April 2019 FCBA Meeting - Speaker Kaira Wagoner Varroa and hygenic behavior Also Annual Pound Cake Challenge

Forsyth County Beekeepers Association April Meeting @ The Forsyth County Cooperative Extension Building

Potluck Dinner: 5:30 pm and Pound Cake Challenge  Bring you Favorite Pound Cake to Share
Presentation:  6:30 pm
Meeting: 7:15 pm

Our Speaker Karia Wagoner Post-Doctoral Fellow
Rueppell Lab University of North Carolina at Greensboro 

She will be discussing  Varroa Mites and hygienic behavior in bees

Kaira Wagoner

Post-Doctoral Fellow

I have been a nature lover all my life, but my formal education began at Guilford College, where I double majored in Biology and Health Sciences, and minored in Chemistry and Astronomy. After the death of a dear friend from malaria, I was inspired to return to school to study malaria-carrying mosquitoes. My master’s thesis was entitled “Identification of morphologic and chemical markers of aestivating conditions in female Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes.” This work fostered my interest in the chemical ecology of insects, although for my doctorate I decided to switch my focus to a beneficial insect – the honey bee. I was particularly interested in the fascinating social immune mechanism hygienic behavior, the ability of adult honey bees to detect and remove unhealthy brood from the hive, improving the overall health of the colony. My doctoral dissertation was an investigation of the relationships between common stressors, brood-signaling, hygienic behavior, and selective breeding in the honey bee. As a post-doctoral fellow, I have continued this work, and am currently using natural honey bee stress signals to develop an assay for the improved selection of hygienic behavior and Varroa resistance.