- 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
Page, a UC Davis doctoral alumnus, a UC Davis distinguished emeritus professor and former chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, wrote an article The Art of the Bee for the journal, and editor Robert Brodschneider interviewed him in a piece titled Robert E. Page Jr--Mapper of the Genetic Architecture of the Honey Bee.
Rob lives and breathes bees, UC Davis, and Arizona State University (ASU). He obtained his doctorate in entomology in 1980 from UC Davis; joined the UC Davis faculty in 1989; and chaired the Department of Entomology from 1999 to 2004. After retiring from UC Davis in 2004, he accepted an appointment at ASU as founding director of the School of Life Sciences. He served as provost of ASU from 2013- 2015, and dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, 2011-2013.
His research on honey bee behavior and genetics appears in his publications: Queen Rearing and Bee Breeding (1997, with Harry H. Laidlaw Jr., his major professor at UC Davis and "the father of honey bee genetics"); The Spirit of the Hive, Harvard University Press (2013); and The Art of the Bee, Oxford University Press (2020). His 230-plus research papers have been cited more than 20,000 times.
Much of Rob Page's research occurred at UC Davis. For 24 years, from 1989 to 2015, he maintained a honey bee-breeding program, managed by bee breeder-geneticist Kim Fondrk, at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility on Bee Biology Road, west of the central campus. Their contributions include discovering a link between social behavior and maternal traits in bees. Their work was featured in a cover story in the journal Nature. In all, Nature featured his work on four covers from work mostly done at UC Davis.
Looking to learn more about bees? You'll want to pick up a copy of his book, ;The Art of the Bee: Shaping the Environment from Landscapes to Societies, 2020, Oxford University Press), and/or access his newly created free YouTube channel, The Art of the Bee," at https://www.youtube.com/@artofthebee.
Why did Page create the free and accessible-to-all YouTube Channel? Because that's what Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), known as a German geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science, would have done.
It's about making science understandable.
"Von Humboldt appealed to artists to learn about nature, and ecology, and paint it," Page wrote in the Bee World article. "He believed that artists and writers could do more to advance an understanding of science and nature than the scientific specialist. His plea was for making science understandable to the public, a plea for popular science."
Page's YouTube channel guides the viewer through "the fascinating biology and behavior of the bee," presented in 38 videos ranging from 4 to 27 minutes in length. He organized the videos into six segments that roughly correspond to the nine chapters of the book:
- Landscape Artists
- Environmental Engineers
- The Social Contract
- Superorganisms
- How to Make a Superorganism
- Song of the Queen.
We love this passage from his book:
"The impact of bees on our world is immeasurable. Bees are responsible for the evolution of the vast array of brightly-colored flowers and for engineering the niches of multitudes of plants, animals, and microbes. They've painted our landscapes with flowers through their pollination activities and have evolved the most complex societies to aid their exploitation of the environment."
We can learn so much from the bees...
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Sometimes overlooked as pollinators are the syrphid flies, also known as "hover flies" or "flower flies."
Unfortunately, they are often mistaken for honey bees. Hey, if it's a critter on a flower, it's a bee, right?
Not necessarily!
Syrphid flies are easily distinguished from honey bees. Among the differences: (1) honey bees don't hover, (2) syrphids have only one pair of wings, while honey bees have two (3) syrphids have short, stubby antennae, while honey bees have long, bent antennae called genticulate antennae and (4) syrphids belong to the order Diptera, while honey bees are in the order Hymenoptera.
We spotted this syprhid fly soaking up some early-morning sun It stayed still for a dorsal photo and then sensing danger, slipped under a leaf.
Scientists estimate that there are more than 6200 species of syrphid flies in the world, and more than 3000 in California alone.
The UC Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program (UC IPM) has this to say about syprhids in its Natural Enemies Gallery post: "Adults are robust to slender flies 1/8 to 1 inch (4–25 mm) long, varying by species. The broad head is about the width of the abdomen or wider and has large eyes with distinct antennae. The body of many adults is black with bands or stripes of orange, yellow, or white, resembling stinging bees or wasps. Some species are mostly brown, metallic blue or green, yellow, or combinations of these or other colors. For example, adults of ant-predaceous Microdon species are blackish to brown or bright to dark greenish."
Many syrphids prey on aphids and mealybugs, so they're good guys and gals to have in your garden.
Says UC IPM: "Most species are predaceous, most commonly on aphids or mealybugs. Some syrphids prey on ants, caterpillars, froghoppers, psyllids, scales, other insects, or mites."
The good guys and gals of the garden...
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
And if you're part of the UC Davis-based California Master Beekeeper Program (CAMBP), it takes a lot of worker bees from all facets to succeed.
