Strapped into a small holding device, the honeybee amiably wiggles its antennae. Like a toddler in a highchair, it seems to reach greedily for the dropper with sugar water that appears over its head. As its mouth opens, its tongue darts out for a taste of the sweet liquid.

As part of Ramesh Sagili's experiments to understand honeybee behavior, bees wait in this feeding tube to receive sugar solutions. (Photo courtesy of Ramesh Sagili)

This isn’t just a strange way to treat a honeybee to lunch. It’s all part of Ramesh Sagili’s effort to understand honeybee behavior, and in particular, the reason for their sudden disappearance. Since the emergence of Colony Collapse Disorder in 2006, entire hives of honeybees have been dying with no obvious explanation.

Honeybee decline could seriously damage agricultural crops across the nation. Take the $2 billion California almond industry, which depends heavily on domestic honeybees to pollinate almond crops. Every February, 1.5 million honeybee hives are trucked from all over the country to pollinate the thousands of acres of almonds.

“Without honeybees, there is no almond crop in California,” says Sagili, an assistant professor in horticulture and the OSU Extension honeybee specialist. “In the U.S., it would be highly improbable to rely on hand pollination because the work is so expensive and labor intensive. These plants have coevolved with bees, and the bees do a much more efficient job than humans.”

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, honeybees pollinate 90 percent of the country’s apple and blueberry crops and are partially responsible for pollinating oranges and peaches. In fact, honeybees play a part in pollinating at least 130 U.S. crops. Since about one-third of our food depends on bees for pollination, a decline in honeybee hives would be disastrous.

Vanishing Act

And yet, that’s exactly what is happening. In late 2006, honeybees began to vanish from their hives at unprecedented and inexplicable rates. Beekeepers around the country were mystified when they opened their bee boxes, finding all the adult bees missing and only the queen and larvae remaining. Even stranger was that the absent bees were nowhere to be found, dead or alive. They were simply gone.

Researchers were hard-pressed to explain this phenomenon. Colony numbers were dropping 30 to 60 percent in some areas of the country, and the future of a $20 billion industry was at stake. That was four years ago, and scientists are still searching for a solution to the mystery.

When Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) first gained attention, Sagili was working at Texas A&M University. At the time, researchers were not focusing on honeybee sustainability. “Because we weren’t seeing big losses, we were trying to increase colony productivity for the farmers,” Sagili says.

As CCD hit, Sagili realized that he needed to shift gears and focus on honeybee health. Oregon State University hired him in 2009 to work with Oregon beekeepers and to study colony health and vitality.

“I had to change direction completely,” Sagili adds, referring to his new studies that revolve primarily around diagnosing what is wrong with the bees.

At OSU, Sagili is the Sherlock Holmes of honeybees. He searches for clues in the insects themselves, collecting honeybees from around the state. He keeps in touch with about 25 of the state’s commercial beekeepers through email or conferences. Twice a year, he and his colleagues at the OSU Honey Bee Lab examine the collected bees for levels of mite infestation, fungal spores and protein content in food-producing glands.

The first two categories seem relatively straightforward. It makes sense that mites, Nosema (a type of fungus) spores or other parasites would harm bee health and make them less successful. But glandular protein content is particularly important because it deals with nutrition, and as Sagili says, “Everything boils down to nutrition.”

Stress in the Orchard

Modern agriculture may put stresses on honeybees that they don’t face in nature. For example, almond trees in California are practically the only plants blooming in February when bees are trucked in for pollination. Consequently, the bees acquire little but almond pollen for an entire month.

Ramesh Sagili, Oregon State University entomologist, is investigating bee nutrition (Photo: Lynn Ketchum).

That’s a problem, says Sagili, because just like humans, bees require a balanced diet. Some amino acids, the building blocks of protein, must come from food; neither people nor bees synthesize all the ones they need. Bees need 10 amino acids in their diet for full development, and since their only protein source is pollen, collecting a variety of pollens is crucial to proper nutrition.

