Hangry Bees: Environment Impacts Temperament in Addition to Genetics with Dr. Elizabeth Walsh

Hangry Bees is a series of experiments looking at how nutritionally-stressed honey bees respond with increased aggression. Additionally, there was a significant effect of genetic background (honey bee stock), but the environmental factor was also significant. Further implications surrounding disease/pest/pathogen status also abound, as we see in our study that nutritionally stressed bees also had increased pest and pathogen loads. The takeaway thoughts here are that sometimes re-queening isn’t going to solve behavior problems because the environment and genetics interact, which is something that contradicts the traditional advice of simply continually re-queening whenever a colony shows a behavior beekeepers dislike.

Speaker Details:

Dr. Liz Walsh is a Research Scientist with the USDA-ARS laboratory in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Steve Pernal of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada at the Beaverlodge Research Farm in Alberta. Liz's postdoc was spent exploring the links between honey bee health challenges and honey bee biomarkers as a part of the national BeeCSI project, but she also did work with AFB and chalkbrood, exploring stock variation, asymptomatic vs. symptomatic infections, and more. This was all very different from her dissertation work, which was done at Texas A&M University with Dr. Juliana Rangel, where Liz explored the impact of miticide exposure in immature queens. Liz is pleased to be at the end of her "teenage" years as a beekeeper, since she began keeping bees as a young high school student in her home state of Wisconsin, and is proud to serve the beekeeping industry through research initiatives.

Liz is currently working on various projects, which include examining aggression in various honey bee stocks, drone reproductive health and biology, queen reproductive health after stressor exposure, and honey bee variation in responses to pathogens (Varroa, chalkbrood, and Nosema).