Bee Stings Tested in the Lab - The Results Were Not What We Expected

🐝 What if an everyday baking ingredient could actually help calm honey bees?

In this video, we explore a surprising early finding coming out of the University of California San Diego bee lab. A UCSD research student has been testing a common household ingredient during honey bee aggression (sting) testing, using a TechBee smoker, and the early data looks promising. The wild part? You probably already have this ingredient in your kitchen. Take a guess in the comments before it’s revealed 🧁

I sit down with Emily, a research student in Dr. James Nieh’s UCSD bee lab, to talk about how she got started in honey bee research and what led her to focus on bee aggression for her thesis. We also talk about realizing we were both trying to answer the same core question: do certain scents repel bees, or can they actually calm them?

Emily walks us through how the aggression testing works, from setting up in the bee yard to scoring sting responses, and whether these methods were learned, adapted, or developed through her own research. We also talk about unexpected (and sometimes funny) moments that happened during testing, including some classic arena-style sting tests 😄

You’ll see real behind-the-scenes footage from the bee yard, including provoking aggression at the hive entrance, placing the leather sting patch, applying scent samples, and cleaning the testing equipment between trials to avoid contamination.

A quick disclaimer: UCSD does not endorse any products and does not endorse the TechBee Smoker.

We also talk about when Emily plans to publish her findings, what she hopes to do after graduation, and where this research could lead in the future.

Huge thanks to Emily, Dr. Nieh, and everyone at the UCSD bee lab for collaborating with us on this project 🙏

If you’re part of a university bee lab and researching bee calming, mite control, or small hive beetle management, leave a comment below—I’d love to connect with you and your students.