Dr. Margarita Orlova

Dr. Orlova did her BSc, MSc, PhD, and postdoc at Tel Aviv University. In her PhD program she unveiled the complex interrelationship between queens and workers in honeybees. Her approach was multidisciplinary, encompassing behavior, chemical ecology and molecular genetics. Dr. Orlova was born in Rostov-na-Donu, Russia, and moved to Israel as a teenager. Now her work, supported by Zuckerman and also by the highly competitive Vaadia-BARD fellowship, takes her to the lab at the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State, one of the best places in the US for studying the genomics of honeybees.

She plans to combine this lab’s expertise with her own to better understand honey bee glands and pheromones, and their link to reproductive conflicts within the colony. More detailed knowledge of this field could help closer monitoring of queen health and productivity in commercial hives, an area of research that is greatly needed in Israel. Dr. Orlova’s work has been published in prestigious journals. She has also served as a lecturer and translator into Russian for an Israeli government innovation program for beekeepers from developing countries.