honey bees Archives - News@91��ɫ

Honey bees experience multiple health stressors out-in-the-field

sandramc — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 15:32:19 +0000

TORONTO, April 17, 2024 – It’s not a single pesticide or virus stressing honey bees, and affecting their health, but exposure to a complex web of multiple interacting stressors encountered while at work pollinating crops, found new research out of 91��ɫ.

Scientists have been unable to explain increasing colony mortality, even after decades of research examining the role of specific pesticides, parasitic mites, viruses or genetics. This led the research team to wonder if previous studies were missing something by focussing on one stressor at a time.

Amro Zayed

“Our study is the first to apply systems level or network analyses to honey bee stressors at a massive scale. I think this represents a paradigm shift in the field because we have been so focussed on finding the one big thing, the smoking gun,” says corresponding author of the new paper 91��ɫ Faculty of Science Professor , 91��ɫ Research Chair in Genomics. “But we are finding that bees are exposed to a very complicated network of stressors that change quickly over time and space. It's a level of complexity that we haven't thought about before. To me, that's the big surprise of this study.”

The paper, , published today in Current Biology, takes a much broader look at the interplay of stressors and their effects. The study team also included researchers from the University of British Columbia, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, the University of Victoria, the University of Lethbridge, the University of Manitoba, l'Université Laval, the University of Guelph, and the Ontario Beekeepers' Association.

Not all stressors are the same, however. Some stressors are more influential than others – what researchers call the social media influencers of the bee world – having an outsized impact on the architecture of a highly complex network and their co-stressors. They also found that most of these influencer stressors are viruses and pesticides that regularly show up in combination with specific other stressors, compounding the negative effects through their interactions.

Sarah French

“Understanding which stressors co-occur and are likely to interact is profoundly important to unravelling how they are impacting the health and mortality of honey bee colonies,” says lead author, 91��ɫ Postdoctoral Fellow Sarah French of the Faculty of Science.

“There have been a lot of studies about major pesticides, but in this research, we also saw a lot of minor pesticides that we don’t usually think about or study. We also found a lot of viruses that beekeepers don’t typically test for or manage. Seeing the influencer stressors interact with all these other stressors, whether it be mites, other pesticides or viruses, was not only interesting, but surprising.”

French says the way influencer stressors co-occur with other stressors is similar to the way humans experience co-morbidities, such as when someone is diagnosed with heart disease. They are more likely to also have diabetes or high blood pressure or both, and each one impacts the other. “That’s similar to the way we examine bee colonies. We look at everything that's going on in the colony and then compare or amalgamate all the colonies together to look at the broader patterns of what is happening and how everything is related. Two or multiple stressors can really synergize off each other leading to a much greater effect on bee health.”

From Québec to British Columbia, honey bee colonies were given the job of pollinating some of Canada’s most valuable crops – apples, canola oil and seed, highbush and lowbush blueberry, soybean, cranberry and corn. The study covered multiple time scales, providing numerous snapshots, rather than the usual single snapshot in time. The research team found that honey bees were exposed to an average of 23 stressors at once that combined to create 307 interactions.

A beekeeper samples pollen from the comb of a honey bee hive from a colony located near canola crops in Lethbridge, Alberta for the BeeCSI project. Photo by Shelley Hoover

Honey bees are a billion dollar industry. In 2021, honey bees contributed some $7 billion in economic value by pollinating orchards, vegetables, berries and oil seeds like canola, and produced 75 to 90 million pounds of honey. Figuring which stressors would provide the most benefit if managed would go a long way toward developing the right tools to tackle them, something beekeepers are often lacking.

The research is part of the project funded to the tune of $10 million by Genome Canada in 2018 to use genomic tools to develop a new health assessment and diagnosis platform powered by stressor-specific markers.

More research is needed to unravel how the stressors are interacting and impacting honey bee mortality and colony health going forward, says French. “It's really teasing apart which of these compounds might have that relationship and how can we build off this to study those specific relationships.”

It can’t come soon enough, honey bees are currently facing poor health, colony loss, parasites, pathogens and heightened stressors worldwide. Some beekeepers in this country and the United States face a loss over winter of up to 60 per cent of their colonies.

