Internationally known honey bee geneticist Robert E. Page Jr., emeritus professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Arizona State University provost emeritus, has been selected a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences (CAS), San Francisco.

He is one of 10 Fellows, and the only one from UC Davis, to be inducted Tuesday, Nov. 15 at the annual CAS meeting and awards dinner.

The Fellows are a group of distinguished scientists, nominated and appointed in recognition of their outstanding contributions to the natural sciences. They help extend the Academy's “positive impact on research, public engagement, and education, through individual and collaborative efforts with Academy researchers and staff,” a spokesperson said.

Page was nominated by chemical ecologist and CAS Fellow Walter Leal, UC Davis distinguished professor of molecular and cellular biology and former professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology (now the Department of Entomology and Nematology). James R. Carey, UC Davis distinguished professor of entomology and a CAS Fellow, seconded the nomination.

“Rob is internationally known for his expertise on social insect behavior and population genetics,” Leal said, describing him as a “highly gifted, innovative and productive researcher, administrator, collaborator, teacher and author.” Leal said there are few “who can match his scientific stature.”

Page focuses his current research on the evolution of complex, social behavior. “Using the honey bee as a mode3l, he has dissected bees' complex foraging division of labor at all levels of biological organization—from gene networks to complex social interactions,” Leal noted. “Throughout his career, he has been on the cutting edge of discoveries involving behavior, life cycle, genetics, physiology and biochemistry, and, as such, is a high cited author on such topics as Africanized bees, genetics and evolution of social organization, sex determination and division of labor in insect societies.”

A native of Bakersfield, Page received his doctorate in entomology from UC Davis in 1980 and served on The Ohio State University faculty before joining the UC Davis faculty in 1989. His UC Davis career spanned 15 years. He served as department chair from 1999 to 2004 when Arizona State University recruited him to found its School of Life Sciences. As the founding director and dean, he established the world-class, integrative School of Life Sciences and the Honey Bee Research Facility.

Page's career advanced to vice provost and dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in 2011, and then to university provost in 2014. After a highly distinguished academic career, he became emeritus provost and Regents professor in June 2015 and continues his research, teaching and public service.

A highly productive scientist, Page has authored more than 230 research papers and articles. He and his major professor, “father of bee genetics” Harry H. Laidlaw Jr., (for whom the UC Davis bee biology facility is named), wrote the pioneering book, “Queen Rearing and Bee Breeding.” In 2013 Page published his latest book, “The Spirit of the Hive: the Mechanisms of Social Evolution,” which explains the self-organizing regulatory networks of honey bees.

Page is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Entomological Society of America and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the German National Academy of Sciences, and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. His many honors include the Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize, the highest honor given by the German government to foreign scientists. In 2009 he was elected to Leopoldina, founded in 1652, for his pioneering research in behavioral genetics of honey bees.

Other UC Davis entomologists who are members of CAS include integrated pest management specialist Frank Zalom; ant specialist Phil Ward; and native pollinator specialist Robbin Thorp, distinguished emeritus professor of entomology. Catherine Tauber and her husband, the late Maurice Tauber, both affiliated with the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nenatology, were named  honorary fellows of CAS in 2009.

See list of CAS fellows 

UC Davis-affiliated entomologists James R. Carey and Robert E. Page Jr., internationally recognized for their work, have been selected plenary speakers for the International Congress of Entomology's 2016 conference in Orlando, Fla.

Carey, a distinguished professor of entomology with the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, is considered the world's foremost authority on arthropod demography. Page, provost of Arizona State University and emeritus professor and former chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, is considered the most influential honey bee biologist of the past 30 years.

UC Davis chemical ecologist Walter Leal, co-chair of the International Congress of Entomology (ICE 2016), announced the names of the eight plenary speakers at the Entomological Society of America meeting, underway Nov. 16-19 in Portland, Ore. The process was highly competitive, he said, with 77 nominations worldwide.

The ICE conference, set Sept. 25-30, 2016, may be the largest gathering of entomologists ever. Some 6000 are expected to attend.  It will be co-located with the annual meetings of the Entomological Society of America and the Entomological Society of Canada, along with events hosted by the entomological societies of China, Brazil, Australia, and others.

“We are delighted to have the first Hispanic woman (Latina) to give a plenary lecture at ICE; likewise, the first kiwi (New Zealander), as well as the first native African to have the opportunity to highlight their work in this venue,” said Leal, professor in the UC Davis Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology.

