The journal Bee World, published by the International Bee Research Association, recently featured the research of internationally acclaimed honey bee geneticist Robert E. Page Jr., a UC Davis distinguished emeritus professor and former chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology whose administrative career culminated in provost of Arizona State University (ASU).

Newly retired from teaching but not entirely from research, Page holds the titles of ASU Provost Emeritus and Regents Professor Emeritus, as well as UC Davis Entomology Chair Emeritus.

Bee World published his article, "The Art of the Bee," as well as a one-on-one interview with editor Robert Brodschneider in a piece titled "Robert E. Page Jr--Mapper of the Genetic Architecture of the Honey Bee."

In his article, Page zeroes in on his latest book, The Art of the Bee: Shaping the Environment from Landscapes to Societies, 2020, Oxford University Press), focusing on the importance of honey bees and making science understandable to the public.

Page applauds the work of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), known as a German geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science.

"Von Humboldt appealed to artists to learn about nature, and ecology, and paint it," Page wrote. "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 strongly supports that plea. Earlier this year, he created a free and publicly accessible YouTube channel, "The Art of the Bee," at https://www.youtube.com/@artofthebee to do just that.

His YouTube channel guides the viewer through "the fascinating biology and behavior of the bee," presented in 38 videos from 4 to 27 minutes in length. He organized the videos into six series that roughly correspond to the nine chapters of the book. He included "a rich set of illustrations, images, and videos, to paint a narrative in the spirit of von Humboldt."

The six segments: Landscape Artists; Environmental Engineers; The Social Contract; Superorganisms; How to Make a Superorganism; and Song of the Queen.

In the first segment, Page writes: "One hundred twenty-five million years ago, the earth exploded with colour with the rapid evolution of flowering plants. The explosion coincided with a rapid increase of species of bees. The bees and flowering plants were locked in a dialectical dance of coevolution, each becoming adapted to the other. The flowers evolved to exploit the feeding habits of bees, and bees evolved to rob the flowers of their precious loads of pollen and nectar. Bees became social and developed communication and navigational systems to better exploit their environment. They continue to transform our world through their effects on the agricultural landscapes and the food we eat. Honey bees have evolved mechanisms to forage optimally both as individuals and colonies, expending their energy and short lives to maximally provision their nest. Their communication system directs foragers to different floral patches at different times of day reflected in the changing kaleidoscope of colour on the legs of returning pollen foragers. Their pollination transforms the landscape in the spring into splashes of colour resembling a painter's pallet."

Page's Bee World article includes this text 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. The biology of the honey bee is one that reflects their role in transforming environments with their anatomical adaptations and a complex language that together function to exploit floral resources. A complex social system that includes a division of labour builds, defends, and provisions nests containing tens of thousands of individuals, only one of whom reproduces. Traditional biology texts present stratified layers of knowledge where the reader excavates levels of biological organization, each building on the last. This book (The Art of the Bee: Shaping the Environment from Landscapes to Societies) presents fundamental biology, not in layers, but wrapped around interesting themes and concepts, and in ways designed to explore and understand each concept. It examines the coevolution of bees and flowering plants, bees as engineers of the environment, the evolution of sociality, the honey bee as a superorganism and how it evolves, and the mating behaviour of the queen."  

Robert E. Page Jr. as a UC Davis doctoral student of Harry H. Laidlaw Jr.

Native of Bakersfield. A native of Bakersfield, Rob holds a bachelor's degree in entomology (1976), with a minor in chemistry, from San Jose State University. He obtained his doctorate in entomology (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 Arizona State University as founding director of the School of Life Sciences. He served as provost of Arizona State University (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 his research occurred at UC Davis. For 24 years, from 1989 to 2015, Page maintained a honey bee-breeding program, managed by bee breeder-geneticist Kim Fondrk. 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.

Bee World Interview. In the interview with Bee World editor Brodschneider of the Institute of Biology, University of Graz, Austria,  Page told him: "I have never been a hobby beekeeper. I have only kept bees for my experimental needs. I have kept more than 300 hives at a time, but I had an excellent technician for about 25 years, Kim Fondrk. Kim could do everything: instrumental insemination, raise queens, manage large numbers of colonies, run gel electrophoresis and PCR in the lab, and even constructed some of the equipment we used in the lab. I was very fortunate because I wasn't a very good beekeeper. I would only pay attention to one thing at a time. I didn't have the eye for seeing apicultural problems."

