Think of it as a sperm bank for honey bees. That is essentially what you’ll find at Washington State University’s apiary lab. There’s even a “fertility clinic” where researchers artificially inseminate the queens.
If all that sounds like sticky business, try explaining it to a customs agent at the airport.
Once a year, researchers bring the sperm home in metal canisters full of liquid nitrogen to keep it frozen. They fly it in from far-flung places like Kazakhstan. This delicate work is all about improving the genetic diversity of the species – making sure honey bees adapt to changes in the environment. There’s been a ban on importing bees and their semen since the '20s, because they aren’t native. But WSU has a special permit. It's hands-on work, and not as difficult as you might think, given the males don’t have stingers.
“You just squeeze them, basically and out pops the tiny little drop of semen And then we collect that with a syringe under a microscope and so we just do that over and over and over again until we have 200, 300 microliters of semen, ” said associate researcher Brandon Hopkins.
That’s just about a couple drops of liquid. The donor bee dies, but it works the same way during the natural process of mating; when drones mate with virgin queens in nature they also die from the event.
The university is raising money to build a bigger facility where they’ll continue to diversify the honeybee gene pool. That will ensure there’s enough pollinators for crops such almonds, apples and cherries.
