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Set-up for the COMB project is complete!  The process of purchasing new equipment, irradiating used boxes, manipulating equipment to match the stakeholders’ suggested protocols, organizing and distributing all the right items, and then setting them up for the bees was quite an undertaking!  All told, 35 pallets of equipment were purchased and 5 pallets of used boxes were irradiated!  Everything was gathered in a small warehouse in Bethel, PA in February and March.

An assembly line of sorts was set up to make the special combs for the treatment free system.  First, all-in-one small-cell (4.9 mm) plastic (unwaxed) foundation was cut to fit into empty wooden frames.  The foundation was then nailed in place. Clean wax was purchased from Dee Lusby, who keeps bees without treatment and far from agriculture in the AZ desert.  This wax was melted and applied in a thin layer to the foundation before being placed in a new box with a roughened inner surface.

Larry Mutti, part of Central PA team, painting hive bodies.

Equipment was then sorted and distributed to the 6 PA farms.  Apiary setup involved positioning the proper equipment in arcs 4 colonies in each treatment.  The order of the three treatments from left to right in each apiary varied.  With three treatments, there are 6 possible left-middle-right arrangements.  Therefore, in each region, there is one apiary of each arrangement to account for possible effects of drift.  Hive bodies were also painted various colors and patterns to help with orientation.  Each apiary was set up with an electric bear fence.  They are solar powered and baited with bacon so the bears are encouraged to take a bite and get a shock!

The bees came in 3-pound packages and were installed on two dates; 17 April for small-cell bees and 23 April for large-cell bees.  The weather was not cooperative on 17 April, with temperatures in the low thirties.  Most colonies survived, although the far northern site (Waymart, PA) suffered great casualties, with 7 of 12 colonies dying in the first 3 days.  These have since been replaced to keep the sample size in place for research.   On the day of installation, all colonies were subject to an alcohol wash for varroa mites.  Mite numbers were comfortably low, with an average of fewer than 1 mite per 100 bees.  Colonies in the conventional and organic treatments were treated with oxalic acid dribble according to the package instructions on day 3, showing low mite numbers again on sticky board counts.

The colonies are being assessed the week of 7-11 May and  21-25 May. They look very good so far!  There are a few queen issues, but the bees are busy building comb and collecting pollen and nectar for the new brood.

Robyn Underwood

Our honey bee packages for the Project COMB are scheduled to arrive this coming April and we are getting ready for their arrival! Because used equipment can carry on microorganisms to new colonies, we are irradiating older equipment for disease prevention. Irradiation is a sterilization procedure that kills microorganisms present on the equipment using gamma radiation powered by Cobalt-60, which penetrate bacteria cells and kills them by breaking down their DNA. This procedure is commonly used in the medical field to sterilize equipment, and it is also used to improve the safety of food for humans and animals, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals. This irradiation technology is very safe: it does not leave behind residual radiation and it does not use any chemicals. Although irradiation can be expensive, it is commonly used by many beekeepers to prevent an array of bee diseases including American foulbrood, European foulbrood, chalkbrood, stonebrood, and nosema. 

The PSBA (Pennsylvania State Beekeepers Association) has a sterilization program that gives local beekeepers access to this sterilization technology each spring (typically March) for approximately $180 per pallet. The equipment is properly packed and shipped to the nearest commercial facility for gamma irradiation in Pennsylvania which is the Sterigenics Corporation in Salem, NJ. If you are interested in having your equipment sterilized, you can find details about the program at PSBA Hive Equipment Standardization protocol. This spring’s event is coming up soon (March 12th, 2018), so don’t miss out and contact PSBA!

Last week at the Willey – Penn State apiary, we prepped 380 hive bodies for irradiation. It was a long day of organizing over 2,000 frames and properly stacking the equipment on pallets. Preparing the equipment for transport and irradiation requires some effort and it is important to follow instructions for the successful completion of this protocol. See below a detailed procedure that one must follow in order to send equipment for irradiation. 

