PhD opportunity in the SWBio DTP programme available to UK and international applicants (see eligibility criteria).
Application deadline: midnight 6 December 2021
Stressed honeybee queens: do maternal effects change egg composition and worker behaviour?
Honeybees are important pollinators of agricultural and wild plants, yet they also face numerous emerging challenges in a strongly human-modified world, including poor nutrition. We offer an exciting multidisciplinary PhD project to investigate how honeybee queens adjust egg size and composition in changing landscapes and what consequences these adjustments have for their offspring. It is widely appreciated across insects that egg size is a significant predictor of later survival and fitness traits, yet the consequences of egg size – and maternal ability to adjust it - are poorly understood in honeybees. The candidate will use cutting-edge molecular tools to analyse how different foraging landscapes (urban, agricultural, and semi-natural environments) and experimental manipulations of pollen and honey stores affect the molecular and nutritional composition of queen-laid eggs. This will be combined with radio-frequency identification (RFID) tracking of individually marked bees to assess the long-term effects of these maternal effects on worker behaviour and lifespan. Based on the results of the behavioural tracking, the candidate will develop predictive models to assess how variation in resource allocation by queens could affect colony growth and pollination capacity in rapidly changing environments.
The PhD is based at the University of Bristol, with Dr Christoph Grueter and Dr Sinead English as supervisors. The successful applicant will also be working in the lab of Prof Adria LeBoeuf (University of Fribourg, Switzerland) to learn about molecular tools.
Further details can be found here: https://www.swbio.ac.uk/ & https://tinyurl.com/hwyets