Busy Research, Busy Bees BY SARAH DORMER While sweat drips down my back, I turn to Dr. Sue Hannaford, trying to keep my breathing as calm as possible. I need to ask her a rather urgent question. “Sue,” I said, trying to keep my voice level, “Is my hair tickling my face, or is that a bee?” We’re performing our weekly hive check, surrounded by the thousands of honeybees the Hannaford lab and Hiveminders keep on Thompson’s roof. Sue’s head snaps up. “It’s a bee! Close your eyes and hold your breath.” She takes out the smoker we use to keep the bees calm, and gives my face a few strong puffs of smoke. Once the bee wandering my right cheek is subdued, she unzips the hood of my bee suit and lightly brushes it off. “She must have found a gap in the zipper near your neck,” Sue tells me, and we get back to work. When we think of research, we tend to picture someone in a stiff white coat in a lab, surrounded by flasks of different chemicals. I definitely had days like this during my summer research experience, but many days were more like what I described above: examining frame after frame of wax comb, adult bees, larvae, eggs, pollen, and glistening honey, all while sweating profusely in our head-to-toe linen bee suits in the summer sun. We even got stung once in a while. I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. The Hannaford Lab studies the link between pesticides and neurodegenerative disease. I decided to join the team and study the pesticide FujiMite, or fenpyroximate: the EPA considers the chemical safe for honeybees, but in humans, its continued use has been linked to neurodegeneration, Parkinson’s disease, and Alzheimers (1). Despite this, its use on crops like apples and pears has increased. For these reasons, I decided to expose some honey bees to nonlethal amounts of fenpyroximate and study the potential effects: even if pesticide wasn’t killing the bees, it might be causing neurological damage. Every week, I would catch 40 foraging bees on their way out of the hive and bring them to the lab. Some of them ate plain sugar water, but I slipped small amounts of pesticide into the food of others. After 5 days of
treatment, I used EthoVision software to quantify how much and how fast the bees moved around. After this came the hardest part: the bees had to be humanely euthanized by putting them in the freezer--I needed to dissect out their brains to look for neurons undergoing apoptosis. The pesticide had no significant effect on the workers. However, in addition to working with adult bees, I hand-raised larvae in the lab. Watching them turn from tiny grubs to beautiful fuzzy bees was exhilarating, especially because the Hannaford lab hasn’t raised bees before. Any food the workers bring back to the hive is eaten by every member of the colony, so even if the pesticide isn’t affecting the adults, it might harm the delicate larvae. This work will be my thesis--I look forward to many more hours of lab work, baby bees, and days spent in linen, hunched over the hive while thousands of bees make the air sing.
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