“Our study suggests some combinations are occurring very frequently,” adds Zayed, “and that is relevant because we see them again and again, but we don't know how these combinations affect bee health. It helps to prioritize which experiments we can now take back to the lab and establish how these interactions affect bees.”

About 91��ɫ

91��ɫ is a modern, multi-campus, urban university located in Toronto, Ontario. Backed by a diverse group of students, faculty, staff, alumni and partners, we bring a uniquely global perspective to help solve societal challenges, drive positive change, and prepare our students for success. 91��ɫ's fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education. 91��ɫ’s campuses in Costa Rica and India offer students exceptional transnational learning opportunities and innovative programs. Together, we can make things right for our communities, our planet, and our future.

Media Contact: Sandra McLean, 91��ɫ Media Relations, 416-272-6317, sandramc@yorku.ca

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CBC News - World Bee Day a chance to remind people how important, and how threatened, the insects are

sandramc — Fri, 20 May 2022 18:04:08 +0000

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On World Bee Day, everyone can help save the bees

sandramc — Wed, 18 May 2022 15:20:55 +0000

TORONTO, May 18, 2022 – It’s no secret that pollinators are in trouble – and it could affect that morning coffee, fruit and even, bowl of cereal.

The theme of on May 20 is Bee Engaged: Celebrating the diversity of bees and beekeeping systems, and it’s a good time to learn how creating bee-friendly habitats in the garden, on a balcony or in a community garden can help. There are some 350 species of native bees in Ontario, more than 850 in Canada and 20,000 worldwide.

91��ɫ is home to the recently established Centre for Bee Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation where bee scientists and modellers work to foster collaborative expertise and further innovative and cutting-edge research to better understand bees and the risks to their health. Want to know more about bee habitats, behaviour, genetics and diseases, just ask the experts listed below.

And, tune in to 91��ɫ’s Scholar’s Hub @ Home: Bee the Change on May 19 at noon to learn about saving declining pollinators from two of 91��ɫ’s bee experts, Associate Professor of the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change and Professor of the Faculty of Science. Register .

Sheila Colla, co-author of the forthcoming book (June 11) – , can discuss the following:

• What to plant on balconies, in yards and community gardens across Ontario (See )

• Connection between native plants and native pollinators

• Importance of citizen science – how people can help scientists keep track of bees and their habitats

• What happened to the Rusty-patched bumblebee and why it’s a tale of what could happen to other bees

• Other bees on the endangered list

• Beyond honey bees and bumble bees. What are sweat bees, carpenter bees and mining bees, and what role do they play?

, an expert in wild bee genomics, behaviour and conservation and an associate professor in the Faculty of Science, can talk about:

• Loss of plant-pollinator networks and how some plants will now bloom too soon or too late for bees that rely on them

• Are the gut microbiomes of city bees missing key beneficial bacteria?

• Biodiversity conservation and why it’s important

• How maternal care of bee offspring has expanded the social life of bees

• Population and behavioural genomics

• Climate change, land use change and the effects on bees

Amro Zayed, an expert in honey bee biology and genomics, can talk aboutthe following:

• How bee genes can determine how bees behave, including how good they are at keeping their hive clean and how well they can survive cold winters

• Did western honey bees originate in Asia and why is that important to know?

• How the urban environment can help or hinder bees – think concrete versus green spaces, trees and gardens

• What’s stressing bumblebees? How scientists are using a conservation genomic approach and next generation sequencing to look inside for pathogens and pesticides

• Why are African hybrid honey bees (known as killer honey bees) highly defensive and aggressive?

• Bee health diagnostic tools, what they do and what’s being developed

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91��ɫ is a modern, multi-campus, urban university located in Toronto, Ontario. Backed by a diverse group of students, faculty, staff, alumni and partners, we bring a uniquely global perspective to help solve societal challenges, drive positive change and prepare our students for success. 91��ɫ's fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education. 91��ɫ’s campuses in Costa Rica and India offer students exceptional transnational learning opportunities and innovative programs. Together, we can make things right for our communities, our planet, and our future.

Media Contact:
Sandra McLean, 91��ɫ Media Relations, 416-272-6317, sandramc@yorku.ca

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Virtual conference buzzes with sweet bee insights

roshanp — Tue, 12 Oct 2021 14:37:31 +0000

TORONTO, Oct. 12, 2021 – This year’s BeeCon will explore the effects of human-driven landscape disturbance on wild bee communities, the development of diagnostic tools for neonicotinoid exposure, altruistic and selfish aggression in honey bees and more.

