WASHINGTON — When her professor says it’s time, college student Gabby Discafani pumps the beehive smoker. The stainless-steel container exhales smoke that will calm the thousands of honeybees waiting in wooden boxes on the rooftop apiary (or bee hangout) at George Washington University. Soon they’ll be transferred into the eight empty hives.
Discafani leads a student bee research team overseen by biology professor Hartmut Doebel. Their goal? To see whether neonicotinoids, a type of chemical used to kill insects, are contributing to colony-collapse disorder. That is a deadly condition in which a colony of honeybees stops functioning. The disorder has caused more than 40 percent of the world’s honeybees to disappear.
That’s a serious problem, and not just for people who like bees. The U.S. Agriculture Department estimates that bees pollinate about 30 percent of our nation’s food.
“Bees are very, very important,” Doebel says. “If we don’t have pollinators, the flowers cannot grow from generation to generation, from year to year. We will lose the ability to grow many of our favorite fruits and vegetables.”
Discafani has been interested in the problem since middle school.
“When I was in sixth grade, my science teacher got upset when she first found out about the bees dying,” says Discafani, a 20-year-old student from New Jersey. “She asked us to write haiku poems about bees.”
That moment stuck with Discafani. When she saw a flier at George Washington about an opportunity to help with the bee research project, she volunteered.
Discafani helps run the program’s website, GWBuzz.com, which spreads awareness about the importance of honeybees. As a research assistant and senior beekeeper, she helps perform experiments and care for the bees.
On this sunny April day, five floors up on the roof of Bell Hall, Discafani pumps the smoke and then watches Doebel lightly spray the bees with sugar water to distract them during the transition from travel box to hive. Then it’s up to Discafani and the dozen or so other students to transfer the bees into the rest of the hives. They spray the next set of bees and then gently shake them into a hive. They transfer the queen bee — who was kept in a small box — and then reassemble the hive. Each hive can hold 60,000 bees.
Last year, one experiment Doebel and his students performed examined how neonicotinoids can hurt a bee’s memory.
“If they have above a certain level, the majority of the bees won’t ever find their way home,” says student research assistant Michelle Ahn, 19.
If a bee is confused or lost, it becomes vulnerable to disease and loses efficiency. Many bees suffering memory loss is a disaster for the species.
This year, Doebel and his students will examine how chemical substances affect the “waggle dance” — that’s when a bee vibrates its abdomen to communicate to the other bees the direction and distance to a food source.
Doebel hopes the team’s work will help save bees. He also hopes more people will learn about the plight of honeybees and admire and appreciate them instead of fear them.
