Posts

In September, our lab was represented at the Royal Entomological Society’s Annual Conference, Ento25, held in Glasgow. Researchers from around the UK and the rest of the world came together to discuss all things insects, from ecology and evolution to conservation and climate change.

Everyone loves warm, sunny weather, especially red mason bees! Thanks to the fine weather over the last few weeks, the red mason bees, after sleeping through the winter, have finally started to emerge from their cocoons - read Elisa’s latest update on our grant website here as well as all the field updates from earlier in the season.

Our team were busy over the summer with bee fieldwork - you can read Elisa’s latest update on our grant website here as well as all the field updates from earlier in the season.

And just like that, almost two months have shot by since my previous bee update and what a crazy time it has been. We have been inundated with mason bee activity at all of our nesting sites, with over 250 completed tubes to date.

Delighted to say that our lab has secured £833,339 of BBSRC funding. The title of the grant is ‘Resilience of pollinators in a changing world: impact of developmental environment on metabolism and energetic budgets in social and solitary bees’.

Spring is well underway and despite the somewhat turbulent weather we are experiencing at the moment, solitary bee season waits for no one… Good progress has been made on the current project with the installation of the mason bee boxes, aiming to encourage nesting for subsequent larval retrieval and use in diet and temperature manipulations.

Welcome to Sophie Gibson who has started a MSc in the lab! Sophie will be delivering bee ecology workshops in schools and colleges over the coming year to find out whether hands-on experience affects school pupils’ science identity.

Congratulations to Yannis on being awarded his PhD! He passed with minor corrections - thanks to Peter Mayhew and Blake Morton for examining. looking forward to some excellent papers on macroevolution of parental care, life history and nesting behaviour in the near future.

Big congratulations to Alex who has been shortlisted for the 2021 Haldane Prize for our paper on bee nutrition! The prize is Functional Ecology’s annual award for Early Career Researchers. Here is a link to Alex’s blog post about it.

Welcome to Jamie Smith who joins our lab in September to start a NERC-funded Panorama DTP studentship! Jamie’s project will be entitled Nutrigenomics and the resilience of bees in a changing climate.