It's an honor to have Dr. Keith S. Delaplane as our guest. Keith is Professor Emeritus of Entomology at the University of Georgia where he served as Director of the honey bee program there between 1990-2024. Research by Keith, his students, and coworkers resulted in hundreds of publications including over 70 refereed research papers, 7 books, and 5 book chapters ranging across basic honey bee (and termite) biology, health management, pollination, and social evolution, garnering over 6300 citations by peers around the world. His latest book, Honey Bee Social Evolution was published in October 2024. In 2014 he was inducted into the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for his honey bee research and education efforts throughout the UK. Keith and his wife Sonja live in Athens, Georgia, where they keep a few bee hives in their back yard in the Normaltown neighborhood.

Jovana Bila Dubaić is a  Doctor of Environmental Sciences at the Faculty of Biology, University of Belgrade. Her scientific field covers biodiversity protection and invasive species ecology.  Her PhD thesis topic covered “Diversity of the Wild Bees in Belgrade: faunistic overview, patterns of distribution and status assessment of the chosen group population”.

More about the research she does at the Faculty read here https://srbee.bio.bg.ac.rs/srbee and her instagram page can be found at: belgrade.bees.ecology

In this Podcast we talk with Jovana discussing her work with free-living bees and in particualr her use of citzen science and direct engagement with the public.

We were honoured to welcome Héctor Morales Urbina and Maggie Shanahan as our guests to Salon #40. They both are beekeepers and bee researchers from Chiapas, Mexico and the United States, respectively. Maggie shares some broad context around beekeeping in Chiapas and compare and contrast beekeeping systems in the U.S. and Mexico. 

Héctor talks about how beekeepers in Chiapas and their use traditional ecological knowledge to better care for their bees and discusses the ways that the Chiapa culture shapes beekeepers’ relationships with their bees. Together, Maggie and Héctor discuss beekeeper-led strategies to build resilience in the face of industrialisation, broadening focus to consider not just beekeeping practices, but beekeeping systems.

Supporting Links:

Héctor's article:

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/W2RM79S8ZAZZ4GH5A54H/full?target=10.1080/21683565.2025.2475464

Sign-up sheet to receive forthcoming Guidance Memo on Building Resilient Beekeeping Systems:

https://forms.gle/2BPn3jPpjyLcwjW98

Kaylin Kleckner is a PhD Candidate at the University of Florida Honey Bee Research and Extension Laboratory. Through collaboration with Rhodes University, Kaylin conducts field research with wild and unmanaged honey bees in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. She used beelining techniques to locate 130 nest sites to study nesting ecology, population structure, and disease dynamics. Long term, she aims to inform local land management decisions and pollinator conservation initiatives in Africa.

Neste podcast, conversamos com Felipe Mendes, do Brasil. Felipe é um apicultor e consultor arbóreo e biodinâmico, pioneiro em abordagens inovadoras de manejo animal por meio do uso de TreeNests (colmeias em toras). Ele trabalha com híbridos de Apis mellifera scutellata (abelhas africanizadas) e colaborou com o Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) no Brasil, um movimento social que ocupa terras agrícolas não utilizadas para promover a agricultura sustentável e a autossuficiência econômica.