Sustainability

By mating with nearly 100 males, queen bees on isolated islands avoid inbreeding and keep colonies healthy.

The results, published in the current issue of PLoS ONE, focused on giant honey bee colonies on Hainan Island, off the coast of China. Since these bees have long been separated from their continental cousins, it was thought that the island bees would be prime candidates for inbreeding as well as having very different genes, said Zachary Huang, Michigan State University entomologist.

Michigan Biotechnology Institute (MBI) announced a successful pilot campaign for the BioAcrylic process created by OPX Biotechnologies Inc. (OPXBIO), demonstrating successful scale up of the fermentation process at the 3,000-liter scale.

BioAcrylic is a renewable alternative to petroleum-based acrylic acid, for which there is a $10 billion market, including in such products as diapers, detergents, paints and adhesives. OPXBIO has partnered with The Dow Chemical Company to bring BioAcrylic products to the market.

For MSU post-doctoral researcher Anthony Kendall, (below) what started out as a career leaning toward physics and mechanical engineering has evolved into several years of environmental research spanning everything from water resources in the High Plains to Brook trout in Northern Michigan’s Jordan River.

The overwhelming majority of Michigan residents place value on having wolves in their home state while a small minority would buy a license to hunt them, according to a Michigan State University study.

The survey, which addresses how the state could manage its wolf population now that Canis lupus has been removed from the federal endangered species list, indicates that 82 percent of those surveyed value knowing that there are wolves in Michigan. On the other end of the spectrum, only 14 percent report that they would purchase a license to hunt wolves.