Bees eating only almond pollen are like people living only on French fries. A diet composed of single source pollen does not provide enough nutrients, and, suggests Sagili, may weaken the bees’ immune system.

Poor immune systems leave honeybees greatly susceptible to parasites and disease. While these threats are nothing new, unhealthy and nutritionally deficient bees could be falling prey to old pests as their defenses are being drained.

That’s why Sagili is interested in finding a connection between bee protein and immune systems. Poor nutrition might help to explain why bees are disappearing. The other pressures on bees — parasites, viruses and pesticides — are potential contributing factors, and CCD may be the ultimate result of all of them.

Taste Test

Sagili is performing experiments to narrow down the possibilities. In one, he places bees in a “containment tube” and offers them different concentrations of a sugar solution. This taste test, with the bees waiting patiently and wriggling their antennae in anticipation, allows Sagili to learn more about their ability to detect sugar concentrations. Because worker bees have specialized jobs in the hive, some can detect higher concentrations better than others. It’s possible that nutritional stress may affect important foraging behavior of honeybees.

“Once we gather some good information from the past two years, we can see if there’s a correlation between survival status of the hive and all the problems that we found in the hives, such as protein content,” Sagili says.

Meanwhile, as Sagili and other scientists learn more about honeybees and their behavior, the number of hives continues to dwindle, from about 5 million in 1950 to 2.4 million in 2010. If Sagili is right and nutrition is the most significant problem, then beekeepers, farmers and orchard managers may be able to reverse that trend by ensuring that their pollinators are well fed.

Al Shay’s Green Tower holds cucumbers, tomatoes, herbs and more. (Photo: Al Shay)

If your taste buds yearn for home-grown tomatoes, spinach, onions, garlic, lettuce, potatoes and cukes, but your garden is the size of a postage stamp, Al Shay has an idea for you.

The instructor in OSU’s Dept. of Horticulture has built a “green tower” that creates nearly 90 square feet of usable plant growing space in a 12.5 square-foot footprint. Shay constructed the tower on the OSU campus and filled it with left-over soil from research projects, well rotted dairy manure and a commercial potting mix.

The tower can accommodate 45 to 55 plants, including those planted on top. Construction materials include rebar, landscape fabric and poultry fencing. He is hoping to find funding to complete a 100′ long row — a living wall —  where he can vary the soil types and water regimes to see what is most efficient.

As a volunteer with the nonprofit Business Enterprise Center in Corvallis, Plotkin had helped startup companies get their feet on the ground. And he knew that OSU’s Office of Technology Transfer works with scientists and engineers to commercialize their research results. So he contacted then-director Craig Sheward, who arranged for Plotkin to meet Les Fuchigami, an emeritus professor of horticulture and an expert in plant stress physiology. With OSU electrical engineer Tom Plant and graduate students in horticulture and engineering, Fuchigami had worked for nearly 10 years to develop a new way to monitor growing crops with speed and precision. Better information about plant stress could help farmers, as well as orchard and nursery managers, improve crop quality and save money.

Today, Plotkin and Fuchigami are chief executive officer and chief technology officer respectively of Precision Plant Systems Inc., along with Dave Persohn, chief financial officer, and Ping Hai Ding, chief scientist. They founded the Corvallis company to develop a hand-held device based on the OSU team’s work. Called the Ping Meter, it uses near-infrared light to monitor nitrogen and chlorophyll in leaves.

Combined with the meter’s GPS-based mapping capability and plant species databases, these indicators can empower growers in managing their crops, says Plotkin.

Ping Meter? The name plays on the idea that radar, sonar and other monitoring methods “ping” objects and return an echo that can be displayed and analyzed.

And it honors work by OSU graduate Ding whose statistical analyses of near-infrared light experiments played an important part in making the meter possible. With a Patent Cooperation Treaty application in hand, OSU is completing a licensing agreement with the company.

