Walter (Steve) Sheppard is one busy man, flying his own plane
around the Pacific Northwest to meet with beekeepers and deliver
queen-breeding stock produced in his honey bee breeding program to
beekeeper collaborators. He also travels to countries such as
Kazakhstan to study populations of honey bees from wild apple
forests that have the potential to be added to Washington State
University breeding stock. Over the years, he and his students have
bred bees to resist parasites and diseases, produce more honey, and
survive harsh winters better than their ancestors. He’s even bred
friendlier bees that are easier for beekeepers to work with.
Among the problems Sheppard is working on now is colony collapse
disorder, in which honey bees leave their hives and simply don’t
return. There are reports that the disorder has devastated
commercial bee operations in many parts of the country, although it
is still a rare occurrence in the Pacific Northwest.
Honey bee health is crucial to the nation’s farmers and fruit
growers, who rely on bees to pollinate crops such as apples,
cranberries, and watermelons. Together, honey-bee-pollinated crops
are worth more than $9 billion a year to the American economy.
Earlier this year we caught up with Prof. Sheppard while he and
his crew were bringing honey bees out of their winter hives and
distributing them into small mating hives where the new queens will
be produced over the summer. Sheppard talked with us about honey
bee health, his breeding program, and the research he’s doing to
try to pinpoint the cause of colony collapse disorder.
Sheppard directs the Apis Molecular Systematics Laboratory at
WSU. He was a member of the Honey Bee Genome Project, an
international consortium of scientists that earlier this year
published the complete DNA sequence of the honey bee, Apis
mellifera.
—Cherie Winner
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