- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
You're dancing in the dark, on a small, crowded dance floor with lots of obstacles, and you're trying to communicate to other foragers where that great resource is. You're relating the direction, distance, and quality of the resource (pollen, nectar, propolis, or water) so that they too, can find it, collect it and return it to the hive.
Can you do that? And also perform other communications, like letting the colony know where a good nesting site is?
No?
Want to learn more about honey bee communication?
Enter bee biologist James Nieh, a professor and an associate dean at UC San Diego. He'll present a seminar, hosted by the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, at 4:10 p.m., Monday, Dec. 4 in Room 122 of Briggs Hall. His seminar, "Danger, Dopamine, and Dance: New Insights from the Magic Well of Honey Bee Communication," also will be on Zoom. The Zoom link:
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/95882849672
Nieh, who is a faculty member of the Section of Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution, Division of Biological Sciences, and associate dean of Biological Sciences, has studied honey bee communication for decades.
"Karl von Frisch referred to the waggle dance as the 'magic well' for the insights that it provides not only on honey bees, but on the general cognitive complexity that social insects are capable of," he writes in his abstract. "New research demonstrates that the neurotransmitter, dopamine, the 'pleasure molecule' plays a similar hedonic role in honey bees as it does in many vertebrates, regulating the perception of danger and the anticipation of food rewards as revealed in the excitatory waggle dance and the associated, inhibitory stop signal. I will also discuss new data showing that the honey bee waggle dance is partially learned and has elements that may be culturally transmitted. Together, these findings, demonstrate that the waggle dance can teach us a great deal about shared cognitive mechanisms and the importance of social learning across taxa."
In an article, "Social Signal Learning of the Waggle Dance in Honey Bees," published in Science in March, 2023, Nieh and his research team showed that "correct waggle dancing requires social learning. Bees without the opportunity to follow any dances before they first danced produced significantly more disordered dances with larger waggle angle divergence errors and encoded distance incorrectly. The former deficit improved with experience, but distance encoding was set for life. The first dances of bees that could follow other dancers showed neither impairment. Social learning, therefore, shapes honey bee signaling, as it does communication in human infants, birds, and multiple other vertebrate species. that correct waggle dancing requires social learning. Bees without the opportunity to follow any dances before they first danced produced significantly more disordered dances with larger waggle angle divergence errors and encoded distance incorrectly. The former deficit improved with experience, but distance encoding was set for life. The first dances of bees that could follow other dancers showed neither impairment. Social learning, therefore, shapes honey bee signaling, as it does communication in human infants, birds, and multiple other vertebrate species."
Nieh received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1991 and his doctorate from Cornell University in 1997. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship funded by NSF-NAT0 (National Science Foundation, North Atlantic Treaty Organization) at the University of Würzburg, Germany. He served as a Harvard Junior Fellow from 1998-2000.
Seminar coordinator is Brian Johnson, associate professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. For Zoom technical issues, he may be reached at brnjohnson@ucdavis.edu. The list of seminars is posted here.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Nieh will present his seminar at 4:10 p.m., Monday, Dec. 4 in Room 122 of Briggs Hall and also on Zoom. The Zoom link:
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/95882849672
"Karl von Frisch referred to the waggle dance as the 'magic well' for the insights that it provides not only on honey bees, but on the general cognitive complexity that social insects are capable of," Nieh writes in his abstract. "New research demonstrates that the neurotransmitter, dopamine, the 'pleasure molecule' plays a similar hedonic role in honey bees as it does in many vertebrates, regulating the perception of danger and the anticipation of food rewards as revealed in the excitatory waggle dance and the associated, inhibitory stop signal. I will also discuss new data showing that the honey bee waggle dance is partially learned and has elements that may be culturally transmitted. Together, these findings, demonstrate that the waggle dance can teach us a great deal about shared cognitive mechanisms and the importance of social learning across taxa."
In an article titled "Unlocking Secrets of the Honeybee Dance Language--Bees Learn and Culturally Transmit Their Communication Skills," and published March 9, 2023 in The Conversation, Nieh described the waggle dance as "one of the most complicated examples of nonhuman communication. They can tell each other were to find resources such as food, water, or nest sites with a physical 'waggle dance.' this dance conveys the This dance conveys the direction, distance and quality of a resource to the bee's nestmates."
