By Nkosi Muse

Although we don’t have flying cars and shiny, metallic cities just yet, technology has certainly grown and evolved exponentially in recent years. A large number of these technological advances have been in the realm of transportation: electric cars, buses, and trains. If you live in a major city such as Atlanta, chances are high that you have seen clusters of electric scooters, bicycles, and other gadgets available to help you get around the city. Public response to these vehicles has been mixed, with some people raving about the accessibility and convenience of scooters, while others complain about safety concerns and discarded scooters clogging up sidewalks.

The history of electric scooters

The thing is, these scooters aren’t really new pieces of technology, as companies such like Razor and Segway have been selling electric scooters for years. However, they had never been utilized at a major scale until entrepreneurs Matt Ewing, Michael Keating, and Dan Riegel founded Scoot Rides, Inc. in 2011. In 2012, they issued a line of electric mopeds for short-term rental using an app on your phone, followed by electric scooters, or “kicks,” and electric bicycles. The trend picked up, and the rise of the e-scooter industry soared after Bird and Lime introduced their line of scooters in 2017.

In a relatively short amount of time, Bird acquired Scoot Rides and has expanded to almost 100 cities globally, amassing a net worth of approximately 2 billion dollars. Its closest competitor, Lime, racked up over 11 million rides of its electric fleet in 2018, building a net worth of 1.1 billion dollars. Rideshare apps Lyft and Uber also caught on to the trend and added a fleet of scooters to the streets in 2018 to accompany their already extremely profitable driving market. This new method of transport complements the shift towards more environmentally friendly transportation, as many of these companies track their positive impact on the environment and make efforts to be climate-friendly in other areas as well. For example, Lime claims their scooter rides have helped riders avoid more than 1.2 million car trips this year, reducing the amount of carbon emitted into the atmosphere.

Getting down with scooter science

While all of these electric scooter companies seem to be masters of business and economics, they are utilizing and largely benefitting from the new and rapidly expanding field of data science. Data sciences are behind almost every advanced piece of technology we access and use, especially if it interacts with the internet. This science has established programming languages as a new universal language, in which we can communicate with computers (big or small), and computers can communicate with each other.

“There is a science behind the placement and operation of these scooters in different cities.”

Programming languages also drive the apps that we use to rent and ride our scooters. I spoke with data scientist Perry Johnson who shared his insight on the data science behind the operation of our beloved (or hated) electric scooters. “There is a science behind the placement and operation of these scooters in different cities,” he says. A city’s population is a heavily weighted factor in whether a scooter company (e.g. Bird) will select it to deploy its fleet of scooters, but the data for the scooters themselves rely on something called an “application programming interface” or “API.” 

What is an API?

Think of an API as a kiosk at the airport: when checking in, the kiosk provides you with a multitude of options such as print bag tags, change your seat, or print your boarding pass. Pressing the button for the kiosk to carry out one of these actions is similar to the function of an API. An API controls what happens between the time you press the button and receive an output. If you ride these scooters, whether or not you realize it, you are using an API.

“These APIs contain scooter data from scooter latitude and longitude coordinates, to battery levels, to scooter IDs,” Perry continued. “When you open your Bird scooter app, your phone is essentially making a call to the API, which in return shows you the location of scooters around you, their battery level, and their ID.” There is also a Nest ID, which corresponds to the “nest” a scooter is placed in—a bird in its nest, if you will! If you happen to see a bunch of scooters in one place, that is most likely a nest, whose location is usually closely related to recorded scooter “hot routes,” city landmarks, and scooter battery level, according to Perry. Any scooter without a Nest ID is most likely a scooter that was taken out of its nest or randomly placed—such as when a rider drives a scooter from a nest to a random, isolated destination.

An innovative approach

The app not only uses data science for its users but for its “workers” as well. Scooter companies such as Bird hire people to charge their scooters and to place them back on the streets for use. To know which scooters to pick up, the app notifies the user which scooters in the area have low battery. When they are fully charged, the app determines where to place the scooters based on nest locations, demand, hot routes, battery, landmarks, etc.

Now that you know a little more about these scooters, you may be saying to yourself: “why didn’t I think of this to get rich?” Trust me, so am I. Innovations that deploy an API have become so familiar that they can sometimes seem simple, but there is usually a lot more at work within the machines, computers, and applications we routinely use and view as ordinary. However, the next time you scan a scooter’s bar code to go for a ride (with your helmet on, of course), you’ll have a better understanding of everything the device in your hand just did for you.

How has COVID-19 affected the e-scooter industry?

