Episode 115: Corinne Jordan from The Bee Lady Apiaries, QLD

Today’s very special guest on the Bees with Ben podcast is Corinne Jordan from The Bee Lady Apiaries (visit honeybeelady.com). Corinne founded this family-owned business in 2008 after initially researching beekeeping as a potential vocation for her son (who subsequently proved to be allergic to bee venom) and then developing a passion for honey bees herself! Located about halfway between Brisbane and the Gold Coast, at the mouth of the Logan River, she is blessed with near perfect weather and an extended beekeeping season. This suited her interest in breeding queens, and around 2012 she decided to refocus from honey production (with an apiary containing 50-100 hives) to selective breeding and queen production. In her ideal climate, queen breeding can take place just about all year round. Corinne says it takes determination, resilience, good record keeping and keen observational skills to be a successful queen breeder, as well as fine motor control, and that the bees must always come first. She says that it requires a lot of effort for little financial reward, but that the greatest rewards are derived through resultant stock improvements. She tells Ben that breeding is an evolving activity, since it is impossible to focus on a range of traits at any one time; she is currently working on resistance to chalkbrood and EFB. All her breeding is conducted by instrumental insemination. She catches the drones on their return from mating flights, then extracts the semen and inserts this into virgin queens that have been first anaesthetised with carbon dioxide. The queens generally start to lay just 5 days later. Corinne produces an average of about 150 queens per season, and still to this day struggles with introducing the artificially inseminated queens to their hives, as colonies often do not recognise them as they would a queen that has undergone a normal mating flight. In her short down season (usually between May to July), one of Corinne’s pastimes is to catch up on bee research around the world. It was in this way that she discovered the work of Dr Kaira Wagoner (of the University of North Carolina) on varroa sensitive hygiene. Essentially, this refers to the ability of some bees to detect the presence of the varroa mite in brood, whereupon they uncap the cells and remove infected larvae, thereby breaking the mites’ breeding cycle. One of the difficulties in selecting for varroa resistance in Australia has always been that we have had no active mite population, however, Corinne remained intrigued by the prospect of breeding resistant stock (she had been selecting for hygienic behaviour in general since 2014), in part since she was convinced that varroa would one day inevitably reach Australia. Dr Wagoner’s research identified elevated levels of 2 hydrocarbons in brood infected with varroa; she managed to synthesize these compounds and produce a spray which could be applied to brood capping. Bees which exhibit varroa sensitive hygiene (VSH) will recognise the odour of these chemicals just as if varroa was present and eliminate the brood accordingly. This is something of a game changer since it does not require the presence of the mites to test for VSH. Corinne subsequently reached out to Dr Wagoner and has been included in field tests for the spray. Initial tests indicate that about 4% of honey bee colonies exhibit VSH, however Corinne is now seeking funding for large-scale trials - she estimates it will cost about $250,000 for the first year, and has set up a special website for the project, beegenetics.com Corinne is well placed to conduct this research with a number of unique assets. She has a proven track record, insemination skills and an apiary with high quality stock. She has the support of industry groups as well as 'Flow' and will donate the resultant queens to raise further funds. If you are able to assist with this vital project, please head to beegenetics.com for further details.