Building a better Honeybee
August 24, 2015
From: Innovation Trail
By The Allegheny Front
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“No. 18, there,” Berta says, pointing to a queen with a little florescent yellow tag on it. “That little disc there with the ‘18’ on it, we call those our NASCAR bees because they have numbers on them.”
No. 18 is bit of a science experiment, funded with money from the USDA. This queen’s mother is from a Vermont colony that survived disease and cold winters. And then Berta had her artificially inseminated by Purdue University scientists who were raising bees that demonstrated a unique, mite-fighting grooming behavior.
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