LFS:UBC Farm Audio Tour Bees

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I'm Leonard Foster and I'm an associate professor in the Biochemistry department here at UBC. My research lab studies, among other things, the interactions between honey bees and some of the pathogens, or infectious diseases, that affect them. I think that there is a general awareness now of the importance of bees to agriculture and that recently there have been enormous die-offs of bees around the world. In Canada and the US beekeepers have lost an average of 1/3 of their colonies every winter for the past four years. This may seem like funny math since they should no longer have any bees but beekeepers can work very hard in the summers to expand their bee populations to make up for the losses but this is a lot of work and does not make them any money. Our research focus is to try to understand why the bees are dying and what we can do about the situation to prevent the losses. There is a parasitic mite called the Varroa mite that is easily the worst problem facing bees right now and the damage the mite inflicts is compounded by several viruses that the mite transmits between bees. We're hoping to develop tools for bee breeding that will allow breeders to select bees that have natural resistance to these diseases and in that way allow beekeepers to get away from the array of chemicals that they are now forced to use to control diseases in their bees