Contact Information
505 S. Goodwin Ave.
Urbana, IL 61801
Research Description
How do environmental stressors interact to affect bee health?
Dolezal is a broadly trained insect physiologist with interest in how environmental stressors interact to affect bee health. Pollinators, particularly honey bees and wild bees, are a critical element of healthy ecosystems and key players in agriculture. Dolezal’s research interests revolve around studying how ecological stressors, like nutrition, landscape composition/ecology, viral pathogens, and sublethal pesticide exposure interact to affect these pollinators. Working mostly in Midwestern agroecosystems dominated by row crop agriculture, his lab uses of a variety of approaches, including landscape ecology, ethology, physiology, and genomics to study these interactions and better understand how field-relevant stressors contribute to bee declines.
Education
PhD, 2012, Arizona State University
B.S., 2006, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Awards and Honors
List of teachers ranked excellent by their students, 2019
Additional Campus Affiliations
Associate Professor, Entomology
Affiliate, Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology
External Links
Recent Publications
Barley, T. A., Blaydes, H., & Dolezal, A. G. (2025). A stitch in time: integrating energy infrastructure into the fabric of conservation habitats. Current Opinion in Insect Science, 69, Article 101358. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cois.2025.101358
Guo, Y., Taylor, L. N., Mishra, R., Dolezal, A. G., & Bonning, B. C. (2025). Gut-binding peptides as potential tools to reduce virus binding to honey bee gut surface proteins. Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 91(3), Article e02418-24. https://doi.org/10.1128/aem.02418-24
Payne, A. N., Prayugo, V., & Dolezal, A. G. (2025). A honey bee-associated virus remains infectious and quantifiable in postmortem hosts. Journal of Invertebrate Pathology, 209, Article 108258. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jip.2024.108258
St. Clair, A. L., Dolezal, A. G., Cass, R. P., Hendriksma, H. P., Stein, D. S., Borchardt, K. E., Hodgson, E. W., O'Neal, M. E., & Toth, A. L. (2025). Insecticide application prevents honey bees from realizing benefits of native forage in an agricultural landscape. Science of the Total Environment, 959, Article 178146. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.178146
Bawden, T., Dolezal, A. G., & Cook, C. N. (2024). Indoor tent management for extending honey bee research season: benefits and caveats. Journal of Insect Science, 24(3), Article 10. https://doi.org/10.1093/jisesa/iead113