Seedbed for Growth

If final patent protection is granted, the science and engineering behind the Ping Meter will add to the 181 OSU innovations that have been patented since 1980 in agriculture, wood science, engineering, chemistry, microbiology and veterinary medicine. Some have reached the marketplace, and others require additional research. But as a group, they represent a seedbed of potential products, a growing resource for established corporations and startup entrepreneurs like Plotkin. And new opportunities are emerging. Last fall, they included an environmentally friendly polymer invented by undergraduates working with chemical engineer David Hackleman and a disease-resistant Port Orford Cedar rootstock developed by plant pathologist Everett Hansen (under development by Monrovia, the world’s largest wholesale nursery).

Such innovative technologies will drive future economic development, says John Cassady, OSU vice president for research.

Companies are increasingly looking to universities to provide the science behind new products. Moreover, state governments from Georgia to Oregon are pursuing economic development by investing in partnerships that bring top-notch experts together across the academic and corporate landscape.

Oregon has three such initiatives in nanoscience, sustainable technologies and drug discovery. All focus on translational research, the application of lab results to circumstances that are relevant to the marketplace.

“The states are seeing there’s potential to drive their economies through universities,” says Cassady. “You have to be proactive in trying to move through the translational stages to the point where it has an impact on the economy.”

Pressure on states to attract jobs has been growing for decades, notes a recent report by the Pew Center for the States and the National Governors Association, but global competition is raising the stakes: “States must accelerate their efforts or risk becoming economic backwaters. Specifically, they must become places where new ideas are discovered, invented or given their first big break.” (Investing in Innovation, 2007)

To generate more ideas that lead to products like non-toxic wood adhesives, disease-resistant crops and the Ping Meter, Cassady wants to expand collaboration between OSU, other universities and the private sector. He has created a university/ industry partnership committee, which, with the help of pharmaceutical-executive-turned-consultant John MacDonald of Massachusetts, is surveying technology transfer officers and corporate executives about effective partnerships.

“Universities are starting more and more to build these clusters of innovation and be recognized on a global scale,” says MacDonald. “At the same time, industry is seeing the relationship divide in such a way that the early discovery process is going to reside at the university, and the development and commercialization are going to evolve on the company side.”

With a history of partnering through the OSU Extension Service, agricultural experiment stations and other units, land grant universities are in a strong position to foster such partnerships, he adds. “They need to be proactive in their relationships, develop clusters of innovation that are going to solve problems and meet needs, generate the return on investment that industry is looking for. Partnering has to become part of the DNA of OSU.”

More Than Technology

Such relationships depend on discoveries that come to light through confidential “invention disclosures,” a description of an idea or technology. Brian Wall, interim director of OSU’s Office of Technology Transfer, says his office now receives 60 to 70 disclosures annually. Based on market analysis, patent potential and additional research by the inventor, Wall will typically apply for provisional patent protection on half of them.

It can take up to five years and cost $15,000 to $40,000 to secure a decision from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Multiply the numbers, and risk for the patent applicant mounts. For universities that bet on multiple inventions, payback can come through license fees or an equity stake in just one blockbuster technology.

In 2007, OSU received $2.5 million in licensing revenues and $100,000 in a sale of stock in Clear Shape Technologies, a Silicon Valley firm.

Nevertheless, Wall and Cassady stress that institutional finances are not the only, or even the most important, consideration.

For them, graduates are OSU’s most significant contribution to economic development. “Most universities realize that one of the most important things we produce for these companies is talent.

It’s not just about research and development and intellectual property. It’s about students,” says Cassady.

“Students may join companies that aren’t based on OSU technologies,” adds Wall, “but they got their education here. Or they join small companies and build them.

Or they join Intel or HP down the road and build a whole new division.”

So the strategy in the Office of Research is multi-pronged, supporting students with research grants and assisting faculty at each stage of the process. For entrepreneurs like Larry Plotkin, education and technology together represent a mother lode for Oregon’s economic future.