Insect pollinator nutritional & behavioral ecology
This past week I attended the First Annual Protecting Pollinators in Ornamental Landscapes Conference in Hendersonville, NC. When it comes to protecting pollinators, a lot of research focuses on honey bees, pathogens, pesticides, and the current state of agriculture however, most of us encounter pollinators in the ornamental landscape (i.e. urban environments, backyard gardens). At […]
Acutally, this video was taken a little over a month ago so it is a bit past that time of year. During late summer/early fall, honey bee hives prepare for the winter by kicking out the males (a.k.a. drones). In this video, you can see the smaller (female) worker forcefully removing a larger (male) drone […]
This past weekend, I had the honor of speaking at the Georgia Beekeepers Association (GBA) Fall Conference and it was a blast! At the conference, I led two breakout sessions on honey bee physiological and behavioral immunity, gave a talk about my recent findings on honey bees and dirty water, learned some really cool (and […]
If you asked 12 year-old me if I liked honey, the answer would have been a hard no. If you asked a more open-minded 20 year-old me the same question, the answer still would have been no. If you asked me that same question today, the answer would be a bit different: heck yes! Growing […]
As described in my last post (Battling Bees), my current research project involves mass-marking bees from 8 separate observation hives so I can determine mineral preferences of each individual hive, and track how those preferences might correlate with hive health. To mark the bees, my summer interns (four industrious interns over two separate summers) and […]
To investigate honey bee mineral preferences, I put out artificial feeders (the upside-down tubes in the video) with different mineral solutions to create a “tasting table” for the honey bees. Once trained to feed from the tasting table (see last week’s How to Train Your Honey Bees), the bees forage at the table, and drink […]
Honey bees can be trained to do a lot of things. Recently, they have been trained to detect bombs, diabetes, and maybe even cancer. I simply train my honey bees to drink from artificial feeders at a certain location. Easier said than done (in the summertime anyway). Whether honey bees are being trained to detect […]
Why do honey bees like dirty water? It is a common question—in fact, this is not the first blog post concerning honey bees and dirty water (see Mud Songs and Honey Bee Suite)—and yet, there is not a definitive answer. I first started keeping bees when I joined the Starks Lab in the summer of […]
Providence Pollinator Lab 