Lab Receives USDA-NIFA Award to Advance Honey Bee Clock Research

We are thrilled to share that the Lab has received a $200,000 award from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture to support our research on the honey bee circadian clock and pollinator health at Middle Tennessee State University. This exciting award will help launch a new phase of our work to understand how the bee brain keeps time and how environmental cues, such as light, shape the neural mechanisms that support healthy behavior and pollination.

Honey bees play a vital role in agriculture and ecosystems, and their ability to forage, navigate, and communicate depends in part on a properly functioning internal clock. Through this project, our lab will develop new molecular tools to identify and monitor key clock neurons in the honey bee brain and will investigate how those neurons respond to light across the day. We are especially excited that this work will strengthen our ability to connect fundamental neuroscience with real-world questions about pollinator health, resilience, and sustainable agriculture.

This award is also an important milestone for our growing research program at MTSU. We are deeply grateful for this support and look forward to the discoveries, student training opportunities, and broader impacts that will come from this project over the next two years.

This work is supported by the Pollinator Health: Research and Application, project award no. 2026-67039-46034, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and should not be construed to represent any official USDA or U.S. Government determination or policy.