As honey bee colonies across Canada continue to die off at alarming rates, scientists at York University believe that solutions to the problem could be hiding in the insects’ DNA.
In October, the university is launching a breakthrough project to help beekeepers diagnose their ailing colonies.
The goal is to fight back against a potential population decline that could devastate both the environment and Canada’s agriculture industries.
“We have a bee health crisis and we don’t really know how to improve it,” said Amro Zayed, an associate professor at York University and co-lead on the project.
Researchers estimate that Canada’s honey bees pollinate around $5.5 billion worth of crops every year, ranging from fruits and vegetables to canola seeds. They also produce 90 million pounds of honey annually.
But today, around 25 per cent of all honey bee colonies die each winter, around twice the rate that experts consider sustainable.
What’s more, the worsening colony deaths often mystify beekeepers, who can only explain symptoms of the decline, and not the root causes behind the deaths.
“When colonies die, often we’re kind of guessing at why they died,” Zayed told CBC Toronto.
Zayed and his team, which also includes experts at the University of British Columbia, say explanations for colony deaths could be found by examining the DNA of specific bee populations.
Examining that data could yield what genomics experts call “biomarkers,” signs of stress encoded in the honey bee genome that are effectively switched on or off by environmental factors.