Location: Innovative Fruit Production, Improvement, and Protection
Project Number: 8080-30500-002-001-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: May 12, 2025
End Date: May 11, 2026
Objective:
The objective for this project will be:
1) Determine if native woodland habitats provide improvements to honey bee health and performance.
2) Generate economic opportunities through beekeeping programming for Appalachian citizens.
3) Assess pollinator diversity and abundance and apple fruit set at Patriot Guardens Patriot Apple location prior to and after pollinator restoration strips being installed.
Approach:
Obj. 1. Determine if native woodland habitats provide improvements to honey bee health and performance.
Methods. Transect sampling of habitats surrounding ABC honeybee hives will be performed over a 2km circular area. Early, mid- and late-season flowering hosts will be identified and the proportion of those hosts found in the landscape will be calculated. Waggle dances will be observed for at least one hive per location to estimate foraging distances during each seasonal period. Colony strength will be measured using flight entrance counts, Liebefeld method and/or cluster counts (Grant et al. 2021). Finally, honey weights will be recorded for each hive during early, mid and late-season. Data will be analyzed to determine if woodland habitats support stronger colonies and increased honey production. Honey samples from ABC hives will be collected and subjected to DNA metabarcoding to determine what plant taxa were used by honeybees during the early, mid and late-season (Wirta et al. 2021, Namin et al. 2022). Additionally, worker bees arriving at hives with pollen will be collected and subjected to washes to identify plant pollen through standard pollen DNA barcoding techniques (Galimberti et al. 2014).
Obj. 2. Generate economic opportunities through beekeeping programming for Appalachian citizens.
Methods. Appalachian Beekeeping Collective program, an economic development program, will provide expertise and programs for local people in Central Appalachia to learn beekeeping practices. This program will provide bees, hive boxes, equipment, continuing education, and support for new beekeepers as well as market channels through the ABC Beekeeping Collective.
USDA-ARS Action Plan Problem Statement 2C: Conserving Bee Diversity, Improving Bee Taxonomy and Genomics, and Developing New Pollinators.
Obj. 3. Assess pollinator diversity and abundance and apple fruit set at Patriot Guardens Patriot Apple location prior to and after pollinator restoration strips being installed.
Methods. Pollinator restoration sites will be established on post-use mined land repurposed for agriculture in Summersville, WV. Multiple sites will be planted according to previously established methods used at the Mammoth preserve in Kanawha and Fayette Counties; briefly soils will be decompacted and native trees will be planted using species and relative densities reflective of the region. Sites that are being planted according to a USDA-NRCS program will be used for comparison. Pollinator surveys using standardized methods will be conducted (Bell et al. 2023). Additionally, fruit set in experimental will be measured annually. Buds will be tagged just prior to bloom. Two treatments will be compared; hand-pollinated and those pollinated by available pollinators. Fruit set will be evaluated just prior to “June drop” and at harvest for each treatment.