A USask researcher and her graduate student are breaking the stigma around fetal alcohol spectrum disorder with the help of a fuzzy friend.

Dr. Sarah Wood explains that biologically and socially, bees are very comparable to humans. Because of this, her lab has exposed bee larvae to trace amounts of ethanol to mimic the effects of FASD.

“Honeybees look after their young cooperatively. They have overlapping generations, so parents and children live together in the same hive, and they have division of labour, so bees of different ages perform different tasks.”

Her lab has exposed bee larvae to trace amounts of ethanol to mimic the effects of FASD.

“The queen is going to lay eggs in the hive, and after three days those eggs will hatch into larvae. We transfer those newly hatched larvae to the laboratory. We feed them a specific larval diet, and into the diet we add low concentrations of ethanol.”

Those larvae then grow into adult bees, which takes about 20 days to complete. The adult bees are put inside a hive with glass walls, and Wood sits back to observe.

What she’s found is that the effected bees have abnormalities in their locomotion, and she expects they will also struggle with abnormalities in their social behavior.

She adds that her long-term goal for the research would be to test new drug therapies for FASD on the honeybees as a screening model to see if they might be effective. Her short-term goal is to use the bees to break down the stigma that comes alongside FASD and encourage more positive conversations about the disorder.