Despite a few stings, Karen Pruiett has embraced her work with bees for nearly 35 years.

"If I had to guess, I'd say I get stung almost 25 times per week, depending on what I'm doing," Pruiett said.

Though she has kept bees as a hobby for the first 25 of those years, Pruiett said she never fully appreciated the beauty of what bees do until she became a bee research specialist at the lab. As a lab manager now surrounded by nearly 100 colonies of honey bees, each totaling 50,000 to 80,000 in bee-count, she said she now realizes how honey bees can be used as a good model for researchers to study.

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"By studying social insects like bees, we can gain a little insight into how brains work," Pruiett said.

Honey bees are social insects, meaning they are a part of an intricately organized society where the labor is divided between the bees.

Seth Ament, a graduate student, has been working with Pruiett in the lab for several years.

"The work that we do couldn't go on without her guidance and expertise," Ament said.

As a past president of the Central Eastern Illinois Beekeeper's Association, Pruiett convenes with fellow beekeepers monthly to try to solve problems beekeepers face.

"It's an uphill battle that a lot of us are willing to take on because it's so rewarding," Pruiett said. "One of the best parts of my job is to try and educate other people about honey bees."

Ament added that Pruiett's passion for her work was obvious.

"She is such a great advocate for the beekeeping community," he said.

Pruiett's work was recognized last April when she won the Chancellor's Academic Professional Award for her outstanding research.

Gene Robinson, who works with Pruiett, said researchers and students at the lab are studying how the bees respond to the needs of the colony by performing different jobs.

"We are most interested in how the genes in the brain of the bee support all of that sophisticated behavior and in understanding the molecular basis of social behavior," he added.

As the director of the campus Bee Research Facility, Robinson said he does not manage honey bees for their agricultural purposes, such as honey production and pollination. Rather, Pruiett and other researchers try to create colonies of bees that are genetically superior due to careful research and insemination.

"We are trying to look at good genetics to produce queens that are a little heartier for this immediate area," Pruiett said. "We're looking for survivor genetics and queens that are really healthy and robust."

Apart from being the colony's egg-laying machine, the queen bee releases pheromones that keep the colony cohesive and functioning, Pruiett said.

"Without the queen, the bees are useless. They need her for everything to function right," she added.

Pruiett's project involves grafting one-day-old larvae from a colony with a strong queen and placing those larvae into queenless colonies. The bees in these queenless colonies need a queen so badly that they can turn what would typically be a worker bee into a queen.

"They're genetically exactly the same, but through special feeding, the bees will make a different kind of a cell and they create queen larvae," Pruiett said.

This is possible because both worker bees and queen bees come from the same egg. Robinson and his graduate students then do a DNA analysis and study how the bees can have the same genetics but be a different caste. Colonies used for specialized research are contained and fed special diets in order to control certain variables for different experiments.

However, most of the honey bees will typically fly within a two-mile radius of the lab in order to pollinate a variety of crops.

"Bees are just like you and me; they need a varied diet," Pruiett said. Each pollen grain has a different nutritional value for the bees, and the variety of pollen not only affects the health of the bees, but it also affects the taste of the honey.

"The honey is the essence of all the flowers and blossoms. Every year the honey is different, depending on what's blooming and how the temperature is," Pruitt said.

She added that this year's honey was especially thin because there was so much summer rain. Pruiett is so experienced in the field that she can tell by the scent of the nectar what kind of honey the bees are producing. Each colony tends to produce 50 to 100 pounds of surplus honey per year, and the profits from the surplus honey help defray the costs of conferences that graduate students attend.

Inside the honey extracting room, the warm sweet aroma of honey was staggering. Pruiett said the bees in the observatory were busy making aster goldenrod honey.

Honey produced from soybean pollen is especially nutritious because it is high in antioxidants.

"I like to call this 'central Illinois gold,'" Pruiett added as she showcased her liquid treasure.

Gold in Illinois? Surely that's buzz-worthy.