10/10/07 Designing A Better Honey Bee

Designing a better honeybee. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. It's the kind of story you hear at Halloween time where the mad scientists perform gene altering work on some innocent creature turning it into a monster. Part of that perennial favorite is true. Scientists are working right now to create new species or at least enhance traits in current species through the genome. Jay Evans, an entomologist at the ARS Bee Laboratory in Beltsville, Md., explains. EVANS: By finding the genes involved with it you can select lines of bees that carry those genes and are the variations on those genes and are able to breed it into a commercial population. Evans hope is to take a worker bee variation that is especially good at housekeeping and enhance it. EVANS: The trait that's of most interest is called hygienic behavior and its worker bees that patrol around the nest and look for things that are wrong and clear them out whether it's mites or they can actually pick up on their nest-mates, the other bees that are sick and remove those from the colony. So they go through and act as kind of a barrier to disease and that's a genetically variable trait. So some bees do that a lot better than others. Evans says that they are looking at the possibility of breeding out some of the defensive behavior of the Africanized bees. Ultimately Evans work is aimed at making healthier bees for use in pollination and honey production. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.