Other excerpts from the interview:

Brodschneider: "What would you rate as your most important research finding in honey bees?"

Page: "I think that must be mapping the phenotypic and genetic architectures of pollen hoarding behavior. It wasn't a fast 'discovery' but the result of 30 years of being fixated on the question 'how do bees evolve complex social behavior.' I used pollen hoarding (the storing of surplus pollen in the nest) as my study phenotype and looked at all levels of biological organization from gene to complex social interactions to construct the architectures."

Brodschneider: "How about your honey bee breeding experiments?"

Page: "I had three over my career. The first was done with Norman Gary (now emeritus professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology). We did a bi-directional selection for resistance to tracheal mites. We did this soon after they were introduced into North America and were causing a lot of problems for beekeepers. We successfully selected a line that was resistant to tracheal mites and another that was very susceptible. We demonstrated that it was possible to select for resistance. The bi-directional selection for pollen hoarding went on for 25 years and was very successful. The high strain stored more than 10 times the amount of pollen in the combs than did the low strain. These strains became our tools to dissect the genetic and phenotypic architectures. Gloria Hoffman at the Tucson USDA research lab, Kim Fondrk, and I did a very careful bi-directional selection study on varroa resistance. We were not successful. We were selecting for physiological resistance of larvae to varroa. This was our only failure. I don't think it is really possible to succeed. I don't think there is sufficient genetic variation. Certainly no one has done it more carefully or more controlled than we did."

Brodschneider: "Which big research questions in bees remain unsolved?"

Page: "They are all big. I think understanding the genetic networks that control behavior, development, and resistance to bee diseases will dominate honey bee research for the next generation. But, there is still so much to learn about basic methods of culturing bees such as: in vitro rearing of queens, drones, and workers; maintaining viable colonies of bees in confinement; sperm and embryo storage, nutritional substitutes; controlling the foraging of colonies, etc."

Brodschneider: "Are you still involved in some research?"

Page: "What I think is my final research paper is submitted for publication. I am one of several authors but I am very proud of my contribution. It is a paper about how you can take a large set of gene expression data and derive from it coordinated sets of genes that represent a network of interactions controlling a behavior or a physiological function."

Brodschneider: "Together with Harry Laidlaw you worked on bee breeding in the early 1980s. What has changed since then in the honey bee stock kept in the United States and in the breeding programs?"

Page: "I don't think much has changed at all with respect to commercial breeding programs. Queen producers are still primarily queen producers and not queen breeders. I think they do control their stock somewhat through their culling process when they select queen and drone mother colonies. The very few that do really breed bees, like Sue Cobey (who studied with Laidlaw and later became a bee breeder-geneticist at UC Davis and is now with Washington State University) and her New World Carniolans use traditional breeding methods: measure phenotypes, select parents, control matings, and get stock improvements. Sue is one of the few to use instrumental insemination to control mating. I suspect practices today are much like what has gone on since the beginning of agriculture in human societies. I think there is only so far you can go with these methods because there are constraints on what phenotypes you can 'squeeze' out of the honey bee genome. And there are serious social constraints, for example, if you breed too far for hygienic behavior you can get colonies that tear down all of the comb and don't raise brood. Or if you do like I did, breed colonies to collect too much pollen it is pathological because they plug up the brood nest with pollen. We have not yet seen modern molecular genetic tools provide stock improvement, though there has been some limited use of them for markers used in selection. There are severe obstacles due primarily to its social system. For example, if you genetically modify a queen or workers, larvae or adults, they will be detected by the other workers and eliminated. Changing social structure is complex."

Page described current beekeeping in the United States as "Adaptable and curious. It is amazing how quickly and how well the industry responds to the plethora of problems, old and new, that confront the industry. And they succeed because every commercial beekeeper I ever met was curious and was always experimenting to find better ways."

In other comments, Page said that the most urgent problems in beekeeping today involve "Varroa, varroa, varroa. We have to keep looking for better control and management methods. I have been surprised that researchers and the bee industry have done as well as they have to stay ahead of the potential total disaster that varroa can cause."

