B4 Academic Symposium: More Free-Living Honey Bees

Presented by Andrew Brown - For anyone interested in the survival of honey bees as they face more challenges, learning about ongoing exploration of how they are living wild without intervention from beekeepers will be illuminating. Work at Plymouth University looking at Free-Living Honey Bees over the past year will be explained and discussed. Citizen science is contributing, and you will learn how you too can take part. There will closer consideration of some of the threats to honey bees, focusing on the invasive Asian Hornet and Honey-Bee genetics. The Asian Hornet frequently wipes out whole colonies in European countries. Mixing up of the genetic makeup (introgression) of honey bees, thanks to decades of importing other strains, is likely to be contributing to the reduction of the resilience in native bees built up through evolution, but is evolution still going on despite introgression?