BeeCon is a free, annual, now virtual, bee conference from Oct. 15 to 16 that brings local, national and international bee biologists together to discuss bees, their behaviour, taxonomy, genomics, ecology, and conservation, hosted by the Centre for Bee Ecology, Evolution and Conservation at 91��ɫ.

The two-day event will feature a keynote at 11am on Oct. 15 by Associate Professor of the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Texas, Austin, discussing plant-pollinator interactions and ecosystem services in the face of global change.

Below is a selection of some of the many symposium talks, each 15 minutes in length:

Oct. 15:

9:30 a.m. – Can green roofs compensate for the loss of (Hymenopteran) biodiversity in cities? –

Jeffrey Jacobs of Hasselt University, Belgium

12 p.m. – Assessing the impacts of urban beehives on wild bees using individual, population-level, and community level metrics – Hadil Elsayed of 91��ɫ

2:45 p.m. - Effects of Social Status on Aggression in a Facultatively Social Bee Species (Xylocopa virginica) – James Mesich of Brock University

3:45 p.m. – Social environment and sibling cooperation in a small carpenter bee –

Jesse Huisken of 91��ɫ

Oct. 16:

9 a.m. – Holocene population expansion of a tropical bee coincides with early human colonisation of Fiji rather than climate change – James Dorey of Yale University

9:30 a.m. – The risks of crop exposure to honey bee colonies – Sarah French of 91��ɫ

9:45 a.m. – The blueberries & the bees: assessing honey bee health stressors using proteomics – Rhonda Thygesen of the University of British Columbia

10:15 a.m. – Corpse management in bumblebee colonies – Victoria Blanchard of Royal Holloway, University of London

11:15 a.m. – Assessment of habitat use & ecology of native bee communities in tallgrass prairie and oak savanna in Southern Ontario – Janean Sharkey of the University of Guelph

Click here for the schedule of speakers.

To register for Oct. 15, click and to register for Oct. 16, click .

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91��ɫ is a modern, multi-campus, urban university located in Toronto, Ontario. Backed by a diverse group of students, faculty, staff, alumni and partners, we bring a uniquely global perspective to help solve societal challenges, drive positive change and prepare our students for success. 91��ɫ's fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education. 91��ɫ’s campuses in Costa Rica and India offer students exceptional transnational learning opportunities and innovative programs. Together, we can make things right for our communities, our planet, and our future.

Media Contact:

Sandra McLean, 91��ɫ Media Relations, 416-272-6317, sandramc@yorku.ca

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Do you know your bees? Researchers find Canadians lack bee knowledge

roshanp — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 13:05:44 +0000

TORONTO, October 28, 2020 – How well do you know your bees? 91��ɫ researchers have found bee knowledge in Canada lacking with about half of those surveyed thinking honey bees are wild and native to Canada.

They’re not. They were brought over from Europe and are managed by beekeepers like other farm animals, such as dairy cattle for example, but researchers did find it is the bee species best known to the Canadians.

The researchers analyzed material from an Oraclepoll of 2,000 people across the country on general bee facts and conservation conducted by Friends of the Earth. Some participants thought queen bees and drone bees were a species of bee. They are castes within a species, rather than a species.

“The reason for analyzing the survey results in detail is we really wanted to understand the Canadian public’s overall general knowledge of bees, their perceptions of bees and the threats they face,” says lead researcher Nyssa van Vierssen Trip, a grad student in the .

The findings could have a trickle-down effect on conservation.

“It’s important because to increase legal protections for bees, we need to understand how the public sees them. If there is support for bee conservation among the public, then it would be easier for politicians to take action,” says Assistant Professor , whose lab the research was done in.

About 30 per cent of participants, were able to correctly name the bumble bee as a wild native bee species, but only one respondent named a solitary been, in this case a mason bee. Solitary bees, however, make up the majority of wild native bee species in this country. There are 900 native bee species in Canada. Forty-six species are bumble bees of which one-quarter are at risk of extinction across North America.

