Demonstrate

Our project does not have a finished product that is ready to be deployed in the field. However, we felt that we've accomplished a great many parts of our project and we want to show you what we did. In terms of a demonstration we've accomplished to be able to sense Varroa destructor mites using riboswitches. We can sense the guanine in mite feces and vitamin B12. Which we also tested on crushed up hive fragments. We can not demonstrate the BeeT product in the field, as this would break the do not release requirement. We also can not keep a bee hive in the lab, for obvious reasons. Therefore, we tested pieces of a bee hive for mite feces. We simulated the sugar water conditions, BeeT would encounter when applied, in the lab to check for survival. This is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 12. The relationship between the maximum ATP available for survival for an *E. coli* in a sugar-water environment and the theoretical survival time, given a constant water efflux over this time and a starting volume of 2.8e^-13 grams. The various coloured lines indicate water tolerance thresholds for the *E. coli*

Additionally, we modeled the impact of BeeT on bee and mite dynamics under real world weather conditions. We show this in figure 3.

Figure 13. The honey bee population is shown in blue and the *Varroa* mite population in red. A: Colony rapidly declines when no BeeT is present. Starting population is 20 *Varroa* B: Colony barely survives *Varroa* mite infestation. Shows *Varroa* mite in red and worker bee population in blue. Starting population is 20 *Varroa*. C: Colony thrives regardless of *Varroa* mite infestation. Starting population is 20 *Varroa* mites. D: Colony thrives regardless of heavy *Varroa* mite infestation. Starting population is 10,000 *Varroa* mites.

We also made a visualization of our design together with the Design Academy Eindhoven.

See our design page.

Team:Wageningen UR/Demonstrate

Demonstrate