Hello! My name is Dylan Ricke. I'm an MS student at Ohio State University in the lab of Reed Johnson, where I study honey bee ecotoxicology. Specifically, I'm interested in assessing the long-term (chronic) effects of chemicals to honey bees for the eventual purpose of environmental protection. I'm currently working on two projects. The first is an in silico experiment, comparing modeling approaches for the prediction of chemical effects in honey bee colonies. There's currently a lot of interest in using honey bee population modeling for chemical risk assessment, which I'm hoping to inform with my work. The second is an empirical/"hands on" experiment on the movement of metal pollutants within colonies and their effects to developing queens. Specifically, I'm rearing honey bee queens in swarm boxes supplied with sucrose solution containing one of three metals (Cd, Li, or Zn). I'm measuring the accumulation of these metals into nurse bees, their royal jelly secretions, and developing queens, as well as the effects of these chemicals to queen survival through development and to queen body size upon emergence.