“Friends of the Earth Canada initially conducted the poll to understand the level of support from Canadians for protecting wild, native bees and their understanding of these species,” says its CEO, Beatrice Olivastri. “The analysis of the poll results by researchers from 91��ɫ adds weight to the interpretation of these findings and increases their utility for scientists and government officials. We believe Canadians will support new measures to protect wild, native bees beyond protection for those already at risk.”

Can honey bees replace wild bees as crop pollinators? Two-thirds of respondents didn’t know the answer. About a quarter thought all bees can sting, whereas out of the about 860 native bee species in Canada many do not sting.

“There is a real need to work with the public and educate them about Canada native wild bee species,” says Colla. “Almost one quarter of those surveyed didn’t know how they could help bee conservation, while close to 20 per cent didn’t think it was a personal priority.”

When it comes to political stripes, researchers found that which federal party participants voted for predicted their concern for bee health and conservation. Respondents who voted for the federal Green Party or the New Democratic Party were more likely to believe climate change, disease, modern intensive agriculture, and habitat loss were threats to bees than Conservative Party voters. Green Party voters were also 3.78 times more likely to express high levels of concern for bee health.

Overall, though, there was a general level of concern for bee health despite political affiliation with pesticides topping the list of the most likely threat with 89 per cent of participants choosing that, followed by 70 per cent thinking loss of floral resources was the biggest threat. Only 66 per cent said climate change.

There were also regional differences. While most Canadians want the provincial and federal governments to take the lead in bee conservation, people in Manitoba and Saskatchewan were more likely to see bee conservation as the responsibility of homeowners and landowners.

But as van Vierssen Trip says, “What we found, is that despite people’s general knowledge about native wild bees being low, they like bees, they’re interested in bee conservation and there is heavy engagement in this issue.”

The was published this month in the journal Conservation Science and Practice.

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91��ɫ champions new ways of thinking that drive teaching and research excellence. Our students receive the education they need to create big ideas that make an impact on the world. Meaningful and sometimes unexpected careers result from cross-disciplinary programming, innovative course design and diverse experiential learning opportunities. 91��ɫ students and graduates push limits, achieve goals and find solutions to the world’s most pressing social challenges, empowered by a strong community that opens minds. 91��ɫ U is an internationally recognized research university – our 11 faculties and 25 research centres have partnerships with 200+ leading universities worldwide. Located in Toronto, 91��ɫ is the third largest university in Canada, with a strong community of 53,000 students, 7,000 faculty and administrative staff, and more than 300,000 alumni. 91��ɫ U's fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education.

Media Contact:

Sandra McLean, 91��ɫ Media Relations, 416-272-6317, sandramc@yorku.ca

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91��ɫ U study: European ancestry plays role in ‘killer’ honey bees’ aggressiveness

roshanp — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 13:20:02 +0000

TORONTO, July 7, 2020 – What causes African hybrid honey bees (AHB), also known as killer bees, to be highly defensive and aggressive? 91��ɫ researchers have found it was the mixing of African and European genetics that led to hyper-aggression in this invasive strain of honey bees.

AHBs are a genetics experiment gone wrong. Researchers in Brazil imported a honey bee subspecies from South African and bred them with European-derived honey bees in the 1950s. The idea was to develop a better subtropical honey bee, but bees escaped and mated with the local bees.

“The resulting bees were highly invasive and aggressive, much more than the European honey bees used by North and South American beekeepers at the time,” says Associate Professor of the Faculty of Science, a co-author on the paper led by previous 91��ɫ PhD student , now an assistant professor at Purdue University. “The genetics causing this hyper defensiveness were not well known, but the prevailing wisdom was that killer bees are aggressive because South African bees are aggressive.”

Professor Amro Zayed in his Faculty of Science lab

The new AHB colonies rapidly reproduced and spread across, not only Brazil, but South America, Central America and, by 1990, the southern United States. Today, they have completely replaced the European-derived honey bee in Brazil and are the most common honey bee from Northern Argentina to the southern United States.

The research team measured the defence response of 116 Brazilian AHB colonies using the Suede Ball test (see by one of the researchers, Samir Kadri, a former 91��ɫ visiting PhD student from Brazil). A suede ball is gently swung for one minute in front of the colony entrance stimulating a defense response in the bees and encouraging additional bees to sting the ball.

“We sequenced the genomes of the most aggressive colonies, which would sting the ball 90 times or more per minute, and the least aggressive colonies,” says Harpur. “We then compared the genomes of the most and least aggressive colonies to identify mutations that associate with these differences in behaviour.”