The list of plenary speakers:

• Carolina Barilla-Mury, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Guatemala & USA, who will speak on medical entomology immunity
• Jacqueline Beggs, University of Auckland, New Zealand. Topic: biodiversity and biosecurity
• James R. Carey, University of California, Davis. Topic: insect biodemography
• Fred Gould, North Carolina State University. Topic: GMOs: crop and health protection
• Robert E. Page, Jr., Arizona State University. Topic: bee biology: Spirit of the Hive” (title of his latest book)
• José Roberto Postali Parra, ESALQ, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Topic: biological control.
• John A. Pickett, Rothamsted Research, UK. Topic: insect-plant interactions
• Baldwyn Torto, Centre of Insect Physiology & Ecology, based in Nairobi, Kenya. Topic: Colony collapse disorder and pollination.

Capsule information on the UC Davis-affiliated entomologists:

James R. Carey
Carey has authored more than 250 scientific articles, including landmark papers in Science that shaped the way scientists think about lifespan limits and actuarial aging, and two articles in the Annual Review series that provide new syntheses on insect biodemography (2003, Annual Review of Entomology) and aging in the wild (2014, Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics). He directed a $10 million multi-university grant for more than a decade (2003-2013).  

Carey is the author of three books, including Applied Demography for Biologists with Special Emphasis on Insects (Oxford University Press), the go-to source for all entomologists studying demography. Highly honored for his work, Carey received the 2014 C. W. Woodworth Award, the highest honor bestowed by the Pacific Branch of the Entomological Society of America (ESA), and the 2014 UC Davis Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award for innovative and creative teaching.

Carey chaired the University of California Systemwide Committee on Research Policy—one of the most important and prestigious committees in the UC system and served on the systemwide UC Academic Council. In addition, he serves as the associate editor of three journals: Genus, Aging Cell, and Demographic Research. In addition, he is the first entomologist to have a mathematical discovery named after him by demographers—The Carey Equality—which set the theoretical and analytical foundation for a new approach to understanding wild populations.

He is a fellow of four professional organizations: ESA, the Gerontological Society of America, the California Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Carey has presented more than 250 seminars in venues all over the world, from Stanford, Harvard, Moscow, Beijing to Athens, London, Adelaide and Okinawa.  In addition, Carey is considered a worldwide authority on the demography and invasion biology of tephritid fruit flies, particularly the Mediterranean fruit fly; and a preeminent authority on biodemographics of human aging and lifespan. He is also a pioneering force advocating the educational use of digital video technology, work that he is sharing throughout much of the state, nation and the world.

Carey received his bachelor's degree (animal ecology, 1973) and master's degree (entomology, 1975) from Iowa State University, and his doctorate in entomology from UC Berkeley in 1980.

Robert E. Page Jr.
Page, who received his doctorate in entomology at UC Davis in 1980, served as an assistant professor at  Ohio State University before joining the UC Davis Department of Entomology in 1989. He chaired the department for five years, from 1999 to 2004. Page's specialized genetic stock of honey bees was based for many years at UC Davis.

Page has published more than 200 reviewed publications, three edited books and two authored books. His lab pioneered the use of modern techniques to study the genetic bases to the evolution of social behavior in honey bees and other social insects.

Page was the first to employ molecular markers to study polyandry and patterns of sperm use in honey bees. He provided the first quantitative demonstration of low genetic relatedness in a highly eusocial species.

Among his other achievements involving honey bee research:

• Page and his students and colleagues isolated, characterized and validated the complementary sex determination gene of the honey bee; perhaps the most important paper yet published about the genetics of Hymenoptera.
• He and his students constructed the first genetic map of any social insect, demonstrating that the honey bee has the highest recombination rate of any eukaryotic organism mapped to date.

In addition, Page was personally involved in genome mappings of bumble bees, parasitic wasps and two species of ants. His most recent work focuses on the genetic bases to individuality in honey bees.

Page also built two modern apicultural labs (in Ohio and Arizona), major legacies that are centers of honey bee research and training. He has trained many hundreds of beekeepers, and continues to teach beekeeping even as provost of the largest public university in the United States. He is also the Foundation Chair of Life Sciences.

An internationally recognized scholar, Page is an elected foreign member of the Brazilian Academy of Science, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the oldest scientific academy of science, the Germany Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. He was elected to Leopoldina, founded in 1652, for his pioneering research in behavioral genetics of honey bees.

Previously announced as keynote speakers: Nobel Laureautes Peter Agre (2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry) and Jules Hoffmann (2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine). Agre is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health. Hoffmann is a professor of integrative biology at the Strasbourg University Institute for Advanced Study. He is also emeritus research director of the French National Research Center and a past president of the French National Academy of Sciences.

The ICE conference, themed "Entomology without Borders," is co-chaired by Alvin Simmons research entomologist with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Agricultural Research Service, U.S. Vegetable Laboratory in Charleston, S.C.   More information on the conference is on its website at http://ice2016orlando.org/

Arizona State University Provost Robert E. Page, Jr., emeritus professor and former chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, and two other UC Davis-affiliated scientists are among the key members of a scientific team from the United States, Germany and France that cracked the 200-year secret of complementary sex determination in honey bees.

