Location: Bee Research Laboratory
Project Number: 8042-30500-002-000-D
Project Type: In-House Appropriated
Start Date: Mar 4, 2025
End Date: Mar 3, 2030
Objective:
Objective 1: Develop improved diagnostic, delivery systems, and genetic resources, including the deployment of genomic tools, to monitor and mitigate key threats to honey bees and other pollinators. (NP305, C2, PS2A, PS2B and PS2C).
Subobjective 1.A: Create internal and public interfaces for the Disease Diagnostic Service.
Subobjective 1B: Develop genetic traits and field diagnostics.
Subobjective 1C. Conduct metagenomic analysis on viral communities across different ecological settings to unravel how viral pathogens emerge, spread, and evolve on the population scale.
Objective 2: Provide novel management solutions to reduce the impacts of mites and other bee diseases and disorders, maximizing pollination services and honey production. (NP305, C2, PS2A and PS2B).
Subobjective 2.A: Develop novel treatments to improve health.
Subobjective 2.B: Develop natural products as honey bee medicines.
Subobjective 2.C: Develop AI and gene-based immune and disease treatments.
Subobjective 2.D: Develop host-based therapeutics for bee diseases.
Objective 3: Improve colony health, performance, and overwintering success through mitigating interactions between nutrition, microbes, chemical stress, physiology, seasonal behavior, and diseases. (NP305, C2, PS2A and PS2B).
Subobjective 3.A. Reduce impacts of poor nutrition and pests.
Subobjective3.B: Develop seasonal diets for colony growth and overwinter survival.
Subobjective 3C: Determine interactions between hosts and pests/pathogens over winter and effects of temperature anomalies due to climate change on pest/pathogen populations.
Subobjective 3.D: Exploit interactions between nutrition and metabolites from beneficial microorganisms.
Subobjective 3. E: Identify bee responses to climate.
Objective 4: Identify key causes of honey bee queen failure and develop therapeutic measures to improve queen quality and colony survivorship. (NP305, C2, PS2A and PS2B).
Subobjective 4.A: Improve queen nutrition and reproductive health.
Subobjective 4.B: Identify effects of biotic stressors on queen attractiveness and secretion of volatile and non-volatile organic compounds.
Subobjective 4.C: Monitor disease and genetic diversity within operations of major U.S. queen breeders and suppliers.
Approach:
The Project will develop and deploy novel strategies for identifying key disease factors, developing epidemiological tools for predicting disease, and management suggestions. The former will involve thousands of samples received by the Bee Disease Diagnostics Service, which will be analyzed for mites and nosema as well as brood disease. Data from this service will be vetted with help from a decades-old database to identify trends and signals of colony challenges. Epidemiology work will involve regular surveys of disease, triage collections from loss events for commercial beekeepers, and experimental verification of disease pathology in the lab.
For the objectives involved with the development of new mite and disease treatments, candidates will be identified from the literature, through AI-based screens, and other means in-house, then tested in laboratory cages or vial trials for efficacy and safety before long-term field trials.
Colony-level and queen health studies will be carried out primarily in field apiaries. For queen health, a laboratory component will include mitochondrial and genomic analyses of queen genetic traits, along with biomarkers for queen health. Colony health experiments will look at nutrition and colony stressors, seeking and testing better nutritional supplements and management techniques, especially with measurements of colony overwinter survival.
