Does this research benefit beekeepers?

We conduct a variety of research investigations concerning honey bees, often in unusual applications. We started using bees as environmental monitors or sentinel species almost 30 years ago. As we explored how bees can be used in this context, we began to develop an enormous database concerning both the uptake and the effects of exposures of bees to a wide variety of chemicals - many that had never been looked at before. We also realized that we had to have better tools to measure exposures and quantify effects. Using bees to locate and assess toxic metals, inorganic and organic pesticides, and radioactive materials has become relatively routine. Many papers have been published and a book covering this topic, edited by Dr. James DeVillers, has just gone to press (April, 2001).

Six years ago, we added the ability to assess volatile and semi-volatile organic chemicals in the air inside a beehive. We also developed electronic beehives that continuously monitor honey bee colony population dynamics and transfer the data across the Internet. This system has already been used to examine the environmental restoration of three military landfills. It also has been used been used to assess an IPM program for controlling boll weevil in cotton. A recent thesis by Michelle Taylor, an exchange graduate student from New Zealand, demonstrates that the actual effects of pesticides to bees under field conditions can be accurately determined and quantified in real-time. For example, in one trial, exposure to methyl parathion quickly killed a substantial portion of the forager bees. This could be detected using the classical approach - a trap mounted under the hive. Dead and dying bees rapidly accumulated in each traps. After a couple days, the die-off ceased. But, when monitored by our electronic systems, Michelle found that forager bee flight activity continued to decline for another ten days.

Our current systems are too complicated and expensive to be used for routine bee management. However, we are working on simpler and less expensive systems that could be used to help manage commercial beekeeping operations. Already, we have produced a solar-powered, electronic hive. Our objective is to provide an affordable monitoring hive. Large beekeeping operations could place a few of these hives in key apiaries. At the beginning of each day, the beekeeper could use a computer or a cell phone to "call" the hives and get a report on conditions in the apiaries.

We are in the initial stages of this work. Last April, we described this concept in Bee Culture in an article titled: Hi Tech Management Science Fiction or Reality? Bee Culture, Vol. 128, Number 4: 37-38.