Welcome to your new home, bees. These plucky pollinators will be living at the new African Reference Laboratory for Bee Health at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) in Nairobi, Kenya.
The lab, funded by the European Union, aims to prevent problems like colony collapse disorder from taking hold in Africa. It will also take stock of the remarkable diversity of bees on the continent, looking for species with undiscovered superpowers such as disease resistance.
Suresh Raina and his team from the ICIPE's Commercial Insects Programme have already found that East African honeybees seem unfazed by varroa mites and nosema fungus, which plague European honeybees. "By training researchers across Africa, we can find out what else is out there," says Raina.
In the photo above, a scientist is using a microscope to artificially inseminate a queen bee. The fiddly procedure requires the queen to be anaesthetised. Afterwards, she is introduced into a small colony with candy to lure nurse bees close to her. When they approach to chew on the sweets, the proximity allows them to exchange pheromones, helping them to accept their new queen. The technique allows researchers to control the origins of a hive over several generations.
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