Overview
Pursuing best integrated human practices influenced the design of our project and method throughout the course of the engineering process. Our established purpose remained constant while the constructs, and methods may have changed slightly based on the feedback we got from beekeepers, researchers, and people within our community. Human practices is creating a product that not only fulfills a specific need, but also incorporates technology reflecting wisdom and knowledge gained from the perspectives of other stakeholders throughout the design process. While we gained general community knowledge we also consulted with experts and direct stakeholders in our product to see what recommendations everyone involved in using the product had. Incorporating all of these thoughts and viewpoints led to a lot of changes in our design as time went on. The difference in our idea from when we started to now shows how important human practices are to ensure that the final product has real world applications and is going to help people in the intended way. Here we will go into depth about the different organizations and people that gave us feedback and how it changed our design process.
Brainstorming
Creating any product starts with an idea that is made to satisfy a need or help people. While brainstorming for different options to work on this year, we tried to keep in mind problems that impacted the people in our area so we could more directly see the need and have people to work with during the engineering process. In our state, North Dakota, agriculture is one of the most important parts of our economy. With that in mind, we wanted to pick a project that would be based in the agricultural sector, and still be applicable for other places. This led us to choose working with beekeeping, as North Dakota is the number one producer of honey in the US, and it is important throughout the US as well as other countries. Varroa mites remain a problem in beekeeping. With semi-regular miticide application being the prominent treatment method, and unreliable powder sugar based tests being the only way to count current mite populations. This meant we had a prominent problem that impacted a wide variety of people, and an option to help solve it.
Our initial design was based on research our team members had done as well as previous knowledge we had. This led us to create a system relying on external areas where bees would pass through pollen brushes. From these brushes we could collect samples to apply on a test card using cell exudate from our engineered cells. The aim of this design was to save hive owners from having to open the hive to estimate varroa mite count. Opening the hive is disruptive to the bees and can lower honey production. Additionally, estimating the level of guanine would provide a more accurate count of the varroa mites in the hive.
Red River Beekeeping Association
In order to get input from those who would use this technology most, our team attended a meeting for the Red River Beekeeping Association. We heard from 30 hobbyist beekeepers who have years of experience with hives as well as our target pest, varroa mites. After presenting we received useful information that we used to improve the design of our project.
Before meeting with the Red River Beekeeping Association, our detection method was focused on detecting the presence of mites rather than the level of mites in the hive. It was brought to our attention that mites are for all intensive purposes always present in the hive, thus the quantification of mites is more practical information for the beekeepers, as it determines which treatment to administer to the hive based on the degree of infection. Our test was changed to be more quantifiable, as to indicate the number of mites in the hive rather than a simple binary presence or absence detection. The beekeeper would then use that information to determine whether the infection is severe enough to require treatment.
The original proposed sampling method involved swabbing a pollen collector placed by the hive entrance that bees would brush against leaving, behind any varroa mite excrement. However, through feedback of the Red River beekeepers, we became aware that this method is not only poor for guanine detection but also not economical for the beekeepers, as it removes valuable pollen from the bees, rendering them useless for garden and plant pollination, a common reason hobbyists and farmers keep hives.
NDSU Explore
Taking our early design and new information from local beekeepers, we presented at a local scientific poster presentation event. Here we were able to explain our idea and design to others in the scientific community and receive feedback. Firstly we learned that varroa mites primarily feed on the larvae instead of the adult bee. In general the larvae did not leave the individual combs of the hive very often. This means using the pollen collector as our sample point would not work. We would have to revise our idea to sample comb cells from inside the hive instead in order to get a more accurate quantification. We still wanted to have a design that did not involve opening the hive to prevent a greater disruption to the hive. This led us to create a small section of hive that could be removed through a port in the side of the hive. This port would allow us to remove a section of the comb without opening the whole hive. The feedback we received at this event led us to edit the sample collection part of our design for more accurate sample collection.
USDA Bee Experts
Next we talked to experts in the field of honeybees, and varroa mites. Here we spoke with Joseph Rinehart and Nyle Jonason. These two are experts in the field of honeybees and their management. When discussing our goal of accurately sampling the hive to discern varroa mite infection, we learned more about honey bee and varroa mite behavior. At this point our current design relied on creating a smaller comb that could be put in the hive through a side access point. The comb subsection could be removed through this side port to allow for sampling without opening the hive. Once removed, any capped cells would be swabbed. The swab would be inserted into a solvent to dissolve the guanine, then a few drops of the solvent would be applied to a test strip which would turn to a color in the presence of high enough guanine concentrations. While explaining this to Joseph he explained that varroa mites preferably infect drone brood, which worker bees will not create on their own in times of stress. This led us to alter our comb insert to be shaped slightly differently to encourage the forming of drone brood rather than the sizing of normal brood cells. Going out into the field added to our understanding of bee behavior by observing the shapes and patterns in brood creation in the comb. This led us to fine tune the size of the comb insert. We also changed from using a single tube of solvent to a 96 well plate. The individual wells would allow us to increase statistical power by having presence or absence rather than relying on concentration to determine varroa mite count.
Conclusion
Through all of our talks with a variety of stakeholders we settled on our final design of the synthetic comb that has carefully sized cells in order to promote brood cell development that is used as our sample when testing. Without the human practices portion of the project we would have not settled on this design and would have spent a lot of time creating a product that is not effective or all that useful. This goes to show the importance of stakeholder feedback in a project like this and why it is so critical to the iGEM competition.