(Update: Felicity Muth's Feb. 20th presentation is on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5Nv3DMH38s)
If you missed the native bee booth in the Academic Surge Building during the 14th annual UC Davis Biodiversity Museum Day on Feb. 8, you missed an opportunity to talk to the scientists and see bumble bee nests.
Staffing the booth in the morning were Felicity Muth, assistant professor, Department of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior, UC Davis College of Biological Sciences; pollination ecologist Neal Williams, professor, Department of Entomology and Nematology; and several members of the Muth lab.
The Muth team, including graduate students Sarah Waybright, Melanie Kimball and Minjun Baek, displayed a nest of Bombus impatiens and a micro nest of a set of male B. melanopygus. They fielded scores of questions.
Several young girls who were installing a pollinator garden for their school interviewed Professor Williams. They asked him "what problems are bees facing" and "what is being done to help the bees."
Some 2000 people crowded into Academic Surge on Biodiversity Museum Day to see the multiple table displays staffed by the Bohart Museum of Entomology and the Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology. Elsewhere on campus, scientists showcased a variety of museums and collections.
But the bees were especially buzzworthy!
Zoom Presentation. And speaking of buzzworthy, Muth will give a special presentation on “How Do Animals Think? Some Insights from Bumble Bees” from 3:10 to 4:30 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 20.
Her presentation will be on Zoom only. You can access the link here.
"Animals use their cognition (perception, learning and decision-making) to navigate their worlds, making complex decisions," Muth says in her abstract. "Many of these processes are shared amongst humans and non-human animals. Here I draw on a few topics from our research to highlight ways that bees (and perhaps other animals too) think about things. In addition, I discuss some recent outreach events from our lab and efforts to spread knowledge about native bees."
Muth is a Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspectives on Science (CAMPOS) scholar. The talk will be hosted by the UC Davis Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), Office of Academic Diversity.
Her presentation is meant to spark discussion between faculty and graduate students, but anyone is welcome, said spokesperson Doris Kim of DEI.
Muth, who joined the UC Davis faculty in 2014, specializes in animal behavior and cognition, including aspects of learning and memory that have a clear function in the natural world.
As part of UC Davis' $1.039 billion in external research awards, Muth received funding from The National Geographic Society for her project, "Ecology Shaping Cognition: An Exploration with Wild Bees."
Your mama tells you that you're a bee, but when you look around you, you don't look like any of the bees you encounter in the meadow.
Not the honey bee, not the carpenter bee, not the bumble bee, not the cuckoo bee and not any of the other assorted bees minding their own bees-ness in the meadow.
You're not yellow, you're not fuzzy, you're not social and you're just not certain.
Makes you wonder if you're having an identity crisis, right? (See more of the blog)
Muth, oriiginally from London, completed her undergraduate degree in zoology from the University of Edinburgh in 2009, and her doctorate in biology from the University of St. Andrews in 2012. After receiving her doctorate, she began studying bumble bee cognition at the University of Arizona and University of Nevada, Reno. She was funded by L'Oreal for Women in Science, the American Association of University Women, and the U. S. Department of Agriculture.