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Beekeeper’s bees and Mendel’s peas engage families
 | Gregor Mendel's bee house before the year 1909,
located at the Abbey in Brno, Czech Republic.
| In celebration of National Pollinator Week June 24-30, 2007, and the museum’s newest exhibition, “Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics,” master beekeeper Barry Thompson presented a family program explaining the importance of the study of genetics, and how Mendel’s cross-breeding of peas has evolved into understanding the genetic map of other organisms for agricultural and medicinal purposes.
Mendel, famous for his pea experiments that took place between 1856 and 1863, was also an avid beekeeper. After Mendel published his findings in 1866, he was elected abbot of the monastery in 1868 and his work on heredity went unrecognized for more than 34 years.
Mendel devoted himself to the duties of the monastery and continued his hobby of beekeeping, becoming the founder of the Brünn Apiculture (beekeeping) Society. A natural progression, Mendel had always wanted to transfer his experiments from plants to animals and began crossbreeding bees around 1871. He successfully produced a hybrid strain of bees by crossing bees from Egypt and South America that produced excellent honey. However, they were so vicious that they stung everybody around for miles and had to be destroyed. Mendel had little success studying hereditary elements in bees, in part because their reproduction was so hard to control.
 | "Pollen Store," Susan Derges, Ilfochrome
photographs, 1994 This grid of 30 photographic
prints depicting separate sections of a bee hive
is a piece of contemporary art on display in the
exhibition in Washington, D.C. Various materials
that bees store away through the seasons--blackthorn,
hawthorn, dandelion, clover, heather and ivy--are
captured in hexagonal pockets of pollen
creating colorful and abstract patterns.
| Today the study of genetics through the honey bee remains important and in the forefront of biologists’ experiments using basic laws of heredity set forth from Mendel’s cross-breeding of peas.
Sequencing of the honey bee, Apis mellifera, began in early 2003 and was completed in 2006, led by Richard Gibbs, Ph.D., director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, and was funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The honey bee genome is about one-tenth the size of the human genome, containing about 300 million DNA base pairs. It is also more similar to the human genome than any insect sequenced thus far.
According to NHGRI, besides its importance in agriculture to produce honey and pollinate crops, the honey bee serves as a model organism for studying human health issues including immunity, allergic reaction, antibiotic resistance, development, mental health, longevity and diseases of the X chromosome. Biologists also are interested in the honey bee’s social instincts and behavioral traits.
Comparing the honey bee’s genome with the genomes of other organisms could also provide insight on genes and regulatory regions within DNA, specifically by comparing the honey bee’s genome with previously sequenced insect genomes, such as the fruit fly and mosquito, as well as with DNA sequences from Africanized bee strains that have invaded many areas of the southern United States.
“The honey bee is of extreme importance to farmers. More than one-third of everything you eat is pollinated by honey bees, and 1.4 million colonies of bees are needed for almond crop pollination in 2007 alone,” said Thompson. “But sequencing the bee genome will now give scientists better insight into the heredity of genetic illnesses than ever before.”
 | Master beekeeper Barry Thompson engages
visitors with a real bee hive, explaining the work
habits of drones and their interaction with the
queen bee.
| Thompson’s talk was highlighted with a real bee hive where participants could view honey bees at work, and their behavior and interaction with the queen bee, another area of research of the bee genome. Visitors also viewed a bee hive from Mendel’s apiary circa 1870 on display in the exhibition.
“Peas and Bees: A Growing Connection” family activity is part of the National Museum of Health and Medicine’s educational summer programming for the exhibition “Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics.” A list of upcoming programs can be found on the museum’s web site at www.nmhm.washingtondc.museum/events/events.php.
This exhibition and its North American tour were developed by The Field Museum, Chicago, in partnership with The Vereinigung zur Förderung der Genomforschung, Vienna, Austria, and The Mendel Museum, Brno, Czech Republic. The exhibition will be on display in the museum in Washington, D.C. through Sept. 16, 2007.
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