What’s the Buzz About Bees and Other Pollinators?

From June 22 through 28 (National Pollinator Week), many organizations are conducting events and activities to raise awareness about the 75 percent of all flowering plants that rely on more than 200,000 species of animal “pollinators” – hummingbirds, bats, small mammals, beetles, bees, ants, wasps, butterflies and moths.

Biologist Russell Vreeland, director of the Ancient Biomaterials Institute at West Chester University, frames the issue dramatically. “Every third bite of food you take involved pollination at some stage,” he said. “And pollinators are in trouble. We are constantly expanding our suburbs, making parking lots and destroying the native plants that they depend on.”

Because pollinators are so critical to our food chain, scientists have been trying to understand what is wrong in the bee, bat and other colonies that are collapsing. A beekeeper himself, Vreeland too­­­­k a different approach and that has led to a national study. Working with researchers from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), he turned his attention from what was wrong with the colonies to what should be right. “What would constitute the perfect condition of a bee hive?” he asked. “What would the bees like to have?”

A key component of hive health is “bee bread” – pollen that has been collected by bees, inoculated by them with groups of organisms (whose origins are still mysterious), and fermented over a period of time. Bees eat bee bread, feed it to each other, and coat their offspring with it. Highly acidic, it has proven to protect bees and their hives from many intruders that cannot tolerate an acidic environment.

From Vreeland’s perspective the question became, “What would go into making perfect bee bread?” There’s just one problem: “Because of the pesticides and other substances we throw on our planet, there really are no pure samples.”

Vreeland and the University’s Ancient Biomaterials Institute are in a unique position to help. In his highly specialized, sterile laboratory, organic material that is thousands – even millions – of years old can be analyzed without contamination. He can extract and type DNA that is truly ancient. In fact, there is a microorganism growing in his laboratory right now that was salvaged from a 250 million-year-old salt crystal.

Vreeland is joined in the bee research by Diana Sammataro, Carl Hayden, and Gloria Degrandi-Hoffman from USDA, which has also provided some funding for this project.

Using his contacts, Vreeland located 3,000-year-old bee hives in Israel and is working with the USDA and other government agencies to acquire samples of the hives. Because they pre-date the chemicals used in modern agriculture, Vreeland hopes they will yield that sample that will tell scientists exactly what goes into an optimum, healthy hive.

“From analyzing these samples,” he says, “I think we will be able to say, ‘Here is exactly what bees want!’”

Russell Vreeland is one of the first scientists to find biomaterials in ancient rocks. He isolated the two oldest living microbes (aged 250 and 125 million years) and the world’s oldest DNA (412 million years). His designs for procedures to extract biomaterials from minute samples ensure contamination probability of less than one in one billion. Vreeland is celebrating his 20th year with West Chester University.