Creating Better Bees

Creating Better Bees. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Honey bees face a lot of challenges and researchers have been looking at ways to use genetic cross-breeding methods to produce more diverse, resilient honey bee subspecies that could help thwart the nation's current colony collapse crisis. As part of that researchers are using liquid nitrogen to create a frozen bee semen bank. Brandon Hopkins talks about the process.

HOPKINS: The freezing process is to take that honey bee semen and then mix the semen with special solutions. So that’s necessary to protect the cells, the sperm cells from damage during the freezing and thawing process. And then also the rate at which you freeze is variable so finding the proper rate to freeze these cells and have them survive the freezing and thawing process.

Steve Sheppard, professor of entomology at WSU, says they have chosen specific types of bees.

SHEPPARD: We’re only bringing in semen from three specific subspecies. Honey bees aren’t native to the New World. They’re from Europe, Africa and western Asia and the honey bees that we have that we use in agriculture are from Europe but it’s only three of them we are sampling: the Italian honey bee, the Carniolan honey bee from the Alps and the Caucasian honey bee from the Caucasus mountains.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.