Like many other public amenities and resources/tools, the presence of the COVID-19 pandemic has sharply reduced the amount of scooters that coat the streets of what was once the Downtown Atlanta scooter hotspott. However, just because quarantine has limited the use of scooter application programming interfaces (APIs), it does not mean that APIs are not being used elsewhere!

In fact, if you use an app like Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook, an API is most likely what is gathering the information from the web server and displaying it on your phone—especially when you look for a specific tweet, profile, or hashtag. Moderating our fun and convenient electric scooter rides are just one of the ways APIs are utilized.

Thank you to Perry Johnson for sharing his data science expertise! To learn more about his work, visit http://perryrjohnson.com/.

For more Awesome Science of Everyday Life features and other science updates, follow Science ATL on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram!

By Sydney Hubbard

During the summer of 2017, Kayla Bellman was working with Habitat for Humanity delivering latrines, smokeless stoves, and water filters to families living in extreme poverty in a remote region of Guatemala. This particular region, along with many other rural, agrarian areas of Guatemala, had a local economy largely pillared on coffee production. It was during this summer that her team hired a mason, Luis. To make ends meet, Luis worked for Habitat for Humanity and on a nearby coffee farm as a picker. Kayla soon realized that, despite having two jobs, Luis and his family were still living well below the poverty line.

How could such a large, profitable industry, like the coffee industry, leave its laborers and producers so vulnerable?

As Kayla continued her work with Habitat that summer, she noticed a pattern: “Most of the families that qualified for Habitat assistance had one or more family members employed as manual labor on local coffee farms. These people had full-time, legitimate employment, and yet they were still living on one dollar a day.” How could such a large, profitable industry, like the coffee industry, leave its laborers and producers so vulnerable? The dots Kayla connected that summer pointed her towards glaring gaps and severe inequities in the coffee value chain and set her on a path not only towards a more mindful consumption of that product but ultimately to a career in development.

It is a little too late in the day for coffee, so I sit with Kayla Bellman and her colleague Aelish Brown over craft beers at the Bookhouse Pub in Atlanta to discuss the fundamentals of coffee production, the coffee value chain and finance sector, and fair trade, among other topics. Kayla is a current student in the Masters in Development Practice program at Emory University and a project intern at Transparent Trade Coffee (TTC), a program at Emory University’s Social Enterprise at Goizueta Center (SEG). Aelish Brown is a program associate at SEG.

As I am a coffee novice in all senses of the word, I ask them to start at the beginning: How does coffee travel from a distant farm in a foreign country into the filter used for my morning drip? Aelish patiently explains this process, known as “bean to cup.”

Where does coffee come from?

Coffee is grown on trees (genus Coffea) with beautiful white flowers in tropical climates, typically in Latin American, Asian, or African countries. These white flowers produce cherry-like fruits that change color from green to red and are harvested once a year over an approximately three-month period. Inside the skin of these red cherries are several hard seeds, which will become coffee beans. Farms hire local, seasonal labor to handpick the red cherries to procure the seeds inside. If the farm is in an area with access to adequate supplies of water, the seeds undergo a “wet process” in which they are fermented in tanks of water for 24 hours to remove the excess pulp from the fruit and then dried.

However, if water is scarce, farms opt for a “dry process” in which seeds are placed on giant patties to dry in the sun, and then the excess fruit is removed. Once the seeds undergo one of these processes, the resulting beans, often referred to as “green coffee,” are sorted by size, graded for quality, and bagged for sale. Individual farms or cooperatives (groups of farms investing in equipment and labor together) then sell these bags to an exporter. Exporters are based out of producing countries. They typically coordinate with importers in consuming countries in the global north (United States, Europe, etc.) to move the green coffee via cargo ships. Importers and exporters coordinate putting this haul in warehouses and listing the types of coffee.

The actual roasting of green coffee takes place in importing countries. The beans are placed in roasting machines and transform into the brown beans we know, love, and purchase in stores.  At this point, a roaster will go to the warehouse, select and buy coffee, and move it to stores and coffee shops where it is ready for consumption. (For a video of the process, here’s NPR’s Bean to Cup.)

The fundamentals of coffee production

The coffee ecosystem includes the labor of farmers and their employees, as well as importers, exporters, roasters, and consumers.  Also swirling around this delicate ecosystem is the finance sector and something called the C price. “Coffee is treated as a commodity by the New York Stock exchange. The trading price of a green pound of coffee is known as the ‘C price,’ and this figure ultimately affects the price of coffee,” Aelish describes. Like other commodities, the law of supply and demand determines the C price. For example, if there is coffee scarcity, the price will go up until consumers stop buying it because it is too high. If there is an abundance of coffee, the price will drop.

