Insect pollinator nutritional & behavioral ecology
When scientists give talks, we typically end the talk with an “Acknowledgements” slide, where we thank everyone who made that talk possible: co-authors, funders, field hands, etc. In March, I had the honor of giving a much different kind of talk: a TEDxTufts talk! Even though I was alone on stage, I couldn’t have pulled […]
This past summer, I raised honey bees on different diets on the Tufts Vet School campus in Grafton, MA. I am interested in how those different diets may, or may not, have affected the community composition of the honey bee gut microbiome. The honey bee gut is full of bacteria that may be beneficial to […]
This semester, I am a teaching assistant for Tufts University’sExperiments in Ecology (a.k.a. BIO 51). BIO 51 is a team taught class where undergraduate students learn about three different study systems, and design their own experiments. This semester’s study systems are honey bees, snails, and tea. The honey bee unit is led by my adviser […]
Everyone knows that bees are busy. Many know that their hives work like a well-oiled machine. But did you know that a bee’s life is basically organized chaos? Take this video for example. Slowed down to ¼ the speed, these foragers aren’t as graceful as they first appear. At the beginning of the video, a […]
My interns (James and Joanna) and I recently installed pollen traps on our observation hive at Tufts University. We installed the pollen traps to control which amino acids our bees eat. Since pollen is basically the bees’ only source of amino acids (there are small amounts of amino acids in nectar), pollen traps allow us […]
As some of you may have seen on Facebook, the Starks Lab “bee huts” got a serious facelift this summer. During the first week of the Tufts University Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Program, we were landscapers, painters, and carpenters—and it was a blast! Although I am a field biologist, I can honestly say that […]
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 […]
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 