Bees in the bee lab? Nope, not yet.

I survived my first year as an assistant professor! I taught three courses (Behavioral Ecology, Experimental Ecology, and Intro Bio), wrote one grant proposal, got two papers out (1) (2), and started trying to get my research program started. It's that last, key piece that's giving me the most trouble. There's just one hitch: no bees.

One of the major hurdles I've been facing this year is getting permission from the City of Claremont to keep honey bees for my research. (BTW, Claremont, lots of other cities are jumping on the backyard beekeeping bandwagon, including Santa Monica and, perhaps soon, even Los Angeles!) After over a year of negotiations with lawyers and bureaucrats, I finally have a permit to keep bees at an off-campus site. Which is, don't get me wrong, very exciting! But keeping them on campus, where students could really learn from them, still seems a long way off....

At least I've got these bees.

In the meantime, my five (!) summer research students and I are waiting for my new apiary to be built. It's still weeks off, so it'll be a race against time to see if we can squeeze in any research on honey bees this summer. Luckily, in the meantime, they've got plenty of other projects to work on, involving flying drones (a quadcopter, not male bees), a "smart beehive", a collection of native bees, and young ant queens. Check back over the next couple of months to hear more, as they report on their progress and other related topics.