The Atlantic Tech Transfer Team for Apiculture has been busy this past summer conducting research in apiaries, wild blueberry fields and within our own lab facilities. Our projects have largely focused on supporting the pollination industry and on honey bee health. Read this week’s blog for a brief summary of our main projects from summer 2024.
Summary of ATTTA Summer Field Work 2024
ATTTA Regional
Varroa Mite Survey
This summer ATTTA
has been conducting a regional Varroa mite survey involving 23 different
beekeepers from New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. These
beekeepers represent a significant portion of Maritime beekeeping operations.
The survey is intended to broadly sample across the Maritime region. Those who
participate have been asked to provide ATTTA with 3 samples of approximately
300 honey bees 3 times throughout this beekeeping season (prior to pollination,
after pollination and late season). Samples were only taken from commercial
beekeepers who use their colonies for wild blueberry pollination. The survey
has several main goals, including determine Varroa mite levels across the
region at three important time points during the current season; collect Varroa
mites for miticide efficacy testing; establish temporal measurements for annual
comparison of Varroa burden for the Maritime region; and create a stored bank
of samples for possible future testing (e.g. tracheal mite). In next week’s blog
we will provide details of the results of the survey to date.
Pollination
Efficiencies for Wild Blueberry Production
ATTTA has a
continued goal of supporting the wild blueberry pollination industry. This year
ATTTA had three projects that focused on assessing wild blueberry bloom, and the
requirements (timing and stocking density) of pollination units. The first
project involved assessing wild blueberry bloom during the months of May and
June. The aim of this project is the creation of a growing degree day bloom
model, using local weather stations, to better predict the timing for placement
of pollination units. An original GDD model of wild blueberry bloom was based
on a single field and across one season (White et al., 2012). At the time of publication, the authors
recommended the need for additional data sets to be collected, throughout the
region. This improved model will also include the endodormancy and ecodormancy
requirements of the wild blueberry plant to establish a starting point for GDD
modeling. This is now the second year of
this three-year collaborative project with Dalhousie University and ATTTA. The second project involved assessments of
sprout year fields. The goal of the project is to assess how early in the year
floral and leaf buds can be distinguished, and how early accurate bud counts
can be achieved. This will help to determine the crop year floral density as a
predictor of pollination requirements. The hope is to support blueberry
producers and beekeepers through a better understanding of bloom as one
component of a predictive model determining the demand for pollination
services. Finally, ATTTA followed up on
a study from 2022, that assessed sequential loading of honey bee units on wild
blueberry fields. This study will validate the previous work by repeating the
2022 trial on limited number of fields with are reversal of the control and
treatment groups. ATTTA will be
reporting on all wild blueberry pollination work in the months to come.
Queen
Rearing
The ATTTA
team has slowly started to resume rearing queens for research purposes. This
summer we focused on building up colony numbers, as any queen producer knows it
takes an abundance of bees and resources to raise queens. A member of our team
received specialized training to learn how to raise queens on a large
commercial scale, and ATTTA has plans to resume research on outdoor
overwintering of banked queens starting next season.
Bumble
Bee Captive Breeding and Overwintering
The final project
to discuss is ATTTA’s work involving captive breeding, housing and
overwintering Bombus impatiens. As a continuation from last year’s trials,
the ATTTA team captively bred Bombus impatiens queens on a weekly basis
throughout July and August. After mating, queens were cared for daily in
ATTTA’s indoor facility. Each queen was kept in a temperature-controlled
environment and fed both pollen and sugar water. The team also exposed each
queen to the needed conditions to stimulate her to start producing brood. These
conditions included a small amount of carbon dioxide exposure and a low
temperature environment for a period of time. The intention of the project is
to now manage these queens into the winter months. There were multiple
objectives to meet throughout this project, including: evaluating the
percentage of queens that artificially mate: assess if mated queens will
produce honey cups, eggs and larvae; assess the timeline of colony build-up;
determine the time a mated queen will survive in simulated diapause; and
determine if queens will survive diapause long term (i.e. through the winter).
Overall, this project allows
the team to gain a deeper insight into these important pollinators and to
better support producers relying on insect pollination.
References
White, S.N.,
Boyd, N.S. and Van Acker, R.C. 2012. Growing degree-day models for predicting
lowbush blueberry (Vaccinium angustifolium Ait.) ramet emergence, tip dieback,
and flowering in Nova Scotia, Canada. HortScience, 47(8), pp.1014-1021.
Connecting with ATTTA Specialists