Buzzing with excitement about summer project: Moscow teen, WSU professor conduct research on how pesticides affect honeybees

July 01--While many of her classmates are no doubt coating themselves in insect repellent as part of their summer vacation activities, Moscow High School student Sisi Cheng is immersed in research that could eventually benefit one of mankind's most useful six-legged partners -- the honeybee.

Cheng, who will be a senior at MHS this fall, is working with Washington State University Entomology Department Chairman Steve Sheppard to find out how pesticides affect the way hives of bees raise their queens. She prepared for this summer's work by researching honeybees during the school year for her Extended Learning Internship class at MHS.

At the root of her research is colony collapse disorder (CCD), which in recent years has resulted in the mysterious disappearance of worker bees from their hives. Cheng said scientists are still trying to find out the exact cause or causes of CCD, which is now a global problem that affects an already relatively fragile animal. She said even without CCD as a factor, a commercial beekeeper can expect about 10 percent of his or her hive to die off for various reasons.

"With CCD, the loss is considerably bigger," Cheng said. Widespread colony collapse won't mean the end of the world, she said, but it will have dire consequences for agriculture and the human food supply, not to mention the food chain in general.

"(Many plants) depend on the pollination of bees to actually produce fruit," she said.

Her research this summer will involve two hives -- one free of the influence of pesticides and another contaminated with trace amounts of dozens of commonly used agricultural chemicals. Sheppard described the pesticide levels as "sublethal" because they aren't strong enough to kill the bees, but they still negatively impact the bees' immune systems.

"If you're feeding a baby pesticides all the time, you're not getting the most healthy individual," he said. He and Cheng said pesticides build up over time in the bodies of feeding adult bees and in the wax brood combs that are used to raise new bees.

Cheng spent Wednesday at the WSU bee laboratory initiating the first step of her summer project, which involves molding "queen cells" from wax. She carefully stirred a heated pot filled with clumps of sticky, dark brown brood comb wax that had previously been home to growing bees in a hive. Once the wax was melted and separated from natural hive debris, Cheng used wooden sticks with rounded edges to mold the cooling, hardening wax into hollow cones. The cones are where her primary test subjects, the queen bees, will be grown.

"Queen bees are the same genetically as other bees, but their treatment makes them become queens," she said. Cheng said she will graft bee larvae into the wax cells and then place the cells in already-established hives that are missing queens. Because queens are necessary to produce additional, more expendable bees of lower hierarchies, young worker bees in the queen-less hives will work hard to ensure the new larvae develop into matriarchs.

"Young bees have really active glands that produce royal jelly, which is food for queens," Cheng said. Each hive has only one queen that mates with several male drones to replenish the hive's population. Bee larvae become sexually mature queens when they are fed a heavy diet of royal jelly, otherwise they become sterile female worker bees.

Cheng said she is beginning the hands-on portion of her bee research this summer because "queen rearing takes place around this time" of year. She said she hopes the experience will give her an advantage when she eventually applies to college, perhaps to study engineering or medicine at a top university like Stanford. But in the meantime, Cheng hopes to enter her eventually completed research in the upcoming Intermountain Science Symposium for high school students.

She said she's never been stung by a honeybee, and she's not scared to find out what it's like.

"I sort of understand them," she said. "They're bees -- they don't want to make you miserable. They only sting if you do something wrong."

Cheng said the queen-raising will last about a month, and then she'll be able to observe how each set of bees coped with pesticides or a lack thereof. Some pesticides actually kill mites that harm bees, so treating honeybees with insect-killers is a fine line to walk, Cheng said.

"It's sort of a sticky business," she said.

Holly Bowen can be reached at (208) 882-5561, ext. 239, or by e-mail at hbowen@dnews.com.

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