How to prep equipment for irradiation

If you are interested in participating in the irradiation program,please follow the outlined steps below and contact the PSBA or your local beekeeping club.

1. Equipment: Standard pallet, large piece of cardboard, shrink wrap, 4 mil plastic sheeting, identification sheet.
2.  A layer of thick paper or cardboard is laid on a standard 40 x 48″ wood pallet
3. Cover the cardboard with enough 4 mil plastic sheeting to extend 12” up each side of your stack. This will prevent honey or other substances from dripping outside the boxes.
4. The boxes are stacked one atop the other in a 6-column configuration. They can be either stacked full of frames or they can be nested if they are empty.
5. The total height of the stacked hive equipment including the pallet cannot exceed 6 ft.
6. Once the hive boxes are stacked, there are two layers of shrink wrap that must be applied. The first layer is wrapped around the stacked hive boxes from top to bottom without wrapping the top and bottom plastic sheeting.
7. Another sheet of 4 mil plastic is draped over the top, overhanging 12″ on each side.
8. The second layer of shrink wrap is applied, making sure that the top and bottom plastic sheets are fully sealed.
9. The pallet must be labeled with the Owner’s name and contact information so that it can be properly returned.
10. The pallet is loaded into the truck and ready for travel to  Sterigenics Corporation in Salem, NJ.

Available resources on this topic

PSBA protocol: Hive Equipment Irradiation Standardization protocol. Please note that the hive equipment irradiation is scheduled for Monday, March 12th 2018 for Montgomery County Beekeepers [link]

de Guzman LI, Frake AM, Simone-Finstrom M. (2017). Comparative Flight Activities and Pathogen Load of Two Stocks of Honey Bees Reared in Gamma-Irradiated Combs. Insects, 8(4), 127 [link]

By Robyn Underwood, Assistant Research Professor, López-Uribe Lab

Tracking Feral Bee Health in Pennsylvania, preliminary results 2017

What a better way to start 2018 than with an update about our exciting and ongoing citizen science project, Tracking Health of feral Bees in PA. It was a busy 2017. We sampled 19 feral colonies coupled with 11 managed colonies in six different cities throughout Pennsylvania. Once winter arrived, the field season wound down, and the bees had gone into hibernation mode, we were able to begin laboratory analyses. This involved comparing the immune systems and viral levels of the feral and managed colonies . We are very excited to share with you preliminary results from our first year of sampling. So far, the data from the laboratory analyses suggest that feral colonies have 2-4 fold higher amounts of deformed wing virus (DWV) than managed colonies. This may seem like bad news. However, our results also suggest that the feral colonies are producing immune genes at a much higher proportion in feral than managed colonies. What does this mean? While we are still working on collecting more data and starting follow up experiments,  these preliminary results suggest that feral colonies in PA are overall exposed to extremely high levels of DWV but that these colonies are defending themselves naturally through their immune systems (figure 1). This is very exciting as the main goal of the project is to identify colonies that have evolved better tolerance to mites, and that could be used for breeding programs in the future.

As we enter our second year of this citizen science project, we hope to continue mapping the distribution of  feral bee colonies throughout PA and to characterize levels of disease pressure and immune gene expression in these colonies.

We would like to give a big thank you to everyone who has contributed to this project, especially those who submitted information about the location of feral colonies. We are planning to sample 16 additional feral colonies this coming spring, so we still need your help! If you know of a feral colony location please contact us or fill out our Feral FORM on our webpage.

This work is supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Animal Health Appropriations under Project #PEN04620 and Accession #1011873.

 Contributed by Katy Evans

How to cite this webpage

Hinshaw CR, Evans KC, Rosa CR, Grozinger C, and Lopez-Uribe MM. 2018. Tracking Feral Bee Health in Pennsylvania. https://lopezuribelab.com/2018/01/25/tracking-feral-bee-health-pennsylvania-preliminary-results-2017

Stakeholders at our first COMB meeting in November 2017

On November 17, 2017 stakeholders from across Pennsylvania converged to State College to discuss beekeeping protocols for our upcoming research project. The project, funded by the USDA’s Organic Agriculture Research and Extension Initiative (OREI), will be a side-by-side comparison of honey bee health using three distinct management systems: conventional, organic and chemical-free. The López-Uribe Lab invited beekeepers that use these different management systems to participate in this meeting by providing details on the protocols they use in their operations. In addition, we requested that each group discuss a general definition of their management philosophies and new terminology to identify themselves.

