Honey Bee Research in North Dakota by Michael Andree

Image by Mike Andree. This image depicts our standard for sampling honey bee colonies in an apiary in North Dakota. Pink pollen traps have already been installed on three hives, can you spot them? Also be sure to look for the clear Nalgene bottles we use to take alcohol samples of honey bees. The sample bottles are then shipped back to the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture to be tested by technicians for Varroa mites and the fungal spore Nosema. During our sampling trips bees are also collected and frozen on dry-ice in centrifuge for virus analysis at the Bee Research Lab in Beltsville, MD. In this image you can also see me taking notes on colonies in the apiary just before getting ready to do colony assessments. Colony assessments are used by the USDA Agricultural Research Service, headed by Dr. Jeff Pettis, to define strong and weak colonies amongst different apiaries. Together the colony assessments and the biological sampling gives Dr. Pettis and his team a better understanding of the true health of both individual colonies and apiaries as a whole.