Infrastructure

We maintain beekeeping infrastructure at the heart of SLUs 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.

The honeybee colonies we manage at the Centre are divided between 3-4 apiaries on campus in Ultuna. These apiaries are most active in our research and kept close by to facilitate various activities at the Centre. 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. Therefore, they are a central component to many of our research projects at the Centre with the aim to better understand the evolution and ecology of host-parasite interactions in this system.

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.