KALAMAZOO, MI -- The hive sounds like simmering butter placed in a hot frying pan. A steady hum of bees buzzing fills the air as Larry Connor checks hive No. 2 for a queen.
"See this structure right here?" Connor, entomologist and bee expert, said. "That was where they produced their own queen."
He points to a peanut-sized cell poking out of the grid on a hive frame. There's one problem: The queen isn't there.
"Unless this queen did get out and mate, our colony is at risk," Connor said. "We will have to reconstitute the colony by taking bees and brood from one of the strong colonies."
Connor is part of a group at Western Michigan University looking for queen bees, eggs and any other signs of life in the hives. Students for a Sustainable Earth, a student organization at WMU added the first-ever beekeeping installment two weeks ago in an effort to expand sustainable efforts at the university and figure out why honeybees are disappearing from their nests.
Keeping healthy bees is important because one-third of the American diet, including fruits, vegetables, nuts and berries, comes from plants that are pollinated by bees, Connor said. Pollination fertilizes the plant to produce seeds.
"If we don't have honeybees, our diet changes considerably," Connor said. "We want to have healthy bees."
Researchers, which include any interested students, faculty
or staff at WMU, will learn about bee life and the problem of honeybee
Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), an unsolved phenomenon that causes worker bees
to flee the nest.
From 2006-2011, beekeepers reported a 33 percent loss of bees during the winter, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. One third of that loss was explained by CCD.
"If this were a multiple choice test we would check 'all of the above,'" Connor said of the bee die-off. "It seems to be a combination of: poor nutrition because of monoculture; seasonal changes, which are not new; a change in the genetics of the bee; the use of insecticides that have lethal effects on bees and also pathogens. It's a pretty complex mix of what's going on."
He said researchers have been pointing a lot of fingers at different causes. "They named just about everything except cell towers," Connor said.
The group is taking small steps toward studying CCD by starting with the basics, Connor said. Researching the lifestyle of honeybees is going to help keep them around.
"We want to do pollen research so we can actually bring some of the pollen samples back to the lab and see what plants they're visiting throughout the year," Weston Hillier, co-chair of Students for a Sustainable Earth. "I want to see what plants they like."
No experience is necessary to participate, so most of the
students involved in the research are beginners. The number of hours people are
available to commit to the hive determines whether they are a primary
researcher or a secondary researcher. Participants must be from WMU or with a
member of the WMU group to visit the hives. To become a part of the project, sign
up on SSE's website.
"There's a lot of stuff I'm not sure about because I've only been learning about bees for two months now," Hillier said. "I've been out here three or four times."
The research season will run from the last frost of spring to the beginning of winter. Members of the group are hoping to start a classroom learning environment and are in talks with the Department of Biological Sciences about getting lab time, Hillier said.
"The only person who has experience is Larry, our advisor," Hillier said. "He's actually teaching us out of his textbook too so we're taking a course on this."
Connor is also the owner of Wicwas Press, a publishing company
specializing in bee books and programs.
"When they talk about researching CCD, they're really talking about learning about bees," Connor said. "They'll certainly be advocates for bees."
Six wooden hives painted brown and gold, stand 3 feet high in the middle of an overgrown apple orchard field. Right now, Connor said there are 10,000 to 15,000 bees in each hive. He expects 50,000 to 70,000 bees in each hive when they're fully grown.
No, they won't sting.
A member of the group pours smoke over hive with a tin pitcher that looks like a watering can.
"It disrupts their pheromone sense so they can't communicate as well," Hillier said. "They're surprisingly docile."
In fact, there is a way to breed gentler bees, Connor said. The group purchased six "nukes," or nuclei, consisting of five frames, full of honey and bees, from a colony in the Southern U.S. The queens in each nuke are the daughters of queens that were mated through artificial insemination.
"These bees have been selected for low mite numbers," Connor said. "That's probably because of Colony Collapse Disorder."
The hives, located on Western Michigan University's property near the Asylum Lake Preserve, are the largest Student Sustainability Grant project funded through WMU's Student Sustainability Fee, a charge that students pay each semester.
"It's the first one that's over $10,000," said Hillier, co-author of the grant proposal. "We've had to go through a couple different jumps and loops that a lot of other people haven't."
Members of Students for a Sustainable Earth (SSE) originally lobbied for the $11,065 grant in April 2011, according to the Student Sustainability Grant Allocations Summary. However, the Student Sustainability Grant Allocations Committee rejected the proposal, asking for more supporting documentation, SSE's website said.
Hillier, along with grant co-author, Nicholas Wikar, wrote a successful grant that was passed in February 2013 by the SSG Allocations Committee after working closely with entomologist Connor, WMU's Office for Sustainability, the Department of Biological Sciences and Landscape Services. They also gained the support of WMU's student government, the Western Student Association. Read their resolution to WSA.
The group recently transplanted a queen cell, still in its pupil stage, to hive No. 2. Apparently, their queen bee had died and female worker bees were starting to lay eggs because of that, Connor said.
"If there's not a queen, the cool thing is that we can just take a larvae cell from one hive, put it in the other and a queen will hatch out," Connor said.
Meanwhile, a queen scurries along the pulsing frame of bees as Connor opens hive No. 1. The queen is easy to spot for her long silhouette and wasp-like body.
"Here's what you want to see," he said. "She moves like a son-of-a-gun."