What does it take to create a virtual world for bees that lets us study how they learn? Gregory Lafon is at the forefront of using this technique to study honey bee cognition. In this episode, he discusses the challenges involved in building VR for bees and what we stand to learn.

What does it take to create a virtual world for bees that lets us study how they learn? Gregory Lafon is at the forefront of using this technique to study honey bee cognition. In this episode, he discusses the challenges involved in building VR for bees and what we stand to learn.

Bees rely on their sense of time to navigate and find food. Is there a chance that pesticides alter this sense of time? Manuel Giannoni Guzman is a postdoctoral scholar at Vanderbilt University. He and his team posed this question and designed an experiment to find out.

Kamal Bell left his full-time job as a teacher to turn a 12-acre piece of land into a profitable farm and honeybee apiary. The goal? Educate young farmers and increase access to fresh produce for minorities affected by food deserts. In this episode, Kamal tells the story of how Sankofa Farms came to be.

Cassie Cichorz is the Asian Giant Hornet outreach and education specialist at the Washington State Department of Agriculture. In this episode, she tells the story of how her team used tracking technology to follow a hornet back to its nest—then what they did to eradicate it. If you’re in Washington and come across what you believe is an Asian Giant Hornet, you can report it to the WSDA by calling 1-800-443-6684.

Dr. Scarlett Howard is a postdoctoral research fellow at Deakin University in Melbourne Australia. She’s asking the question: can bees do math? In this episode, she talks to us about how she teaches bees about zero, addition, and subtraction.

There are millions of dollars being poured into trying to pass off cheap syrup as honey. Jim Gawenis is trying to stop it. He is the CEO and chief chemist of Sweetwater Science Labs, the only lab in the USA that uses Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) to ensure the authenticity of honey.

As the research leader of the USDA Agricultural Research Service’s (ARS) Carl Hayden Bee Research Center, Dr. Gloria DeGrandi-Hoffman has received grants for her research in excess of $6 million. In this episode, she shares how a deadly parasitic insect has overtaken honeybee colonies across the world and what we can do to stop it.

Justin Maness is the founder of Buddha Bee Apiary, a company that installs and manages beehives in backyards across North Carolina. They do all the work and provide the equipment—and the customer gets the honey. He believes hands-on education could be the key to helping honeybees. But, he’s up against some serious challenges. In this episode, we learn his story.