::: ::: Beekeeping 　　Major researches are concerned to improve bee variety and bee keeping skills. Pollination by bee is known to be a good strategy to increase crop production. In this connection, selection for bee variety for more efficient pollination and high honey production is being made. Processing and quality test of beehive products are also the main task of this Section. 　　Currently, this Station maintains 8 bee races such as Italian bee, Carniolan bee, Carpathian bee, etc. A closed rearing system is used to keep the breeding population, and a superior honeybee strain will be selected based on its ability to produce more royal jelly. 　　Taiwan beekeepers generally use the method of single-hive bee keeping. The experiment results of this Section indicated that using a double-queen in a 2-story colony to collect honey during nectar flow would be able to increase 70% of honey yield with improved quality. The experiments on using drone comb to mass produce drones and small nucleus for unfertilized new queens have proved to increase 9-65 folds successes on queen breeding Since drone pupae is a healthful delicacy food, a confined queen on drone comb can massively produce high-quality drone pupae. 　　In cooperation with Taiwan Agriculture Research Institute, we found that a newly developed royal jelly collector can save 70% of labor cost on harvesting royal jelly. With the establishment of a pre-ordering system and the invention of a waterproof carton beehive, led beekeepers to commercialize their bee colonies. A pre-ordering system has been established for selling of the carton beehive to the farmers for pollination of their crops. As a result of this measure, the acreage of crop using honeybee pollination has increased to 3,500 hectares including cucumbers grown in screen house, Shing-Hsing graft pear and watermelon. Bee pollination not only be able to save the labor cost of NT $40,000 per hectare for artificial pollination but also reduces the number of malformed fruit. Studies on the application of honeybee pollination on other fruit trees are underway. 　　Research on processing honey to make various by-products to increase its added profit has been made. A new method has been developed to produce various kinds of mead to meet consumer's taste. A series of crystal honey products from litchi honey, which is used to spread over toast and crackers, is now increasing their markets. 　　In the future we will continue working on the improvement of bee variety and low cost rearing technique. Using bee as a mean of pollination in more diverse crops will be continued. More attention will be paid on the management of apiary with regards to production of high-quality honey and its by-products as well as marketing of the honey products.   Jelly-Fig (Ficus awkeotsang Makino) 　　Jelly-fig is a deciduous plant. Its seeds are used to make delicious jelly . The fig-wasps inhabit inside the fruit of the male plants of fig-tree. Fig-wasp is known to be the only pollinator for jelly fig flowers in the nature. Therefore, artificial rearing of fig-wasp is important to fig production. The Station collected female plants of jelly-fig plants from 168 locations and its male plants from 32 locations. Field performance of collected jelly-fig plants with regard to their agronomic and physiological characteristics is under investigation. Special interest is laid for studies on the life cycle and the ecology of fig-wasp propagation under the cohabited condition with the male jelly-fig plants. The colony of fig-wasp will eventually be commercialized as an insect pollinator on jelly fig. 　　Under this situation, the research work includes the following items: (1) method of growing jelly-fig plants from highland to lowland; (2) selection of good varieties of jelly-fig plants in terms of providing a good living condition for fig-wasp to facilitate its propagation; (3) method of mass rearing of fig-wasp on the male plants of jelly-fig plants; (4) to enhance the pollination ability for reared fig-wasp colonies; and (5) commercialization of the reared fig-wasp colony to the farmers   Silkworm and Mulberry 　　The research activities on silkworm have been decreased due to the declined demand of silk in the market. However this Station is still conserving a large number of genetic stocks of silkworm and mulberry tree varieties. A total of 136 silkworm varieties and 176 varieties of mulberry trees are conserved in this Station. Future work is to develop a technique on the production of high-value recombinant protein from the baculovirus-infected silkworms.