BioFrontiers Presents: "Pollinator Pandemic: The Outsized Role of Parasites in Bee Health"
Category: Event Calendar
Date and Time for this Past Event
- Tuesday, Apr 23, 2024 6pm
Location
Jennie Smoly Caruthers Biotechnology Building
Details
Pollinator Pandemic: The Outsized Role of Parasites in Bee Health
Sammy Ramsey
Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
While pesticides dominate most discussions of honey bee welfare, research has consistently shown that parasites are the most significant single driver of honey bee losses. The landscape of honey bee parasites is diverse and strange, so much so that bee parasites have earned their own ecological category "Melittophiles". Each has had to amass a suite of odd adaptations to persist with social organisms primed by millions of years of evolution to exclude any creature seeking access to their trove of biologically invaluable treasures (honey, wax, bee bread, brood, etc). This research has taken me and my team (in collaboration with National Geographic) all over Asia as we track the emergence of a new Melittophile destroying bees in each new country it spreads to carving an unsettling path westward.