The research, “Gradual Molecular Evolution of a Sex Determination Switch in Honeybees through Incomplete Penetrance of Femaleness,” is published in the December edition of Current Biology. The research shows that five amino acid differences separate males from females.

The lead author, Martin Beye, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Duesseldorf, Germany, was Page’s former UC Davis postdoctoral researcher. Bee breeder-geneticist Michael “Kim” Fondrk provided the genetic material from crosses using Page’s bees that he tends at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, UC Davis.

“The story goes back to Johann Dzierson in the mid 1800s through Mendel, through Harry Laidlaw to me and to my former postdoc at Davis, Martin Beye,” Page said.

“Much of the work was done at UC Davis beginning in 1990,” Page said.  "From 1999-2000, Martin Beye was a Fyodor Lynen Fellow in my lab funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.  During that year he began the sequencing and characterization of the csd gene; the paper was eventually published as a cover article in Cell."

Said Fondrk: “This project was a long time in making; it began soon after our Cell paper was published in 2003. First we needed to assemble variation for alleles at the sex locus, by collecting drones from many different, presumably unrelated queens, and mating one drone each through an independently reared set of queens using instrumental insemination (which was Fondrk's task). "Then a second set of crosses was made to identify and isolate individual sex alleles. The progeny that resulted from this cross were taken to Germany where Martin Beye’s team began the monumental task of sequencing the sex determination region in the collected samples.”

“It's taken nearly 200 years, but scientists in Arizona and Europe have teased out how the molecular switch for sex gradually and adaptively evolved in the honey bee,” wrote ASU spokesperson Margaret Coulombe, director of academic communications for the ASU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Silesian monk Johann Dzierson began studying the first genetic mechanism for sex determination in the mid-1800s. Dzierson knew that royal jelly determines whether the females will be queen bees or honey bee colonies, but he wondered about the males.

Dzierson believed that the males or drones were haploid – possessing one set of chromosomes, a belief confirmed in the 1900s with the advent of the microscope. In other words, the males, unlike the females, came from unfertilized eggs.

“However, how this system of haplodiploid sex determination ultimately evolved at a molecular level has remained one of the most important questions in developmental genetics,” Coulombe pointed out in her news release. 

The collaborators resolved the last piece of the puzzle.

“Once again, the studies by Dr. Rob Page and his colleagues have unraveled another mystery of honey bee development,” commented Extension apiculturist Eric Mussen of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, who was not involved in the study but knows the work of many of the collaborators. “It would be interesting if someone investigated the same type of sexual dimorphism in other hymenopterans to determine if they all use the same, ancient-based mechanism.”

The authors studied 14 natural sequence variants of the complementary sex determining switch (csd gene), for 76 genotypes of honey bees.

“While complex, the researchers had several tools at hand that their predecessors lacked to solve this sexual determination puzzle,” Coulombe wrote. “First, honey bees are ideal study subjects because they have one gene locus responsible for sex determination. Also, Page and former graduate student Greg Hunt identified genetic markers – well-characterized regions of DNA – close to the complementary sex determining locus to allow gene mapping. In addition, Hunt and Page found that the honey bees’ high recombination rate – the process by which genetic material is physically mixed during sexual reproduction – is the highest of any known animal studied, which helped Beye isolate, sequence and characterize the complementary sex determining locus. Page and Beye were also able to knock out an allele and show how one could get a male from a diploid genotype; work that was featured on the cover of the journal Cell in 2003. 

“However, the questions of which alleles were key, how they worked together and in what combinations and why this system evolved were left unanswered, though tantalizing close. This compelled the current team of collaborators to step back to review what actually constitutes an allele.”

Page was quoted in the news release: “There has to be some segment of that gene that is responsible in this allelic series, where if you have two different coding sequences in that part of the gene you end up producing a female. So we asked how different do two alleles have to be? Can you be off one or two base pairs or does it always have to be the same set of sequences? We came up with a strategy to go in and look at these 18-20 alleles and find out what regions of these genes are responsible among these variants.”

“In this process,” Page said, “we also had to determine if there are intermediate kinds of alleles and discover how they might have evolved.”

“What the authors found,” wrote Coulombe, “was that at least five amino acid differences can control allelic differences to create femaleness through the complementary sex determiner (csd) gene – the control switch.”

Page explained: “We discovered that different amounts of arginine, serine and proline affect protein binding sites on the csd gene, which in turn lead to different conformational states, which then lead to functional changes in the bees – the switch that determines the shift from female to not female.”

The authors also discovered a natural evolutionary intermediate that showed only three amino acid differences spanned the balance between lethality and induced femaleness, Coulombe wrote. The findings suggest that that incomplete penetrance may be the mechanism by which new molecular switches can gradually and adaptively evolve.  

