Insect pollinator nutritional & behavioral ecology
This Halloween, I carved a bee-themed jack-o-lantern. The shape, and size, of my pumpkin was perfect for a skep carving (and a couple bees of course). Humans have a long history with keeping bees; a skep is an artificial hive that beekeepers have been using for over 2,000 years. In nature, European honey bees (the […]
Last week, I tweeted that one of my newly installed observation hives had two queens. Unfortunately, I only have these not-so-great-quality-phone-through-Plexiglas photos. But, you can see that one queen has a fading, white paint mark on her back, and the other does not. How can this be? Each hive is only supposed to have one […]
While I was in Exeter, UK for theInternational Society for Behavioral Ecology (ISBE), I got a message from my two interns: the bees looked sick. In five of our eight observation hives, some of the worker bees had white dots stuck to their back. Even one of the queens had it! The only thing I […]
This year marks my first bee installation! Although I have been studying and keeping bees for about 3 years now, I had only worked with observation hives. I don’t actually install the bees in the observation hives—I bring empty observation hives to our bee guy (Rick Reault, owner of New England Beekeeping). Then, Rick installs […]
Of course bees live in bee hives. When a managed Langstroth hive is abandoned by its bee inhabitants however, it becomes a nice home for a few other animals. An abandoned bee hive is a wonderful home for mice. This is particularly true in the wintertime (it’s warm). Thus, in the winter, many beekeepers put […]
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 […]
Providence Pollinator Lab 