With collaborators John Mola, Ian Pearse, and Enakshi Ghosh and funding from the USDA, we are working on immune priming in bumble bees. Bees can be “vaccinated” essentially, which up-regulates immune function and enhances disease resistance. Even more exciting is that they can pass this heightened immunity to their offspring. Immunity, however, can be costly to bees. We will be evaluating the effectiveness in immune priming for some new pathogens and in non-model bees, the costs of immune priming, and also will examine how food quality and availability influence immunity and overall fitness.