Other co-authors included Christine Seelmann and Tanja Gempe of the University of Duesseldorf; Martin Hasslemann, Institute of Genetics at the University of Cologne, Germany; and Xavier Bekmans with Université Lille, n France. Grants from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft supported their work.

Page, who studies the evolution of complex social behavior in honey bees, from genes to societies, received his doctorate in entomology from UC Davis in 1980, and served as an assistant professor at Ohio State University before joining the UC Davis Department of Entomology in 1989. He chaired the department for five years, from 1999 to 2004 when ASU recruited him as the founding director and dean of the School of Life Sciences, an academic unit within College of Liberal Arts and Science (CLAS).

Page was selected the university provost in December. He had earlier served as the vice provost.

Recognized as one of the world’s foremost honey bee geneticists, Page is a highly cited entomologist who has authored more than 230 research papers and articles centered on Africanized bees, genetics and evolution of social organization, sex determination and division of labor in insect societies. His work on the self-organizing regulatory networks of honey bees is featured in his new book, The Spirit of the Hive: The Mechanisms of Social Evolution, published in June 2013 by Harvard University Press.

May 12, 2011

Robert Page is the newly appointed vice provost and dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University.

DAVIS--Honey bee geneticist Robert E. Page Jr., emeritus professor and former chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, is the newly appointed vice provost and dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Arizona State University, effective July 1.

ASU Provost and Executive Vice President Elizabeth D. Capaldi announced the appointment May 11.  

Page's responsibilities will encompass student academic affairs, faculty development, promotion of research, and the planning and implementation of degree programs for a college that has nearly 18,000 undergraduate and more than 2,500 graduate students, according to an ASU news release. He also will be responsible for budgeting, planning, fundraising and personnel decisions.

Page, who received his doctorate in entomology at UC Davis in 1980, served as an assistant professor at  Ohio State University before joining the UC Davis Department of Entomology in 1989. He chaired the department for five years, from 1999 to 2004.

Page's specialized genetic stock of honey bees is based at UC Davis. Bee breeder-geneticist Michael “Kim” Fondrk, who worked with Page at Ohio State University, UC Davis and ASU, manages the stock.

In 2004--the year Page retired from UC Davis--ASU recruited him as the founding director and dean of the School of Life Sciences, an academic unit within CLAS. At the time, his duties included organizing three departments—biology, microbiology and botany, totaling more than 600 faculty, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and staff--into one unified school.  

As its founding director, Page established the school as a platform for discovery in the biomedical, genomic and evolutionary and environmental sciences. He also established ASU's Honey Bee Research Facility.

In a news release written by ASU's Carol Hughes, ASU president Michael M. Crow praised him as  “ideally suited to head the university's core academic unit.”

”Rob Page has a track record of academic, scientific and administrative excellence and has exhibited strategic vision in organizing faculties into a school without disciplinary boundaries,” said ASU President Michael M. Crow. “That is the type of experience and achievement that makes him ideally suited to head the university's core academic unit.”

“Rob has been a strong leader of one of the largest units in CLAS,” said Provost Capaldi, “and has shown he can bridge many disciplines, bring faculty together, innovate in curriculum and instruction, and build excellence."

Said Page: “I have been privileged this past seven years to be part of the transformation of Arizona State University under President Crow's vision and leadership. The School of Life Sciences was the first experiment in the new school-centric model and offered many challenges and rewards. I look forward to taking what I have learned and advancing the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, certainly one of the largest and most complex colleges, anywhere.”

The college's all-funds budget for the current fiscal year is $282 million, and research expenditures in the college for the 12-month period ending Jan. 31 totaled more than $112 million.

An internationally recognized scholar, Page is an elected foreign member of the Brazilian Academy of Science, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the oldest scientific academy of science, the Germany Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. He was elected to Leopoldina, founded in 1652, for his pioneering research in behavioral genetics of honey bees.  

UC Davis entomology professor James R. Carey, who continues to work with Page on reserach projects, describes him as "one of the most gifted scientists, administrators, and teachers I have had the privilege to know in 30 years in academia.”

Page is the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award, the highest honor given by the German government to foreign scientists. His publications total more than 200 scientific papers, nine general media articles, 23 book chapters and review articles. He also co-edited  three books and co-authored  a textbook.

Page is a highly cited author on such topics as Africanized bees, genetics and evolution of social organization, sex determination, and division of labor in insect societies

 (Editor's Note: Carol Hughes of ASU”S College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, is the lead author of this news release)

Related Links:
Reproductive Ground Plan' for Honey Bees That Began at UC Davis Is Featured in Science
Honey Bee Geneticist Robert Page Elected to Prestigious Germany Academy of Sciences Leopoldina
Honey Bee Stock Heading Back to UC Davis
Arizona State University News Release

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--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894