Ongoing research

Descriptions of recent and ongoing research

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Exploitative competition between honey bees and native bees could have negative consequences for native bee populations, but we know surprisingly little about when and where negative effects are likely to occur. This research combines a series of manipulative experiments and field surveys to assess when and where honey bee competition impacts native bee foraging and fitness.

Understanding how and when pathogens spillover from reservoir to target species has important implications for our understanding of disease ecology in multi-host systems. This collaborative project investigates how parasites and other pathogens are transmitted among different bee species using plant-pollinator networks, parasite screens of field-caught bees, and inoculation assays.

Abundant honey bees can compete with native bees for flowers, prompting native bees to visit different plants. Such niche partitioning could allow bees to escape the negative effects of competition. However, if bees are displaced from preferred species, they might compromise their diet quality, which could in turn have negative health consequences. In this study, we assessed how resource availability and honey bee competition impact native bee pollen nutrition.