DAVIS -- A noted honey bee stock developed 18 years ago by internationally known honey bee geneticist Robert E. Page Jr., formerly with the University of California, Davis and now at Arizona State University (ASU), will soon return to the Harry Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility at UC Davis.

All 50 hives of the strain, a specially selected high and low pollen hoarding genetic stock spanning 32 generations, will relocate to Davis and "will pave the way for future genetic research here," announced Walter Leal, professor and chair of the Department of Entomology.

The bees are expected to be right at home here. "The hot summers in Arizona are hard on the bees," Page said.

"This stock," said Page, "is the most studied, most valued honey bee research stock ever." To date, studies by some 30 scientists have generated more than 50 published papers, focusing on behavioral traits, learning behaviors, sensory response and insulin signaling paths. Much of the research occurred when Page and bee geneticist M. Kim Fondrk were based at the Laidlaw facility from 1989 to 2004.

"All the stock production and maintenance will be at Davis," Page said. "All the colonies have queens that were instrumentally inseminated, and come from completely controlled matings traced back to their origins at UC Davis. We know they've never been contaminated by any Africanized bees, for example. Kim Fondrk, who just retired as our ASU honey bee research program manager, will produce stocks (queen bees) for us to use in Arizona for our research." 

The bees are currently pollinating a Dixon almond orchard, but when the almond season ends, will be moved to the Laidlaw facility, where Fondrk will manage the strain.

"Kim's been with me since 1986, starting at Ohio State University, and then at UC Davis," Page said. "He agreed in 2004 to help set up and establish our honey bee facility in Arizona, and once it was up and running, would return to Davis." Fondrk's wife, Carolyn DeBuse is a farm advisor for Solano and Yolo counties.

Page, a 15-year UC Davis Department of Entomology faculty member who chaired the department from 1999 to 2004, retired as an emeritus professor in 2004 to accept his current position as the founding director and foundation professor of the ASU School of Life Sciences.

"We are glad to have part of Rob's stellar honey bee research program in Davis," Leal said. Page's honey bee research is funded by the National Institutes of Health, with close ties to UC Davis. The Almond Board of California and other commodity boards also support the research. In addition, Page's UC Davis connections include advising UC Davis graduate student Jennifer Tsuruda.

Because of ongoing grant collaborations with UC Davis entomology professor James Carey, "Rob never really 'left' the department," Leal said. Carey directs a five-project, five-year grant , "Biodemographic Determination of Lifespan," funded by the National Institutes of Health. Page serves as the principal investigator of the ASU portion of the grant. In May, the scientists will apply for an NIH grant renewal.

Carey and Page are currently co-authoring a research paper on hierarchical demography, capturing the concept of birth and death rates at both individual level (queen and workers) and colonel level (superorganism).

With the impending hire of a pollination biologist and the recruitment of the Häagen-Dazs Postdoctoral Fellow, Leal said the department "will soon reclaim the status of the premier pollination biology program in the country. Harry Laidlaw would be very proud to know that the Honey Bee Research Facility will soon be operating in full capacity with world-class research on native and European honey bees."

Page worked closely with Laidlaw. "All of us who have made our careers studying the genetics of honey bees stand on the shoulders of Harry Laidlaw," Page said. "Harry was totally dedicated to honey bee breeding and apiculture from the time he opened his first hive of bees when he was 5 years old, until he died at 96."

The Harry Laidlaw Facility team currently includes Eric Mussen, Cooperative Extension apiculturist; Susan Cobey, bee breeder and geneticist; and Robbin Thorp, professor emeritus who studies native pollinators, including bumblebees. Conservation biologist Claire Kremen of UC Berkeley works with the Laidlaw researchers.

Long-range plans call for Page to return to the Davis area, where he and his wife, Michele, reared their children, Brian, now a U.S. naval intelligence officer in Tokyo, and Jennifer, now of south Sacramento.

Page, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is considered a pioneer in the field of evolutionary genetics and the social behavior of honey bees. He did much of his work at UC Davis. He received his doctorate in entomology at UC Davis in 1980 and then joined the Ohio State University faculty before joining the UC Davis faculty in 1989.

In the 1990s, Page led a team of collaborators in mapping a single gene responsible for the honey bee's complementary sex-determination system; the research led to a cover story in the journal Cell. He and his research team later offered further insights into the regulation of honey bee foraging, defensive and alarm behavior, and discovered a link between social behavior and maternal traits.

When Page was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, ASU Life Sciences professor and colleague Bert Hoelldobler, described him as "the leading honey bee geneticist in the world." Page is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, won the Alexander von Humboldt Senor Scientist Award (the Humboldt Prize, the highest honor given by the German government to foreign scientists), and is listed on the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Science "Highly Cited" list for Plant and Animal Science. This list represents the top 1/2 percent of all researchers, worldwide, and is the benchmark measure for impact recognition.

Page is also a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg (Wiko) or Institute for Advanced Studies, Berlin, and will spend a year there to develop a working group on social insect evolution.

Fondrk received his bachelor's degree in general biology from Ohio State University. University in 1974. He served as a research assistant and then apiarist in the Ohio State University honey bee lab from 1979 to 1989.

Fondrk joined the UC Davis Laidlaw facility as a staff research associate in 1989, and then, in 2004, accompanied Page to Arizona to set up the ASU honey bee research lab.

The Harry Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility just received a $100,000 contribution from Häagen-Dazs to address the bee population decline. The funds will benefit sustainable pollination research, target colony collapse disorder, and support a postdoctoral researcher. The UC Davis Department of Entomology, headquartered in Briggs Hall, is rated No. 1 in the nation by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Note: For more information and photos, see http://entomology.ucdavis.edu/news/beestock.html