People fear their sting and love their honey, but bees have more to offer than just a sweet treat.
Created in 1990, the Rothenbuhler Honeybee Research Laboratory manages over 4 million bees for its research.
The lab studies the olfactory function, or sense of smell, said Kevin Daly, a post-doctoral associate at the lab.
The olfactory function is how the nervous system handles odor information.
“From a practical perspective, we believe that studying insect olfaction, for example, can provide information about human olfaction,” Daly said.
The systems of smell in humans and insects are very similar in design.
“Structurally, they have the same patterns of brain mass and architecture,” Daly said.
Bees learn about their environments either visually or through sense of smell and can identify certain flowers, odors and colors, he said.
One way in which tests are done is putting an insect in restraints and then training it with an odor.
“We can ask questions about how odor is being perceived by changing the odors in the test phase,” Daly said.
Although it started out as strictly a bee lab, bees now represent only a fraction of the insect population; research is now done on other invertebrates including moths, fruit flies and crayfish, he said.
Different insects were added to the testing because if the same results can be rendered in several species than the testing is more sound, said Geraldine Wright, a post-doctorate fellow in mathematics and biological sciences institute. Fruit flies are easier to use in genetic studies and moths, because they are larger, and better for physiology studies.
Research with moths has also turned out interesting results.
“We built a bomb detector,” Daly said. “You can train animals, like moths, to respond to odors that are signatures of explosives.”
The device, funded by the Department of Defense, passes air through a chamber in which moths are placed. When the correct smell, such as plastic explosives, passes through, the moths react and alert people of explosive materials, Daly said.
The lab turned from strictly insects to include crayfish because there are a relatively large number of other labs focusing on the study of crayfish and spiny lobsters and the sense of smell of these marine animals, Daly said.
“We interact with those labs and we’ve developed techniques that they’re trying to use,” he said.
A selective breeding program takes laboratory staff into international realms.
Susan Cobey is the apiculturist, or beekeeper, at the lab and she teaches artificial insemination of queen bees.
Her work has taken her to Central and South America and South Africa and Egypt.
Selective breeding is important to many nations because bees are needed for pollination in croplands. By carefully breeding bees, diseases can be avoided in the bee population.
“The concerns are mostly with defensive Africanized bees and parasitic mites,” Cobey said.
Working with invertebrates provides the lab with more freedom and opportunity. Insects can be used just like a rat or monkey is used in the medical school.
“We can answer basic research questions about the nature of olfactory processing about humans by studying animals, and in this case they are insects, but it works the same,” Daly said.
There are no regulations on testing using invertebrates at the university or anywhere in the nation, as there are with vertebrate animals.
“It makes them a very inexpensive alternative,” Daly said. “It provides a huge advantage to us in terms of time and resources.”
The laboratory is named for the late Ohio State professor Walter C. Rothenbuhler, the first to find that genetics can be the base for behavioral traits in animals and insects.
