[Handler Sue Stejskal leading Maple through a demonstration of how it is able to detect the presence of American foulbrood]
[Maple sitting and looking up at Stejskal, indicating the dog has determined AFB’s presence]
[Michigan State University honey bee researcher Meghan Milbrath holding a beehive frame filled with bees]
Meghan Milbrath (interview): “Here at Michigan State, we work a lot with honey bee bacterial diseases and other pests that affect honey bees. One of the projects we’re excited about is working with Maple, who we are training to detect for the honey bee disease American foulbrood.”
[Stejskal walking Maple to the demonstration site]
[Stejskal putting the veil of Maple’s protective suit over the dog’s head]
[Maple running and picking up her toy off the grass]
[Stejskal playing with Maple]
Sue Stejskal (interview): “It’s pretty much the same across the board, whether you’re training a narcotics dog or explosives dog: You take the target odor, you present it to them, and through a series of kind of systematic and repetitive training, you start to — the dog starts to learn to correlate the odor, the target odor, with something good is going to happen.”
[Stejskal holding up Maple’s protective suit]
[Stejskal putting the suit on Maple]
Sue Stejskal (interview): “Much like with humans, we recognize that if a dog is going to be in an active bee yard, they need to wear the same personal protective equipment as people do. And so, that is a bee suit. You can’t buy them on Amazon for dogs. And so, there’s been some altering and testing and that type of thing.”
[Maple standing still as Stejskal is putting the suit on her]
[Stejskal putting a boot on one of Maple’s paws]
Sue Stejskal (interview): “She also wears boots, because quite often in a bee yard there’ll be bees on the ground, and we don’t want her stepping on them.”
[Maple having her suit put on]
[Maple with boots on all four of her paws]
[A fully suited-up Maple on the move]
Sue Stejskal (interview): “The bee suit is still a work in progress. We’re getting there, and she’s comfortable and working in it. Fortunately for Maple, her drive exceeds her, ‘Why am I wearing this suit? Why am I doing this?’”
[Maple getting outfitted]
Sue Stejskal (interview): “So, I know a lot of people are always concerned about heat and her getting hot. If it’s hot outside, we don’t work, we don’t train.”
[Milbrath manipulating the beehive]
[Bees flying in and out of the bottom of their enclosure]
[Stejskal adjusting Maple’s veil]
[Maple sniffing around during another demo, correctly landing on the AFB scent]
Meghan Milbrath (interview): “The idea with the dogs is that they can work as a screening tool. So, we have beekeepers that have 5,000, 10,000 colonies. And it’s very hard to go through them with enough rigor to actually see all of the disease.”
[Maple is being called by and running to Stejskal]
[Milbrath and the bees]
Meghan Milbrath (interview): “Our goal is to work with Maple, have her trained up, but really to video and document the whole process and working with Sue to write it up into a book so that other people can use our journey with Maple to train their own dogs to do American foulbrood detection or other honey bee disease detection so that dogs can be used as screening tools for honey bee diseases.”
[Stejskal leading around Maple]
Sue Stejskal (interview): “It’s a cool project, but I was over-the-moon excited, because my dog would still have joy in her life and would still be able to work.”
[Maple playing with her toy]
This script was provided by The Associated Press.