Nieh related exactly how the bees perform the waggle dance. "Essentially, the dancer points recruits in the correct direction and tells them how far to go by repeatedly circling around in a figure eight pattern centered around a waggle run, in which the bee waggles its abdomen as it moves forward. Dancers are pursued by potential recruits, bees that closely follow the dancer, to learn where to go to find the communicated resource."
"Longer waggle runs communicate greater distances," Nieh wrote, "and the waggle angle communicates direction. For higher-quality resources such as sweeter nectar, dancers repeat the waggle run more times and race back faster after each waggle run."
Nieh noted that "The Greek historian Herodotus reported over 2,000 years ago on a misguided forbidden experiment in which two children were prevented from hearing human speech so that a king could discover the true, unlearned language of human beings.
"Scientists now know that human language requires social learning and interaction with other people, a property shared with multiple animal languages. But why should humans and other animals need to learn a language instead of being born with this knowledge, like many other animal species?"
Nieh went on to point out that "This question fascinates me and my colleagues and is the basis for our recent paper published in the journal Science. As a biologist, I have spent decades studying honeybee communication and how it may have evolved."
Nieh received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1991 and his doctorate from Cornell University in 1997. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship funded by NSF-NAT0 (National Science Foundation, North Atlantic Treaty Organization) at the University of Würzburg, Germany. He served as a Harvard Junior Fellow from 1998-2000
Seminar coordinator is Brian Johnson, associate professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. For Zoom technical issues, he may be reached at brnjohnson@ucdavis.edu. The list of seminars is posted here.
Resources:
- Social Signal Learning of the Waggle Dance in Honey Bees, March 9, 2023, Science
- Bees Can Teach Their Young to Dance, March 9, 2023, Washington Post
- The Waggle Dance, PBS documentary on YouTube
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Ponisio, who grew up in Fresno and holds degrees from Stanford University and UC Berkeley, is an assistant professor of biology at the University of Oregon who seeks to preserve and restore populations of bees and other pollinators.
Her seminar, both in-person and virtual, is sponsored by the UC Davis Department of Entomology andNematology at 4:10 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 8 in 122 Briggs Hall. Host is community ecologist Rachel Vannette, associate professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. The Zoom link:
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/95882849672.
"Infectious disease prevalence is among the top five drivers of global extinction, including in wild bees," Ponisio says in her abstract. "With the global decline of wild bees, our work aims to contribute to understanding how community characteristics shape infectious disease prevalence in plant-pollinator communities. Infectious parasites can influence host immunity, physiology, and reproduction. The sharing of floral resources is a common mode of disease transmission among pollinators."
"Increasing host aggregation on floral resources can increase disease prevalence, that is, amplification," Ponisio noted. "Conversely, high host species diversity---even if accompanied by host aggregation---may dilute infection. Because bees pick up parasites from flowers, but not all flowers transmit parasites equally, flower abundance and diversity may further contribute to parasite dilution. In three systems, mass-blooming sunflower in Yolo County, CA, harvested forests in Coast Range, OR, and high elevation meadows across the Southwestern U.S., I examine how the factors that shape plant-pollinator abundance and diversity and the ramifications for parasite prevalence in wild bee communities. Across all systems, more than 40% of bees have at one parasite. Both natural (phenology) and human-induced (years post-harvest, mass-blooming crops) modification of the bee and floral communities indirectly affected parasitism by altering host community characteristics. I found a consistent amplification effect of host (bee) abundance and detected dilution through either host diversity or floral diversity in each system."
On her website, Ponisio elaborates: "We focus on understanding the mechanisms by which species interactions maintain species diversity, and how we can harness these processes to manage and restore diversity in human-modified systems. We focus on pollinators because they are critical for pollination in managed and natural plant communities, but our research is broadly applicable across ecological interactions. Our aim to discover new insights into how communities form, evolve, and persist through time and space, aiding in the prediction and prevention of community collapse. We combine modeling, synthesis and field-based work, and adhere to the principles of reproducible, open science."
Lauren holds two degrees from Stanford: a bachelor's degree in biology, with honors, in ecology and evolution (2010) and her master's degree in biology (2011). She received her doctorate from the Department of Environmental Science Policy and Management, UC Berkeley, in 2016.
