Project Overview
Information Products
Commodities
- Animals: bees
Practices
- Crop Production: beekeeping
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.
Our research project addressed the above listed problems by producing and sustaining a varroa and disease resistant queen breeding program with a new selection tool called UBEEO. All the research was conducted in real time dealing with beekeeping variables in multiple locations making our research and results more realistically able to be achieved in the field. In conclusion to the research , we will continue with our selection and breeding program to produce queens and queen cells to other beekeepers to promote varroa and disease resistant stock throughout the country. Local beekeepers, hobbyist and commercial, have used our queen stock from the project and are very pleased .
Project objectives:
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.