Honey Bee Research at the University of Alberta
As always, the ABRC meeting was exciting and informative! Amazing plenary talks, but all presentations were great. Glad our group contributed three of them, with Kaira reporting on her new testing of hygienic behavior assays, Esmaeil describing his newest virus experiment to study queen immunity, and Bin Han as lead author on the presentation of his identification of the neuropeptide tachykinin as general regulator of the degree of behavioral specialization in honey bee workers.
A great, interdisciplinary team of undergraduates made this nice combination of empirical research and theoretical modeling happen:
Phoebe successfully defended her MSc defense on group size effects on hygienic behavior. Interesting topics and results with more to come… Thanks everybody involved for making it a success!
The North American Pollinator Protection Campaign celebrates its 20th anniversary. Amazing achievements over the past twenty years, and I am proud to be a part of the honey bee health task force!
Congratulations to Hongmei Li-Byarlay for publishing our paper on transcriptome and epigenome consequences of IAPV infection in honey bee pupae! And congratulations for Esmaeil Amiri for publishing our comparison of the transcriptomes of honey bee eggs coming from healthy or virus-infected mothers!
I am excited to join the excellent Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta! And I hope to get this site up to speed shortly!