What happens at the bee care center: The 6,000 sq ft Bee Care Center facility and pollinator gardens opened at Bayer CropScience’s RTP campus in April 2014. The center serves as the North American hub for Bayer’s bee health education, research, partnership and stewardship programs.
-Education: Bayer Bee Care Center participates in education initiatives with group programs, such as Raleigh’s local Passage Home, FFA, and Girl Scouts. The staff participates in 100+ bee health related tradeshows and conferences annually. They had had over 3,000 visitors in the first year of operation tour the facility. Anyone looking for a free field trip?
-Research: I found the research piece of the center to be fascinating! One piece of technology is called the SmartHive monitoring system which helps apiarists monitor hives from a remote location. For example, it can measure temperature and weight. Weight may be an indicator of low food source and will let the bee keeper know he needs to add sugar water. Currently, this technology is used on a commercial level, but hopefully with technological advances, it will become affordable for hobbyists. A graduate student is working on a bee repellancy product, in which bees would be naturally repelled from an area where crop protection products were recently used. Also, the researchers are developing the Varroa Gate system which treats bees for the dangerous varroa mite as they enter the hive. My favorite part of the Bee Care Center was participating in some of this research.
–Partnerships: The Feed a Bee campaign is a partnership between Bayer Bee Care and nonprofit organizations to increase bee forage across the US. The initiative was an immediate success, and 60+ million flowers have been planted thus far. (see Feed a Bee website). I am hoping my students will be able to participate in this program as an environmental responsibility lesson during our ecosystems unit. If you know of an organization that would like to participate, you can order free seed packets from the Feed a Bee website.
–Stewardship: In order to promote sustainable agriculture, growers need both crop protection and a healthy ecosystem for pollinators. Bayer works with growers to reinforce best management practices and mitigate crop protection’s impact on pollinators, such using products at the right time and rate and communicating with local bee keepers about application dates.
What I learned about…
-Bees: There are about 4,000 native bee species in North America. However, the well-known honey bee is not native to the US, but was brought over by early colonists. Honey bees, unlike most bee species, are highly social. They provide food for the colony and care for offspring through division of labor. Out of the 40,000-60,000 bees in a colony, there is only one queen. She is the only fertile female and spends her life laying eggs. She can live one to three years, in which another female egg will be fed “royal jelly” to make the bee fertile. The new queen and old queen will sting each other numerous times and fight to the death. The queen is the only honey bee that can sting multiple times. The worker bees are small, sterile females who make up the most of the hive. They only live 4-6 weeks, but have different job based on the their age. Their jobs range from providing food to the eggs and larva and collecting pollen (protein source) and nectar (carbohydrates) in the field. Bees collect nectar from plants and store it in their honey stomachs. The nectar is converted into honey by an enzyme called invertase. Bees then regurgitate honey into the honeycomb and cap it with wax for preservation. The color and flavor of the honey is dependent upon the flowers in which the bees gathered nectar. Lastly, there are drones. These males breed with the queen and are kicked out of the hive during winter, so they don’t drain the food source. See a hive demonstration by Sarah Myers from the Bee Care Center here.
Honey bees have continued to be significant in the US, because they are an indicator species, meaning they can tell us a lot about the ecosystem by their population trends. Their highly social behavior makes them easy to monitor relative to other bee species. Additionally, the economic impact of honey bees is important, because of the honey and the pollination services industries (more on this later). Honey bee populations are impacted by economic supply and demand. When the demand for honey is high, the number of bee keepers, and consequently, the number of bees increase. After World War II, many veterans pursued bee keeping, but gradually the industry slowed, and honey bee populations declined. In the last ten years, Honey bee populations have slightly increased in the last ten years, ranging from 2-3 million.
Did you know? Bees generally have a one direction flight path, as opposed to hornets that dart in flight.
