Hygienic Behaviour Training Workshops at the University of Sussex

摘要

For a number of years, the team at the Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects at the University of Sussex (LASI) have been working on a project to enhance naturally occurring "hygienic behaviour" in the Dark European honey bee Apis mellifera mellifera for tolerance to Varroa destructor1'23'4. A number of methods of assessing hygienic behaviour have been developed over the years, but we have chosen to use the liquid nitrogen version of the "freeze killed brood bioassay". This proves convenient for our purposes for a number of reasons, not least being that as we are part of the University's School of Life Sciences and adjacent to the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, liquid nitrogen is freely available to us, being purchased in large quantities by colleagues for a variety of uses.