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The Perilous Life of a Drone – a talk by Alison McAfee

13th February 2023 @ 7:30 pm - 8:30 pm GMT

Drone honey bees get little attention from workers, queens or even researchers!  Yet they are clearly a vital resource for a healthy colony.  

CABK members and Non-members are welcome to attend.  There is no fee for this event which also will be live-streamed to the CABK YouTube Channel – watch live or later, for one week only, on demand.

Registration for this Zoom event is now open.

Register


Dr Alison McAfee will talk about her studies into the resilience of those largely ignored drone bees

Alison McAfee

Alison McAfee completed her Ph.D. in Genome Science and Technology at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and is now a postdoc at UBC and North Carolina State University. She is a L’Oreal For Women in Science Research Excellence Fellow and her research has been reported by Scientific American, National Geographic, and CBC, among other venues. She also enjoys long, steep hikes, fishing, and training horses with her dressage coach.

The Perilous Life of a Drone
Drone honey bees are woefully understudied. An abundance of healthy, high-quality drones are necessary to produce top-notch queens, but we have a very poor understanding of how stressors like extreme temperatures and pesticide exposure affect adult drone fertility, survival, and physiology. We evaluated drone and worker stress tolerance in terms of survival, and measured levels of common stress-response proteins after exposure to pesticides. The results we obtained were not at all what we expected, and hint at drones having more complex stress tolerance mechanisms than we give them credit for.

Details

Date:
13th February 2023
Time:
7:30 pm - 8:30 pm GMT

Venue

Your house, via Zoom

Organiser

Sue Carter
Email
secretary@cabk.org.uk