Many citizens have heard about the decline honey bee population, but most do not understand the complexity of this issue. Citizens have heard the term Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), which is often used incorrectly. CCD refers to a specific set of symptoms, most interestingly, the disappearance of worker bees from the hive. There are no dead bodies to investigate, so little is known about this condition. However, bee populations are affected by many factors, including: starvation/poor nutrition, queen failure, poor wintering conditions, improper pesticide use, disease, and varroa mites. Varroa mites are parasites that suck “bee blood” (haemolymph) and carry viruses. When I was in the lab, I saw several varroa mites and used a microscope for closer observation. When thinking of the impact of the varroa mite, think about having a tick the size of a dinner plate on your back. By both sucking blood and carrying diseases, it’s easy to see how dangerous these mites are for the honey bee population.
–Botany: Plants have two major transport systems: the xylem which moves water like a straw through the plant and the phloem which moves sugars. Neonics (type of pesticides) are highly mobile in the xlyem, but not as moveable in the phloem, which helps protects the bees because of low residues in the parts of the plant where bees are collecting nectar and pollen. The bees carry pollen on their hairy bodies to help plants either self pollinate or cross pollinate, depending on the type of plant. They transfer the pollen from the male to female parts of plants. Cross pollination occurs through abiotic factors (wind and water) and biotic factors (insects, bats, snails, and birds). Bees are just one piece of the puzzle, but the interdependence of these organisms is significant.
-Commercial pollination Industry: Some bee keepers transport their bees to farm for pollination services. Bees pollinate during the day and return to the hive at night. Beekeepers close up the hives and move to another farm. The commercial pollution industry is big business, especially in the almond farms of California. These bees are transported hundreds or even thousands of miles to pollinate the crops!
What I did: I participated in data collection by helping scientists determine a varroa mites to honey bee ratio. The researcher collected samples of about 100-400 bees from participating bee keepers. This research is helpful in comparing the efficacy of various varroa mite treatments. Additionally, the research wanted to find out about what pollinator species are present in the area. We placed 105 bee bowls (see picture) around the premises, particularly in high forage areas. The bowls were colored white, yellow, and blue to attract pollinators. Then, insects are captured by a soapy water solution. At the end of the day, we collected the bee bowls and prepared the insect samples for later investigations.
Classroom implications/take aways: After reviewing the K-8 science curriculum for the North Carolina essential standards, I noticed very little focus on entomology with exception to a butterfly life cycle unit in second grade. I am curious why this vast area of science is not given much time in the curriculum, while other concepts are revisited throughout many grade levels. At any rate, I still saw some connections to curriculum and plan to develop several lessons with Bayer’s Making Science Make Sense program that will align with objectives, such as plant anatomy, pollination, and environmental stewardship. These lessons are in the embryonic stage of development, but maybe I can post them here when they are finalized. Most notably, I saw several citizen science opportunities with students. Journey North and Monarch Watch are programs mentioned in our Kenan professional development that have reappeared in my internship. Although these are related to butterflies, the skills and knowledge base are very similar to the entomology work at Bayer.
Personal take aways: I cannot honestly classify myself as a nature lover, although I did once capture my own caterpillars as childhood pets. However, the more I learn about nature, the more impressed I am. Learning about the complexity of DNA on a molecular level last week to learning about the extricate interdependence of organisms across kingdoms this week just makes me fall in love with science all over again. Sometimes we think of science as a concrete base of knowledge. However, that is not an accurate description of science. Science is all about discovering the natural world. We often tells our students how we used to think the earth revolved around the sun and explain that we know much more now. However, science is constantly changing. The entomologist I worked with told me about how she discovered unique species of insects. I wonder what example we will use from 2015 science to explain our naivety to students in 2200?
For more information:
Links to learn more about bee health or scheduling a tour (free field trip anyone?).
Interesting website about entomology http://www.amentsoc.org/
Information about the varroa mite: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-06/27/mite-sucks-bee-blood
Follow Bayer Bee Care on Twitter @BayerBeeCare.
photo credits (other pictures are mine): worker bee jobs by age; varroa mite on bee; varroa mite, commercial pollinator map; up close honey bee
