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.
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 hive, 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
Assistant 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 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
The Collegiate Hotel creates annual fund benefiting AU-Bees Lab
Local Auburn business the Collegiate Hotel recently announced the creation of The Brian E. and Kimberly A. Wirth Family Annual Fund for Excellence, also known as the Bee Excellent Fund, supporting the AU-Bees Lab in the College of Agriculture at Auburn University. ...
Beekeepers continue to report high colony loss rates, no clear improvement
From University of Maryland Beekeepers across the United States lost 45.5% of their managed honey bee colonies from April 2020 to April 2021, according to preliminary results of the 15th annual nationwide survey conducted by the nonprofit Bee Informed Partnership...
Auburn entomologist seeks alternatives for urban pesticide use
By Jacqueline Kochak More than 80 percent of Americans live in expanding urban areas, and suburbanites are still craving greenspace as farmland gives way to housing developments and big-box stores. The problem is that proud homeowners use significantly more...