That question I can answer. Thank you for your interest.
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada has been involved in projects looking at developing markers for breeding bees. These would be markers based on the proteins expressed by honeybees or markers in their genome and genetics. We've been working with many labs across Canada in developing markers for better selectively breeding bees. We have been successful in concluding some of these projects and trying to help introduce them to the industry.
We're currently involved in projects with our university collaborators to also look at markers of stress, which may help us more to real-time diagnose what's actually happening in a bee colony, rather than looking at a dead colony and trying to figure out what happened.
I would say that there is progress on this front. I think the aim certainly is to move bee breeding more into the realm of other major animal systems like cattle or swine. Through AAFC and our collaborators at Canadian universities, we have worked on marker selection projects for bees.