The Publishing group Elsevier today notified me that my that work published back in 2013 is one of the most highly cited (top 5) within their journal of invertebrate Pathology over the period of publication to June 2016.
-According to Google scholar, the article has been cited 55 times. 
The article was written in collaboration with undergraduate student Kathryn Yates, plus Ben Darvill from the Bumblebee Conservation Trust and my PhD supervisors Dave Goulson and William O.H. Hughes. It describes how we identified the parasite, Nosema ceranae in wild bumblebees in the UK. We go on to test the effects of this parasite on the common bumblebee Bombus terrestris, and find it to be harmful to the bumblebees survival and an aspect of their physiology known as the Proboscis extension response.
To learn more, the article can be read here
Whilst we know a lot about the foraging preferences of honey bees, little is known about the foraging preferences of bumblebees. In this new study, we show that whilst the majority of foraging bumblebees are generalists (feeding on both pollen and nectar), some bumblebees do specialise on only foraging for pollen, and some specialise on nectar. Believing this may be linked to the different sizes of bumblebee foragers that a colony produces, we set about looking for relationships between this foraging preference and the body size, fat content, sucrose sensitivity and ovary size of the workers.
The first thing i must say, is this was a HUUUGE event! Far bigger than any other conference i have attended. There was a total of 6,682 delegates from 102 countries! Spread over a large venue, it really was a race to get to the different talks in time with 10’s of talks taking place at any one time it took most of a morning to plan each day! The topics were diverse across the entire diversity of insects (as you can imagine), and frustratingly, but maybe not surprisingly, many of the bee talks weren’t necessarily near the rooms where the parasite or microbiome talks were being done! That couldn’t stop me from being excited to be there though and see as many talks as i could! I should also mention that i was there, in part, because of the generosity of the ESA who kindly awarded me an Early Career STEP travel award to attend and present my work – THANK YOU ESA!
Well, somehow in between all the talks and the running around i was able to meet some great new friends, many of whom i’ve read a lot of their awesome work! Also, i got the chance to catch-up with post-docs and supervisors of christmas past! A postdoc from my time at the University of Leeds, Dr. Adam Smith, is about to publish some bumblebee behaviour work we did together from our time at Leeds, which is fantastic! and Dr. Seirian Sumner will shortly become a reader at UCL!
The bumblebee industry relies heavily on pollen to feed the bees. This pollen is harvested from the legs of honeybees then fed to bumblebees. The problem with this is that it may contain parasites that are infective to bumblebees!
The deformed wing virus (DWV), known to be ubiquitous in honey bees, has now been detected in bumblebees. In addition, the neogregarine Apicystis bombi has been discovered to be more prevalent than previously thought. Here, we assess for the first time the lethal and sublethal effects of these parasites during single and mixed infections of worker bumblebees (Bombus terrestris). Overall, we find that A. bombi exhibits both lethal and sublethal effects. DWV causes lethal effect and may reduce the sub lethal effects imposed by A. bombi. The results show that both parasites have significant, negative effects on bumblebee health, making them potentially of conservation concern
I’ve had a great evening at the NERC awards. Whilst I didn’t win, I came runner-up which means I get funding to continue researching threats commercial bees may pose to wild bees…and I got a cupcake!
In my category of ‘Early career impact’, Professor Hannah Cloke won for her work developing new techniques and methods to forecast flooding. The award evening, hosted at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, was a huge networking event with key industrial partners attending and provided a platform to launch the NERC 50th anniversary year, celebrating half a century of ground-breaking science.
Today I had the pleasure of hosting the visit of Professor Mark Brown to the University of Bristol.
To celebrate a joint meeting on the subject of bee health hosted by the Biochemical Society, the British Ecological Society and the Society for Experimental Biology in January 2014, the BES has compiled this virtual issue on Pollinator Ecology. The included papers are drawn from all five journals and provide examples of the latest research in pollinator ecology from flower visitation and ecosystem services, to the effects of invasive pollinators, agriculture, pesticides and bee pathogens. We hope that this selection of papers will be of interest to researchers and stakeholders in this highly topical field.
Results from my newly published work, 
”In a three year Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)- funded study PhD student Pete Graystock will screen native and foreign bumblebees as using advanced molecular techniques to identify parasite DNA. They will also investigate the affects of parasites on bee health.
PhD: I’ve embarked on a 3.5 year research PhD investigating pathogen spillover from commercial bumblebees colonies to native bees. Based at the University of Leeds with Dr William Hughes, the work will be done in partnership with the bumblebee conservation trust.