Efforts to classify beekeepers into the various beekeeping philosophies is difficult. These management philosophies are a continuum more than discrete categories. However, for the purpose of the meeting, participants were split into three groups. One category grouped the beekeepers that are willing to use any product on the market to maintain healthy parasite-free colonies. These beekeepers, who we initially called conventional, re-named their group as ‘Adaptive Beekeeping’ because they are flexible in their decision making. The second group comprised beekeepers that do not use synthetic pesticides or antibiotics in their hives. Beekeepers in this group only use naturally-occurring chemicals, such as formic or oxalic acid, to treat pests. They also heavily rely on mechanical methods to control pests. Because they do not strictly use organic chemicals but multiple methods for pest management, they identify themselves as the ‘Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Non-Synthetic Management’ group. The last group of beekeepers was comprised of beekeepers who are unwilling to apply ‘non-bee’ derived products to the colony. Instead, these beekeepers rely on the bees’ natural mechanisms and their genetic disposition to keep the colonies thriving, only intervening with mechanical techniques when emergencies arise. This group identified themselves as the ‘Holistic Chemical Free Beekeeping’ group.

Bringing together experts and experienced beekeepers working in these different categories was a highly valuable and informative experience for everyone. Our goal with this project is to identify the costs and benefits of each of these management systems in the context of honey bee health, environmental safety, and an economic perspective. This stakeholder meeting has set the stage for this project. We learned a great deal from all the participants and everyone had time and space to speak their minds. By the end of the day, we worked out a preliminary protocol for each management system. Some work is still needed, but everyone is excited and we feel that things are getting off on the right foot. We hope to keep the support of the beekeeping community throughout this experiment.

Contributed by Robyn Underwood

Research Associate

Penn State University

What would Halloween be without pumpkins; where would pumpkins be without bees? Non-existent!

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Pumpkins and Halloween go hand in hand. Jack O’Lantern carving is one of the most popular fall activities and pumpkin pies are a definite favorite for many at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Pumpkins were first cultivated in northern Mexico. However, they are now grown on every continent except Antarctica. Pumpkins are part of the crop genus Cucurbita (which includes squash, gourds, and zucchini among others) and these crops rely on bee pollination to produce fruit. Pumpkin pollen is large and sticky and the most common pollinators include bumblebees, honey bees and most importantly squash bees. The squash bee Peponapis pruinosa is one of the most important pollinators of pumpkins in Pennsylvania. However, this bee species is not native to the northeast, it traveled northwards from Mexico as native Americans began cultivating this crop during the 14th century (Lopez-Uribe et. al. 2016).

Squash bees are a specialist pollinator of Cucurbita and have been essential to the domestication, spread, and production of Cucurbita throughout the Americas. There are two primary characteristics that make squash bees one of the most efficient pollinators of pumpkins: 1) they are hairier than many other bees so they can carry more pollen from flower to flower and 2) they are active very early in the morning which coincides with the times when the pumpkin flowers open (Lopez-Uribe 2017). The heaviest pumpkin in North America was over 2,000 lbs in Rhode Island in 2016. We have to give a shout out to the squash bee because after all, Halloween just would not be the same without her.

1. López-Uribe MM, Minckley RL, Cane J, Danforth BN (2016) Crop domestication facilitated rapid geographical expansion of a specialist pollinator, the squash bee Peponapis pruinosa. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 283: 20160443. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2016.0443 [link]
2. López-Uribe MM (2017). Why are Bees the Best Pollinators? Pennsylvania State Beekeepers Association Newsletter, October [link]

By Katy Ciola Evans