Scientists Follow Bees to Study Colony Survival

May 07, 2021

Millions of honey bees trek across America each year, pollinating almonds, apples, melons, and many more crops.

Trucked in great stacks of hives, bee colonies are dispersed across hundreds of miles. It’s very difficult for beekeepers to track the impact from pests, diseases, pesticides, and environmental factors at every location.

This spring, scientists at Washington State University are following the journey and inspecting hives to get a clearer picture of colony health across the annual cycle of pollination.

Pointing to queen
WSU scientists are inspecting honey bee hives to develop a better way to measure colony health and make beekeeping decisions.

Funded by a $1.1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service, the team is partnering with beekeepers to build a predictive model and decision aid system that helps manage and protect pollinators.

“We need better tools to reduce colony losses,” said Rae Olsson, co-lead investigator and postdoctoral researcher with WSU’s Department of Entomology. “Our project helps beekeepers plan and place their colonies for improved health and sustainability.”

Four threats to colony health

Pollination is vital to most fruit and seed crops, but the pollinators themselves face a tenuous existence: one recent study found 43% of managed bee colonies died from 2019 to 2020.

“Honey bee colony loss is commonly attributed to what we call the ‘Four Ps’: pesticide exposure, poor nutrition, parasites, and pathogens,” Olsson said.

On the move themselves, beekeepers often have a hard time tracking the location, health, and treatment of each colony. This can lead to overuse of chemicals and the buildup of pesticides.

Rae Olsson, post-doctoral researcher at WSU’s Department of Entomology, co-leads research into honey bee health and survival.

“Once a beekeeper puts colonies in an orchard for pollination, bees are really at the mercy of the farm’s practices, and those of neighboring farmers,” Olsson said. “If a nearby farmer sprays a pesticide that is harmful to bees, and wind blows residues toward the crop where bees are located, the bees could be harmed or killed.”

Chemicals aren’t the only threat. If weather is exceptionally rainy or cold, flowers won’t bloom, meaning less food for bees.

“Beekeepers are often dealing with one or more of these factors, and some of the additive effects are unknown,” Olsson said.

To understand the relationship between location, environment, threats, and survival, WSU scientists want to create a standardized metric of colony health.

Partnering with Washington state beekeepers and a private technology company called Nectar, the team will follow colonies throughout their pollination journey over three years, testing and ground-truthing pesticide exposures and the availability of food sources across the landscape.

Scientists have begun checking hives and collecting monthly data on environmental and colony health, including the health of the queen, number of bees, food levels, and disease symptoms. They are also sampling pollen stores for pesticide residues.

New tools for beekeepers

Bees close-up
A close-up of a queen and honey bees in an opened hive. Scientists will use personal inspections and technology to measure colony health.

Data will be used to create an overall score called Colony Health in Place and Season, or CHIPS, which will be used to develop a system that can predict and model colony health and survival. The system could tell a beekeeper if a given site and season will offer enough resources to sustain their bees.

“With colonies being constantly moved to new locations, there are many difficult-to-follow factors going back through the lifetime of the hive that may contribute to colony death,” Olsson said.

“Our technology could make things easier by allowing researchers to monitor thousands of hives remotely, and let beekeepers track their colonies in a streamlined way,” they added. “We’ll have a better understanding of how to keep hives healthy throughout the season.”

Additional partners in the research team include scientists at the WSU Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center at Mount Vernon, Portland-based Synergistic Pesticide Laboratory, and WSU’s Decision Aid System.

Source : wsu.edu

Video: Why Your Food Future Could be Trapped in a Seed Morgue

In a world of PowerPoint overload, Rex Bernardo stands out. No bullet points. No charts. No jargon. Just stories and photographs. At this year’s National Association for Plant Breeding conference on the Big Island of Hawaii, he stood before a room of peers — all experts in the science of seeds — and did something radical: he showed them images. He told them stories. And he asked them to remember not what they saw, but how they felt.

Bernardo, recipient of the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, has spent his career searching for the genetic treasures tucked inside what plant breeders call exotic germplasm — ancient, often wild genetic lines that hold secrets to resilience, taste, and traits we've forgotten to value.

But Bernardo didn’t always think this way.

“I worked in private industry for nearly a decade,” he recalls. “I remember one breeder saying, ‘We’re making new hybrids, but they’re basically the same genetics.’ That stuck with me. Where is the new diversity going to come from?”

For Bernardo, part of the answer lies in the world’s gene banks — vast vaults of seed samples collected from every corner of the globe. Yet, he says, many of these vaults have quietly become “seed morgues.” “Something goes in, but it never comes out,” he explains. “We need to start treating these collections like living investments, not museums of dead potential.”

That potential — and the barriers to unlocking it — are deeply personal for Bernardo. He’s wrestled with international policies that prevent access to valuable lines (like North Korean corn) and with the slow, painstaking science of transferring useful traits from wild relatives into elite lines that farmers can actually grow. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But he’s convinced that success starts not in the lab, but in the way we communicate.

“The fact sheet model isn’t cutting it anymore,” he says. “We hand out a paper about a new variety and think that’s enough. But stories? Plants you can see and touch? That’s what stays with people.”

Bernardo practices what he preaches. At the University of Minnesota, he helped launch a student-led breeding program that’s working to adapt leafy African vegetables for the Twin Cities’ African diaspora. The goal? Culturally relevant crops that mature in Minnesota’s shorter growing season — and can be regrown year after year.

“That’s real impact,” he says. “Helping people grow food that’s meaningful to them, not just what's commercially viable.”

He’s also brewed plant breeding into something more relatable — literally. Coffee and beer have become unexpected tools in his mission to make science accessible. His undergraduate course on coffee, for instance, connects the dots between genetics, geography, and culture. “Everyone drinks coffee,” he says. “It’s a conversation starter. It’s a gateway into plant science.”