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By Amro, December 22, 2012

Why do honey bees have hairy eye balls?
Hear the answer on the Quirks Question Show on Saturday Dec. 29, at noon on CBC Radio One.  You can also listen online here.

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By Amro, September 11, 2012

My first cohort of grad students successfully fledged the nest last August – Brock and Shermineh both defended their Masters degree. Brock’s free time was incredibly short-lived, as he just started his PhD studies (on honey bee population genomics and health) last week!

Brock and Shermineh celebrate their shiny MSc degrees (note the gold stars!)

I also want to welcome Nadia – a new masters student in the lab. Nadia got to do serious bee work over the summer, where she figured out how to train honey bees to navigate through mazes! – very cool, check out this video! She’ll use this test to study the genetics of learning and memory in honey bees. Welcome Nadia!

Nadia; Only dedicated students inspect colonies in the rain with no gloves!!!

The lab also welcomes two Research at York Students; Anna and Jonathan, who will help us with some molecular biology and bioinformatics research respectively.

Fall Winter RAY’s:
Jonathan and Ann

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By Amro, August 24, 2012

We’ve been a very excited bunch this last month – we recently purchased a super fast computer server to crunch a very large dataset; the genomes of many worker bees.

Clement put in some serious efforts to get the server up and running… and man, does it ever run!  The computer’s 24 cores crunch numbers so fast, that Amon had to wear a helmet when operating the machine!

Amon looks on as the server’s 24 cores light up (in red)

Clement, Amon, and Brock are in Awe!

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By Amro, August 24, 2012

Very happy to announce that Shermineh Minai successfully defend her Masters thesis today.  Shermineh contributed greatly to the population and genetic evolution studies we undertook over the past two years.  She was a co-author on the recent paper on the effects of management on genetic diversity in the honey bee, in addition to co-authoring a very exciting manuscript on the effects of recombination on GC content and molecular evolution in the honey bee (currently being reviewed).  She also wrote another manuscript on the molecular evolution of transcription factors involved in regulating worker behaviour.

Congrats Shermineh on a very productive masters.

Amro

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By Amro, August 20, 2012

Congrats to Brock for successfully defending his masters’ thesis today. Brock’s thesis was awarded with distinction (top 5%) and contained one published paper and one manuscript that is about to be submitted. Brock was very productive; he completed one published side project and several other experiments that will be written up this fall/winter.

All you bee fans out there – don’t despair! Brock is continuing his research in the lab as a PhD candidate this September.

Congrats Brock!

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By Amro, July 13, 2012

I am happy to announce that we are hosting York’s latest spark student here at the lab. Spark is an award of up to $4000 allowing superstar high school students to participate in ground-breaking research at York University.
Amon will be joining our research group as we tackle studies of honey bee immunity and genomics.
Welcome Amon!

Check out Amon’s blog to learn more about his experiences in the honey bee lab!

(left to right: Brock, Clement, Nadia, Amon, Afshin)

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By Amro, April 30, 2012

The spring is starting to break in Southern Ontario, just in time to greet the new cohort of summer students joining the lab, including:

Nadia Tsvetkov, our new research associate (and incoming MSc Student this fall)
Jack Xu and Mohammad Mahjoori are summer NSERC undergraduate scholarship students (congrats! its very competitive)
Anna Chernyshova, Arash Soltani and Tabashir Chowdhury are honours thesis students (Anna and Arash are also Research at York students this term)
and Armando Ponte who is doing a summer research practicum.

Stay tuned for updates on our summer research;

Sincerely,

Amro

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By Amro, March 7, 2011

I’ve been having fun reading/using two recent bee books: Laurence Packer’s Keeping the Bees and May Berenbaum ‘s Honey, I’m Homemade

Laurence is a former-mentor and now colleague at York University’ Department of Biology – the book is very informative and fun to read.  I am a bit biased however, as I like to think that I am the hero of chapter 8 !

May’s book is a great compilation of desserts using honey as an ingredient (I’ve been salivating over the Norwegian Rice Custard recipe on page 113)… Remember to buy honey from your local beekeeper before trying out the recipes!

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By Amro, September 2, 2010

The honey bee as a model organism has many advantages (haplodiploidy, high recombination rate, huge family sizes, well known ecology and physiology, etc.).  A subtle and understated advantage is unlike other lab critters, you don’t have to feed them… as a matter of fact, the bees feed you! Here are a few pictures of our honey harvest from a couple of weekends ago.  A very rewarding experience after a long and warm field season!

Our first spin!

(L->R: Alex, Jen, Brock, Amro)