Fabian Royer, MSc BSc

Room 518
Fabian.Royer@student.uibk.ac.at

I was taken into nature from an early age and eventually went there myself – be it for playing, sports, relief, or even for observation. But I also recognized the threats to our natural world early on, and so it became my goal to become a conservationist. During my ecological voluntary year, I became even more aware of the threats; the Krefeld study on the decline of insects had just been published. That is how I ended up doing my PhD recently. I am following the question of how some of our most important pollinators are interacting with each other. Therefore, already during master studies, Julia Schlick-Steiner and I focused on the relation between honeybees and wild bees regarding microbiome transfer. Especially in grassland and farmland and around settlements, one can see very high densities of honeybees (Apis mellifera) – which are susceptible to pathogens. Infections of the partly rare wild bees (400 species in Tyrol), or at least an exchange of microbiome in general, seem possible. In addition, in the wake of bee mortality, beekeeping became more popular. All this increases food competition for nectar and pollen as well as the risk of infections. We collect wild bees and honeybees around Innsbruck in different habitats from apple plantations to alpine grasslands. The extraction of DNA and RNA should give us insights into the bacterial communities and viruses inside our bees. In my PhD, my aim is now to enlarge these studies and steer them in a direction in which concrete contributions to wild bee protection can be made.

Research topics
Bees
Conservation biology
Microbiome research
Pollination ecology