By the time the expansion to the National Bee Diagnostic Centre is done, the facility will have tripled in size. Construction on the Grande Prairie Regional College lab in Beaverlodge is already underway and is expected to be finished by the summer of 2018.
It was announced a month ago that a total of $6 million dollars will be going into the project, which will increase the building’s floor space to 865 square metres. $3 million is coming from the federal government, while GPRC and the province of Alberta are splitting the rest evenly.
“It will be a significant growth of lab space,” says manager of the Technology Access Centre Dr. Carlos Castillo. “We would probably need to double the staff that we currently have. We have come a long way, but there’s still much more to do.”
With the expansion, Castillo expects they’ll be able to triple the number of diagnostics they perform every year. 20,000 tests were done on samples in the past year.
The NBDC officially opened in 2012 and began collecting client samples in April 2013. Researchers look into pests, parasites and pathogens that are affecting bees, as well as applied research into bee health for the industry.
