Bee organic

A $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture will enable a team of researchers — led by Penn State entomologists — to assess foraging patterns of honey bees on organic farms.

The aim is to create opportunities for beekeepers to produce certified-organic apiary products. Honey bees generate commercial products, such as honey and wax, which contribute more than $300 million to the US economy annually. According to the researchers, because of difficulties in meeting organic-certification requirements, beekeepers in the continental United States are typically unable to produce organic apiary products, despite their higher market value.

“Specifically, beekeepers can’t meet the pesticide-free zoning requirements, which call for maintaining at least a three-kilometre, pesticide-free radius around their colonies,” said project leader Margarita López-Uribe, Lorenzo L. Langstroth Early Career Professor and associate professor of entomology in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences.

“The three-kilometre zone was established based on maximum foraging distance of honey bees,” she explained. “But our preliminary data and published research indicate that honey bee foraging is context-dependent, and their range can be significantly smaller in smaller colonies and in those surrounded by high-quality landscapes.”

Honey bee movements will be tracked by employing automated tag readers and harmonic radar and the bees’ waggle dances, which honey bees perform to communicate the location of food sources to hive mates, will be decoded. This will help the researchers characterise foraging patterns in colonies of different population sizes and located in landscapes with varying characteristics and quality of floral resources.

Image credit: Robyn Underwood/Penn State

High-quality floral maps will be created around the apiaries based on satellite imagery, ground-based observations and pollen metabarcoding — which can identify genetic material from many plants in a single sample using rapid DNA sequencing. This will enable the team to develop a seasonal landscape quality index that can predict the estimated average foraging distances of the colonies in different landscapes.

“Our goal is to assess whether the recommendations for pesticide-free zones can be reduced based on empirical data that incorporates information about landscape quality and colony size,” said Robyn Underwood, Penn State Extension apiculture educator and a member of the research team.

Image credit: iStock.com/Onfokus