The average production cost of coffee ranges anywhere from $1.05 to $1.40 per pound.

The C price should reflect how much coffee is available and how much people want it. However, this is not exactly how the C price operates in reality. Much of the pricing around coffee is determined via speculation of what the price of coffee will be on a future delivery date. If there is speculation that the price of coffee will drop in the future (say due to abundance), people will start selling coffee and futures contracts, and the CURRENT price of coffee will drop. Therefore, the C price is not linked to current, real market conditions but to highly variable market predictions, and this can have a severe impact on the price of coffee and coffee producers.

According to Caravela, the average production cost of coffee ranges anywhere from $1.05 to $1.40 per pound. With recent booms in coffee production, the C price has dipped as low as one dollar per pound, leaving coffee farmers in the red. Furthermore, considering that the majority of cost around coffee production is labor, farmworkers like Luis often withstand the worst of this deficit.  And it is in this way that the cycle of poverty remains at the farm level, and profits stay in the hands of large companies.

Third-party certifications of coffee products were born to attempt to fix this problem and to assure consumers the product was harvested under both eco-friendly and economically fair conditions; the most well known of these certifications is “fair trade.” Fair trade guarantees a minimum price for commodities (like coffee) to ensure that laborers in producing countries are paid a just wage. When the C price falls, they are still paid the agreed-upon minimum price for their product. In theory, this minimum price creates a safety net for farmers.

However, if the C price happens to take an upswing, under fair trade rules, coffee growers are paid the same fair-trade price (even if the C price exceeds this price). Or as Aelish put it, “When you create a floor, people will sit on it.” Basically, fair trade ensures that farmers do not lose when coffee prices fall, but they do not gain when the prices climb either. In this scenario, again, the benefits and profits often fall into the hands of large companies. 

Direct-trade coffee alternatives

Many experts in the coffee industry argue that a blanket minimum price is not the solution. Instead, prices need to be based on the real cost of production, which varies by country, and emphasis needs to be placed on transparency along the entire value chain. This is where new buying models and social enterprises like TTC enter the picture.

TTC is one of a number of organizations spearheading a direct-trade approach to the coffee industry. Essentially, direct-trade approaches cut out the middlemen. Small coffee farmers sell directly to buyers and are often paid substantially more in the process. TTC has compiled a list of “Transparently Traded Coffees” that allows consumers to see the effective return to origin, or the percentage of a coffee retail sale that goes back to farm, for each brand of coffee. This information allows consumers to know exactly how much a farmer was paid for his/her product and make their own informed choices about which coffees to buy (Transparent Trade Coffees).

In the end, the ultimate goal of third-party certifications and direct-trade approaches is to get money out of the hands of big corporations and back into the hands of small farm owners and their laborers, allowing people like Luis to provide for their families and lift themselves out of poverty.

Think before you drink

As we finished our beers and our conversation, Aelish Brown made her final call to action: “We all have that one thing we care about: maybe it’s coffee, maybe it’s clothing, maybe it’s this craft beer we’re drinking. Whatever it is, I hope that learning about the value chain of coffee and thinking about where it comes from has incentivized you to care OR at least think more critically about other products. Even if I haven’t reframed the way you think specifically about coffee, even if you don’t practice it day-to-day, I hope you can take this logic and thoughtfulness and apply it to that one thing you care about.”

Thank you to Kayla Bellman and Aelish Brown for teaching us about the incredible science of coffee production! Check out Transparent Trade Coffee for direct-trade coffee that helps support small farmers.

For more Awesome Science of Everyday Life features and other science updates, follow Science ATL on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram!

By Ana Cheng

Atlanta is the 11th most congested city in the country, and most ATLiens are familiar with the frustrating ballet of rush hour traffic. On average, drivers lose 97 hours and $1,348 each year just stuck in traffic. Atlanta is also the fourth fastest-growing city in the country, meaning our roads will have to support increasingly more commuters year over year. However, like with most modern-day problems, there are teams of scientists and engineers heroically searching for ways to improve our lives. I spoke with Dr. Jorge Laval, a civil engineering professor at Georgia Tech who specializes in transportation, to find out more.

What is Traffic Theory?

The field of traffic theory can trace its roots back to the mid-twentieth century, shortly after cars gained popularity. Engineers began measuring traffic flow with cameras and appropriated fluid mechanical concepts to describe the patterns they observed, likening traffic to the flow of water in rivers. Since then, new models and technology have enabled research through advanced simulations of driver behavior. Dr. Laval, who has been studying transportation for twenty years, uses this technology to study traffic patterns. He’s among a handful of transportation researchers at Georgia Tech and part of the Georgia Transportation Institute, a consortium of researchers at various universities working in policy and planning, environmental issues, transportation technology and infrastructure, and traffic operations.

