Team:FAFU-CHINA/Practices
Q:What is the influence of CSBV to your bee population?
A:This disease outbroke seriously in my bee farm located in Wuyi Mountain. It began from April this year with high Infectiousness and spread fast and strong.This disease is so difficult to cure that it resulted in economic loss.
Q:How do you combat this disease based on past experience?
A:If this disease outbroke more serious in the past , then they could only be used some illicit chemicals to combat, such as oxytetracycline. Most of these drugs are expensive but the effect is good, so it has become a choice for traditional beekeepers. But now with the improvement of beekeeping technologies, as well as taking into account the impact of drugs on product quality .We seldom use the drugs.
Q: What were measures you taking to reduce the loss without drug treatment?
A: Because the disease first breaks out in the general body of the bee larvae but he impact on adult bees are relatively small. Therefore, in the early stages, the hive of pest is more difficult to find. When honeycomb occurrence of disease was more serious on a board , we only could dispose of the pests on that board to prevent the transmission to other bees to reduce losses.
Q: Our project is to create a gene medicine that can inhibit viral replication and add E. coli bacteria to the syrup to feed bees.It will use bees’ habits of feeding each other to achieve the effect of prevention and treatment of disease.Then we want to know whether the E. coli we add will have effects on honey quality and safety ?
A: Actually, unprocessed honey contains various active microbes, such as yeast, E. coli and other bacteria. So there is a specified index for honey products. But our production of honey bee is essentially non-pasteurized. First, because the honey itself contains a certain amount of lysozyme, it has a bactericidal effect. Second, the quality honey which is sterilized will decline. In addition, E. coli is not the dominant bacteria in honey, so basically you can not consider security issues.
Q: If we made gene medicine products, compared with traditional chemical drugs in the market what are our competitive advantages?
A: Your generic drugs can effectively treat CSBV and has small food safety risks to human as opposed to the traditional hazards of drugs on security issues. If it is put into the market, it will certainly have a incomparable advantages with other drugs. But you have to take into account the cost and the use of generic drugs. Because to the beekeepers, what they pursue are economic benefits. So if you can effectively solve these problems, it will be promising.
Q: How Chinese bee population develops in China how?
A: Nowadays most bees Chinese beekeepers raise are Italian bees. Because Italian honey bee produce high volume honeey and has relatively cheap price to have a higher economic efficiency. While the population of Chinese bees is relatively small and product less honey.So people seldom farm them.These factors slowly caused the population of Italian bee rapidly expanding.However, the relative reduction was in Chinese bees population.
Play is a way of being, a way of learning, and a way of doing science.
Play is the most fundamental and best way of learning.
To remove the barrier between science and normal people’s life, It is our responsibility to lead people into the wonderland of science. This is a lofty ideal, and thousands of people in many fields have already been working for it for years. But this time, we need some innovations, perhaps some funs too.
Play is not only a simple process. We believe that play is actually a way of being, a way of learning, a way of doing science. So now If u ever watched the TED of Beau Lotto . You’ll know that play provides everything you need in oder to be a scientist, and that is what motivates us. If we add rules to play, we have a game which is actually what project is. And who can be better than children to play? Then we tried to spread the idea that everyone has the potential to be scientist as long as being offered an opportunity. Instead of giving a dull lesson about biology, this year FAFU-China decided to teach children how to play correctly, how to play with principles from science, and finally they will find their own way to science.
We cooperated with a semi-profit social organization Fanshu Park. Part of the reason is that they are very experienced with holding activities for children. But most important of all, we actually have a common philosophy——Playing is the best way of learning. Over the past 4 years, Fanshu Park has successfully explored a new field in Fuzhou city and organized a bunch of children and parents on it’s back. They can definitely teach us how to play with kids and give us some lessons. But we were not simply trying to teach children something. We aimed to inspire their interest in science, and make it clear that they all have a talent of doing science, for they all have a talent of playing and learning.
Fanshu Park gave us a few training so that we know how to deal with kids, besides they helped us organized ten children and provided us an activity space and facilities needed.
In 28th of August, we held an half-day activity. During the activity, we taught them everything we know about honeybees, and they did show a great interest in the small charming creature.
We taught them the structure of honeybees and they were required to use a way they want to show us what they have learned. Some kids tried to draw a picture of honeybee and some even tried to made a shape of honeybee by using plasticene.
We also taught them the difference between real honey and fakes, so that in future they won’t make a terrible purchase. This part may be a bit dull for kids, but when they were required to distinguish out real honey from fakes on their own, it seemed rather practical instead.
