All posts by amencerr

New Paper: Queen Bees Offload Pesticides to Their Eggs

Publications

Published in Current Biology, led by our lab with Drs. Julia Fine at the USDA-ARS and Bruce Buchholz at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. We show that honeybee queens under chronic pesticide exposure shunt contamination into their eggs — “maternal offloading” — once worker-bee filtering is overwhelmed (95% filtered on day 1, down to 86% by day 10 in our nanocolony trials). This reveals a mechanism by which pesticide burden can build in a colony over time and potentially contribute to delayed colony collapse. Access full article here!

Featured in UCD News.

Presenting at ESA 2025

Presentations

An enriching discussion on honey bee health research took place at the symposium “From the Bench to the Field: Emerging Technologies to Advance Honey Bee Health” part of the Entomological Society of America Annual Meeting in Portland, OR. The symposium was co-organized by Dr. Nicklisch, Dr. Fine, and Dr. Ricigliano; and hosted presentations from:

  • Elena Gratton ( University of Illinois) – What can forensic methods tell us? Using non-lethal pathogen screens to identify bee pathogens. 
  • Professor Reed Johnson (The Ohio State University) – Are honey bee detoxicative cytochrome P450 genes different from other bees?
  • Angela Encerrado (University of California, Davis) – Mapping the invisible: How advanced AMS technology reveals chemical communication and contamination pathways in bee colonies.
  • Allyson Martin Ewert (Louisiana State University) – Honey bee stock mediates the gut microbiome response to diet.

Congratulations to our Jastro & Shields award recipients!

Fellowships and Awards Grads

Three AgChem PhD students received the 2025-2026 Jastro-Shields fellowship award for their research proposals on:

Angela (left)- “Tracing Pesticide Flow in Honey Bee Colonies Using Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS): Mapping Physical and Biological Hotspots”

Eli (middle)– “Mechanisms of Cellular Uptake and Toxicity of Inhaled Pollutant-Absorbed Nanoplastics”

Zeke (right)– “Determining the Extent to Which Microplastics have Infiltrated a Protected Marine Ecosystem”

Congrats Spyros – M.S. Graduate

Graduation

Spyros Tamvakopoulos graduated with a Master of Science from the Forensic Science Graduate Group. During his time at UCD Spyros worked on fingerprint detection and visualization in crime scenes.

All the best wishes in his future endeavors for M.S. Spyros Tamvakopoulos!