We congratulate CAMBP for its well-deserved recognition at the recent UC Davis Staff Assembly's Citation of Excellence ceremony.
CAMBP director and founder Elina Lastro Niño, associate professor of Cooperative Extension and a member of UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology faculty, and co-program manager Wendy Mather won a Faculty-Staff Partnership Award.
Niño, UC Extension apiculturist since 2014, founded CAMBP in 2016. Mather joined the program in March of 2018. Also integral to the program is Kian Nikzad, but as a newer employee, was ineligible to be nominated.
The awards ceremony, held Sept. 12 in the International Center on campus, singled out “some of our most exceptional UC Davis individuals and teams,” Chancellor May said in his presentation.
Nominators of "The Bee Team" (Kathy Keatley Garvey, Nora Orozco and Tabatha Yang of Department of Entomology and Nematology) lauded Niño and Mather for providing a “program of learning, teaching, research, and public service, goes above and beyond in delivering comprehensive, science-based information about honey bees and honey bee health. They continually and consistently develop, improve, and refine their statewide curriculum that educates stewards in a train-the-trainer program to disseminate accurate, timely, and crucial information. Honey bees pollinate more than 30 California crops, including almonds, a $5 billion industry (no bees, no pollination, no almonds). Indeed, California produces more than a third of our country's vegetables and three-quarters of our fruits and nuts. However, colony losses are alarming due to pesticides, pests, predators and pathogens.”
As of Sept. 15, 2023, CAMBP has donated 34,000 hours of volunteer time and served 209,000 individuals in education, outreach and beekeeping mentorship. If a volunteer hour were to be calculated at $26.87, CAMBP has given $913,580 back to California in service of science-based beekeeping and honey bee health.
Its website, accessible to the public, offers a list of classes and knowledge-based information, including backyard beekeeping, bees in the neighborhood, bees and beekeeping regulations, defensive bees, live honey bee removals, and protecting pollinators.
“Bottom line,” the nominators concluded, “our ‘B' Team is really an ‘A' Team, an outstanding example of UC Davis teaching, research and service; a team providing exemplary service and contributions; and a team that creates and maintains high morale and embodies the Principles of Community.”
Joint Statement. In a joint statement following the awards ceremony, Mather and Nikzad said: “We share this award with our passionate and caring member volunteers. Our members are deeply committed to honey bee health, science-based beekeeping practices, and, most importantly, to each other. Their enthusiasm and dedication drive our mission forward. We wish to acknowledge Elina Niño for her visionary leadership; she has brought together various stakeholders, including growers, bee breeders, commercial, sideline, and hobbyist beekeepers, as well as the general public, through CAMBP, UC Davis, UC Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC ANR) and UC Cooperative Extension (UCCE). We missed having her at the ceremony.”
Well deserved! A tip of the bee veil to CAMBP! You're smokin'
(See full-length news story and more images on the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology website)
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
But it's not going to happen.
So here we are in our Vacaville pollinator garden, looking at the Chinese forget-me-nots. We see honey bees, leafcutter bees, syrphid flies, lady beetles, cabbage white butterflies, and other critters foraging. It's National Pollinator Week.
And then we see a pinkish caterpillar munching away on one of the sky-blue blossoms. He's a very hungry caterpillar. Did we say "hungry?" He's ravenous. Absolutely ravenous!
It's a tobacco budworm, Heliothis virescens, as identified by UC Davis distinguished professor Art Shapiro, an expert on Lepidopterans who has monitored butterfly populations in central California since 1972--and also studies moths. (See his butterfly website.)
In its adult stage, the tobacco budworm will become a moth. (If we let it!)
In its larval stage, it can vary in color from pale green to pink to dark red to maroon, according to a University of Florida entomological fact sheet.
"Tobacco budworm is principally a field crop pest, attacking such crops as alfalfa, clover, cotton, flax, soybean, and tobacco," the University of Florida entomologists related. "However, it sometimes attacks such vegetables as cabbage, cantaloupe, lettuce, pea, pepper, pigeon pea, squash, and tomato, especially when cotton or other favored crops are abundant. Tobacco budworm is a common pest of geranium and other flower crops such as ageratum, bird of paradise, chrysanthemum, gardenia, geranium, petunia, mallow, marigold, petunia, snapdragon, strawflower, verbena, and zinnia."
Naturalist-photographer Greg Kareofelas, a Bohart Museum of Entomology associate, remembers rearing one that he plucked from his geraniums a few years ago. We are not going to rear this one. Tobacco budworms are not our buddies.
This afternoon honey bees tried to push the pest away. They did not succeed.
Tomorrow the California scrub jays nesting and chirping in the cherry laurels probably will!