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
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!
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)
Here is the 2012 summer edition of the Zayed lab, fresh off marking ~10,000 drones!
Left to Right:
Amro, Afshin, Tabashir, Brock, Anna, Shermineh, Clement, Alex, Jack, Arash
(Nadia is missing)
May 10 – Boxing Day
Jack and the box
“Do you know how to use a hammer?” I asked
“Yes!” nodded Arash
“Great, you’ll get bottom boards!… Brock and Jack get the box, Alex and I will do the telescoping covers.”
… and so our experiment started with preparing 50 hive boxes – the future home of 50 honey bee colonies that we will setup later for our study. The boxes are a half-size version of the standard Langstroth hive and come unassembled as 16 pieces of wood and 80+ nails per hive.
We finished them off by 4 pm, a good day ahead of schedule. “I want you all to update your CV’s with ‘Strong With Hammer’ ” I joked over lunch.
Beeautiful
Here is the 2010 edition of the BEEUNIT!
Right to Left: Amer, Clement (with Jason, an honorary member), Amro, Brock, Shermineh, Mandana. (Missing: Alexandra)
The bees are coming… look bee-zy 🙂
Caramel Crunch or Autozygosity with drift and mutation?
Last week was a bit of a milestone for me. It was the grande finale of my first course as a professor. I developed and taught a 4th year course on population genetics and I was fortunate to have a really great group of students. To celebrate, I delivered the final quiz of the term using the best and tastiest medium for disseminating higher knowledge – cake! The students had to explain the meaning of the equation inscribed on the cake (extra points were given for the complete derivation :)). [hint: it was called the mutation-drift cake !]
Thanks all!
Amro
I can’t wait for the bee season to start! Its been getting warmer and less gray here in Toronto. Bee season is a month and half away, and I am very happy to announce the near completion of the Zayed Lab’s research apiary. The research apiary will consist of a bee yard to keep honey bee colonies, and a near-by laboratory to setup experiments. Here are a few pictures of the site from last fall. I’ll post more pictures once we get going with the bees in April/May.
Amro
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