Honey bee male reproduction and rearing – Honey bee males are notoriously difficult to culture in vitro. Students working on this project will experiment with different methods of keeping males in the lab and assessing reproductive consequences of developing through adulthood outside the hive.

As social organisms, honey bees within the hive are protected by foragers, that make riskier interface with human-influenced environments. Students working on this project will perform contact tracing using a fluorescent dye model to assess material transfer between individuals. See the dedicated page for more information.

Honey bees forage not to meet their own needs, but rather those of their larval siblings. As such the brood produce several pheromones that regulate adult foraging behavior. Students working on this project will monitor colonies for food collection behavior in response to synthetic pheromones.

Honey bee workers are famously, but at least somewhat reversibly sterile. Workers that are isolated from the brood and queen quickly develop to an “anarchistic” state where they produce unfertilized eggs, a fatal condition for the hive. Students working on this project will assess workers in various commercial contexts for the average development of the anarchical condition through physiological assays.

Reliable assessment of honeybee usage of the wax comb requires significant observation, with photographic methods and automated recognition potentially providing increased resolution and repeatability of colony growth and storage measures with less human labor. Students working on this project will assist in training algorithmic recognition programs to appropriately recognize the different stores on honey bee frames.

Pollinators sample the environment widely and in places that humans rarely get to; however understanding where they go and what they collect requires detailed work. Students working on this project will be identifying pollen collected from an extensive bee monitoring project throughout North Carolina to assess what plants bees collect pollen from and what affects their choices.

 Humans make their structures out of dead wood, which is coincidentally exactly what Carpenter bees do too; to the chagrin of deck builders everywhere. There are manifold options for repelling or killing carpenter bees, and a lot of them are either ineffective or frankly morally unsound (we don’t advocate killing wild bees for convenience). Students working on this project will explore a mimic of an ancient hymenopteran pheromone, that smells like grape drink and is used in human foods, to modify carpenter bee nesting preference.

Monitoring for bees widely requires a great deal of travel and sampling time, that is taxing both on researchers and the insect populations. Students working on this project will explore a novel method of assessing pollinator activity using the sounds they make while collecting flowers to identify “pollinators.” 

Animals impact human thinking and culture in broad-sweeping ways, but not necessarily always in the ways we expect. Bees in particular are highly charismatic and present throughout human art, kitsch, and even gaming. Students working on this project will explore the differences of representation of bees and beekeeping in gaming to learn what these games are teaching the players about their subject, and how humans respond to these representations.