Professor wins grant to study bees
October 23, 2008 by SARAH BRUMBELOE For The Red Black
Filed under News
The University was one of 17 colleges awarded a $4.1 million grant to investigate the sudden decline of Georgia honey bee populations.
The irksome insects play a pivotal role in the success of Georgia’s economy, providing free pollination for locally grown produce.
“I had no idea what I was getting into,” said Keith Delaplane, an entomology professor who heads the bee project at the University. “The [U.S. Department of Agriculture] grant was initially brought up at a meeting of professors in August.”
Since the grant was awarded, the “sharp downward spike” in bee populations has been officially dubbed as colony collapse disorder.
The main dip in population occurred among the adult worker bees, who, for reasons unknown, abandon their nest. This leaves the nest unprotected and unable to function, inhabited only by the queens and other immature bees. The honey is left to sit unused and the nest is often ravaged by other bee colonies.
The research project itself is a coordinated affair that assigns each school to a potential cause of disappearance that they are to research.
The University is the overall leader of the project, and the group of University researchers will focus on other diseases, environmental stresses and the effect of the varroa mite. The varroa mite is a pest introduced to the United States from Asia that disrupts bees’ learning abilities, causing them to suffer from memory loss and possibly abandon their nest.
The goal of the project, Delaplane said, is mitigation through instrumental insemination – a process that will make bees “genetically resistant to the mite” and will allow farmers to stop using chemicals to combat the pest. The chemicals may have played a part in the bee’s unusual behavior as well, he said.
Delaplane said researchers are also hoping to broaden www.extension.org, a national Web site headed by the agricultural departments of state colleges.
Bee breeders can access the network for information about colony collapse disorder and other problems they may encounter.
The site is an attempt to educate farmers and will be joined by a training program to educate them on the ins and outs of breeding and “preventative action.”
The success of the project should help to decrease the number of farmers forced to truck new bee populations to fields in the middle of a gas crisis, but progress will be slow to come, he said.
But the project will take time.
“Four years from now, we are planning to expect results,” Delaplane said.
