Advanced genomic tools
Their research is taking place at the University of British Columbia and it’s spearheaded by molecular biologist Professor Leonard Foster and his peer from York University in Toronto, the environmental scientist and biologist, Dr. Amro Zayed. The grant they’ve received to conduct their work comes from both government and industry.
The aim of the two is to create advanced genomic tools that will enable them to selectively breed honeybees that can survive the diseases and pests they encounter in Canada, and the cold temperatures prevalent in some parts of the country.
The project will look at some 1,000 Canadian honeybee colonies and identify the traits that best enable a honeybee to survive in Canada and work to ensure that bees with those traits are the ones which are bred.
“We are not genetically modifying bees,” said Foster. “We are looking at the diversity of honeybees to design tools that will allow us to pick the bees that will better resist diseases and pests.”
Breeding better bees
Each year a large percentage of honeybees in Canada die off — it has been as high as 80 percent — requiring importing queens and bee colonies from the U.S. and other countries. That can lead to importing other bee diseases.
A further concern, the researchers say, is that invasive species of bees could be inadvertently imported, such as the Africanized honeybee.
Breeding Bees: Scientists aiming to improve the Canadian honeybee pic.twitter.com/r0LXVixprN
— Digital Journal (@digitaljournal) November 7, 2015
Canadian beekeepers would like to be able to have a native population of bees that survive, eliminating the need to increase their numbers by bringing in bees from elsewhere.
Foster and Zayed are hoping that their work will help them to breed bees suited to Canada decades quicker than it could have been done by more traditional methods of selective breeding.
Honeybees and other bees play a major role in food production via insect pollination.
