Overview
Bees are vital for ecosystem stability and global food security. They provide pollination services worth hundreds of billions of pounds annually. The UK has ~245 species of wild bees, collectively performing more pollination than managed honeybees and bumblebees. Unfortunately, wild bee populations are declining. Two key factors are human-induced changes to nutrition and climate.
All bees feed offspring with pollen from the landscape. But humans are altering nutritional landscapes for bees, so how can bees respond to these changes? Most of what we know about bee nutrition comes from studies in social bees like honeybees or bumblebees, where nutrition influences caste determination, development, pathogen resistance and others. We know that nutritional cues affect gene expression, but this knowledge comes from a few genes, and only in honeybees. The nutritional ecology and nutrigenomics of other bees, particularly solitary bees, is largely unstudied.
Human activity is also warming the planet. Temperature affects animals’ metabolic rate, physiology, digestion, and nutrient assimilation, as well as gene expression. Dr Gilbert’s recent work has identified carbohydrate and fat storage overwinter as potentially critical for solitary bees’ nutritional ecology. But we know little about how this is regulated, and how bees will deal with changing nutritional landscapes in a warmed future.
We are now, for the first time, in a position to understand not just whether but also how different nutritional landscapes and climates affect bees. We will address this crucial knowledge gap in this exciting cross-institutional project, by combining field ecology with cutting-edge molecular approaches. The project will address issues relevant for pure ecological science, conservation biology, agriculture and crop science.
You should normally have, or expect to obtain, at least 2:1 Honours degree (or international equivalent) in a related subject.
See the Panorama website for more information on the Project, the Supervisory Team, training and the working environment.
For individual introductions to each Panorama DTP project at the University of Hull, watch a recording of a webinar held on 9 December 2021. You'll hear from programme leaders, supervisors, and students talking about funded postgraduate research at the Panorama DTP as well as queries from other applicants in the Q&A.