3.      November Meeting

The November meeting will be at 7.30 p.m. on the 14th November at Shirehall. The speaker is Dr. Steve Martin, who is a member of the Animal & Plant Sciences Research Department at Sheffied University, which is the foremost bee research group in the country. He will be updating us on the latest findings to do with controlling varroa.

4.      Western Region RBI Report from Dave Sutton.

After the business items of the October AGM meeting were concluded, or RBI, Dave Sutton, gave us a report on some of the activities of the Inspection team this season. To date, in the Western Region, they have made 429 apiary visits and 1857 colonies have been inspected. No Shropshire colonies were found to harbour brood diseases, though AFB has been found in colonies in Wrexham. Given the concern over Colony Collapse Disorder this season, it was interesting to note that the number of colonies found to have died out over the winter comprised just over 11% of the total, which is more or less the same as last season (though this percentage has increased steadily since 2001). Honey sampling has been a regular feature of the Inspectors’ task with 120 samples being collected. Dave reminded us that we can no longer use PCB crystals (or mothballs) to kill off waxmoth in our stored frames. It has been found to create a very persistent and carcinogenic residue in wax. Even allowing the chemical to be stored in the vicinity of frames that are later used in the hive can cause the honey to be tainted with the taste and smell.

Increasingly the Inspectorate is being directed to prevention rather than cure, with an emphasis on providing training in disease recognition and good husbandry for beekeepers and tighter controls on the importation of goods that might lead to further pests and diseases becoming established. For example, we saw some statistics relating to the importation of queens - almost 2000 from EU countries (particularly Cyprus, Italy and Slovenia) and many more from outside the EU, e.g. 2000+ from Hawaii and almost 700 from New Zealand. All these imports have to be monitored and a significant sample inspected. Dave concluded his talk by describing the measures being taken to monitor imports of other goods that could lead to the accidental introduction of such apiary pests as the Small Hive Beetle. Airports, docks, zoos, fruit and vegetable markets and even some garden centres are being ‘risk-assessed’ and subjected to trial operations when the Inspectorate go through their plans for the containment and eradication of various threats to our beekeeping.

5.      How do Drones find Queens?

The mating ritual of the honey bee is a mysterious affair, occurring at dizzying heights in zones identifiable only to a queen and the horde of drones that court her. Now a research team led by the University of Illinois has identified an odorant receptor that allows male drones to find a queen in flight. The receptor, on the male antennae, can-detect an available queen up to 60 meters away. This is the first time an odorant receptor has been linked to a specific pheromone in honey bees.

The “queen substance,” or “queen retinue pheromone” was first identified decades ago, but scientists have only recently begun to understand its structure and role in the hive. The pheromone is a primary source of the queen’s authority. It is made up of eight components, one of which, 9-oxo-2-decenoic acid (9-aDA), attracts the drones during mating flights. It also draws workers to the queen and retards their reproductive growth. The principal investigator was Professor Hugh Robertson, a professor of entomology, who was among the research group that last year published the entire honey bee genome, a feat that allowed his lab to identify 170 odorant receptors in honey bees. Robertson and his colleagues knew that male drones probably had little use for most of these receptors. The drones don’t forage and so do not need to detect the subtle scents of flowers. Their social role within the hive is virtually non- existent. They have only one task: to find and mate with a queen. Once they have accomplished this, they die.

Researcher Kevin Wanner was able to determine which odorant receptors were more dominant in males than females. He found four receptors that were expressed in much higher quantities in males than females. He explained that “a neuron goes all the way from the receptor to the brain. Now the brain gets a signal that says, ‘I’ve smelled this chemical.’ If the chemical is 9-aDA, for the drone that means one thing and one thing only: ‘There’s a queen somewhere! Go get her!’” To identify which of the four primary receptors in males was actually responding to 9-ODA was a formidable challenge.

“That’s where we were very lucky,” Robertson said. By chance, at a conference on the science of olfaction, Wanner met Charles Luetje, a neuroscientist at the University of Miami who had expertise with precisely this type of problem. Luetje had perfected a technique for testing odor-sensing receptors to see which compounds activated them. When he heard of Wanner’s work in honey bees, Luetje offered to use this technique to test the four primary odor receptors of honey bee drones. After refining and testing the technique in insects, Luetje’s graduate student Andrew Nichols exposed each of the drone odorant receptors to 9-ODA. Only one of the four receptors responded. When it found 9-ODA, the protein receptor’s conformation changed in a measurable way. None of the four primary male odorant receptors responded to the other components of the queen pheromone. Only the 9-ODA elicited a response and then only in one of the four receptors.

“Scientists have spent decades exploring the mysteries of insect smell, but the newest tools make such research much more promising”, Professor Robertson said. “Like so many biologists, we are wonderfully caught up in the genomic revolution, which has opened up this black box of the molecular biology of insect smell. Finally now we can peer inside.”

The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A longer version was reported by Jemima Watson in The Scottish Beekeeper, October 2007.Committee Report.