Although these researchers use sophisticated simulations and math to understand traffic patterns, one does not need a PhD in civil engineering to understand the real-world effects of congestion. “You’re a driver, so you experience it every day,” says Dr. Laval. Take, for instance, the concept of capacity drop. Capacity refers to the maximum number of vehicles that may pass a given point on a road during a given period of time. Because of varying road conditions like accidents or lane changes, this number might drop, causing a disproportionate effect on traffic. “When [capacity] drops, it goes down by typically 10-20%. It doesn’t sound like much, but in queueing systems like these, that’s a huge difference. It could mean twice the delay,” explains Dr. Laval. 

To understand factors that contribute to changes in capacity on a macroscopic scale, he and other theorists utilize fundamental diagrams, created using data collected by loop detectors (those pairs of black cables laid across the road). Every city or “network” of roads has a unique set of properties that give it a characteristic fundamental diagram, meaning that the diagrams for Atlanta and Los Angeles will be different. Once researchers have obtained a diagram for a specific network, all they need to know to understand current road conditions is the number of vehicles on the road, which they can count with loop detectors. From this, they can glean the average speed and travel time for any given path. For example, researchers can look at the diagram below and find the optimum density of cars for maximum flow or the least traffic (labeled with a red star).

What Causes Traffic?

In order to apply what they know, researchers must first understand what causes traffic in the first place. Freeway on-ramps, accidents, and rubbernecking are obvious culprits. The unifying factor in all traffic jams is human error. Consider the on-ramp scenario: when vehicles enter the freeway, they’re typically going slower than the rest of traffic, creating small disturbances in flow. It’s made worse when other cars start to change lanes, causing disruptions across multiple lanes. In fact, lane-changing activity is the main contributor to capacity drop. In other situations, traffic jams seemingly appear out of nowhere. In these cases, slight variations from driver to driver lead to minute braking and acceleration, which become magnified as following cars react. Dr. Laval calls these stop-and-go waves. 

In downtown areas, traffic is mainly influenced by the length of city blocks and the timing of green lights (called green time). Short blocks mean a lot of stopping and starting, which is a recipe for traffic disaster. If the lights aren’t synchronized efficiently, spillback can happen. Spillback is the phenomenon that occurs when cars move forward because their light turned green, but end up blocking intersections because the next light is still red. The ideal grid has long blocks and short green lights, minimizing the spillback effect. However, if we zoom out on dense urban areas, not even traffic light coordination has much of an effect on the average speed of the network. The main factors remain the block length and average green time.

As for why Atlanta traffic is especially bad; it’s surprisingly not due to our non-grid layout. Dr. Laval blames sprawl and underuse of public transport for increasing the number of vehicles on the road. Moreover, our infrastructure was built using outdated traffic models—and for a much smaller population than that of present-day Atlanta.

Fortunately, Dr. Laval is working on ways to bring our roadways into the twenty-first century. He’s developed a variable speed limit algorithm which adjusts the maximum speed on the freeway to optimize the capacity. “It hasn’t worked really well because people don’t comply,” he laments. It’s because the algorithm can sometimes seem counterintuitive: drivers who read a speed limit of 45 mph tend to drive faster if they don’t see many cars on the freeway, even though the displayed limit will improve the capacity. So now Dr. Laval is hoping to coordinate variable speed limits with real-time ramp metering algorithms—algorithms that respond to current traffic conditions by adjusting the rate of green lights—in a collaboration with the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT).

Reducing Traffic Congestion

The unfortunate truth is that to minimize overall traffic, some people would have to take longer routes. It might seem straightforward for every driver to take the most direct route to their destination, but this has a hidden social cost—increased traffic due to congestion on popular roads. Introducing congestion pricing might help accomplish that by making it less enticing to take a busy road if it comes with a pricier toll, even though it may be the shortest route. With this system, “People act as if they’re minimizing their own cost, but they internalize their social cost. That’s one way in theory that you can have people choose their own routes but have tolls such that the equilibrium is going to give you the system optimum,” explains Dr. Laval.

In other words, by making the more socially costly (read: busier) roads more financially costly with tolls, enough drivers will take the cheaper routes that it will minimize the overall traffic. However, it may mean that only wealthier drivers have an improved driving experience. Alternatively, apps like Waze and Google Maps also have the power to offer drivers alternate routes that would improve overall traffic without the economic barrier posed by congestion pricing. Being able to regulate the behavior of every car through an app? “That’s the holy grail of city planning,” says Dr. Laval.

