The main thurst of our research season is finally winding down, and it has been an incredibly productive summer. We hosted three summer research interns in our lab through our BeeMORE program (see below), and they all did very impressive work during their short 9-week tenure in the lab. Molly and Claudia have each worked on their thesis projects, Joe has juggled experiments in the lab and field, and Brad supervised nine different undergrads on various projects ranging from pollen morphology to bioacoustics. Jen has been getting our tour infrastructure ready for when we finally move into our new building, and behind it all Kim has been keeping the bees healthy and the field logistics humming.

Molly Carlson is an NC State alumna, but she has several years of experience working in USDA-ARS honey bee research labs so she comes back with a wealth of knowledge and experience in apiculture research. She initially helped to revive our molecular facilities in the Queen & Disease Clinic, but since January she has been working on her MS degree investigating how brood pheromones influence new colony establishment and worker-queen interactions that affect queen acceptance. She has been a wonderful addition to the lab since she is a very hard worker and dedicated to both our research and extension missions.

August is a very trying month for beekeepers... Read full article

Teaming up with colleagues from Purdue University, we were part of a study testing a rare genetic mutation in honey bee drones that causes their eyes to be white!

Shultz, R. R., J. M. Nixon, D. K. Ryals, A. C. Buschkoetter, I. R. Gilchrist, J. K. Given, B. N. Metz, A. A. Magaña, B. Thanepohn, J. Mahood, D. R. Tarpy, L. Foster, and B. A. Harpur. (2026). The life history of recessive deleterious alleles as seen through the eyes of a honey bee (Apis mellifera). Molecular Biology and Evolution, 43: 1-16. [LINK]

Every summer for the past 10 years, we've run a USDA-funded summer research internship program called BeeMORE. These are undergraduate researchers, mostly from off campus, who come to NC State and engage in a wide variety of research projects involving bees (honey bees and native bees) and microbes (e.g., pathogens, beneficial gut bacteria, wild yeasts). This summer, we were very fortunate to host three fledgling bee scientists in our lab.

Lauren Petronella is a rising sophomore at Ohio State University, majoring in Entomology and has been a beekeeper for many years. Her project was to see how queen reproductive quality might cause workers in a bank to congregate around their cages. She found that while the amount of clustering does not indicate her quality, attractiveness was associated with viral infection such that heavily infected queens had many fewer bees on them.

Victoria Robillard is a Biology major from Southwest Minnesota State University, and she worked with Claudia on the degree to which workers in packaged honey bees might develop their ovaries. Surprisingly, after 4 and 7 days in a package, a shockingly high proportion of the bees had some degree of ovary development, suggesting that the physiology of workers might have some bearing on queen acceptance and success of new colony establishment.

Kiley Smith is a senior at the University of Nevada at Reno, and her project was working with Joe and Brad on how temperature might cause honey bee drone sperm to be weakened once it is stored in a queen's spermatheca. This project could have implications on queen longevity, since once queens run out of viable sperm they can no longer fertilize eggs.

Fall registration opened in the last month, and AEC 203, "An Introduction to the Honey Bee and Beekeeping," filled to capacity in record time! With a cap of 165 students and a waiting list of 25, more than 87% of those enrolled were upperclassmen (juniors and seniors), which is an all-time high. Just shows the popularity of the course and that fulfilling the Interdisciplinary Perspectives requirement has made it even more so!