Basic and Applied Systems Biology in Honey Bees to Improve Honey Bee Health and Climate Change Resilience

Honey bees provide us with pollination services that benefit the ecosystem and managed agriculture, with those contributions being valued and more than $100B worldwide. But honey bee health is declining, due to a combination of factors that includes diseases and climate change. In this talk, I will discuss how we have used the tools of systems biology (mostly proteomics and metabolomics) to better understand how both diseases and extreme weather events can impact bee health, how there can be synergistic interactions between diseases and weather, and how we might be able to use some of those same systems biology tools to breed bees that are more resilient.