Most of our projects have run their course for the season, so it's been good to look back at our accomplishments this season. Molly was able to conduct an impressive number of cage trials of queens interacting with workers exposed to different pheromones, and there was a significant amount of variation in the behavioral responses (from outright rejection to total acceptance). This in vitro study very much complements her field experiments from last year, so that together she is poised to have a very strong MS thesis on how brood pheromones promote colony growth and queen acceptance. Brad has been overseeing a large number of undergraduate students, on projects ranging from pollen identification to drone sperm viability to pollinator landscape plantings. Jen has been working on various extension projects and helping the NCDA&CS with hunting down the yellow-legged hornet, and Joe has been busy in the field wrapping up native bee sampling. Kim has been working overtime getting our ~200 colonies ready for the winter, as well as ramping up our honey processing in the new facility even before we move in. Claudia has finished her field project on how to effectively introduce queens to laying worker colonies, but she still has ~10,000 workers to dissect and measure their ovary development. So as the semester starts, we're transitioning from the field to main campus but that doesn't mean we've stopped turning the crank!

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.