Lisa Hindmarsh

• BSc (Hons) Zoology
• An examination of the behavioural effects of Thymol, a plant essential oil used as a miticide in bee hives, on the Honeybee Apis melifera

A common treatment for the honeybee’s parasitic mite, Varroa, is the essential oil, thymol, originally derived from thyme. Anecdotal accounts from beekeepers report that bees avoid thymol and remove materials contaminated with it from the colony. To characterize how thymol affects bees, I recorded the behaviour of workers for 30 min during exposure to thymol. Bees exposed to high doses of thymol could not readily right themselves after falling over and spent more time grooming, implying that thymol has a pharmacological influence on bee locomotion consistent with the prediction that it interacts with GABA receptors in the nervous system.

Funding Source: Wellcome Trust