Meeting 1170 Minutes

Minutes from the 1170th Meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club

President Shayla Salzman called the 1170th meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club to order at 7:40 pm on Tuesday, December 8th in MCZ 101, 26 Oxford St. Approximately 25 members and guests were in attendance.

Old business: Treasurer Patrick Gorring reminded members to pay their dues.

Ashley Mi Bae and Rory Maher were confirmed for membership.

Prof. Lynn Adler of UMass/Amherst presented a talk entitled Floral traits mediating pathogen transmissions & establishment in pollinators.

Dr. Adler discussed the role of plants in mediating bee diseases, how nectar chemistry and pollen can affect bee gut pathogen loads, how potential transmissions and protections vary across plant species, and implications for bees on the colony level.

She described her experiments inoculating the bumblebee Bombus impatiens with the gut parasite Crithidia bombi and allowing bees to feed on various configurations of nectar and pollen with added compounds, such as nicotine and thymol. One of her experiments utilized tents containing different combinations of plants; some with one species of plant (canola) only, others mimicking high-or low-diversity plant communities. Certain individual plants, sunflowers, for example, were found to offer significantly more protection. She found that plant diversity had a big impact on colony-level bee disease loads, with the high diversity communities offering the most protection.

The meeting was adjourned at 8:50 for discussion and refreshments.

Respectfully submitted,

Andrea Golden, CEC Secretary