Retrieving USBombus bees

This week I took (yet another) road trip up to University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to visit my post-doc advisor Sydney Cameron. We collected a lot of bees as part of our USDA Bumble bee decline project and we wanted to make sure the collection stayed all together in one freezer for the foreseeable future. So I packed up all the thousands of frozen bee samples representing many US Bombus in coolers of dry ice and lugged them back to UA. We hope to use these samples for several forthcoming projects relating to bumble bee evolution and conservation genomics.

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I was also able to visit my friend Alex Harmon-Threatt who is a good buddy from back in Berkeley and is a prof in the Entomology Dept at UI that does cool stuff with pollinator biology.

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