As students bundle up, bees become active
While most insects are dormant for the cold season this time of year, the research bees on USU campus will become active again within the next few weeks.
Hundreds of queen bumblebees are being stored in boxes in a refrigerated cooler on the north side of campus.
“We’re doing two projects,” said James Strange, United States Department of Agriculture research entomologist. “One is to look at wintering these bumblebees for commercial uses. If you can keep all these queens in a refrigerator situation over the winter, you can then take them out and start a nest with them.”
“It’s just like a walk-in cooler that they’d have in a restaurant or any other lab,” said Cory Stanley, USU Extension bee specialist. She said each species of bee has a different requirement for wintering temperature, but that the cooler is set at four degrees celsius.
Strange said one of the issues in commercial production is having the ability to store bees when they don’t need them and bring them out when they do.
“The trick then is to learn to control the amount of time that they’re sort of under,” Strange said.
Strange said the regulated cold temperatures in the cooler forces the insects into hibernation, allowing researchers to store them and have them ready when needed for research. Commercial sellers also keep bees this way to time the dormancy and be able to meet markets.
“We’ll bring those out of their hibernation probably within the next few weeks and get them going artificially in the greenhouse,” Strange said. “We’ll have nests of bumblebees over the winter when they would normally be dormant in nature.”
Strange said the simulated winter can be conducted during any season even summer. In the life cycle of most bees, there’s an obligatory winter period where a season of dormancy is necessary for the bees to fully develop.
The queen bumblebees are stored while dormant, then activated in a greenhouse. A colony is started by taking the queen out of winter hibernation and giving her a nest box in the lab.
Strange said it takes a couple months for the queen to get the colony up and running to where it becomes an economically viable pollinating unit. During this process, the bees can’t fly outside in the cold or they would die.
“That means all the food has to come from us,” Strange said.
The lab researchers collect pollen over summer to use as food for the bumblebees in the lab during the winter. Strange said it’s a labor intensive process and big commercial companies pay quite a bit for employees to do the job.
“It takes a fair amount of work,” Strange said.
Strange said the second project underway is something new this year.
“Unlike honey bees that live in a hive and during the winter, bumblebees don’t have a hive,” Strange said.
The queen bumblebees leave the nest and burrow in a little soil pocket, or hibernaculum, where they spend the winter remaining relatively dormant. It is nearly impossible to locate these queens once they are under the soil and snow.
“We have an outdoor arena that’s screened in where we’re doing some experiments looking at more natural situations and trying to understand how deep they go,” Strange said.
The queen bumblebees are brought into the screened area, where the tent is removed after hibernation and before the first snowfall. The bees spend the winter underground until the screen is placed over the area once more to contain the bees when they emerge in the spring, usually during April.
Strange said it’s the fifth year of keeping bees in the lab over the winter.
“We’ve began to learn more and more how to do it, and as we go our success increases,” Strange said.
This is the first year the screenhouse experiment will be conducted.
“We just set that up this summer,” Strange said. “In fact, this will be the first year we’ve had any bees in there. We didn’t have a lot of bees to put out at the end of the season because we wanted most of them for in the lab.”
Stanley said there are more than 900 species of bees native to Utah, and at least 10 species of bumblebees.
According to the BBC, bumblebees are the primary pollinators of crops grown in greenhouses, as well as other crops and wildflowers. There is a large market for bumblebees and millions of dollars of bees are sold each year. They are particularly effective with tomatoes, as their buzz frequency releases large pollen loads.
“The reason we can have tomatoes in the winter now is because we have bumblebees in greenhouses doing the pollinating,”
– tmera.bradley@aggiemail.usu.edu