Auburn University Bee Laboratory
Our mission is to understand and promote bees through research, instruction, and outreach.
About Us
About Us
Welcome! Housed in the College of Agriculture’s Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology, we are the AU-BEES (named after Auburn’s world-famous mascot Aubie). Our outreach, extension, and research activities benefit our local community while educating the public on our vital work.
Explore our site, “like” us on Facebook and follow us on Instagram to learn more about us, our efforts to improve bee health and how you can help.
Job Opportunities
We are always on the lookout for individuals to perform field work with our bee teams. Check out this undergrad position or send an email to kld0063@auburn.edu for more information.
Bee Lab Outreach
Members of the Bee Lab enjoy talking with everyone about our work! You can find us supporting AU community events like the Sustainability Picnic, Earth Day Extravaganza, and the Welcome Back Picnic for the College of Agriculture.
At the Bee Lab, we also like to host visitors including students, local stakeholders, and international guests. We show them our honey bee hives, observation hives, drone petting zoo, bee hotels, and native pollinator specimens.
The Auburn community supports the Bee Lab as well. The Collegiate Hotel donates $1 for every AU-Bee Margarita they sell to help us with our mission. Members of the community buy our AU-Bees t-shirts and honey during our sales.
Research
Teaching
Team
Publications
Honey & Sales
Donate to AU-BEES
Contact
Geoffrey Williams
Associate Professor
301 Funchess Hall
Auburn, AL 36849
(334) 844-5068
williams@auburn.edu
Sweet Honey
The amazing natural sweetener & rapid source of energy!
Our Honey
Honey is a truly amazing thing. Mainly composed of simple sugars and water, its value as a natural sweetener and rapid source of energy has been known for millennia.
Several different bee species produce honey. Among the most well-known is the western honey bee Apis mellifera. It’s the only species of honey bee in the United States.
The color, flavor, and aroma of honey are influenced by many things, but the most important is the type of sugary secretion collected by the foragers of a colony. Perhaps it is floral nectar collected from plants like clover, goldenrod, or tupelo, or maybe it is animal secretions produced by other insects like aphids. With a bit of modification, both can result in honey!
The Alabama Extension publication Nectar and Pollen Producing Plants of Alabama: A Guide for Beekeepers by Jim Tew and colleagues provides a list of important floral nectar sources for honey bees in the region. Around Auburn, important sources of nectar for honey bees are clovers, Chinese tallow, privet, and tulip poplar.
Research
Our wide breadth of research focuses on everything from conservation to kiwi pollination and more.
ENPP News
Three ag faculty members complete national LEAD21 program
Three faculty members from the Auburn University College of Agriculture were among 88 nationally to complete the 2023-24 LEAD21 leadership-development program. They were Jeremiah Davis, professor and director of the National Poultry Technology Center; Kim Mullenix,...
$3.9 million grant to fund research for enhanced honey bee health
The USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture recently awarded a $3.9 million, five-year grant to a team of researchers to enhance honey bee health for pollination of specialty crops. Auburn University associate professors Geoff Williams, from the Department of...
Entomologists find evidence of current mating behavior in extinct termites
Mizumoto recreates fossilization process to test tandem run hypothesis An assistant professor in the Auburn University Department of Entomology & Plant Pathology recently found evidence that termites living millions of years ago mated the same way termites do...