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Peponapis pruinosa, commonly known as the squash bee, is a specialist pollinator of plants in the genus Cucurbita (a.k.a. squash, pumpkins, gourds, zucchini, among others). Over the past several weeks, members of the López-Uribe lab visited 19 pumpkin farms throughout central and eastern PA to collect squash bees, bumble bees, and little green sweat bees! These three species, in addition to honey bees, make up approximately 90% of the bees that visit pumpkin and squash flowers. In total, we

Last Saturday was the 9th annual ‘Wings in the Park’ at Tudek Park in State College. Wings in the Park is an educational event hosted by the Penn State Extension Master Gardeners of Centre County. It is a family fun day centered around celebrating the butterflies, bees, and all of our beneficial pollinators. People from the Lopez-Uribe, Hines, and Grozinger labs were present, educating both children and their parents on the importance of pollinators, specifically bees, and how amazing

  Steve Repasky introducing virgin queens into queenless nucs Last Saturday the we attended the Queen Improvement Field Day hosted by Burgh’s Bees in Pittsburgh. The day was lined with speakers that are participating in the PA Queen Improvement Program. The topics included how to conduct mite grooming assays to detect “mite-biting behavior”, quantify winter survival, queen rearing techniques, and installation of virgin queens. Most beekeepers attending this event had previously participated in educational sessions earlier in the month

Queen rearing is an important skill that beekeepers need to learn in order to keep important bee traits among the colonies in their bee yards. For example, it may be of interest to keep bees that have a milder behavior, produce more honey, or that are capable of better dealing with mites. Rearing queens is not a trivial task, but it is an art and it requires a lot practice. It requires good eyes, a

Centre County Beekeepers Last month we talked to the Centre County Beekeepers and they helped us to locate our 17th feral colony in the State College area. Thank you to all for your support, we are very excited! After our talk on the biology of feral bees, we took a small survey and we would like to share with you the results of the survey. Many beekeepers had significant annual losses last year. This is