SBIR-STTR Award

Honey bees are crucial for agriculture and serve as a model system for insect pollinatorecotoxicology. At the heart of a honey bee colony's health and productivity is a set of complex interactions among the workers and the queen determining egg production and the health of the queen's offspring. The bee health crisis demands that researchers be able to study these interactions and how they are influenced by nutrition pathogens parasites and pesticides. However progress in these areas has been stymied by the expensive time-consuming and seasonal nature of traditional apiculture and experimental techniques. Similar limitations also impact the screening of pesticides and other bioactive compounds on honey bee development creating a severe bottleneck for agrochemical businesses seeking to create pollinator safe pesticides. We have developed the Queen Monitoring Cage (QMC) a published and patent- pending system for maintaining and monitoring queen honey bees in the lab. This system allows for dozens or even hundreds of queens (each with a small retinue of 50-200 workers) to be housed in a single incubator or similar enclosure and easily observed for health and egg laying behavior. Eggs can be assayed via a removable plate system permitting researchers to quantify the impact of environmental factors on queen egg laying a process that would normally require the use of dozens of field colonies. QMCs also allow for eggs to be harvested year-round from a highly controlled environment for downstream applications such as studies on honey bee development or larval toxicology screening. The system thus has promise to facilitate basic and applied research in the academic government and industrial sectors. In Phase 1 we will 1) create a machine vision algorithm for the automated identification and assessment of eggs in egg laying plates 2) adapt the QMC system to existing techniques for the automated tracking of behaviors (including the exchange of food with the queen) and 3) create a semi-autonomous QMC thereby drastically decreasing maintenance time. These advances will drastically increase the throughput and scalability of the QMC system while enabling researchers to track mortality and egg laying linked to the flow of nutrients pathogens and other environmental factors through the worker bees and to the queen. We will optimize and rigorously test each component of this system to ensure it is robust reliable and highly effective. Once commercialized the QMC system will provide end-users with a series of cost- effective and high throughput solutions to increase the scale of queen and larval research by orders of magnitude while enabling entirely novel experimental paradigms. The availability of this technology will therefore have dramatic ramifications for the long-term health of honey bees and other insect pollinators. By facilitating research into how nutrition pathogens parasites pesticides and other factors impact queen honey bee health and fecundity and larval survival and development this system will help address priorities Strategic Goals 2 and 4 of the USDA's 2022-2026 Strategic Plan as well as goals in all of the five subject areas of the 2022USDA Annual Strategic Pollinator Priorities and Goals Report.