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:
Lots of good news to report from the Hammer lab lately! 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!
Perla was awarded a fellowship from the UCI Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program to support her research project on how the gut microbiome affects bumble bee health and behavior. Congrats Perla!!
Jen was awarded a Mildred E. Mathias Graduate Student Research Grant, to support her work on solitary bee diversity and microbiomes in the UC Natural Reserve System. Congrats Jen!
Curious about what happens to the gut microbiome and immunity across the host lifespan? Check out our paper now in press at Molecular Ecology!