Hi! I’m a new member of the Midwest Tech Team, and am looking forward to meeting many of you in the future. Here is a little bit about my honey bee background and my motivation for getting involved in the Bee Informed Partnership:
I first became interested in honey bees when I was taking an animal behavior class as a college undergraduate. It fascinated me that so many individuals help the queen reproduce, sacrificing their own reproduction. I wanted to learn the theories underlying this phenomenon, and found that the more I learned, the more my interest in bees was cultivated. I wanted to learn to keep bees, and applied for a field assistant position in Tom Seeley’s lab at Cornell University. I really enjoy hands-on work, and found beekeeping really fun and rewarding. I liked all parts of the job, from the smell of a burning smoker, the inspecting of hives, and assembling equipment, to talking through experiments and running them. I returned the following summer to do my own experiment, looking at how induced brood breaks affect mite levels throughout the season. After graduating with a B.S. in entomology, I hired some full service long distance movers and moved to Minneapolis to work in Marla Spivak’s lab, helping to manage the lab colonies.
I was really excited when a position opened up on the Bee Informed Partnership Tech Team. I really value the bridge that BIP forms between the community of scientists, conducting bee research, and the beekeepers that are providing fundamental pollination services and producing honey. I’m excited to be a part of this organization, and to dedicate time to working with both of these communities. And on a more basic level, I’m looking forward to spending more time in the country and every sunny moment outside.