To illustrate that everyone has a potential of being a scientist, or a engineer, we helped them to design their own project. We helped children to solve their question on their own. Why will the honeybees die after biting a person? What is the relationship between honeybees and bumblebees? Something like that. The process of doing their project is more like a game, but we tried to add some rules in this game. We told them that they need four basic different sections to do their project, an objective, a procedure, an expectancy, and a discussion. The objective says what is the question? and why. The procedure tells you how you are going to solve the question. Expectancy is what do you think the answer for the question would be. And the discussion is, who cares?
We successfully taught them the how to play correctly and scientifically by doing this way. And we believe that in their future, the principle of playing will have a long-lasting effect in many aspects of their life.
Professor Susong Kun:He was awarded Special Economic Animals (including Silkworm, Honeybees) PhD by Zhejiang University .
Now he is the vice president of bee faculty in Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University and he is Professor, doctoral tutor; positions bee scientist of modern industrial technology system , "Minjiang scholar" Professor; Deputy Secretary-General of China Institute of beekeeping, executive director of China Institute of beekeeping bee biology,deputy director of the professional Committee of three bee breeding, vice president and the Secretary-General of apiculture Zhejiang Association. He Mainly engaged in research work of bee genetics and breeding, behavior and molecular biology and other fields.
When we met professor Su we exhaustively introduced igem and our team to him. Then we told him about the project and the process of experiment. Next we started the interview.
Q:According to reports, the number of bees is now declining every year.But we do not know the accurate reasons for it.We would like to ask your views on this matter, as well as the impact on the apiculture in China?
A:Yes, this problem is more serious in Europe and America. American bee colonies began baffling death with a large quantity in 2006, which was terrible for beekeepers. Europe also has a similar situation. But for China, the problem is not that serious. The reason may be the unique Chinese bees followed by domestic beekeeping long history and rich experience. Meanwhile beekeeping has also imposed a fine management. These factors make China has not been a big impact.
Q:OK,please tell us your opinions about what results in this situation?
A:The reason for this problem is unknow , I think the reason is multifaceted and comprehensive. Such as environmental factors, electromagnetic, viruses, pesticides, etc., it is a common effect of these factors make reduction in the number of bees. Where a large number of use of pesticides will be a very important affecting factor.
Q:We aim to cure Sacbrood disease which is caused by Chinese Sacbrood Virus. In recent years, This disease has been controlled under a certain level in some ways . What is the traditional method we have to control this disease and what are the advantages of our technology?
A:In early times this virus is very serious indeed, resulting in enormous loss of bees . And this virus is very hard to be cured. I have been to bee farm in Wuyi Mountain , where the honeybees are infected by CSBV. And only 2 boxes in 100 boxes of bees survived after last epidemic outbreaks , resulting in heavy losses to beekeepers. But beekeepers have trained that two boxes of bees from the perspective of disease resistance, thanks to resistance to disease, and that two boxes of bees now develop into hundreds of boxes. The RNA-interference is an innovational idea , if you succeess,it will be a great news to all beekeepers in China. Oxytetracycline is the most widely used medicine in China for it’s cheap and effective, but it can not be guaranteed that there will be no infection. And Oxytetracycline is also harmful to human beings. So this medicine is urgently needed to be replaced. This technique is equivalent to cure from the root , more direct thorough.
Q:In the experiment, we paid special attention to bio-safety issues. One of the biggest problems is that we used E. coli to be the carrier, but we feared that these E. coli is a potential pathogen, resulting in intestinal infections and other diseases. For this, we want to hear your views and suggestions?
A:E.coli is indeed harmful and you also relates to a transgenic.So security of products in question must be paid attention to. Suggestion, I think you can pass some security tests to verify.
Q:In order to solve the security problems, we made two programs. One is turning Prokaryotic expression into eukaryotic expression , replaced with harmless yeast as carrier. Another is that suicide gene is introduced into E. coli. Do you have any ideas or suggestions for our two programs ?
A:The program of import suicide gene in E. coli ,effect of suicide gene may not be as good as that in theory, in the end it may not effectively solve the security problems .So it remains to be confirmed,which you need to do experimental test . Yeast program sounds good, but I did not study in this regard, I can not give you any advice.
Q:Our idea is to make this technology into patents and product, we want to hear your views and suggestions on our industrial prospects of this technology.
A:Now there is no direct treatment to the virus, if the RNA interference technology is successful, I think the outlook is still very good. But before that there are several issues you need to address, the first one is the safety of the products , this was just been mentioned before. After all, the honey will be marketed, and goes to public. The safety problems must be solved. The second one is the effect of the product, you must reach a certain level of effect. Because now through artificial breeding, we have been able to reduce the harm caused by CSBV, so your products must have a better result. The final prices of product and costs are also important issues, if you can solve these problems, I think it will be a dramatic product in apiculture.