On the occasion that you actually spy a Varroa destructor clinging to one of your honey bees, don’t you wish you could just zap it with a laser? A pair of Cornell graduate students have developed a device to do just that.
Hailey Scofield and Nathan Oakes recently entered the Ithaca, New York-based university’s inaugural Grow-NY business competition, billed as “an innovation and technology startup challenge focused on enhancing the emerging food, beverage and agriculture hub in Central New York, the Finger Lakes, and the Southern Tier.” They came away with a $250,000 grant to further development of their project, called Combplex.
Hailey has been conducting behavioral research on honey bees since 2010, while Nathan’s background is engineering. They have been collaborating for about …