“The most defensive colonies in our study were more related to South African honey bees except at several regions of their genome that influence aggression. Here, they were more related to honey bees from Western Europe,” says Zayed. “That is – it was the mixing of these two honey bee subspecies that led to hyper aggression.”

How DNA from these two subspecies interacts to influence defense response is an important next question.

The was published in the journal .

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Media Contact:

Sandra McLean, 91��ɫ Media Relations, 416-272-6317, sandramc@yorku.ca

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Scientists set to start $10M project to create health diagnosis tool for bees

roshanp — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 13:54:30 +0000

91��ɫ to develop ‘BeeCSI’ tool to help Canada’s rapidly declining honey bees

TORONTO, September 18, 2019 – When Canada’s honey bees are thriving, they produce honey and pollinate valuable crops like blueberries, apples and hybrid canola seeds.

But the health of honey bees is declining, with more than a quarter of honey bee colonies dying each winter. These deaths have left beekeepers and government regulators struggling to find ways to quickly diagnose, manage and improve bee health.

The solution could be a new bee health diagnosis tool being created as part of a research project led by bee genomics expert Associate Professor , of 91��ɫ, along with Professor Leonard Foster, of the University of British Columbia. On October 1, they will launch a $10 million project to develop a new health assessment and diagnosis platform, supported by Ontario Genomics and Genome Canada.

“We need to think of innovative solutions to fix the bee health crisis. The current tools are just not cutting it,” said Zayed in the Department of Biology, Faculty of Science.

Honey bees produce 90 million pounds of honey each year and are needed to pollinate some of Canada’s most lucrative crops. Their pollination services are valued at $5.5 billion per year in Canada alone.

The causes of bee decline are complex, variable, and difficult to identify. But beekeepers and government regulators need to rapidly identify the stressors impacting specific populations before they can make changes to improve bee health. Currently, the industry uses post-mortem analysis to test for the presence of a few known pathogens or toxins in dead colonies. These tests are often expensive, time consuming, and provide an incomplete picture of the stressors affecting bee health.

The research team is looking to modernize the industry by delivering a tool to quickly assess bee health in living colonies that would allow loss-mitigating strategies to be implemented.

“You can identify the stressors affecting a colony, not by searching for the stressor itself, but by looking for specific signatures of stress in the bee – what we call biomarkers,” explained Zayed. “The biomarker approach has a lot of potential for quickly screening stressors affecting bees before colonies decline.”

The researchers will use genomic tools to measure stressor-induced changes in bees to identify biomarkers for specific stressors. By the end of the project, the researchers envision a system where beekeepers can send their samples for biomarker testing and receive a report with both a health assessment and information on the most effective management strategies, which can then be applied in the field to improve the health of their colonies.

The research team is comprised of 22 researchers from across Canada including researchers from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), University of Manitoba, University of Guelph and University of Laval. The project is funded through Genome Canada’s Large-Scale Applied Research Project Competition: Genomics Solutions for Agriculture, Agri-food, Fisheries and Aquaculture. Funding partners include Genome Canada, AAFC, Genome British Columbia and Genome Quebec.

91��ɫ U's fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education.

Media Contact: Vanessa Thompson, 91��ɫ Media Relations, 647-654-9452, vthomps@yorku.ca

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Scientists set to start $10M project to create health diagnosis tool for bees

roshanp — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 13:54:30 +0000

91��ɫ to develop ‘BeeCSI’ tool to help Canada’s rapidly declining honey bees

TORONTO, September 18, 2019 – When Canada’s honey bees are thriving, they produce honey and pollinate valuable crops like blueberries, apples and hybrid canola seeds.

“We need to think of innovative solutions to fix the bee health crisis. The current tools are just not cutting it,” said Zayed in the Department of Biology, Faculty of Science.

The research team is looking to modernize the industry by delivering a tool to quickly assess bee health in living colonies that would allow loss-mitigating strategies to be implemented.

91��ɫ U's fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education.

Media Contact: Vanessa Thompson, 91��ɫ Media Relations, 647-654-9452, vthomps@yorku.ca

The post Scientists set to start $10M project to create health diagnosis tool for bees appeared first on News@91��ɫ.