ts been great to hear from members of the group who attended IUSSI2026 in Freiburg, talk about how much they enjoyed the conference, the IUSSI community, and presenting their work.

Miles Nesbit (PhD yr 3) Presented his work exploring the relationships between host genetics and their microbial communities in wild bees
Charlotte Fryday (PhD yr 2) Presented her data so far on exploring the two-tired impact of toxins on holobiont systems
Susie Hawthorne (Postdoc) Presented her work on engineering microbiomes

Attending conferences is such an important part of networking and growing as a scientist – they make such a big impact. It sounds like an open bar during the conference dinner also helped make an impact too! so many reasons to feel sad i missed this one!

Congratulations to Tianqi Zhu (MRes EEC), whose masters project, building on research funded by the CB Dennis Trust, British Beekeepers’ Association, and Bee Diseases Insurance Ltd, has now been published in Royal Society Open Science. The study builds on previous findings that near-infrared (NIR) light exposure can improve bee health by investigating whether NIR can help counteract the negative effects of neonicotinoid pesticides on bumblebee thermoregulation. The results show that pesticide exposure substantially reduces bees’ ability to maintain body temperature, while specific NIR treatments may partially mitigate these impacts, highlighting a promising avenue for future research into protecting pollinators from environmental stressors.

Max is doing an MSc in Ecological Applications (EA) 2025/26, and is working in the lab on directed evolution experiments. Specifically aiming to evolve functions in microbes that could be used to improve the resistance of bees to pesticides.

Congratulations to Adam Bourne (MSc EA) and Katerina Elger (MSc EEC), former Master’s students in the lab, on the acceptance of their paper investigating how nutritional supplementation influences Nosema infections in honey bees. The study found that dietary supplements increased both parasite loads and mortality in infected bees, demonstrating that nutritional interventions can sometimes unintentionally benefit pathogens. We are delighted to see this MSc research develop into a published study and congratulate Adam and Katerina on this achievement.

Feeding the disease: The impact of nutritional supplementation on Nosema (Vairimorpha) infection in honey bees (Apis mellifera)

Raquel is doing an MSc in Ecology, Evolution & Conservation (EEC) 2025/26, and is working in the lab exploring the impact of toxins on whole bumblebee colonies

Last week Charlotte was in attendance at the Evolution x Ecology 2026 Conference in sunny Cornwall. In addition to taking part in workshops/discussions, Charlotte presented some of her PhD findings on Holobiont Responses to Chemical Contaminant Stress. Since returning, charlotte has discussed the conference freebies, singing sea shanties, and informing the lab about various animal poo microbiomes.

Xiaoling is doing an MRes in Ecology, Evolution & Conservation (EEC) 2025/26, and is working in the lab exploring the links between bumblebee microbiomes and their social behaviour – the gut-brain axis (GBA).

Congratulations to Bryony who made it to the British Ecological Society conference “Microbiomes for resilient crops” in the midst of an intensive week of wheat harvesting and soil processing. Bryony presented her data on wheat growth following soil microbiome manipulations. We are looking forward to taking a closer look at this data over the coming weeks (months!)

Shuqing is doing an MSc in Computational Methods in Ecology and Evolution (CMEE) 2025/26, and is working in the lab on a research project exploring Transmission Dynamics: How Do Flowers Impact Parasite Spread in Pollinator Communities?

2026: Raquel Garcia Perez, Max Connolly, Susie Hawthorne, Shuqing Ren, Owen Stewart, Xiaoling Zhang, Miles Nesbit, Vida Svahnstrom, Charlotte Fryday, Peter Graystock – Sadly missing Bryony, Peter, Josepha, Haifa, Mujie and Caitlin

Despite plans to have more people available we still had a handful miss out today as we went for lunch together at the Thatched Tavern down the road. Its been a great year so far with lots of cool projects ongoing from microbial evolution to modeling disease transmission and exploring the Gut-Brain axis on bumblebees.

In this short video, Charlotte introduces her PhD research on how environmental contaminants shape the evolution of gut microbes within bumblebee holobionts.

