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"Nutrition Matters: Healthy Diets Help Distressed Bees"

Speakers: Makaylee Crone and Kate Anton

Makaylee is an Ecology PhD candidate in the Department of Entomology at Penn State, where she is co-advised by Christina Grozinger and David Biddinger. The goal of her research is to understand how pollen protein and lipid content can positively influence honey bee tolerance to pesticides. To tackle this question, she uses pesticide bioassays to examine differential survival when bees are fed diets containing naturally different protein to lipid ratios (P:Ls), or diets altered to have different P:Ls. She also uses molecular methods to understand how different diets impact honey bee health genes.  

Her other projects involve understanding how different pollen diets impact mason bee (Osmia cornifrons) growth and development, with the goal of understanding if pollen diversity or P:L is more important for these outcomes. Shr is also interested in how pollen collections vary across different bee species throughout the growing season. Makaylee’s research is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, the Bunton-Waller Fellowship, and the North American Pollinator Protection Program.

Kate Anton is the apiarist for the Grozinger Lab and Center for Pollinator Research at Penn State University.  Kate started beekeeping as a hobby 12 years ago and now manages 75 research colonies. She also specializes in queen rearing and breeding to aid honey bee research focused on nutrition, health, landscape ecology, and genomics.