Another simple fix is encouraging more people to utilize public transit options. Studies have found that if 1% of drivers opted for public transit, average commute times could be reduced by 18%. Further, because less congestion would lead to more reliable bus schedules, it would start a virtuous cycle that would make public transit even more appealing and reduce traffic in addition to its environmental and health impacts.

“We know nothing about (autonomous vehicles) and that’s a problem because they’re coming—they’re already here.”

Overall, in order to truly eradicate congestion, we must remove human error from the driving equation. Could autonomous vehicles (AVs) be the grand solution? Dr. Laval explains there’s a shift happening in the field of traffic research as AVs have begun to hit the road. “We know nothing about AVs and that’s a problem because they’re coming—they’re already here,” he says, “We don’t know what they are going to do to capacity. My bet is that it’s going to be bad in the beginning. Due to safety concerns, they will overreact and be very conservative by driving really slowly.” In fact, the current models show that when mixed in with human drivers AVs are worse for traffic, likely due to programming that overcompensates for safety concerns. We may not see the benefits of AVs until they make up the majority of the road. So until their inevitable takeover, take the bus when possible, obey variable speed limits, and don’t change lanes near bottlenecks.

Thank you to Dr. Jorge Laval for navigating through the science of traffic patterns in Atlanta! Follow Science ATL on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for more Awesome Science of Everyday Life features and other science updates.

By Laura Mast

“There’s a lot more science than people realize. People think, you go out there, you dig a hole, you plant a tree and pick it. There’s a lot more.” David Lillard, orchard manager at Mercier Orchards, leans back in his chair and smiles good-naturedly at me and Ian Flom, Mercier’s brewmaster. Flom adds, “I grew up local, in this area. I knew Mercier’s was an apple farm, but I didn’t realize how extensive the process was until I actually became an employee here.”

“There’s a lot more science than people realize. People think, you go out there, you dig a hole, you plant a tree and pick it.”

In its 75 years of operation, Mercier Orchards has grown to over 300 acres with over 100 thousand fruit trees. Nestled in the North Georgia Mountains, it’s blessed by temperate conditions perfect for growing apples: moderate summers, cold winters, and high humidity. Lillard tells me they get 60” of rain every year. 

These features, though, also present dangers. Moisture is also great for pests, and an early frost in the spring could kill the budding fruit. Keeping these many trees – and the new trees they buy each season- healthy and hearty, takes a careful eye, hard work, and of course: science. 

A flood of pheromones, and a blanket made of ice

Lillard has a few tricks up his sleeve to handle pests and frost. 

“There’s just no way I can fight that disease cycle organically in this neck of the woods,” says Lillard. But instead of using pesticides every year, they rotate in four-year cycles. They’ll do a round of regular pesticides in one year, and then for the other three, they do an organic treatment focusing on the two most prevalent pests: the oriental fruit moth and the coddling moth. 

Each spring, orchard laborers go into the fields and hang lures from the branches of every other tree. These lures, which look like bread ties, are soaked in insect pheromones, and flood the orchard with scent for the next 90 days. These confuse the male insects, who use the smell to track female insects. As a result, the males are unable to locate and breed with female insects. 

If insects are a long-term issue, weather is a short term one. “I spent a lot of time, effort and money getting a crop to a certain point and I could lose everything in five seconds if Mother Nature decides to take from us. You have to be pretty zen to work in this industry,” says Lillard.

“You have to be pretty zen to work in this industry.”

If the temperatures are forecasted to drop so much that the apple buds are in danger, Lillard turns on an overhead irrigation system. This system mists water vapor over all the trees. As the water condenses on the trees, it goes from a gas to a liquid. This is an exothermic reaction, meaning the water releases heat onto the buds, keeping them warm. 

Keeping trees healthy is important because if “a tree gets sick,” says Lillard, “that’s it. There’s no cure- only prevention.” 

One particular strategy for keeping trees healthy is, unsurprisingly, starting out with healthy trees.

Where do baby trees come from?

Well, in the case of apple trees, it’s not quite what you think. Apple trees are not “true to seed:” that is, if you were to take the seeds from your Red Delicious apple at lunch and plant them, and grow them into a tree, the fruit from that tree would not produce Red Delicious apples. “They might taste like cork, but it will be an apple,” laughs Lillard. 

Ninety-nine percent of all apple trees in the US are produced using a technique called grafting. A grafted apple tree consists of two parts: the rootstock, which includes the roots and the base of what will be the trunk of the tree, and the scion, which is the stem. A wedge is cut out of the rootstock, and the base of the scion is cut into a wedge. The two ends are jig-sawed together and wrapped until they heal together. You can see this junction in a young tree as a distinct bulge in the trunk a few inches above the ground.

