LOZIER MOLECULAR ECOLOGY LAB

The following is a writeup by Kennan Oyen, a UWY grad student working with collaborator Michael Dillon and describes some of our integrative aspects of the NSF Mountain Bees project.

I’m Kennan Oyen, A Ph.D. student in Dr. Michael Dillon’s lab. The Dillon Lab has been busy this summer!  Our collaborator Jamie Strange from Utah State and USDA, along with his students, collected wild bumble bee queens (Bombus vosnesenskii) this spring and nested them in the lab.  In May, we received our first batch of hives reared from wild queens collected in Southern California.  With a team of undergraduates and a high school student I have been studying how these bees cope with extreme temperatures.  

We recently wrapped up our first forray into the field for the 2016 season, travelling out west from Alabama to Washington, Oregon, and California. For those interested in what it takes to do bumble bee field work, this picture more or less sums things up. Nets, vials, coolers for storing ice and dry ice to preserve specimens, cooking gear, tents, sleeping bags, and you should be good to go! All this gear does make flying tricky, and since  we need a vehicle when we get out west anyway, we usually just drive. Jason and I have driven back and forth across the country together about 4 times now.​

A new video on the decline of the bee Bombus affinis, and bumble bees more generally. This video features some of the work from my postdoc, including interviews with my old PI Sydney Cameron, among a number of other great bee biologists. Please take a look, and check out the website of the video's maker.  www.rustypatched.com/the-film/

FYI, my personal view is that we can find affinis around in geographically widespread pockets (I even know a few where we've found some over several years!), suggesting that imminant extinction may be less likely, however overall the range is shrinking and the species is certainly doing among the most poorly of any species we've investigated. A canary in the coal mine? 

The Lozier Lab is represented by Jason Jackson and Peter Scott at the Evolution 2016 meetings in Austin, TX.
Jason will be talking some about neutral and adaptative structure among geographic populations of one of our study species, Bombus bifarius, and Peter will be talking about assymmetrical hybrid zones in turtles.