Cornell Department of Entomology

🐝The Dyce Lab for Honey Bee Studies is hosting our annual honey extraction event! Join us on August 21st from 10AM to 6PM to extract honey, build bird feeders and check out our newly planted pollinator garden.
Where: 201 Freese Rd. Ithaca, NY
When: August 21st, from 10AM to 6PM
BYOJ (bring your own jar)!
We also have Dyce Lab t-shirt, hats, and sticker for sale!🐝
Feel free to send us a DM if you have any questions.

🐝📕 New Book Alert! Professor Bryan Danfoth and colleagues recently published a book, The Bee Genera of North and Central America (Hymenopters: Apoidea): Second Edition, with Smithsonian Scholarly Publications.
The online (PDF) version is available on the Smithsonian Institution’s Scholarly Press website and can be viewed and downloaded here: https://doi.org/10.5479/si.9781944466909.hc
This book provides a fully updated treatment of the bees of North America, with illustrated keys to the genera, notes on the biology, ecology, and classification of each of the 173 genera, and color habitus photographs of both the male and female of each genus. Smaller, more manageable keys with improved illustrations and images help make the book essential for bee identification by researchers for the foreseeable future. We hope you enjoy it! 🐝

The Bee Genera of North and Central America (Hymenoptera: Apoidea): Second Edition | Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press Bryan N. Danforth, Seán G. Brady, Karolyn Darrow, Silas Bossert, Eduardo A. B. Almeida, Jason Gibbs, John L. Neff, Terry Griswold, Laurence Packer, Ronald J. McGinley, and Charles D. Michener

🐝🍯 Check out the article about this recent publication: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/07/insights-bee-biology-could-ease-us-rules-organic-honey.

Strict regulations have prevented continental U.S. beekeepers from participating in the lucrative organic honey market, but new research finds that bees’ actual habits make certain rules too extreme. The findings potentially provide evidence for federal agencies to ease restrictions and open organic markets to U.S. producers.

“Consumers are willing to pay 20 to 30% more for organic certified honey than nonorganic certified honey,” said Scott McArt, associate professor of entomology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University and a senior author of the new study, published July 29 in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

“If organic honey was possible to produce in the continental U.S., it would open up a huge market for our country’s beekeepers, who are really struggling right now.”

Read more: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/07/insights-bee-biology-could-ease-us-rules-organic-honey.

There may be three times as many insect species than previously thought, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University research finds.

Most experts have currently accepted an estimate of about 6 million insect species, a figure that has stood for the last 40 years. But the new count, which used genetic information for 1.6 million individual tropical insects, a census of a highly diverse group of parasitoid wasps in Costa Rica, and statistical strategies, conservatively estimates the total number of insect species at closer to 14 to 20 million.

The study, published June 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, claims that a doubling or tripling of estimated insect species – already established as the most diverse group of animals – has profound implications for understanding the scale, richness, and future of biodiversity on Earth.

“We know there are many more to go, and one of the challenges is the more we sample, the more we discover,” said Laura Melissa Guzman, assistant professor in the Department of Entomology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and the paper’s corresponding author.

“It’s a question of trying to estimate what is unobserved based on what we know.”

Read more: https://news.cornell.edu/index%2ephp/stories/2026/06/there-may-be-3-times-many-insect-species-previously-thought.

How many insect species are on Earth? According to new research co-authored by Department of Entomology Professor Laura Melissa Guzman, the answer could be 14–30 million—with an estimated 97% still unnamed. 🐛🦋🪲 A striking reminder of how much biodiversity remains to be discovered.
Read more on this recent Cornell Chronicle article: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/06/there-may-be-3-times-many-insect-species-previously-thought

Thank you for the photos ( )
🪲Illustration by: Shea Oleksa/Cornell University

Check this out! Entomology student Edmund Hod is putting classroom learning into action across New York through Cornell Cooperative Extension’s Summer Internship Program.🐜🦟🦗