WINGS Fellow Marla Spivak will take your group of up to six people on a tour of the Bee Lab at the University of Minnesota Bee Research Facility at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, Minnesota. Your tour should be scheduled at a mutually agreeable time between mid-May and the end of August (for optimal bee observation) in 2019 or 2020 and will last 2 to 3 hours.

The Bee Lab's mission is to promote the conservation, health, and diversity of all bee pollinators through research, education, and hands-on mentorship. On the tour you will experience both wild and managed bees, including native bee collections and live honey bee colonies, and will walk through our landscaping for pollinators.

Marla Spivak is a MacArthur Fellow and McKnight Distinguished Professor in Entomology at the University of Minnesota. Recent awards include the 2015 Minnesota AgriGrowth Distinguished Service Award, the 2016 Siehl Prize laureate for excellence in agriculture, and the 2016 Wings WorldQuest Women of Discovery Earth Award. She and Gary Reuter bred a line of honey bees, the Minnesota Hygienic line, to defend themselves against diseases and parasitic mites. Current research includes studies of the benefits of plant resins (propolis) to honey bees, and the effects of agricultural landscapes and pesticides on bee health.

Marla's interest in bees began when she worked for a commercial beekeeper in New Mexico in 1975. She obtained her PhD from the University of Kansas in 1989 on the identification and ecology of Africanized and European honey bees in Costa Rica. She was a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Insect Science at the University of Arizona before coming to the University of Minnesota in 1993.