Claudia just won the prestigious Project ApisM Costco Canada scholarship for completing her PhD on hygienic behavior and brood signaling in the honey bee. That is great news and will infuse the project with much-needed funds to complete Claudia’s ambitious goals!

The recent publications of our lab and collaborators show the diversity of research topics we are involved in:

Our 2025 i-STEAM student Rosie Whiskeyjack presented her poster at the final celebration of this year’s program. Rosie was able to show with former i-Steam student Breanna that pheromonal signals might be influencing honey bee egg size. Thank you to all supporters!

Congratulations to Yosef for his new paper, showing that honey bee workers differ in substantial ways in their gut microbiome, depending on whether they were performing hygienic behavior (doi:10.1007/s00040-025-01029-x). Whether these differences are cause or consequence is another question….

In her first scientific publication from our lab, Prabashi describes a study that we conducted to test whether heat-inactivated Israeli acute paralysis virus could be used to vaccinate queens and protect their offspring against active IAPV. Unfortunately, the offspring of both experimental groups died of IAPV indifferently and no significant effect of maternal treatment was found.

Documenting widespread resistance in Alberta to common pesticides against Varroa destructor highlights the problems of the apicultural industry to contain this honey bee pest. This important publication also supports the argument that new approaches to control Varroa are urgently needed.

This past week, we were quite busy presenting our research with Alex and Chenoa giving presentations at the Breeders Day of the Alberta Beekeepers Commission, Demi an Alyssa presenting at the Integrated Pest Management meeting, and Rassol and Olav participating in the CAPA meeting and Canadian National Beekeeping Convention in Ottawa with presentations on mites and viruses. Excellent work!

Congratulations to Alex for a well-produced video to explain his 2024 research project on the queen retinue. This project, funded by NAPPC, involved has generated some interesting findings on the virus content and susceptibility of retinue workers and Project ApisM is recognizing Alex’s production at the ongoing American Bee Research Conference with the Bellow’s Award!

A long-term project by former postdoc Bertrand Fouks has finally come to its conclusion in form of a publication entitled “Alternative double strand break repair pathways shape the evolution of high recombination in the honey bee, Apis mellifera.” At the same time former undergraduate researcher Tim DeLory (now PhD student with Karen Kapheim in Utah) has taken the lead to give a new perspective on the high recombination rates in social insects, published in the Annual Review of Genetics.

This year’s ABC AGM Conference & Trade Show, Rassol presented an update to our Varroacide development project, Olav presented together with Leslie Holmes on the collaborative Alberta stock comparison project, and Chenoa won hockey tickets in the banquet’s Kahoot game after already being awarded an ABC bursary award. What a great meeting!

Congratulations for Prabashi to successfully transition from MSc to PhD status in our graduate program at the end of this semester. Good progress on three separate projects propelled her forward! And just before transitioning, she received the Entomological Society of Canada’s Post-Graduate (MSc) scholarship. Wonderful news and definitely made her trip to the ESC conference twice as rewarding! She gave a great presentation too:

Despite some tough competition from graduate and undergraduate students, Chenoa was awarded the best student presentation award in her session. Demi, Prabashi, Breanna, Alyssa, and Rassol also gave excellent presentations on our research, so congratulations to all.

Well done!

Mingcong and Vanessa presented their research into virus transmission across experimental social networks at the International Research Symposium of the University of Alberta! Congratulations, well done!

The question of why Varroa might prefer invading drone brood is easily answered: They have more time to produce offspring due to the longer development of the male pupae. However, Yves Le Conte’s great discovery that Varroa hones in on male-produced chemicals (DOI:10.1126/science.245.4918.638) may only part of the answer to the question of how the Varroa foundresses preferentially invade drone cells. It might also have to do with opportunity as we show in this collaborative publication lead by former MSc student Taylor Reams (doi:10.1093/jisesa/ieae044) that drone cells are more visited by nurse bees, and more visitation by nurse bees is associated with higher Varroa infestation probability (although this important result isn’t really clear when you just read the abstract).

…have a complicated relationship. If you want to know the details, read our new article. Generally speaking, larger groups of honey bees are better than smaller ones in performing hygienic behavior. Thus, hygienic behavior follows a common trend, but the mechanism is unclear.

Congratulations to Jacob Herman for winning the Franklin & Maria Butz Memorial Graduate Award! I cannot think of a better winner because Jake has the same drive for continuous innovation and improvement that we can see in the Butz Apiary. Here is Jake with some of his favorite bees during field work in Thailand:

The Cold Spring Harbor conference on the Genomics and Biology of Social Insects (co-organized by Olav) just concluded successfully and some cutting edge research was presented.  Presentations included our work on egg size plasticity in honey bee queens and our new “Weak Worker” hypothesis for explaining division of labor in social insects. The social insect research community is truly amazing although its choral qualities remain to be tested (photo below).

Congratulations to Jake and Heather for winning first and third place among the oral presentations at the RE Peter Biology Conference in their respective categories! Scientific communication is so important: Well done!

In an extension of the concept of social immunity, we explain in our latest publication that defense mechanisms against stressors that are not pathogens or parasites can also occur at the group level and that group-level adaptations might exist that might proximally explain some behavior and life history patterns in social insects. For more information, check doi: 10.1111/brv.1307.

