Wolfpack’s Waggle Newsletter
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What have we been up to? |
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By May every year, we’re firing on all cylinders. It has been a particularly busy season with swarms, with Kim doing her best to keep them out of the trees, but it’s been an uphill battle! It’s also been a very good nectar flow so far this year, with our supers filling up quickly. On the research front, we have many different projects already underway. Brad has several projects going on (one on determining how infection affects drone sperm viability, one on how antibiotic affects brood pattern, and one on using brood pheromone for colony establishment), Catherine has started another project on how temperature affects drone quality, and Jen and Kim are busy rearing high- and low-quality queens for a microbiome and behavior experiment. We also have a bunch of side collaborations with other labs or institutions, such as drone color mutants, comparative reproductive quality of native bees, and potential deterrence of carpenter bees. Not enough time in the day these days! |
Lab spotlight |
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What would we do without Kim Guillemette?! She is our Apiculture Technician, meaning that she is responsible for running our entire field operation. Anything doing with live bees, she’s the boss. It’s a challenging job to run numerous apiaries of honey bee colonies, especially when our research projects require that we do everything opposite to beekeeping best management practices! But our overwintering losses were extremely low (12%) in a year when beekeepers are reporting 60-70% mortality, and we’ve come through the winter with extremely healthy bees, all thanks to Kim. She’s been a wonderful addition to our team and look forward to great things to come! |
What you should be doing in your apiary this month (May 2025) |
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Swarm season is in full swing but should be slowing down shortly. Many colonies have already swarmed, or ideally they were split by the beekeeper….. |
New publications and grant awards |
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Here is another recent paper, led by Abbi Chapman at UBC, who showed how viral infections of queens affects their immune systems and the gene expressions in their eggs over the course of the season. Chapman, A., A. McAfee, K. Wrightson, A. Alcazar, D. R. Tarpy, J. Fine, Z. Rempel, K. Peters, R. Currie, S. Hoover, and L. J. Foster. (2025). Honey bee egg composition changes seasonally and after acute maternal virus infection. Scientific Reports, 15: 10418. [LINK] |
…and sadly missed… |
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With the end of the spring semester, we will be saying goodbye to four excellent undergraduate colleagues. Isabella “Izzy” Cogan, Alex Harris, Claude McLeod, and Cecille Ernst have all conducted some excellent projects over the last several years, including digitizing the compound eyes of drones, viral infections of queens, mating flight behavior of drones, and the social transmission of antibiotics in colonies. They are all going their separate ways and onto great things, so we wish them nothing but success! |
Teacher’s corner |
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Our large course in the fall semester, AEC 203 “An Introduction to the Honey Bee and Beekeeping,” is already fully enrolled at 165. Aimed at non-science majors, the course is designed to fulfill the General Education Requirement (GER) for most University majors. As such, we not only cover the interesting aspects of honey bee biology and beekeeping, we also delve into honey bees in art and literature, mythology and religion, even politics and warfare! |
