Apiology International Conference was held at the IDB RAS

Details
Scientific meetings

This was the first Apiology conference not only for Russia, but also for the entire scientific community.
Despite the great importance of the honeybee as a pollinator, producer of biologically active products and model organism, to date there have been no conferences specifically devoted to the biology of this species.
This conference was dedicated to the 115th anniversary of Dmitry V. Shaskolsky, the outstanding researcher of the honey bee.

Dr. Shaskolsky studied the genetics of the honey bee through all of his life, working for a long time at the IDB RAS. He wrote a review “The Bee Apis mellifera L.” for the book “Objects of Developmental Biology” published by the IDB RAS (“Science”, M., 1975, pp. 147-172). This book is considered as a classical handbook for developmental biology. The genetics of honeybee sex determination - one of the main topics of Dr. Shaskolsky research - is intensively developing nowadays thanks to the methods of molecular biology and bioinformatics. The honey bee is a very convenient model for studying the epigenetics of development and the mechanisms of behavior pattern formation.

The conference featured presentations on the most topical issues of bee biology: phylogenetics of the honey bee, epigenetics of behaviour, bee embryology, sex genetics, evolution of bee viruses and etc. 
Prof. Thomas Dyer Seeley (Cornell University) presented a unique book about on the life of bees that has become a world bestseller, “The Lives of Bees: The Untold Story of the Honey Bee in the Wild” (2019).  Prof. Seeley is a famous scientist who devoted his life to the study of the honey bee. He was a student of Edward Wilson, the founder of sociobiology.
The “10th Anniversary conference on natural beekeeping” was held in the parallel with the Apiology conference at the IDB RAS. 
More than two hundred researchers from Russia and other countries (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Switzerland, Germany, Latvia, Mongolia, South Korea, Australia and the USA) participated in both conferences online and on-site.
Given the great interest in honeybee biology, it was decided to hold conferences on Apiology and Natural beekeeping every year.