CIBER

Welcome to CIBER: The Centre for Integrative Bee Research

For the latest news and updates join us on our CIBER facebook page:

Breaking News:
The Australian Premiere of "More than Honey"



[click picture to enlarge]

The documentary movie "More than Honey" CIBER was involved in is finally coming to Australia!

We provided the scientific advisory , and some of our research is featured in the movie as well. The film is currently screened in several different Australian cities as part of the German Film Festival (for more details for the different screening dates and times click here) .

Tickets for the first screening in Perth are sold out but still available for a second screen on the 13th of May click here.

To get the most updated information about the film visit our movie blog here.




Honeybees

Honeybees have a worldwide distribution and are major pollinators of native flowering plants on all inhabited continents. Their domestication and breeding over thousands of years by humans has heavily impacted and manipulated honeybee populations and their distribution. Their agricultural importance as pollinators for major crops is now very significant and they are major sources for commercial honey, pollen, and wax production. Honeybees have been a model species for a broad range of scientific studies for many years and the full sequencing of the genome has now opened the way to new opportunities for functional genomics research.


The Decline

The global importance of honeybees for ecosystem stability and human food production is overshadowed by continous devastating declines in both feral and managed populations, especially in Europe and in Northern America, mostly caused by spreading parasites and pathogens resulting in increasing problems to secure pollination services and raising food prices. More than 80 crops of agricultural interest or about a third of our food requires pollination services from honeybees.



[click picture to enlarge]

CIBER

Located at the University of Western Australia, CIBER is dedicated to facilitate interdisciplinary research on honeybees. CIBER offers a working platform for scientists to perform collaborative research on honeybees alongside industry partners. The ultimate goal is to better understand honeybees and counter the dramatic losses currently occurring. To achieve this CIBER combines expertise from beekeepers with decades of experience, sociobiologists and their insights into the functioning of bee societies, evolutionary ecologists and their understanding of evolutionary processes and molecular biologists that provide expertise to harness the honeybee genome and proteome.

Collaborating Partners