UCO Studies Honeybees to Detect Agricultural Threats

A University of Central Oklahoma research team is examining the use of honey bees to detect pathogens that can negatively impact crops in order to strengthen the agricultural biosecurity of the United States.

It’s part of an effort to increase agricultural biosecurity, protecting farms from pests, pathogens, and contamination that can devastate crops and livestock.

After the anthrax attacks, the biggest bioterrorism attack in U.S. history, when letters were sent in the mail laced with anthrax that killed five people, there was an assessment on what the other bioterrorism targets could be, and agriculture was identified as one.

James Creecy, Ph.D., member of the research team, and the assistant director and dean of UCO’s W. Roger Webb Forensic Science Institute, said that the honey bees are a “surveillance technique… they’re constantly coming and going, they’re…bringing back samples to the hives.” 

The research team checks the hives every two weeks and starts to form a baseline of the area’s environmental bacteria by sequencing the DNA of the samples to find fungus and bacteria, says Creecy.

“The interesting question,” says Creecy, ” is if the baseline changes, how fast can we recognize this change and go out into the field and help… before it starts to become a big thing.”

The research team uses honey bees due to the high number of individuals in a hive and their central location that they come back to; across Edmond and Oklahoma City, there are nine hives, but students only manage the three that are located on UCO’s campus.

If the honey bees were to become tools for early detection of fungal and bacterial pathogens, Creecy says that it would look a lot like the Centers for Disease Control. The teams in normal circumstances would constantly monitor and wouldn’t have to do anything, but they would be able to identify where the pathogens are coming from and “start to handle it while it’s small.”

Creecy says the research is possible from the $300,000 grant that he and John Barthell, Ph.D., a member of the research team, wrote together, submitted, and got selected for approval from the U.S Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, a department part of the USDA that funds and supports research, education, and solutions to problems that are affecting agriculture. 

This research also supports the effort from UCO to raise UCO’s Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education from “Research Colleges and Universities” to R2, “Doctoral Universities: High Research Activity.”

So far, UCO has one of the two requirements to get the upgrade; UCO spends over seven million dollars on research, two million over the requirement, according to Carnegie’s Classification website. The only requirement left for UCO to achieve is to award 20 research doctorates annually, according to the Carnegie Classification website.

UCO provides only two doctoral degrees so far: the Doctor of Science in forensic science and the Doctor of Education. With the limited doctoral programs, UCO is investing more in research, like this one, to produce more doctoral graduates.

If UCO gets to R2, then there is the “benefit of recognition of doing high-level research on campus,” says Creecy.