Morgan Roth

PhD, Entomologist

After completing my B.S. in zoology I started working for Dr. Aaron Gross as a research assistant and M.S. student at Virginia Tech. Throughout my M.S. program I studied varroa mite acaricide resistance in the state of VA and also tested several known and novel insecticides against small hive beetle larvae and honey bees. I was interested in spending more time researching small hive beetle physiology and behavior, so after my M.S. I started another set of small hive beetle projects as part of my Ph.D. research.

My Ph.D. projects included testing small hive beetle antennal responses to a series of repellent and attractant compounds and testing small hive beetle behavioral responses to these compounds through olfactometry experiments.

Through this work I have been able to discover which repellents were most effective against small hive beetles and found that repellents could obscure responses to attractants in behavioral testing. I hope that this work can some day be applied in apiary settings in the form of repellents that keep small hive beetles from detecting and entering apiaries in the first place.