Infrastructure for honey bees
We maintain beekeeping infrastructure at SLU´s Ultuna campus and keep approximately 40 honeybee colonies in order to facilitate various activities carried out at the centre, including fundamental and applied research, education, extension training, and public demonstration.
In our bee house, located beside SLU’s ‘knowledge garden’, we keep and store all the necessary hive materials for beekeeping, such as extra boxes, frames, and wax. We also have all equipment needed to extract honey produced by our bees, which can be purchased from the SLU store on campus.
Our honey bee colonies are kept at three to four apiaries on the Ultuna campus. Keeping the apiaries close to the centre makes it easier to use the colonies for research and other activities.
We also maintain a research apiary on Gotland, Sweden through a long-standing collaboration with a local professional beekeeper. This honey bee population has survived for over 20 years with minimal intervention and exhibits both varroa mite resistance and virus tolerance traits. These bees play a central role in many of our research projects, helping us understand the evolution and ecology of host–parasite interactions.
The Bee Centre also has a molecular laboratory at the Department of Ecology which supports honey bee disease diagnostics alongside fundamental and applied research projects on pathology, ecology and epidemiology of disease in honey bees and wild bees.
Contact
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SLU Honey Bee Research Centre