Geoffrey Williams is an Auburn University entomologist and one of 16 researchers to receive a $283,000 grant from the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research’s Pollinator Health Fund.
According to Williams, beekeepers have been experiencing a 25 percent increase in bee losses, mostly seen in the winter months. He will use the funding to research two specific stressors affecting this decline; pesticides and Varroa mites.
“There has been a lot of work looking at individual stressors with bees but there is nothing about the effect of two stressors,” Williams said. “The grant will help us continue research on multiple colonies kept in the campus Bee Lab.”
His assistants, Emily Muehlenfeld and graduate student Selina Bruckner, help maintain the bees and equipment in the lab and also analyze data from the experiments.
“I never was really interested in insects until I realized that this work is very important,” Bruckner said, who is working toward her master’s degree in entomology.
Before coming to Auburn in 2016, Williams was Bruckner’s professor at the University of Bern in Switzerland. He inspired her desire to work with bees.
“I had studied entomology and parasitology and somehow was able to fuse the two together,” Williams said. “It was very opportunistic and I feel fortunate to do work that some people want to do as a hobby.”
In addition to their current research, Williams, Muehlenfeld
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