cover story Breeding better bees


Research at the molecular level is aimed at developing colonies that are pest-free, disease-resistant and producemore honey. By Grant Ullyot


L


eonard Foster, a professor at the University of B.C.’s Michael Smith Laboratories, is co-leader of a project called BeeOMICS seeking ways to enable the breeding of honeybees for 12 economically valuable traits.


It’s hoped beekeepers across Canada will benefit by gaining useful tools to select bee colonies that are pest-free, disease-resistant and produce more honey.


In Canada, honeybees produce 75 million pounds of honey annually and are crucial for pollinating crops. The total economic contribution is estimated at $4.6million yearly. The project is being funded in part by Genome BC and Genome Canada, with their grant of $7.3 million.


“Industry in the general sense is also supporting us financially,” says Foster. “There is an endowment fund that is run by the BC Honey Producers Association and they support research on bees and we get some money for our project from that.


“The B.C. Blueberry Council also helps fund our work and we also get some industry money from other provinces as well.”


Foster says an important issue is the continued disease problems faced by the industry.


“The worst pest for bees right now is the Varroa mite, which is also by far the worst problem worldwide. “It is not a natural pest for the Western, or European honey bee, but it is a natural pest of the Eastern, or Asian honey bee.”


The problem, Foster explains, is that the mite’s life cycle and its tight integration into the bee’s life cycle


UBC professor Leonard Foster and colleague Amro Zayed of Toronto’s York University are studying the insect’s genetics to select productive bees that are more winter-hardy. Their goal is to reduce the annual Canadian over-wintering loss from 30 per cent to 10 per cent. The bees are not genetically modified but are chosen using molecular tools in order to breed more effectively.


make it fairly hard to treat. The mite has developed a resistance to the present chemical treatments in use. “I suspect that reason alone is the big cause for the increased die-off over the last 10 years. It has taken B.C. a few years to adapt to this new variety and learn how to deal properly with the mites.”


Canada used to get its honey bee supply from California, but that stopped back around 1987 and Canada still won’t allow honey bees to be imported from the U.S. The ruling at the time was made to slow down the spread of the Varroa mite into Canada. “It certainly worked for a couple years,” says Foster, “but of course bees and mites don’t recognize borders and eventually the mite moved into Canada. “The 2015 ruling to keep the import ban in place is reasonably sound,” Foster believes. “It is to protect Canada from importing Africanized honey bees, which are an aggressive form of the honey bee in the U.S.


“One of the problems there, though, is that the test we have for


4 British Columbia Berry Grower • Fall 2016


‘Africanization’ is not very accurate. We are still importing about 60,000 packages of bees from New Zealand, it is just that they are not coming from California anymore.”


Foster’s research is currently focused on developing queen bees. He explains that a large number of beekeepers have the ability to raise queens from their own stock.


“Some beekeepers just allow the bees to raise queens naturally. However, in a large part of the industry beekeepers raise queens every one or two years, because as queens get older they can’t maintain a really strong colony so they need to be replaced at least every two years. In these kinds of cases Canada has some internal supply.”


He said some provinces can produce queens and sell them to other areas in the country but that is a very small fraction of the total demand, “so we need to import queens. We import about 200,000 queens per year from Hawaii.


“Putting that in context, it is about 700,000 colonies here in Canada at any


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16