University Of North Carolina At Greensboro issued the following announcement on Aug. 29.
The hive doesn’t revolve around the developing insect. Instead, the brood – consisting of the eggs, larvae, and pupae – are part of a larger whole, whose health holds higher stock than any one individual.
Diseases and mites are the hive’s most significant threats, including the famed Varroa destructor mite. Beekeepers are losing up to 40% of their colonies every year due to these threats, says Dr. Kaira (KAY-rah) Wagoner, a research scientist at UNCG.
But some honey bees have sniffed out a curious method to reduce disease in their hives.
These specialized adults can smell when a developing bee is unhealthy and will uncap its cell, so the unhealthy brood can be inspected and, if found sick enough, removed from the hive. Scientists call the pheromone-driven process “hygienic behavior.”
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Some people dream about being scientists. Others aspire to be business owners. To use her findings to do good, Dr. Kaira Wagoner has decided to be both, launching a startup with UNCG alum Phoebe Snyder.
→ Science in a spray bottle
→ Launching a bee business
“Making the sacrifice of an individual unhealthy bee improves the health of the colony,” Wagoner says. “We think of a honeybee colony as a superorganism. The focus is on the colony as a whole.”
During her doctoral studies at UNCG, Wagoner became curious about how bees communicate to perform this hygienic behavior. She discovered that elevated levels of certain compounds on sick baby bees serve as a signal to adults.
“Specific cuticular hydrocarbons were slightly elevated if the honeybee pupae was unhealthy,” she says. “Bees are so sensitive in their ability to smell that they can detect these tiny changes.”
Wagoner had answered her question, but she wasn’t done.
“I love to take science and turn it into something that’s really applied and useful," she explains. "I think it’s important to not only communicate science, but to use it to do good.”
Cutting-edge science in a spray bottle
Wagoner began investigating how her findings could practically improve beekeeping.
Beekeepers, she knew, used a variety of tactics to identify and selectively breed for bees that had a knack for hygienic behavior. One of the most common was freezing brood with liquid nitrogen and testing how much removal of the dead brood happens over 24 hours.
But Wagoner’s compounds offered the possibility of identifying more sensitive hygienic bees with less harm to the brood.
Chemists at UC Riverside and UNCG helped Wagoner synthesize her target compounds in the lab. Then she and her collaborators put a mix of those compounds to the test.
In Wagoner’s assay, pheromones are sprayed on a section of capped brood, which is then placed back in the hive. If the bees can sense the elevated compounds, they will uncap the brood cell to inspect it. After two hours, the researchers measure the percentage of uncapping in the treated area.
Since the hive will eventually recap healthy brood, the assay leaves them unharmed.
Using this test on multiple colonies, the researchers gave each colony a hygienic score.
“Higher scoring hives,” Wagoner explains, “have fewer mites, lower virus loads, and can be bred to produce bees that are less reliant on beekeeper interventions to survive.”
The new test, the researchers found, was not just less detrimental to the brood – it was also more accurate.
The science solidified a business product: a spray bottle containing their compounds, for beekeepers to identify their most hygienic bees for breeding. It also resulted in three patents for Wagoner and her mentor at the time, Dr. Olav Rueppell.
Original source can be found here.
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