Ponisio conducted postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley and served on the faculty at UC Riverside before accepting her current position. She received graduate fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute for Food and Agriculture, as well as a postdoctoral fellowship from the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. She was named among the Global Food Initiative's “30 Under 30” in Food Systems in 2016.
Food Gone. Ponisio says one of her most difficult field work experiences occurred in Yosemite National Park, according to her People Behind the Science podcast. "Their study on the effects of fires on pollinators required them to backpack out to remote sites where there had been natural fires. Lauren started working months ahead of time to get ready for the trip and prepare dehydrated meals for the lab to eat. One day, they opened the large canister where they had been storing their food to protect it from bears, and they discovered the food was gone. All that was left was a handwritten note from someone thanking them for leaving out food."
"The next day, the lab's field assistant tripped over a log and sprained her ankle. Then they accidentally left their sampling gear at a site and had to hike all the way back to retrieve it. Later, a bear came into their campsite and destroyed many of the traps they needed to collect pollinators for their study. At this point, Lauren and her colleagues were exhausted, surviving on snacks, their field assistant could barely walk, and much of the equipment they needed had been destroyed. In the face of all of these challenges, Lauren stayed calm. These kinds of things happen in field research, and everyone made it back to share the story."
Ponisio was featured on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" in January of 2021 when she discussed "Wildfires Open Forests for Wildlife and Research."
Ponisio is the lead author of a recently submitted journal paper, "Mass-Flowering Crops Attract Bees, Amplifying Parasitism," co-authored by G. P. Smith, H. Sardinas, J. Zorn, Q. S. McFrederick and S. H.Woodard. (See CV)
The UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology's winter seminars are held on Wednesdays at 4:10 p.m. in 122 Briggs Hall. All are virtual. They are coordinated by urban landscape entomologist Emily Meineke, assistant professor. (See schedule.) She may be reached at ekmeineke@ucdavis.edu for technical issues.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
We've all read stories dealing with "A Day in the Life" of principals, presidents and princesses. We're probably familiar with The Beatles' song "A Day in the Life," the final song on their Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album.
But do you know what's it's like to be a queen bee for a day? A virgin queen bee?
You will if you attend the Wednesday, Feb. 3 seminar by Extension apiculturist/professor David Tarpy of North Carolina State University on Wednesday, Feb. 3 in 122 Briggs Hall, Kleiber Hall Drive, UC Davis. He will speak on "Young Regality: a Day in the Life of a Virgin Queen Bee" from 12:10 to 1 p.m. It's part of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology's noonhour seminars and is open to all interested persons. It also will be recorded for later posting on UCTV.
His host is Elina Niño, Extension apiculturist, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.
Tarpy, a honey bee biologist, joined the North Carolina State University faculty in 2003. He received his bachelor's degree in biology in 1993 from Hobart College; his master's degree in biology (advised by David Fletcher) in 1995 from Bucknell University; and his doctorate in entomology in 2000 from UC Davis, with major professor Robert Page, former chair of the Department of Entomology and now university provost emeritus and Foundation chair of Life Sciences, Arizona State University.
Tarpy went on to complete his postdoctoral fellowship (advised by Tom Seeley) at Cornell University, New York.
Tarpy focuses his research on the biology and behavior of honey bee queens—using techniques including field manipulations, behavioral observation, instrumental insemination, and molecular genetics—in order to better improve the overall health of queens and their colonies.
Specific research projects include understanding the effect of the polyandrous mating strategy of queen bees on colony disease resistance, using molecular methods to determine the genetic structure within honey bee colonies, and the determining the regulation of reproduction at the individual and colony levels.
Tarpy's work has provided some of the best empirical evidence that multiple mating by queens confers multiple and significant benefits to colonies through increased genetic diversity of their nestmates.
More recently, his lab has focused on the reproductive potential of commercially produced queens, testing their genetic diversity and mating success in an effort to improve queen quality. He recently worked with the California Bee Breeders' Association, headquartered in Orland. Many of the bee breeders sent him queen bees to be tested.
He wrote a piece for North Carolina Extension on why honey bee colonies are dying.
For further information on his seminar, contact Niño at elnino@ucdavis.edu. While in the area, Tarpy also plans to address the Marin County Beekeepers' Association on Thursday, Feb.4.