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 decid ed 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 sis--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.