Russian Honey Bee Project Cooperators

The scope of the Russian honey bee trials is large, involving several cooperators. There are two reasons for needing these cooperators. First, the trials require more honey bee colonies than the laboratory can possibly maintain on its own. Each year the tests require more than 500 colonies of honey bees. Second, in order to produce a stock of commercially valuable honey bees, tests need to be conducted in several different beekeeping environments so that lines selected for inclusion into the program are known to have value in more than one location.

Our cooperators are very patient with the peculiar needs of researchers. We need to do things to the test colonies that are not necessarily helpful to them. We sometimes need to work them to the bottom board during a nectar flow. We almost always need to have colonies that have varroa mites and sometimes we need to let control colonies die or almost die in order to get good test data. Our cooperators are incredibly patient and tolerant of requests that go against common beekeeping good sense, sometimes harm their colonies, even causing some to die, and almost always reducing their honey production. These cooperators are essential to our breeding program. It would be far less effective without them.

http://www.russianbreeder.org/coop.htm