Honey bees play a vital role in agriculture through the pollination of food crops. One third of the food we eat is pollinated by bees. Honey bees provide 80% of this service – native bees provide the rest. Did you know there are 423 species of native bees living in Ontario? They are also vitally important as they pollinate many native plants. Hummingbirds and some bat species pollinate too! Honey bees face numerous health challenges and the role of the University of Guelph’s Honey Bee Research Centre (HBRC) is to help beekeepers keep their bees healthy. The centre conducts hive health studies and trains beekeepers on a global scale. In this presentation Paul Kelly will outline the challenges bees face, survey the research and education activities of the HBRC, and let us know how we can help them help bees.

The Jewish population of Canada is currently about 400,000 people of which close to half reside in the GTA.  They first settled in the area in the 1820s and their number continued to increase when Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe arrived in Canada in large numbers after 1880.  They came seeking a home and country in which they could not only survive and prosper, but one in which they could leave a positive legacy for their children, grandchildren, and the generations that followed.  They did indeed find the refuge they were searching for in Toronto and elsewhere, yet their acceptance and integration into the larger society was not always wanted or welcome, and the struggles they faced caused much inner turmoil and hardship.  In this lecture historian and author Allan Levine examines the key lessons, trends and patterns of two centuries of Jewish life in Toronto.

Everything about us is an emergent property of our enormous, intricate, and orderly nervous system. And our nervous system, like any other system, requires security. Providing that security is the job of our immune system. But treason at the biological level is real. At every level of the nervous system there are internal miscreants, rabble-rousers, and spies. In this lecture, neurologist Dr. Roy Baskind will take us on a tour of those autoimmune domestic threats – from our nerves, up our spinal column, and into our brain – and in the process expose our internal ‘fifth column’: autoimmunity against our own nervous system. This lecture aims to leave us with a newfound awe of our personal neurological government and how it can all go so wrong.