Wearing nothing but a plaid shirt and jeans, Charley Nye, lab manager of the University’s Bee Research Facility, toured the backyard of the property. Before him was a Styrofoam box; the buzzing of bees became louder and louder as he approached.

With the onset of spring, the ground he stepped on was lush and budding with dandelions, the early-season pollen source for the facility’s residents: honeybees.

“The year’s kind of ramping up right now,” Nye said. “(The bees) spend the winter clustered together in a tight little ball, warming each other up and slowly eating honey until spring comes and the flowers start blooming.”

The box is one of the facility’s man-made hives, and by July, it will be joined by many more boxes as the bee population in the facility increases.

But this increase doesn’t reflect the nationwide honeybee population, which saw a dramatic decrease this year, according to University researchers. They are using the facility to look into this decline through genetic research.

“This last year was a real shock,” said Gene Robinson, director of the Bee Research Facility and the Institute for Genomic Biology. “(The honeybee population) looked like it was getting better, the problem was getting less severe … it’s not yet clear what the problem was this year.”

Researchers have not yet found a specific cause of the decline, but May Berenbaum, head of the department of Entomology, said four different factors have been proposed as contributors to the decline.

“There’s pesticides, parasites and diseases, management practices, and nutritional factors,” Berenbaum said. “So we’ve got people working on most of the main hypotheses that are out there to account for bee decline.”

The Bee Research Facility is one place where University researchers can experiment and test these theories.

“The Bee Research Facility exists to support our research and make possible our research on honeybees,” Robinson said. “Our research on honeybees deals with a variety of topics that generally have to do with understanding the role of genes.”

Berenbaum said the main focus of the research is to determine the cause of the population decline.

“Identifying the causes opens up possibilities for treatment and prevention,” she said.

Researchers are also figuring out ways to preserve the bee population.

“There are new efforts to breed resistance, so people are taking a very different approach to the use of pesticides in the hive,” said Berenbaum, referring to a pesticide that protects bees from fatal disease. “There are efforts to breed bees that are resistant to mites, (and) there are efforts to find less toxic chemical alternatives for controlling mites.”

Robinson said the decline of the honeybee population is contributing to several problems throughout the U.S., including diminishing agricultural yields.

“It’s very dangerous for our economy because of pollination,” he said. “Honeybees account for one third of the food that we produce in this country every year, the value is about $20 billion per year to our economy. So the decline in bees, if it goes unchecked, could really have a serious disruptive effect.”

Bernbaum cited the almond industry as an example. Because of the decline of bees, almond growers have had to rent honeybee hives.

“The rental fees have skyrocketed,” said Berenbaum. “So of course, if it costs more to produce the crop, it’s going to cost more to buy the end product in the grocery store.”

Eleanor can be reached at [email protected].