Queen of the bees

Susan Cobey examines a panel of bees. Sacramento Bee/Hector Amezcua

Susan Cobey holds a bee with a mite attached to it. Mites are suspects in last winter's massive honeybee die-off, which has spurred national interest in her work to breed stronger bees. Sacramento Bee/Hector Amezcua

Davis expert tries to breed tough critters

By Jim Downing - Bee Staff Writer

As a child in Lancaster County, Pa., Susan Cobey always liked creepy-crawly things.

"I just liked hanging out in the backyard catching bugs," she said.

But when she finished college at the University of Delaware in 1976 with a degree in entomology, she found that most job prospects involved finding ways to slay bugs, not cherish them. Except one: beekeeping.

"It was the one place I could propagate instead of kill," she said.

And propagate she has. Over the last 30 years, Cobey has become a world leader in the obscure realm of bee fertility. The University of California, Davis, hired her in May to lead a new bee breeding program.

By some accounts, she's the world's top bee inseminator: By hand, one bee at a time, she vacuums tiny drops of sperm from drones and inserts them into queens. The goal, as in any livestock breeding program, is to create a better bee.

"She has trained probably more people ... in that technique than anyone alive," said Gloria Degrandi-Hoffman, research leader of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's bee research center in Tucson, Ariz. "She is the world authority."

But as Cobey won renown in bee circles, her painstaking and solitary work, along with that of the bee industry as a whole, drew little attention from the wider world.

Until last winter.

As news reports across the country told of an unprecedented honeybee die-off, the result of the still ill-defined "colony collapse disorder," Cobey's skills suddenly seemed to offer a potential solution to a national crisis. Even TV crews from San Francisco captured her first days on the UC Davis campus.

"It's been a bit overwhelming -- I think the reason I chose bees in the first place was that I'm kind of shy," she said. "But it's been good. We've been working as an invisible industry, and I think the importance of bees is finally getting recognized."

The nation's 2.4 million commercial beehives help to produce nearly one-third of our food. Last winter a quarter of those hives died, with many keepers losing 80 percent to 90 percent of their stock, according to the USDA.

No single cause has been linked to the collapse. Many beekeepers and scientists, including Cobey, suspect it is at least partly the result of chronic infestations of blood-sucking mites, combined with the regimen of pesticides, antibiotics and feed supplements that keepers now employ to keep their hives alive as they are trucked around the country to pollinate crops.

"I think we've been pretty good at propagating what I call 'welfare bees' that can't take care of themselves," she said.

Cobey doesn't imagine she'll be able to breed some sort of superbee, though she's optimistic about the prospects for incremental gains.

Until the late 1980s, hardly anybody worried much about bees' genetic makeup. Then came Varroa destructor, a mite originally from Asia that feasts on bee larvae in the hive and even nibbles on adult bees. The European honeybees that make up most U.S. hives had virtually no natural defenses against the mite.

Since then, both wild and commercial honeybee populations have dropped. At the same time, the demand for bee pollination services has shot up, thanks largely to the expanding acreage of California almonds. Last winter, California almond farmers alone hired roughly 1.3 million hives at nearly $150 apiece -- three times the price of a decade earlier.

But while beekeepers' revenue has grown in the post-mite era, so have the costs and headaches of keeping bees.

"Thirty years ago, you could put the bees away in October and not look at 'em until January," said John Foster, 49, a lifelong beekeeper in Esparto.

Now, he said, his 14,000 beehives require 365-day surveillance.

"I dream about them all the time. I have nightmares about mites," he said. "The thing that gets me is that we haven't been able to find a mite-resistant bee."

That's where Cobey may be able to help.

For a bee, battling mites involves at least two hygienic behavior traits: the ability to smell out the invaders and the gumption to attack and kill them. Both traits are important, but they don't appear to be genetically linked.