Building a better bee

As a kid growing up in Lancaster County, Pa., and Seaford, Del., Sue Cobey never was the type to do what everyone else was doing. She loved to bring insects to school for show-and-tell, even though the other little girls were more likely to show off new dolls or charm bracelets.

So it’s no surprise that Cobey, AG ’76, now holds one of the most unusual jobs on the planet and that it revolves around her beloved insects. Cobey is a queen bee inseminator, one of a handful of people worldwide who know how to perform instrumental insemination of bees. What’s more, Cobey teaches the technique, which by all accounts is a lot trickier with such small creatures than artificial insemination of livestock.

When Cobey graduated from the University with a degree in entomology, she knew she wanted to work with bees. Although UD didn’t conduct bee research at the time, Cobey had attended one semester as an exchange student at Oregon State University, which had a long-established bee program. At Oregon, she quickly got hooked on bees, which are “the most fascinating and amazing insects,” Cobey says.

After UD, she worked in a range of academic and industry jobs, including at the now defunct Genetic Systems Inc. in Labelle, Fla., and the federal Bee Breeding and Stock Center at Baton Rouge, La. Most notable of these jobs was a two-year period in the early ‘80s at University of California, Davis, where she learned artificial insemination of bees from the man who helped develop it, Harry H. Laidlaw Jr.
In the ensuing 25 years, Cobey has become almost as well-regarded in the beekeeping world as Laidlaw himself—“the father of honeybee genetics.” She is considered the world’s premier bee insemination authority, according to UD entomology professor Dewey Caron, who joined UD and began building the University’s bee research program five years after Cobey graduated.  

Last May, after 17 years as a staff apiarist at Ohio State, Cobey returned to UC Davis to revitalize its honeybee research program, which had languished after retirements and budget cuts.
What her bee insemination work is all about is building a better bee—one that is gentle, productive, resistant to most pests and disease, an efficient pollinator and able to over-winter.

“The challenge with honeybee genetics is that queens always mate in flight,” says Cobey. “They’ll mate with multiple drones, as many as 60, within a couple of days.
“With instrumental insemination, we can control mating, enabling selection to enhance commercial stocks and maintain desired traits, such as resistance to disease and parasites.”
With a background in commercial beekeeping, Cobey developed and maintains a line of honeybees called New World Carniolans, which have been well-received by commercial beekeepers and by bee experts like Caron.

“Sue Cobey has been of immense service to the beekeeping industry,” Caron says. “She is a careful observer of bees and an expert in evaluating colony traits. In developing the New World Carniolans, she has produced a bee suitable for commercial use as well as a bee that’s ideal for our backyard beekeepers.”  

Right now is Cobey’s busy time. “The California pollination season is much earlier than in Ohio; it’s much more diverse and demanding,” she says. In mid- to late March, she starts raising queens, and by April she is conducting artificial insemination on a daily basis. Her schedule will stay crazy through June, when weather conditions in the Davis area get hot and dry. “At that point, the worker bees kick the drones out of the hive,” Cobey says. “Their work —and my work with them—is done.”

A lanky blonde who wears jeans on most days, Cobey loves to be out in the field, checking on the 80-plus colonies of bees that she maintains. She eventually hopes to build up the UC Davis apiary to about 300 colonies and continue refining her bee—the New World Carniolan—to be the best it can be.

Beekeepers have long had respect for Cobey’s work but the agricultural community at large is taking notice, too, in the wake of colony collapse disorder (CCD), the little understood phenomenon in which worker bees suddenly disappear. Last winter, CCD killed a quarter of the nation’s 2.4 million commercial bee hives, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Without honeybees, agriculture as we know it wouldn’t exist. Honeybees pollinate one-third of all food crops and account for 80 percent of all insect crop pollination, according to the USDA. The direct value of honeybee pollination to U.S. agriculture is more than $14.6 billion, notes a Cornell University study.

With that kind of money riding on pollination, the agricultural community is looking for answers to CCD. No one knows for sure, but researchers have theorized a number of possible causes, including stresses from travel and other environmental factors, pathogens, parasitic mites, exposure to pesticides and loss of genetic diversity.

By controlling the genetics of honeybees, researchers can breed stronger, more survivable bees, bees that are able to tolerate mites and other pests and possibly better able to overcome colony collapse, Cobey says. She is working closely with the industry to develop lines of the New World Carniolan bee that can win the battle over CCD.

“All the attention I’ve received about my work after CCD hit has been almost overwhelming,” she says.

Cobey regularly teaches bee insemination classes that draw researchers and beekeepers from such far-flung locales as Argentina, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, China, India, New Zealand and Nigeria. She also has traveled to Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Costa Rica, Canada, Jamaica, Egypt and South Africa to make presentations. And yet, underneath the professional persona, Cobey says she’s shy at heart. She prefers being out of the limelight instead of in front of the TV cameras, as she was repeatedly when CCD first hit.

“Sue does not feel comfortable in the spotlight,” says her colleague, Eric Mussen, a UC Davis Cooperative Extension apiculturist. “She prefers to have others meet and greet with the public, unless the topic of conversation is her work.”

At UC Davis, her work ethic and drive are legendary. “Sue is a ball of energy,” says Mussen. “She puts in long hours, and weekends are simply something that occur on a calendar. Honeybees don’t operate on a human workweek.”  

Cobey’s husband, Timothy Lawrence, who is an analyst for UC Davis Extension, shares her passion for bees. They co-owned a beekeeping business in California’s Vaca Valley early in their marriage. And on their wedding day, Sue and Tim posed for a wedding portrait sporting matching beards—beards of bees, naturally.

-Margo McDonough, AS ’86, ’95M