Bee-yond the microscope: following our samples to the lab
Posted onJuly 15, 2025byParker Smale|Bumble Bee Recovery, Bumble Bees, Native Pollinator Initiative, News and Events, Pollinators, Yellow Banded BumblebeeBee sample (Photo: P. Smale)
What is the Bumble Bee Recovery Program? Since the 1990s, bumble bee numbers have been plummeting, and that spells ecological disaster. Ninety per cent of all flowering plants — including most of the fruits and vegetables in your fridge — need these pollinators in order to reproduce.
Until the causes of these declines can be reversed, conservation breeding and reintroduction is the only way to safeguard at-risk bumble bees. Today, WPC is the only organization in Canada rebuilding wild bee populations through conservation breeding. Thanks to recent breakthroughs, we’ve figured out how to dramatically increase the number of queens we produce. Once they’re released into the wild, they can establish their own colonies, producing hundreds of pollinators to sustain the ecosystems around them.
My job as I put it to curious friends and family members, is to take a small number of at-risk bumble bees, and turn them into a large number of bumble bees. Since the Bumble Bee Recovery Program’s goal is to increase the size of wild bumble bee populations through re-releases… this very rarely requires a microscope or pipettes, barring some of our fecal sampling efforts.
Usually, we let the Schroeder Lab at the University of Minnesota take care of the “nitty gritty” work – each year, we take some of the bees that died throughout the season and send them off to Dr. Schroeder’s lab, where he and his team run RNA sequencing on them, providing us with important information on bee health and possible pathogens and parasites in our bees. This year, we did something different: in March, I flew down to the Twin Cities myself to learn more about how we go from bee to spreadsheet.
Although I am a biologist, the lab I work in is not what people usually imagine when they think of a science lab. There are no flasks of chemicals, no safety goggles, no lab coats. There is a microscope and a couple of pipettes, but we only got those last year, and they’re kept in a different building. What we have instead is a balmy (swampy) climate, soft buzzing in the background, and some mood lighting: since insects can’t see red light, the lab is lit by red bulbs and headlamps that bring a definite “Dr. Frankenstein” vibe to the space. Much to my dismay, I’ve been told my request for a lever I can pull during thunderstorms to reanimate (bee) corpses is “out of budget” and “unethical.”
Dr. Declan Schroeder’s lab, housed in the labyrinthine Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at the St. Paul campus of University of Minnesota, better fits the stereotype of a modern science lab. The first thing we do upon stepping into the bright, white and chrome lab is locate some spare lab coats – something I haven’t worn since first-year chemistry labs at university. The ultra-sterile environment makes sense, as the lab specializes in virology, most recently focusing on viruses in the agricultural sector: honey bees and pigs. An errant aerosolized molecule could shut down an apiary (probably). To prevent such tragedies from occurring, almost all of our work takes place inside two six-foot-long biosafety cabinets. With sliding glass sashes and some kind of vacuum technology, they use constant airflow and filtration to prevent any airborne particles from contaminating the equipment or liquids we’re working with. The first step of said work? Making “bee soup.”
Recipe for “bee soup”
Ingredients:
1 queen bee (B. terricola or B. ternarius)
3-6 ml of reagent, to allow for easy movement of solids
Instructions:
- Add ingredients to fancy, scientific blender
- Press “Go”
As stated previously, in the Bumble Bee Conservation Lab, our job is to keep the bees alive, but a part of the bumble bee colony’s life cycle does include natural die off. Queen bees only live for about one year, and after they have died, the only way to get that sweet, sweet RNA out of them is to break them down. After some physical (and chemical!) breakdown, the rest of the process is adding and removing various chemical reagents in order to isolate that RNA from the rest of the stuff floating around in the soup.
It’s amazing how different the two sides of our work are. When I go to the lab and look at a shelf of bee colonies, I can get a feel for how well each colony or queen is doing without even taking them off the shelf: healthy colonies are warm, buzzing with workers. Even before workers emerge, and each colony is only a single queen, I can glean some information from her activity level, how much she’s eaten, and her behaviour. Looking down at the plate we’ve prepared, there’s virtually no difference between the 96 wells: each one looks like it contains a drop of water, but really contains the genetic information from a single bee or fecal sample. It is only at the end of the process, when Clarissa generated charts and charts in the sequencing software, that I remember what we were doing all this for: the bees!
Earlier on in the process, you could at least tell that some samples were from bee bodies (darker in colour) and some were from fecal samples (more clear/lighter in colour). But by the end, each well was just clear liquid. Photo by Parker Smale.
On that note, being able to see how all this molecular biology research works, helps me better understand how to choose samples to keep and send off, as well as best practices in the storage and preparation of the samples in a way that will make things easier for the lab team that will be dealing with them.
Equally, the other side of things, it was helpful to have time with the Schroeder team to explain more about our lab and what we’re looking for in our samples, which helps them better understand how to interpret ambiguous results as well as what kind of reporting is best for our team on the receiving end.
Utilizing molecular biology in conservation is more important than ever. For us, this means sending off dead bees to see if they have diseases. For others, it might look like using blood samples to estimate the genetic diversity of a population, using eDNA to gather information on species abundance and biodiversity at a site, or even identifying the source of illegally-traded animals and animal products. All of that is important! Technology keeps on advancing, and we should use it just as much for good as it’s used for evil!
Parker Smale
Lead Bumble Bee Breeding Technician – Bumble Bee Recovery Program
Parker came to WPC with a built-in passion for conservation breeding after experience rearing many types of insects. As the lead technician for WPC’s bumble bee breeding program, he specialized in data wrangling, pollen chefery, and entomological match-making. Now, as the program’s lab biologist, his focus is on refining rearing methods to improve conservation breeding outcomes: most recently, his work has contributed to the lab’s first successful yellow-banded bumble bee mating!
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