While it’s easy to see the role of the scion- it creates the apple varietal you want! – the role of the rootstock is a little more complex. The rootstock controls the size of the tree, the age when the scion will start to produce fruit, how the tree responds to adverse conditions like weather, insects, and diseases, and more. 

Most orchards, including Mercier, order their trees from nurseries. It takes three to four years to grow the rootstock, and then several more years before the tree is ready to bear fruit. 

Predicting the future

“I’m 5, 6, 7 years down the road before a tree is going to produce so I got to make sure I get what you want in seven years,” says Lillard. To choose new apple varieties, he and his team will go to horticulture shows and taste test: “We sit down and we’ll sample 100 apples, and we’ll figure out what they taste like. We learn how it’s been growing in the nursery, some other characteristics and then we’ll say hey, that’s a good one. We’ll plant that one and we’ll try that one.”

“I’m 5, 6, 7 years down the road before a tree is going to produce so I got to make sure I get what you want in seven years.”

After working in the orchard for twenty years, Lillard knows his trees: where you could get out fancy scientific gadgets to measure color and sugar, he just uses his hard-earned experience.

“There’s not a lot to it,” says Lillard. “If I know it’s that time of year, so if I know that reds come in at the beginning of September, I’m looking at Red. Do they have enough color? Are the seeds black? Do they taste good?”

You can always try taste-testing yourself: Mercier Orchards offers U-Pick weekends through the summer through the fall, during prime harvest seasons, complete with tractor rides throughout the farm. Put it in your calendar! “If I like them, and they’re ready to go, well, that means you’re gonna like them.”

Can one bad apple really spoil the bunch?

Turns out, yes, and here’s where the cool science comes in with harvesting: storing the apples. You may have noticed that just about any time of year, you can buy apples, as if they were just freshly picked yesterday. This is the result of treatment with 1-methylcyclopropene, or 1-MCP.

As fruits ripen, they release a natural plant hormone called ethylene. This gas prompts the plant to ripen even further: the fruit becomes softer and sweeter, until your forgotten apples are mealy and soft. The ethylene binds to ethylene-specific receptors in the apple skin, which fit together just like a jigsaw puzzle. 

1-MCP looks very similar to ethylene, and it can trick the receptors into letting it bind in ethylene’s spot. 1-MCP treatment fills all the receptors for ethylene with 1-MCP instead, effectively hitting pause on ripening. 

This allows growers to ship out fresh fruit all year round, so you can make your own apple pie any time of year (or, pick up your own or order from their store any time!). 

Come for the apples, stay for the (hard) cider

At Mercier Orchards, the  apples are divided: of course, there’s fruit for sale in the marketplace, and a good portion goes to the kitchen for pies, fried pies (you haven’t lived until you’ve had one, they sell over one million annually), breads, jams, preserves, relishes, butters and all kinds of sauces, and more. But the rest goes to cider, both hard and regular. This is Ian Flom’s territory. As the brewmaster, he’s led the production of hard cider in particular; regular cider has been an orchard staple for decades.

“When I started making cider, it was just a way to get rid of fruit that I couldn’t sell in the market. Now, I set aside blocks of trees purposely as cider fruit,” says Lillard. This has allowed Flom and his team to experiment with a lot of different flavors. Flom says the most variability in regular and hard cider flavors come from the apples: with 10,000 varieties of apples, it’s easy to see how. 

The main things to consider are sugar content and acidity, says Flom. “You’re not going to have the same acidity level in a Red Delicious versus a Mutzu or a Granny Smith, right? Well, just that difference in the acidity can change your flavor profile of your juice. If you were to heavy on the reds and get, let’s say, one part green apple, and then you’re not gonna have the same tartness after fermentation.”

Fermentation is done very similarly to wine: yeast is added to the apple juice mixture, and it consumes sugars, producing alcohol. Fermentation only takes about two weeks; in fact, for a 500 gallon batch of hard cider, going from apples to bottle takes only 18 days. But it’s after fermentation that the fun begins.

Experimenting with Flavor

Flom tends to experiment with small batches (3.5 gallons) at home before bringing his ideas to work. He says the open-minded and passionate attitude of the team has led to some fun discoveries. 

The Just Peachy recipe, a hard sweet peach cider, transformed along this vein. “I remember, David asked me ‘why don’t we do something hot?’ Why not? And then you know, through some trial and error, we end up with the Jalapeacho, which is one of our top sellers.” 

