Project Overview
Commodities
Practices
- Crop Production: beekeeping
Proposal summary:
The Varroa Destructor mite and the dependency on commercially
produced mite-a-cides are currently the biggest threats facing
honey bee colonies. Currently, the treatments that are
available to manage these mites are failing because the mites are
starting to show resistance within colonies and the price of the
theses treatments on the market are not cost effective. The fact
that we could have to to treat up to 4 or 5 times a year is not
sustainable considering the cost of labor, treatment, fuel and
loss of honey production. Most commercial queen stock
produced in the USA has little to no resistance to the varroa
mites. The current method of selecting breeder queen traits
that reduce varroa numbers is time consuming, expensive and very
tedious work. The work is usually performed by a team of
very skilled people, taking days to gather data to evaluate the
colonies for resistance traits. Examples have shown that
breeder queens that produce varroa resistant stock are currently
very expensive, with some selling for hundreds of dollars.
Inseminated queens have sold for as much as $1200 each
which is not sustainable.
Project objectives from proposal:
We are going to use UBeeO by Optera as our selection tool for
this project. UBeeO is a rapid pheromone-based hygenic assay that
measures and predicts mite and disease resistance based on a
colony’s hygenic response to UBeeO pheromone mix when applied to
and area of capped brood cells. This mix is synthesized based on
unhealthy brood odors naturally produced by diseased or
parasitized brood that can trigger patrolling nurses to perform
hygenic behavior. Once the UBeeO mix is sprayed onto a small test
area of capped brood cells, a colony has two hours to respond by
uncapping treated cells in the test area. The more cells uncapped
by the colony, the higher the UBeeO score. UBeeO scores are
broken down into three categories: Low(0-39%). Medium(40-59%),
High(60-100%). The current methods used to evaluate colony’s
varroa and disease restance requires very skilled people taking
days to gather and evaluate for resistant traits. We will
use this assay to evaluate approximately 100 colonies in our
operation to find the colonies that score the highest in
resistance traits. We will then setup 125 queen mating boxes and
cell builders with bulk bees purchased from another apiary that
can supply bees earlier in the spring. These cell builders will
be used to raise daughters to then be open mated from those
selected queen mothers and requeen all of the satellite colonies
in a 3 mile radius around the mating yard that we will use to
produce the drones. We then will wait 7 weeks for the colony
population to have the new traits from the new queen mother and
then evaluate the colonies that have the first round of newly
mated queens that we selected from the UBeeO assay. Then we will
set up cell builders again with the queens that scored highest on
the second assay and raise another round of queens and requeen
all the colonies again in the 3 mile radius. We will then retest
all the colonies again after 7 weeks using OBeeO and compare the
scores to the first ones. We will also monitor the colonies
through the season with alcohol washes and record mite counts and
treatments as needed. We will repeat this process the following
year and record the findings.
Our goal is to produce and sustain our own adapted queen stock
within our operation that will need minimal if any varroa or
disease treatments Therefore, reducing costly and sometimes
ineffective mite treatments and having healthier bees to produce
higher honey yields and eliminate the need for expensive breeder
queens and to have the tools and ability to raise and maintain
resistant stock within your own apiary. We also want to see how
high of a UBeeO assay score average can be achieved in the time
allotted for this research project in the research area.