Year: 2023

Our work was featured in KCRW’s “Greater LA” program! Check it out here: https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/greater-la/insects/bees

Congrats to Nickole on her paper characterizing gut microbiomes for the first time in Neotropical bumble bees! Check it out: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/msphere.00139-23

Kristal and I had a blast collecting bumble bees in the Eastern Sierra and White Mountains last week. Special thanks to Erica Pitcavage for field assistance and staff at the SNARL and WMRS research stations (especially Tim).

Summer is still in full swing, and we’re busy collecting bees in the field, doing experiments, analyzing data, and writing! Some news:

• My new opinion article on “evolutionary addiction” was just published in Trends in Microbiology.
• Dr. Bahareh Sorouri, a postdoc at UA Fairbanks, is joining the lab as a Visiting Scientist. Welcome Bahareh!
• I did an interview with the UCI communications office about the work going on in the lab: video and article

Lots of good news to report from the Hammer lab lately!

• Nickole and Jen did great on their first committee meetings
• Jen received a grant from the Audubon Society to fund her bee research
• Sophia was accepted into a bunch of PhD programs and is going to Cornell in the fall
• We received a grant from the Joint Genome Institute to do metagenomic sequencing of wild bumble bees
• Toby’s paper on bee micro-breweries got some press (here and here)

We’ve got a lot of field work and lab work happening now and a couple of papers (hopefully) coming out this summer, stay tuned!

A new paper on cellophane bee “micro-breweries”, by Toby and collaborators, was just published. Check it out here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2023.1114849/full!

Annika was awarded a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture! She’ll be leveraging her expertise in community ecology to design and test probiotic gut bacterial communities for bumble bees. Congrats Annika!