Another example is the Gone With The Ginger, a sweet hard cider that was born after Flom had been cooking at home. “What if I put some ginger in it? What if I cut it up first, what if I roast it, cook it? So it’s a little trial and error.”

Regular cider doesn’t require nearly as many steps. After the apples are juiced, the juice has to be pasteurized. At Mercier Orchards, they use two different pasteurization methods. The first process, full pasteurization, heats the juice to 180 degrees, yielding a cider that’s shelf-stable for up to two years. Flash pasteurization, however, only heats the juice very quickly to 161 degrees for a matter of seconds. The flash pasteurized juice retains more flavor but doesn’t last as long.

Modern agricultural science at Mercier Orchards

Tim Mercier, CEO of Mercier Orchards, has said he believes the company’s willingness to learn, adapt and change are their most important assets, something that Lillard and Flom strongly support.

Years ago, the farm was only open from September to December; now, 12 months a year you can head to the farm and do so much more than buy apples. Beyond the bakery, the café, the winery, and the marketplace, you can also take a cooking class, do a tasting, take a tractor tour with a guide, or get out in the fields and pick fruit yourself. Every year brings new varieties of apples, and they’ve expanded to peaches, blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, and nectarines as well.

So load up your family, and take them up to Mercier Orchards for a day outside, with a cup of hot cider, a fried pie, and see this family farm do modern agricultural science for yourself.

Thank you so much to David Lillard, Ian Flom, and everyone at Mercier Orchards for taking us through the science of apple growing! To keep up with Mercier Orchards, follow them on Facebook and Instagram. Check out their website for the most up to date information (and to place any orders!): https://www.mercier-orchards.com/

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By: Brielle James
Photos provided by Jennifer Leavey

On the roof of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons sit four waist-high stacks of white boxes. For about 200,000 Western honey bees (Apis mellifera), these boxes are considered home. Together, the boxes (known as supers or hive boxes, each containing numerous wooden frames for the bees to build their honeycomb on) form four beehives belonging to the Georgia Tech Urban Honey Bee Project.

Since the Spring of 2013, the Urban Honey Bee Project, led by Dr. Jennifer Leavey, has maintained anywhere between two and seven hives on the roof of this building. “Once I brought bees to campus,” Dr. Leavey said, “people were really interested in using them for research and learning how to keep bees.” Western honey bees, which originated in eastern Europe, are the most widely managed bees in the world, supplying honey for a worldwide commercial market. How they do this is driven mainly by their biology, allowing them to work together as pint-sized chemists to create the honey we all love.

TEAMWORK

Survival of the colony and honey production requires a group effort from all of the bees in the hive. In every honey bee hive, Dr. Leavey explained, there are 3 types of bees: the queen, worker bees, and drones. Queen bees are responsible for laying and fertilizing eggs (known as brood) to grow the colony.

Worker bees, which are all nonreproducing female bees, make up the majority of the colony. “Worker bees do different jobs at different ages,” Dr. Leavey says. Young bees work inside of the hive as “nurse” bees to eggs and larvae, queen attendants, and hive janitors. As the bees age, they transition to guard bees at the hive entrance and then foragers. 

Lastly, there are the drones, which are male bees whose only job is to mate with queens from other colonies. Compared to worker bees, there are not many drone bees in the colony. “Depending on the time of year there are none of them [drone bees] in the hive. They kick them out in the fall. They don’t feed them, because they’ll raise more in the spring,” Dr. Leavey says. 

FROM NECTAR TO SWEET GOLD

The first step in honey production relies on the forager bees collecting nectar from plants. Honey bees collect the nectar in their honey stomachs, which contain a digestive enzyme called invertase. This enzyme breaks down the nectar’s sugar molecules (splitting sucrose into fructose and glucose). Upon returning to the hive, the forager bees then regurgitate the nectar into cells of the honeycomb. The nectar is repeatedly ingested and regurgitated by the hive bees, adding additional invertase to continue breaking it down.

“[Invertase] is the same enzyme that’s used in the sugar industry to take the fructose produced by corn and produce high fructose corn syrup,” Dr. Leavey says. “So chemically it’s almost impossible to distinguish high fructose corn syrup from honey.” The only way to tell that honey is, in fact, honey is by the residual pollen in it, but big honey producers ultra-filter their honey to sell honey that appears clear and perfect. As a result, “they’ve removed the only thing that distinguishes honey from sugar syrup.”

Chemically, it’s almost impossible to distinguish high fructose corn syrup from honey.

