Project Grant 201065105205791

This three-year, $753,407 National Science Foundation project grant supports research at Marquette University to understand how honeybees collectively manage thermal fluctuations. The principal investigator will study the physiological, genetic, behavioral and neural mechanisms that allow honeybee colonies to effectively regulate temperature through fanning behavior. The research aims to determine how social interactions shape fanning responses, uncover neural gene networks associated with...

The University of Wisconsin-Madison was awarded a $690,000 Project Grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative Competitive Grants Program. The grant will fund the development of a low-cost, high-throughput behavioral tracking system to quantify the impacts of common insecticides on bumble bee behavior and colony performance. Researchers will characterize the effects of three insecticides on bees...

Texas A&M Agrilife Research was awarded a two-year, $120,000 Project Grant from the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative competitive grants program (AFRI, CFDA No. 10.310). The grant funds research to better understand honey bee premature self-removal behavior and its impacts on colony health and dynamics. Texas A&M Agrilife Research will conduct colony health studies comparing colonies...

The Regents of the University of California at Riverside received a $297,139 two-year Project Grant from the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative competitive grants program. The grant will fund research to quantify innate and social immunity responses in honey bees tolerant of Varroa mites, a significant parasite, compared to susceptible managed bee genotypes. Researchers will conduct behavioral,...

This $241,419 National Science Foundation project grant supports research into the protective symbiosis mechanism of honey bees at the University of Michigan from October 2022 to October 2023. The goal is to characterize how a bacterial symbiont protects honey bee brood from fungal pathogens by investigating its antifungal properties. Researchers will use microbiology, genetics, genomics, chemistry and bee rearing to determine how the trait evolved and identify the antifungal metabolite...

This $930,000 Project Grant award from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Agricultural Genome to Phenome Initiative (CFDA 10.332) supports research to mitigate the risk of impaired pollination services due to climate change. The key objectives are to: 1) identify commercially viable honey bee stocks resilient to heat, 2) determine the underlying physiological mechanisms governing heat resilience, and 3) develop genetic markers to...

This $1,120,270 National Science Foundation project grant, funded under the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074), will support research into the social and ecological drivers of life history evolution in wild bees. Principal investigator Utah State University will conduct three sets of experiments to investigate how wild bees allocate resources between immunity, reproduction, and longevity as a function of variation in their social and ecological environments. The research aims to determine...

This $365,000 Project Grant award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) Biomedical Research and Research Training Program (CFDA 93.859) supports research to understand the gene regulatory mechanisms underlying social behavior in bees. The objectives of the five-year project, which began on January 6, 2025, are to: 1) identify gene regulatory network (GRN) changes associated with evolutionary gains and losses of social behavior, 2) profile molecular and behavioral...

This Project Grant award in the amount of $144,912 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) supports research at North Carolina State University to investigate the factors shaping host-associated microbial communities using the honey bee as a model system. The research aims to integrate concepts from ecology and evolution to understand how environmental factors, species interactions, and evolutionary dynamics influence the composition of...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) awarded a $749,720 Project Grant under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) (CFDA 10.310) to Mississippi State University (MSU). The grant aims to understand how honey bees interact with viruses at the individual and cellular levels, with the goal of identifying genetic markers that indicate resistance to viral infections. The project will initially focus on studying the performance of...