Michelle Elekonich lifts a comb of honeybees in one of several hives shes uses in her research. Elekonich is among 170 co-authors of a report in the journal Nature in which scientists have mapped the genetic code of the honeybee. Photos by John Locher.
The queen bee, center, is marked with white paint on her back so scientists can keep track of her and her age. The queen bee is slightly larger than her subjects but lives up to 10 times longer.
Michelle Elekonich has heard every bad bee joke in the book.
"Bees, queen bees, being sweet," she recalls as she shakes her head.
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But there's no joking about Elekonich's research, which has landed her among 170 co-authors of a report in the October issue of the journal Nature.
A group of 170 scientists from 64 institutions around the world, including Elekonich at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has unlocked the genetic code of the European honeybee, Apis mellifera.
The research has revealed hints into the honeybee's aging and life cycles and shown how the incredibly adaptable insect deals with heat and other stresses on its body.
Elekonich, who has been studying bees for eight years and studied under the Nature article's primary author, Gene Robinson at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said the consortium consisted of about 75 percent of all the scientists studying bees in the world.
The genome project places the European honeybee alongside only two other insects that have had their genetic blueprint mapped, the mosquito and the fruit fly.
Honeybees originated in Africa, Asia or the Middle East about 300 million years ago.
From there, humans carried them worldwide because of their ability to make honey, and they now live on every continent but Antarctica.
Part of that adaptability can be attributed to the honeybee's resistance to different, and extreme, environments.
Honeybees, it turns out, have the same muscle tissue and heat-shock proteins as people, although they use them slightly differently.
When humans are subject to extremely hot temperatures, the body starts producing more heat-shock proteins, which absorb some of that stress.
"I guarantee you, when you get into a hot car, you have a heat-shock response, and so do I," Elekonich said.
But honeybees can survive temperatures up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit without producing significant amounts of those proteins.
Instead, the heat-shock proteins are produced mostly while the bees are in flight.
More studies need to be done on why honeybees' biology behaves the way it does, but the research could have effects on other creatures, including humans.
"We can ask all kinds of cool questions about pushing things to the extremes," Elekonich said.
The heat-shock proteins also shed light on the life spans of honeybees, which is usually only three weeks.
The queen, which lays as many as 2,000 eggs per day, can live up to 10 times longer.
Elekonich and other scientists are hypothesizing that because honeybees expend so much energy during flight, they also cause more stress to their bodies and thus lessen their life spans.
"We're looking at, can we make them work harder and age faster, and can we slow them down and keep them from working and make them live longer," Elekonich said.
That research could have significant effects on those in the agricultural industry, who rely on the pollination efforts of honeybees to fertilize their crops.
Elekonich, who has been at UNLV for four years, maintains several honeybee hives holding thousands of honeybees outside her office on campus.
Unlike Africanized bees, which are very aggressive and territorial, honeybees are mostly docile and not a threat to people unless their hive is disturbed.
After a few puffs of smoke from a hand-held device, which prevents the bees from attacking, Elekonich lifts the lid to one of the hives to search for the queen.
Since the invasion of Africanized bees in the valley six years ago, checking to make sure her queens are not Africanized is a regular chore. Her queens are painted with a specific color so she can keep track of them.
Elekonich estimates that every bee in Las Vegas is now Africanized, a testament to the impressive adaptability of the strain since it was brought to Brazil in 1956.
"The African bees' spread throughout the New World is a spectacular example of biological invasion," the Nature report said.
Africanized bees are hybrids with honeybees, and the hybrids are less aggressive than their purely African cousins, Elekonich said.
When Elekonich finds the queen, she replaces the lid and heads back into her lab, with Bill Brown, director of development for the UNLV College of Sciences.
Brown removes his beekeeper helmet to find a honeybee tangled inside.