The world is often complicated. This turns out to be true also for the feeding habits of the ectoparasitic mite Varroa destructor. The long-held belief that Varroa was primarily feeding on the blood (hemolymph) of its honey bee hosts was overthrown by a paradigm-shifting study by Ramsey et al. in 2019, which demonstrated that dispersing Varroa primarily feed on fat body of their adult honey bee hosts. This should be adaptive, given that the fat body is readily accessible from the mites’ hiding spots between the bees’ abdominal segments and the fact that adult honey bees do not contain a lot of hemolymph. However, in our more comprehensive study, we could show that during the reproductive phase that is spent on honey bee brood, Varroa primarily feeds on the hemolymph, similar to another bee mite, Tropilaelaps, which only feeds on bee brood. This complex alternation of feeding habits in accordance with the life stage of parasite and host is a reminder how complex biological interactions are and that we must continue our quest for understanding the natural world around us.

In three important and novel presentations at the ABRC meeting, our lab was well represented in New Orleans this past week!

Virus tolerance and virus resistance are two different things, and on top of that they might be controlled by different genes for different viruses. So, the interactions between honey bees and their viruses are complicated and much research lies ahead of us: See the article at this link.

In a new study Rassol describes his newly developed testing method for current and putative Varroacides. Check it out here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/ps.7891

Both, Robert Lu and Prabashi Wickramasinghe are awarded the prestigious AGES scholarship for their excellence as graduate students! Congratulations: Well deserved!

In a new study, we show that eggs of queens in small colonies  are not only larger but also qualitatively better than eggs produced by queens in big colonies. The superior eggs give larvae a head start. Under natural conditions, larvae that start small but grow up in large colonies can compensate by growing faster and end up similarly-sized as adult workers that grow from big eggs in small colonies. However, when small eggs are transferred into small colonies, they do not catch up and emerge as smaller adults.

Alex and I put our best efforts into writing a comprehensive review of the social aspects of honey bee foraging. What should have been quite straightforward proved more challenging than anticipated. Thank you to the editor anyway for giving us the opportunity to contribute to the book entitled “The Foraging Behavior of the Honey Bee“. We hope that it will be useful!

My personal beginnings of honey bee research were devoted to understanding the transitioning of honey bee workers from in-hive tasks to outside foraging. With our collaborators from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, we have just published another analysis of this phenomenon at the proteome level. Using a novel antibody array as a proteomic tool that should be useful more generally, we report that Major Royal Jelly Proteins are involved, adding to the complex regulation of this life history transition and adding to the complex pleiotropy of MRJPs.

The variation in maternal provisioning in honey bees continues to amaze me and in our newest eLife publication, we report on some of the causation of this reproductive plasticity.

Our new collaborative work with the group of Victoria Soroker of the Agricultural Research Organization in Israel is showing that selection for hygienic behavior in honey bees has multiple benefits. Not only is social immunity enhanced, but this also translates into lower Varroa mite loads and better individual immunity.

On behalf of our undergraduate students Dawit and Tianna, we would like to express our great appreciation of the support by the Alberta Beekeepers Commission. Both, Dawit and Tianna, received ABC bursaries to further their studies of honey bees!

In my first large in-person conference since the COVID pandemic, our lab was well represented, co-organizing a symposium, and contributing 3 talks and 1 poster presentation! Lots of social insect discussion and fun in San Diego as well…

Congratulations to Prashant for graduating with his PhD! We all wish him the best for a bright path into the future!

Kaira termed this the UBO (Unhealthy Brood Odor) assay and it performs quite well in predicting the Varroa mite levels, hygienic removal of mites from brood cells under field conditions, and colony winter survival. Take a look at the paper in the Journal of Insect Science.

Congratulations to Prashant for publishing the first chapter of his PhD thesis in BMC Genomics, demonstrating that stingless bees also have a high genomic recombination rate. A significant knowledge gap has been filled:

Recombination mapping of the Brazilian stingless bee Frieseomelitta varia confirms high recombination rates in social Hymenoptera

I am happy to report that our analysis of the microbiome of high royal jelly bees in collaboration with the Raymann lab at UNCG and guest researcher Han Bin from the Institute of Apicultural Research of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences has been published with graduate student Megan Damico as lead author:

“High royal jelly production does not impact the gut microbiome of honey bees”

Interestingly, the environment (urban vs. rural) did have an effect on the gut microbiome!

Congratulations to Tianna for finishing her research internship with an excellent presentation at the closing symposium today! I am looking forward to her continued contributions to our group as more exciting research is ahead of us.

A very long-term project comes finally to a happy ending in the form of a publication. It started with a trip to Borneo with Niko Koeniger, sparking my interest in the Asian honey bees. The genomes of Apis dorsata and Apis florea followed, and now we have them finally analyzed for signatures of selection that might give us some hypotheses about the evolutionary differentiation among the three principal honey bee clades and adaptations that might have occurred during the common evolution of honey bees. I am so glad and want to thank everyone who was involved, including Robert Page who introduced me to Niko!

A thorough study indicating that the neuropeptide tachykinin may regulate how much behavioral specialists specialize… It’s a new angle on the old and long-standing problem of division of labor. Just a reminder that so much more is to be learned, for example the colony-level consequences remain to be tested!

Tachykinin signaling inhibits task-specific behavioral responsiveness in honeybee workers

I am very happy that the study of former MSc student Anissa and current PhD student Jake has appeared in the Phil Trans R. Soc. special issue on Aging in Social Insects: Even though the title doesnt indicate it clearly, the study has some great results with repercussions for understanding the longevity of reproductives in social insects: Reproductive activation in honeybee (Apis mellifera) workers protects against abiotic and biotic stress

The Varroa task-force of the COLOSS network has launched the second phase of the Varroa Citizen Science Initiative to globally monitor for Varroa and compare its impact across the globe. I will act as the country coordinator for Canada and am looking for volunteers to represent Canada from March 2021-March 2023. Please find more information in this document: VarroaCSI_COLOSS. If you are interested and eligible, please email me directly for registration!