Bees are essential to ecosystems and food security — but do we really have a balanced understanding of global bee ecology and how bees respond to environmental change?
New research by Miles Nesbit analyses nearly 70,000 bee-related publications to ask a simple but important question: does research effort align with ecological importance?
The answer is largely no.
Research is overwhelmingly concentrated on a small number of managed, social bees, particularly Apis (honeybees) and Bombus (bumblebees). Yet many wild, solitary, and ground‑nesting bees – including taxa that are structurally central in plant–pollinator networks – receive little attention. Crucially, the bees we study most are often not those most important for maintaining pollination network resilience.
The paper quantifies these biases and highlights where research effort, monitoring, and policy should be redirected if we want evidence‑based conservation outcomes that reflect real ecological leverage.

Read the research: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-41830-7

Nesbit, M.L., Montauban, C., Windram, F. et al. Mapping global bee research with traits and plant-pollinator interaction networks. Sci Rep 16, 12844 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-41830-7

In this short video, Kristen introduces her research on a soil‑borne fungal disease of wheat and how beneficial microbes could help protect crops and improve food security.

In this short video, Katerina introduces her research on how non‑lethal pesticide exposure affects bumblebee health, disease susceptibility, and colony function.

In 2025 we have enjoyed the addition of multiple postdocs, in addition to another good cohort of masters and undergrad students. Lots of data on parasites, toxicity, microbiomes, wheat and bees! Unfortunately Grace and Andra missed the meal out and photo

This week members of the Leverhulme Center for the Holobiont have been invited to the Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics in Copenhagen. Such a wonderful meeting learning about the incredible science taking place. A pretty fantastic view of Copenhagen from the venue too!

In this short video, Peter Mark introduces his work as a lab technician investigating how soil microbiomes influence wheat growth, from controlled growth rooms to field trials.

Nice to catch up with everyone at the IUSSI conference in London today. A good representation from the lab too with Miles, Charlotte and Monika presenting excellent student posters (Charlotte winning the IUSSI 1st Prize)! – I think it’s also safe to say my phone camera has seen better days!

Students from the Living Planet with Ecological Applications MSc course finished their pollination week with Dr Peter Graystock with a practical of extracting honey from Silwood Park’s honey bee hives. This is always such a fun day!

Today we welcome Charlotte Fryday and Vida Svahnstrom to the group.

Charlotte is actually re-joining after carrying out a sucesfull masters project in the lab in 2022/23. She is part of the Leverhulme center for the holobiont and will be evolving bee associated microbiomes using different systems.

Vida is a on a NERC SSCP DTP and is continuing her work with Kew Gardens, exploring the speciation of epiphytes.

In this short video, Tian introduces his research on how antibiotics and fungicides influence bumblebee foraging behaviour and colony performance.

2024 has been a fun year so far, exploring soil microbiomes, fluorescent wasps, bees, wheat, parasites, thermal performance and toxicity.

Left to right: Haitian, Jingy, Pin, Miles, Peter, Monika, Joely, Temea, Loveline, Emma, Jack)

Today we publish work from data originally collected some years ago but provides a fascinating insight into the fungal diversity found within bumblebee colonies. Samples of various substrates from within 14 bumblebee colonies, including the honey, honey cup wall, egg cup wall, and frass were placed on agar and any fungi present that grew was isolated and sequenced.

Overall, we cultured 11 fungal species from the various nest substrates. These included both pathogenic and non-pathogenic fungi, such as Aspergillus sp., Penicillium sp., and Candida sp. Our results provide the first insights into the diversity of viable fungal communities in commercial bumblebee nests.

Miles Nesbit, explained the findings with a PeerJ spotlight (embedded below), and a direct link to the research is here.

Take-all disease is one of the most destructive root diseases of wheat crops. Caused by infection with the fungi Gaeumannomyces graminis var. tritici, the disease kills the plants and can remain in soils over successive years if careful treatment and management is not applied.

Over the next 3 years, the labs of Bonnie Waring, Peter Graystock, Tom Bell, Samraat Pawar and Emma Ransome will employ 5 Postdocs and 2 technicians to explore the underlying wheat-microbe interactions that are influencing disease and crop yield. The project will then go on to explore manipulative techniques to better harness the microbial communities to improve crop health and yield. In addition to this applied impact, we will also explore the creation of a ‘digital microbiome’ to predict changes and impacts of microbiome manipulations.

More information can be found here: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/248639/245-million-gift-launches-novel-research/

This summer the lab bought some new digital dissection scopes and digital phase contrast microscopes to help us catalogue what we are seeing. Here you can see a few of the microbes we commonly find inside wild bumblebees – the moving microbes are a common parasite called Crithidia (a genus of trypanasomatids)