University Daily Kansan, February 25, 1981
Page 3
Professor of Entomology Orley Taylor checks one of the combs in the beehives he maintains on west campus. As long as Taylor holds the comb steady and moves it slowly, the bees will cling to it. The areas on the comb where the lattice pattern is covered up are areas where the bees have stored honey.
KU professor studies bees' mating habits
By ANNIKAN NILSSON
Staff Reporter
It was one of the last warm fall days. The wind was brisk, rustling the prairie grass on the plain south of the bee hives on West Campus.
High above the field, a queen bee was tethered between two poles.
Orley "Chip" Taylor, professor of entomology, sat by one of the poles, watching and waiting for the drones to come.
ON AN IDEAL DAY, Taylor said, he could catch hundreds of drones that were drawn to the scent of the queen and could be trained by bee vagina Taylor had attached to her.
"I have simply equipped the queen with a tube, or receptacle, which, as far as the drones are concerned, is part of the queen," he said. "We have to simulate queens that were willing to mate for the drones to benefit in order to learn about the drones mating behavior."
Taylor has been fascinated by bees since childhood, and since 1973 he has been busy researching the biology of bees, bee species, popularity known as killer bees.
In a recent interview Taylor said the killer bees were advancing northward at a rate of 30 miles a month and were now reaching Panama.
"They seem to move into an area and completely hybridize the European language."
“For the last two years I have been working on techniques and devices to try to figure out a way of getting at the mating behavior so that we can understand just exactly what is happening when the queens fly out from colonies and encounter those drones,” he added.
LAST FALL he was testing the
This winter, he and some of his students used the drone trap and the fake vigna in Venumbra, where the European bees' territory.
devices, an artificial bee vagina and an aerial drone trap, on European bees in congregation areas on West Campus.
"The past month we put these two techniques together with over 12,000 marked drones," he said.
He said he now had data that could
See related story page 7
explain how Africanized bees were outbreeding their European relatives in South America.
"From the data, it appears that the Africanized drones are physically outcompeting the European drones," Taylor said.
BY STUDYING the time of day drones and queens of the two races fly, Taylor found that European drones had started their mating flights.
"They are mating earlier than most of their queens are even flying," Taylor said.
Usually Taylor is calm but as soon as he starts talking about bees and his research, the passion in his personality blooms.
As his intensity grows, his sunbleached, brown beard starts bobbing in tempo with his explanations of bee biology.
FOR THE MOMENT, he is busy analyzing the new data from Venezuela. He hopes to discover how European and African drones behave around the vagina-equipped queens he has supplied them with.
"The drones, when they go on mating flights, leave colonies between 2 and 5
in the afternoon and fly to the congregation areas, where they simply mill around waiting for a queen to show up." Taylor said.
When the queen shows up, the drones mount her in mid air. The drones go through an explosive copulation, are thrown and fall to the ground where they die.
Taylor's killer bee interest extends beyond his own research. In 1978, he made a documentary on the biologist byrew to a Hollywood movie on killers bee.
"We were a little concerned the movie would distort what was happening," Taylor said.
But he said, "It doesn't represent what we can see now in Venezuela."
HE SAID HIS FILM, which won the Cine Golden Eagle Award for best U.S. Department of Agriculture film that won an award, was known about Africanized bees then.
Taylor, now an internationally recognized honeybee expert, has not always seen the potential of bee research.
When it was time to choose a research project in graduate school, he picked butterfly biology, another childhood interest.
"I once reached the erroneous decision that most of the really interesting things to be done about bees had already been done," he said. "I问that what I already knew and applying it to bees to learn something nowkew."
"I became allergic to the butterflies," he said. "When I get hypersensitive to bees I'll probably switch to ducks."
BUT TAYLOR is back into bees again.
He once raised ducks and now he goes
duck hunting every fall.
Like every person, Taylor has made compromises in his life, and he said the yearly research trips to the tropics had taken their toll on family life. He wrote that his wife and teenage daughters for two months every summer for the last seven years.
'My time with my family hasn't
gone.' The reply, 'But my
family has been very understory.
He said he could not have kept on going without support from his family.
"If I didn't feel my work was hard, I wouldn't bond my personal needs I would not tell you."
TAYLOR'S RESEARCH does also fill a personal need, however. He said he needed to work on projects all the time to keep his creativity alive.
"I purposely design my life so that I confront novelty all the time," he said. "If someone took my opportunities away I would face very fast."
Taylor said he was not satisfied with simply teaching science as dogma. He said he used the field exercise to inform him about the scientific questioning process.
Another goal 'Taylor has as a teacher to be expose the biases of students' and researchers' approaches and solution to scientific problems.
"Science is a more subjective process than we like to believe it is," Taylor said. "Science is a very humanistic endeavor."
By February warm winds are rustling the Kansas grass again and Taylor is no longer in his Snow Hall office.
He is out on West Campus, together with the buzzing bees. His natural habitat
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