Individual feeding of honey bees: modification of the Rinderer technique

MARTÍN P. PORRINI; P. MELISA GARRIDO; MARTÍN JAVIER EGUARAS

JOURNAL OF APICULTURAL RESEARCH

INT BEE RESEARCH ASSOC

Año: 2013 vol. 52 p. 154 - 154

0021-8839

Individual feeding of honey bees: modification of the Rinderer technique Martín Pablo Porrini1*, Paula Melisa Garrido1 and Martín Javier Eguaras1 1Laboratorio de Artrópodos, FCEyN, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata - CONICET, Mar del Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Received 5 November 2012, accepted subject to revision 17 January 2013, accepted 4 February 2013. *Corresponding author: Email: mporrini@mdp.edu.ar Keywords: honey bees, Apis mellifera, individual feeding technique Journal of Apicultural Research 52(5): 194-195 (2013) © IBRA 2013 DOI 10.3896/IBRA.1.52.5.04 Currently, inoculation with substances or infective microorganisms of individual honey bees involves many technical problems, such as long time periods of handling and a tedious manipulation of the bee to achieve the ingestion of the inoculum. Also, many operators are needed in order to simultaneously obtain large numbers of inoculated individuals. Rinderer (1976) published a useful inoculation technique to achieve the feeding of large numbers of adult workers. By this method, bees are individually confined and the food is available on glass capillaries. This technique incorporates a wooden device which contains glass cylinders sealed by a cork, to form a compartment where the bee is confined. The inoculum, composed of sucrose solution and the test material, is placed at the internal end of the glass capillary, which passes through the cork. Confined bees are drawn to the glass capillary by the sugar solution and phototaxis and, finding the inoculum, consume it. Our aim was to replace glass materials to achieve easier handling. Also, we propose different steps in the work sequence in order to speed the technique and reduce the number of operators required to produce large numbers of inoculated worker bees. A notorious reduction on the cost of materials was also achieved. Initially, we proposed the replacement of the glass capillary with a plastic micropipette tip. The tip is truncated to increase the diameter of the feeding tube which allows the glossa introduction (Fig. 2b). Tips are loaded with a standard laboratory micropipette. The cylinders which delimit the capsule walls were made from rigid PVC pipe used in electrical installations (D = 16 mm). The support assembly was prepared with a polyethylene foam sheet, commercially available as insulator (0.5 cm). It was perforated with a punch of the cylinder diameter (Fig. 2a) and glued to a wooden board. The cork used in the technique of Rinderer was replaced by a polyethylene foam circle (the residual from the punched foam) and perforated in its centre to allow the insertion of the tip (Fig. 2b). Workers used to test the technique were obtained from combs with sealed brood placed at incubator conditions (32°C ± 0.79; 60% ± 3.3 HR) until the emergence. Imagoes were confined on wooden cages with plastic mesh and feed with sucrose syrup 60% (w/v) until