University of Illinois creates buzz with new center for bee research

URBANA, Ill. -- A newly opened research facility at the University of Illinois promises to create quite a buzz.

That would happen naturally at the UI's new million-dollar Bee Research Facility, which includes an apiary that can hold up to 50 hives of Western honeybees.

But the lab, part of the relocation of the UI's South Farms, also is likely to attract attention for research designed to shed new light on the roles of genes in social behavior.

With a complex social system that requires cooperation in the hive and in foraging for food outside it, bees are a good model for examining the topic. It's the focus of research by UI professors Gene Robinson and Charles Whitfield, who will occupy the new lab.

Bees aren't only social, they're pretty smart, too. That has created some challenges in moving them from the UI's old bee research facility to the new lab.

Robinson, an integrative biology professor in the UI Entomology Department, said bees have an "exquisite sense of place" and "spatial memory" that allows them to keep track of where their hives are located when they fly far afield for supplies.

Consequently, if they're moved within two miles or so of their former address, they inevitably return to the old location.

"The bees learn where they live by landmarks," said Robinson, who also directs the UI Neuroscience Program. "If they're moved within their home range, they get confused."

The new bee research facility is within two miles of the old one. So UI researchers have had to move their bees to other locations farther away in Champaign County for a while, until they forget where the old hives were or a new generation that never knew takes root.

Then they can be moved to the new lab, where they will reorient themselves naturally, Robinson said.

The UI started planning the 4,000-square-foot building, paid for with campus funds, two years ago. The researchers began moving in this summer and are completing the move over the next few months.

The old bee research facility was basically a retrofitted pole barn. The new one is larger and built for the research going on there.

For example, the building includes a lab for artificially inseminating queen bees, and a 500-square-foot indoor flight chamber that Robinson characterized as the finest of its kind in the world. The indoor chamber allows the researchers to work with genetically modified bees without danger of introducing them into the environment at large, as well as to work year-round.

Besides an indoor flight chamber and hives, the facility includes two, 2,000-square-foot screened enclosures outside that can be used for experiments and to maintain colonies of bees.

While it was conceived separately, the bee lab also dovetails with research being done in the UI's new Institute for Genomic Biology. Robinson is heading a project at the institute called BeeSpace, an effort to do the first complete analysis of which genes are on and off during the normal behavior of an animal, in this case, bees.