Some cool work that my (former, now fully minted) Ph.D. student @twoleglaura.bsky.social did on the impacts of herbicide on honey bee behavior and brains when she was in my lab. This study was published last year, but it got some renewed interest today. Great stuff, Laura!
phys.org/news/2026-04...
Super interesting, from Prof. Jeff Ollerton: why should lawyers care about understanding pollinator declines? I couldn't have answered that, but Jeff explains and it's compelling. http://jeffollerton
I'm looking for a lovely, talented PhD student, working on my ERC-funded project investigating the links between sexual selection and epidemic dynamics. The project uses guppies, worms, behaviour tracking, big experiments, and maths.. email me! Must have a masters! su.varbi.com/what:job/job...
If you are interested in bee immunology, come to Virginia Tech! Dr. Enakshi Gosh is hiring a post-doc. More details here: jobs.apply.vt.edu/jobs/postdoc...
Local bees are getting the spotlight!! I went out this weekend and found a lot of great mining bees, including one named Andrena nuda lololol
A bee is sitting at the entrance of a burrow she has dug from the beige soil. Her head is facing the camera, the two black antenna are blurred at the tip as they leave the plane of focus. The two large compound eyes and the mouth parts are visible. Behind that, slightly out of focus, we can also see the dark legs with light hairs and the thorax, almost completely covered in hair. Around her are the clumps of soil from the the excavation of the burrow.
A gray, rugged, plastic box is set in the middle of a meadow. The box is at the center of the image. On the right of the box, we can see a white air inlet. Right of the box is a red surveyor flag. We can see green grass blades, but also brown grass from the previous year around the box and flag. In between the flag and the box, if we zoom in, we can make out a bee in flight. The bee has a dark-brown abdomen with brighter stripes.
Spring is here, and with that the mining bees have emerged. We are trying out our airborne eDNA sampling in an aggregation that is close to campus. Concentration of airborne eDNA is LOW, so please wish us luck!
We are searching for a new Department Head of Entomology at Virginia Tech. Come work in lovely Blacksburg with some pretty cool people and spectatular students.
Please repost and spread the word. Review Date 4/26/26.
jobs.apply.vt.edu/jobs/profess...
🧪
A New Toy for Serious Science Allows for Individual Honey Bee Forager Tracking. Read about exciting work from Stentiford, Harrap et al. from the Straw lab that delivered a decisive one–two punch to the long-standing challenge of tracking foraging honey bees.
authors.elsevier.com/a/1mkeE3QW8S...
Scientists: for a new story, I have one big question—>
What is a “good day” in the lab?
I’m looking for epic examples of the best day ever to general criteria for what constitutes a “good day” compared to a nothing-burger day.
Ping me if you have examples to share!
Re-posts appreciated!
A honey bee forager is sitting on an artificial feeder that is placed on a small table covered in blue table cloth. The bee is marked on her thorax with a yellow number tag. The blurry background is green grass. The feeder is an inverted jar that holds sugar syrup stuck in a base with grooves that dispense the syrup to the bees. The bee sticks its tongue into a groove to slurp up the sweet, sweet syrup.
A good day is when the ladies have found the feeder and data collection is within our grasp ...
Using our bee-tracking drone, we discovered that honey bees 🐝 have highly precise and individual routes. Now published at @currentbiology.bsky.social : doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...
How do we know our research results are REAL? We replicate them! Most folks agree but lament on how hard it is to publish these replications.
My dearest gentle reader, lament no more! Delighted to unveil: Replication Studies, a new section of Behavioral Ecology 1/
academic.oup.com/beheco/artic...
Incidentally, at that time we tied onions to our belts ...
Why are you coming at me so hard?!
(Yesterday, k1 asked when he can have a moped, and I told him that I had to cycle uphill 3 km to school, and he can have one when he can do that ...)
Empseb is simply the best. If you're a PhD student of evolutionary biology, do go there!
🚨 Tenure-track professorship at Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany, with a focus on evolutionary ecology of social hymenoptera 🐝🐜
Initially for 6 years:
www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/pr...
That is so cool! Looking forward to reading the pre-print!
Have you ever wondered what you would find if you could keep your eyes on a bee for more than a few meters? Us, too!
preprint (with videos!) + thread 🧵
Precise, individualized foraging flights in honey #bees 🐝 revealed by multicopter drone-based tracking
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
1/9
Our survey of #bees & #wasps visiting #soybean flowers is out: doi.org/10.4039/tce..... This work shows most 🐝s visiting soy🌼s carried soy pollen. #Bumblebees & ground-nesting 🐝s were the most common 🌼visitors suggesting that management practices supporting these #pollinators will benefit 🇨🇦growers
As I am eating Ankezopf (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zopf) every Sunday for breakfast, and me and K2 could not live without it, and K1 needs his Rösti (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6...) with just the right cheese, I have to go with A. But it would make me very sad ...
Hey I started a new section of my website called Derek's Tech Corner, come check it out: www.derekhennen.com/derekstechco.... It's where I'll share various software and other tech tools for cool kids that will save you time--so that you can go look for more bugs.
Love the "under construction" banner. I feel right at home in that timeline. Not sure about the choice of editor though ;-)
Awesome, thanks! With teaching starting soon, I imagine it will not be anytime soon. But I will keep it in mind when I do!
Thanks so much! I will have a read and then I only need to carve out time to learn something new ... That should be easy, right?!
Oh, do you have any code that is shareable (e.g., published alongside a MS)? I dabbled in Clojure for a web app (should get back to that as well, shouldn't I?), but I have only done ABMs in NetLogo. I would be interested to learn how to implement them in Clojure.
I second Inkscape and GIMP. Inkscape can either embed or just link the photos. In the latter case, if photos are edited (e.g., in GIMP), the changes propagate into the overall composition.
Honey bees nearly double their foraging distance by shifting and consolidating their preferred sites to remaining, isolated habitat patches within the larger land use changes. (A) Aerial imagery in 2022 of the study area in Blacksburg, VA, USA. Grey polygons represent all the lands converted in 2020-2021. Orange represents small patches of undisturbed microhabitat left within the developments. Black circle denotes the location of the hives. (B) Honey bees nearly double their communicated foraging distance in 2022 (sample size n=502) compared to 2018-2019 (sample size n=382) (mean±c.i, two-tailed likelihood ratio test used for analysis). Here each datapoint is a decoded waggle dance. (C) Honey bee foraging, as determined by dance decoding before (2018-2019, blue) and after (2022, red) the land use change, demonstrated that the bees shifted recruitment to the more distant, remaining orange patches within the grey, especially in the northern corner of the new housing development.
Robert Ostrom, @schuemaa.bsky.social and co show concrete consequences of changing land, as honey bees need to travel almost twice as far during foraging flights after construction. doi.org/10.1242/bio....
I feel the same moving from Europe to the US. Everything is very familiar-ish, but I cannot ID anything. One of these days I have to spot the insect ID class in the department ...
