With a Sniff and a Signal, These Dogs Hunt Down Threats to Bees.

In Maryland, a state employee is training dogs to inspect hives for harmful bacteria — a crucial job as honeybees are sent around the country to pollinate crops.

JARRETTSVILLE, Md. — Cybil Preston stretched her bare hands into a noisy beehive and pulled out a frame of honeycomb, its waxy cells filled with nectar, its surface alive with bees.

“This girl right here was just born,” she said, pointing out a bee with a silvery thorax. “See how her hair is still matted down like a teddy bear?”

Ms. Preston, the chief apiary inspector for the Maryland Department of Agriculture, was on a routine survey of registered colonies northeast of Baltimore. “I’m always looking for signs and signals,” she said, as she examined a worker bee with a misshapen wing. “It’s like ‘CSI.’”

Honeybees are a vital, invisible work force in the food industry, pollinating about a third of the nation’s crops, and Ms. Preston leads a team that tracks their well-being. She pays close attention to Maryland’s commercial colonies, which beekeepers lease out to work blooms across the country — almonds in California, blueberries in Maine and New Jersey, citrus in Florida.

Ms. Preston, 45, certifies that each beehive crossing the state line is free of American foulbrood, bacteria that are harmless to humans but can spread quickly from hive to hive, decimating bee populations.

“Everything else that can go wrong with the hives is fixable,” she said, “but not that.”

Four years ago, Ms. Preston trained a dog to help her find foulbrood, figuring it out as she went along. She recently received a grant through the federal farm bill to expand her canine detection program, which could serve as a model for other states.

Unlike human inspectors, dogs don’t need the hives opened up to check them for foulbrood. They can trot by, sniffing at the comb, and tell if the bacteria have killed off any larvae. Four people working full time cover less than half of what her dog can, Ms. Preston said.

Her golden Labrador, Mack, inspected about 1,700 honeybee colonies last fall and winter. In the cold, when the bees were clustered and the comb was hard to inspect visually, Mack used his nose. This allowed Ms. Preston to continue certifying hives for shipment to warmer climates.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/03/dining/dogs-bees-colonies-sniff-bacteria.html?