Bee Museum Exhibit and Poster

During my time as a graduate student at Cornell, I had the amazing opportunity to be involved in the development of a museum exhibit on the evolution of bees. The exhibit ‘BEES! Diversity, Evolution, Conservation’ was housed at the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, NY. It has a really well developed online presence, so please check it out! The primary contributors were the museum personal and my former supervisor Bryan Danforth.

For the exhibit, I designed a large educational poster, which I expanded over the years. I printed a number of versions and I settled on the one below. If you want to print the poster yourself (or stare at the screen), you can download it here as super high-resolution JPG (Pdf upon request). It is approx. bus stop sized (56’’ x 40’’). Please let me know if you like the poster or if you used it somewhere! Except for the ESM photos, which were kindly provided by Megan Asche (thank you!), I took all bee photos myself.

The apid Tree of Life

I study the evolutionary relationships of bees and recently finished a project on the relationships of the largest bee family Apidae. Thanks go to Jason Dombroskie from the Cornell University Insect Collection (CUIC) for granting me access to the CUIC’s imaging system.

Below are selected photographs of bee specimens that I examined in the natural history collections of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien (NHMW), the Museum of Natural Sciences of Belgium (RBINS), the Logan Bee Lab, and the Cornell University Insect Collection (CUIC).