Dr. Margarita Orlova Receives $10,000 for Honeybee Study  

Dr. Margarita Orlova, an assistant professor of biology, recently received a grant totaling nearly $10,000 from Pollinator Partnership, a San Francisco-based non-profit whose mission is to promote the health of pollinators, which are critical to food and ecosystems, through conservation, education, and research. 

This specific grant funds a project that investigates how health stressors, such as pathogens, pesticides, and nutritional deficiency, affect the chemical profile of honeybee workers and queens. Dr. Orlova is going to test how the exposure to nutritional stress will affect cuticular hydrocarbon profiles and volatiles in experimental groups of honeybees, with the ultimate goal of developing a diagnostic tool, based on chemical signals, that will allow early detection of stress and infection. She will do this by not only studying nutritional stress, but also its interaction with viral infections and pesticide exposure.