he developed — which uses a blend of beer and oil to attract predatory beetles to traps, where they drown — is being heralded by beekeepers nationwide as a potential hive-saver.
The anti-beetle solution is just one of the reasons to include Manaswi among the Orlando Sentinel’s nominees for Central Floridian of the Year. But it’s a big one.
To Manaswi, it was simple: There was a problem. It needed solutions. And his generation would be the one to pay the price if those answers weren’t found — the decline in the honey bee population is a significant threat to the future of the world’s food supply, 80% of which relies on bees to propagate. Manaswi focused on one particular threat to bees: The small hive beetle, which targets hives that are already stressed by other factors and often finishes them off. The chemicals that killed the beetles were harsh and could migrate to honey, beeswax and other hive products. They often proved toxic to the bees as well.
Manaswi experimented with different organic substances (he and his mother can reel them off by rote) and finally found a good match. The beer blend gave off an alluring scent of fermentation, which attracted the beetles to their doom. Then he went one more step further: Dissatisfied with the trap in common use because it was plastic and disposable, Manaswi taught himself 3-D printing and designed a reusable trap that automatically counted the beetles it collected — and kept bees from getting buzzed on the brew.
Because of course he did.
“It’s very easy for us to say, okay, I’m a very young kid or I’m not a scientist, I don’t have a degree,” he says. “I didn’t know exactly what I was getting myself into. I didn’t have any resources, I didn’t have mentors at the time, but I saw a cause and I wanted to try and create a difference.”
It wouldn’t be the first time. Even before the bees, Manaswi had tremendous curiosity and a boldness that let him walk into opportunities that other teens probably never dream of. He’s volunteered in a local hospital’s emergency room since he was 12. He’s cold-called scientists and professors to ask if he could work with them (with poise he says he learned from an early interest in theater) and spoken to dozens of beekeeping groups across the country who are enthralled by his cleaner, more effective and much less expensive solution to beetle infestations.
And there’s his new nonprofit, which he hopes will inspire hope among young people who despair over the condition of the planet they will inherit — and encourage them to follow in his footsteps. (One person already has. He won the Dr. Nelson Ying Science Competition, hosted by the Orlando Science Center, which took him to first-place and grand prize recognitions in the animal sciences division at the Florida State Science and Engineering Fair earlier this month. (Right behind him, claiming the same prizes in the juniors: Aakash, his younger brother.)
While he’s a great person to honor among the Orlando Central Floridian of the Year finalists, it’s not hard to predict that Manaswi has many, many years of successes before him. He is looking at a career in biological or medical research, he says — so long as he’s in a lab, he’ll be happy.
But there’s one quality he values over all others: “I think the best thing and most important thing is passion. So if you genuinely care about the issue and you want to make change, I think you’ll find a way to do it.” he said.
