Since August of 2023, I have had the opportunity and privilege to be part of the Grove City College Apicultural Research Team. From the very beginning I was quickly immersed in what seemed like two brand new languages of beekeeping and scientific research. I came onto the team with a very little understanding of not only the importance of honeybees, but also with little comprehension of how complex and intricate honeybee behavior and ethology really is. To help get the other new research members and I more in tuned and up to date with the apicultural field, Dr. Farone and the more experienced research team members put us through an introductory course that they had created. Alongside this course, we headed out to the bee yard roughly twice a week. The classroom and field work together proved to be engaging, informative, and eye opening for me to the study and field of apiology.
After a semester of honeybee and beekeeping 101 orientation, us newbees were on track to start an independent research project alongside the deformed wing virus project that the team had been working on. The inspiration for my independent research project emerged from a team discussion about various types of honeybee hives, combined with my background in woodworking and construction. Through some guidance and advice, I had decided that my project would be focused on designing and constructing a top bar honeybee hive in order to analyze and study how this new hive might compare to the typical Langstroth hive that fills GCC's apiary and many apiaries across the world.
Thus began the first phase of my independent research project: Design and Build. For specificities and a walkthrough of the Spring 2024 progress of that phase, check out the May 3rd blog publication: “The Top Bar Hive vs The Langstroth Hive”. After what seemed like a successful attempt at building a hive, the summer research crew put my top bar hive to use. Although the hive seemed to perform well in many facets, it fell short in providing structural stability for the honeybee’s comb, making it difficult and dangerous for the structural integrity of the comb to conduct hive checks. Thus, it was back to the drawing board for the Fall 2024 semester.
Dr. Farone and I discussed the possibility of creating wood frames for the top bars that could support metal wiring, which would almost act as a rebar to bear some of the weight of the comb and provide stability for the comb during hive checks. I went forward with the idea, excited to hopefully get this hive fully functional. Once I drew out the design for the top bars, I was ready to start executing the construction of the plans. After hours of measuring, cutting, drilling, screwing, tying, and crimping I brought the drawings to life through thirty of these top bars.
So where does that take the research project? Well, I had finally finished the hive by the end of the Fall 2024 Semester. With it being the winter season at this point, there would be no sense in putting a new hive of bees in a barren hive as they would have no food built up to survive the winer, so we will have to wait for a spring swarm to really test out the comparative effectiveness of this top bar hive compared to the Langstroth hive.
While this independent research project took up a lot of my time during the last two years, as a research team we still had our sights focused on the RNA bound deformed wing virus. Specifically, we have been able to work with Grove City’s own Dr. Yowler in the campus vivarium to test for deformed wing virus (DWV) in honeybees. As of recently, our goals and efforts followed this such procedure:
1. The first phase of our procedure consisted of purifying the RNA from honeybees. This means that we isolated the RNA (remember that DWV is an RNA bound virus) from the other molecules of the honeybee sample. Our samples consisted of GCC honeybees without symptoms of deformed wing virus and GCC honeybees that showed symptoms of having deformed wing virus.
2. For the second phase of our procedure, we used reverse transcriptase enzymes to create cDNA from the RNA from our honeybee samples.
3. For the third phase, we run the cDNA samples that we created against positive DWV control DNA samples (donated to us from the USDA bee lab in Beltsville, Maryland) in the RT-qPCR machine. This machine essentially allows us to view the amplification of DNA through data curves in real time. When the DNA amplification of the samples match the DNA amplification of the positive controls, we can assume that the sample carried some load of DWV. Essentially, we can use this comparative data to confirm or deny certain samples for deformed wing virus.
The team is still trying to improve the procedure to ensure consistency and accuracy in results, but we have made great progress. Ensuring that we can accurately confirm deformed wing virus in honeybees opens up the door for further steps in research and investigation of deformed wing virus in honeybees. This research can hopefully be used to help analyze the development of the virus itself through asymptomatic and symptomatic carriers.
When looking in retrospect at all the hard work that the GCC Apicultural Research Team has put into studying the many factors that honeybees are involved in, it is incredible to think of how much more work there is to be done. Even so, it is gratifying to look back and see all that we have been able to accomplish. Whether in the lab, in the apiary, or even in the classroom, I believe that we have pursued the questions that are worth pursuing, and we have spread knowledge and awareness of things that are worth spreading knowledge and awareness of. I’ll write off with my personal answer to a question that many people ask me when I tell them I am on a honeybee research team. I will often be asked: “Luke, what is the coolest thing that you have learned since you have been working with honeybees?” My answer to that question has always been that the most fascinating thing about honeybees is realizing how much I didn’t know or understand about them—and how much more there still is to learn and discover. These little creatures can often be subjected solely to a combination of save the bee campaigns and DreamWorks' Bee Movie, but there is so much more to these creatures than meets the eye. The intentional design and intricacy woven into these honeybees and their ethology alone makes them worth our time and attention and is certainly enough to leave us in wonderment time and time again.
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