With the semester well underway, we are busy with teach, processing, analysis, and writing. We still have not moved into the new field lab, which has experienced delay after delay, but we are packing up our things at the Dix facility so that we can move once we are given the green light. Claudia is busy dissecting over 10,000 worker samples for their ovary development, and she is getting a head start on her coursework. Molly is busy analyzing and writing the results of her first field season, as well as turning the crank on processing the videos for your cage trials this last summer so that she can eventually do the same. Brad is teaching a course on Animal Communication this semester with ~50 students, and it is going extremely well especially considering that it's a new course in the curriculum. Kim has been getting the nearly 150 beehives ready for winter by monitoring and controlling Varroa, and taking our winter losses in the fall. She has also been instrumental in getting the new lab ready for our eventual move-in, including ordering honey extraction equipment and bottling our 2026 honey crop. Jen has been busy on the Extension & Outreach front, including helping the NCDA&CS Apiary Inspectors help track down the yellow-legged hornet across the state as well as gearing up for the state fair. Joe has been busy identifying samples of bees from the summer research, and hopes to present those results at an upcoming conference. In short, it's been really busy as always!

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.

September should be a relatively uneventful month for the beekeeper... 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.

We're about 2 weeks into the semester of our 20th semester of "An Introduction to the Honey Bee and Beekeeping," and it is going well so far. Claudia is helping to TA the class and doing great at it, and we have 93% upperclassmen (an all-time high) showing just how popular the class has become. We also appreciate Olga Senyukova, an A+ student from last year, helping to make our lecture notes more accessible to those with vision accommodations.