How much honey a hive produces depends on the colony and can vary yearly, but Dr. Leavey says this usually ranges from 50 to 100 lbs of honey per year. She usually takes less than 50 lbs of excess honey from her hives in the mid-summer after the main nectar flow. To do this, she must first harvest the honey. “Sometimes we just take frame by frame,” Dr. Leavey explained. “We’ve got a soft brush and we’ll just brush any bees off and then put [the frame] in a box with a lid.” As she described this initial step, she also shared one of her tricks to harvesting – “if you do it at a time when stuff is still blooming, the bees don’t get mad,” she said. Next, the honey must be extracted out of the honeycomb. Dr. Leavey explained that “if you remove [the honey] from the comb, you can put the comb back for the bees and then they don’t have to make more wax.” A nice way to reduce, reuse, and recycle! 

To extract the honey, students at the Urban Honey Bee Project use a knife to cut the wax off of the comb that the bees have used to seal the honey. The comb then goes into an extractor, a centrifuge that spins the honey out of the comb using centrifugal force. The honey slowly drips to the bottom of the extractor, which has a spout through which the honey can be collected. Beekeepers then strain the honey through screens to filter out any pieces of remaining wax. Wax and pollen can be starting points for crystal formation (solid sugar granules) in the honey, making it gritty and less desirable to eat. Crystallized honey also comes with risks. “If your regular honey, that’s well dissolved, is 83% sugar and then now you’ve got crystals forming, the resulting fluid will have higher water content. If you have higher water content, you can get fermentation to start to occur,” explained Dr. Leavey.

IT’S NOT ALL HONEY IN THERE

Within the honey bees’ hive, there are different storage areas – honey stores, pollen stores, and brood. “The brood area [in the hive] is basically, in 3D space, the size of a football…and then above the football would be where all the honey is stored and then kind of to the sides and underneath is where the pollen tends to be stored,” Dr. Leavey explained. The brood area is home to all of the baby bees as they grow, while the honey and pollen stores provide the colony with food. “When you open up a beehive, in general, you’ll see all the bees in the brood area, because the nurse bees are really busy there,” Dr. Leavey says. It is there where the queen lays her eggs, which hatch into larvae. Once hatched, nurse bees feed the larvae royal jelly. Royal jelly is “the breast milk of bees,” according to Dr. Leavey, a substance full of vitamins and growth factors produced by bees from glands in their neck. Larvae eventually transition to a diet of pollen and honey before they are capped in the honeycomb to undergo metamorphosis into an adult bee.

Interestingly, queen bees are fed royal jelly their whole lives. “The only difference between a queen bee and a worker bee is what they’re fed. Once the workers start getting fed pollen it changes gene expression and it changes their development,” Dr. Leavey explained. This difference in diet leads to distinct behavioral characteristics. For example, the bigger, fertile, longer-lived queen bees leave the hive to mate, unlike the smaller, sterile worker bees.

In the hive are also the bees’ pollen stores, known as “bee bread.” Bee bread is fermented flower pollen and is the primary source of protein for the hive. Forager bees collect the pollen from flowers and groom it off of their body into “pollen baskets” on their hind legs. “They do add a little bit of nectar to the pollen to make it this dough-ball of pollen that they carry,” Dr. Leavey explained. This pollen load is then carried back to the hive and packed into comb cells for storage. The bees add nectar, honey, and saliva to the pollen when they pack it. “You can kind of smell it when you open a hive. It has that yeasty smell. There are microbes that mix with the pollen and ferment it a little bit and that’s what they use to feed the larvae,” Dr. Leavey says.

SAVE THE BEES 

While the complexities of a honey bee colony allow it to thrive, these complexities also make it easy to disrupt. “It’s very hard to keep bees now,” Dr. Leavey says. “There are three contributors to colony collapse. It’s pesticide exposure, disease, and poor nutrition.” The latter results from a lack of habitat and appropriate floral resources for the bees.

To help support the bee population, Dr. Leavey suggests planting flowers that are easy to look at, like sunflowers, which a lot of bee species visit. She also recommends reading lists of region-specific pollinator-friendly plant species published by the Xerces Society and planting trees, specifically tulip poplar trees in Atlanta. “I think trees are great just because one tree has so many flowers,” she says.

The Urban Honey Bee Project is committed to supporting these pollinators and the environments that they need to thrive through a wide range of research and outreach efforts to help local community partners establish their own beehives. To keep up with the Urban Honey Bee Project, checking in on the bees via the “bee-cam” or getting involved as a volunteer, visit their website. You can also follow them on Facebook for more updates.

Thank you to Jennifer Leavey and everyone at Georgia Tech Urban Honey Bee Project for teaching us about the awesome science of honey production. Follow Science ATL on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for more Awesome Science of Everyday Life features and other science updates!