Resources:

• "Why Bees Are Artists and Engineers: Robert E. Page's New Book," July 30, 2020, Bug Squad blog, UC Agriculture and Natural Resources
• Rob Page's Newly Launched YouTube Channel: The Fascinating World of Bees," May 4, 2023, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
• Honey Bee Geneticist Rob Page Named UC Davis Distinguished Professor, Jan. 8, 2018, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology

Wings up!

Butterfly and monarch scientists will discuss their expertise at the Bohart Museum of Entomology open house on "Monarchs," set Saturday, Nov. 4 from 1 to 4 p.m.

The event, free and family friendly, will be held in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building, Crocker Lane. This is an opportunity for attendees to ask questions about monarchs (Danaus plexippus) and native vs. non-native milkweed, among other topics.

The scientists will include:

• UC Davis distinguished professor emeritus Art Shapiro of the Department of Evolution and Ecology, who has studied butterfly populations in central California since 1972 and maintains a research website, Art's Butterfly World.
  
  
• UC Davis emeritus professor Hugh Dingle, a worldwide authority on animal migration, including monarchs.  He is the author of Migration: The Biology of Life on the Move (Oxford University Press), a sequel to the first edition published in 1996. See news story on the UC Davis Entomology and Nematology website.
  
  
• UC Davis professor Louie Yang, who does research on monarchs. Due to parental duties, he may be able to attend only the last part of the open house. See news story about his work.
  
  
• UC Davis professor Elizabeth Crone of the Department of Evolution and Ecology, formerly of Tufts University, who researches monarchs. See news story about the declining monarch population on the UC Davis Entomology and Nematology website.
  
  
• UC Davis postdoctoral fellow Aramee Diethelm of the Elizabeth Crone lab. She holds a doctorate from the University of Nevada, Reno.  Both her Ph.D. and postdoctoral work are on monarch butterflies.  As a doctoral student, she investigated the phytochemical landscape of milkweed (Asclepias) species across northern Nevada and the effects of this variation on western monarch (Danaus plexippus) butterfly performance. See her research posted on Google Scholar, and her blog on "Drought Influences Monarch Host Plant Selection."

Shapiro points out that the monarch "is NOT a focal species in my research and I am NOT a monarch expert. On the other hand, I have a unique breeding-season census data set starting in 1999. The only other census data are for the overwintering roosts on the coast. It has become apparent that the two data sets do not always agree." Shapiro said he'd talk briefly about this at the open house. 

"The iconic black and orange monarch butterfly is known for its astonishing long-distance annual migration and reliance on milkweed as its obligate larval host plant," according to a post on the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW). "Though genetically similar, there are two subpopulations of monarchs in North America, with the eastern population overwintering in Mexico and breeding in the midwestern states, and the western population overwintering in coastal California and fanning out across the west from Arizona to Idaho. Outside the U.S., there are at least 74 known populations of resident, non-migratory monarchs that have established around the world in the past 200 years, all with origins in North America (Nial et al. 2019)."

"Both North American migratory populations have declined over the past twenty years due to a suite of interrelated factors including habitat loss in breeding and overwintering sites, habitat degradation, disease, pesticide exposure, and climate change," CDFW says. "Recently the western population has experienced dramatic swings, for a low of less than 2,000 in 2020-21 to over 200,000 in 2021-22 (Xerces Society Western Monarch Count). While it is unclear which of the many factors are driving these dynamics, insect population commonly fluctuate from year to year. The overall downward trend remains concerning, particularly if the threats are not ameliorated. Though more research is needed, a stable population for western monarchs is likely closer to the historic averages in the 1980's, which are estimated to have ranged between one to four million overwintering butterflies."

"n 2014, monarchs were petitioned to be listed under the federal Endangered Species Act. In December 2020, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that listing was warranted but precluded by other listing actions on its National Priority List. The monarch is currently slated to be listed in 2024."

The monarch population is in trouble. Says the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation in a post on its website: "In the 1990s, hundreds of millions of monarchs made the epic flight each fall from the northern plains of the U.S. and Canada to sites in the oyamel fir forests in central Mexico, and more than a million monarchs overwintered in forested groves on the California coast. Now, researchers and community scientists estimate that only a fraction of the population remains—a decline of approximately 70% has been seen in central Mexico and a decline of >90% has been seen in California."

Resources/Further Reading:

• Monarch Butterfly, California Department of Fish and Wildlife
• Research Permits, CDFW
• Western Monarch Mllkweed Mapper 
• Integrated Monarch Monitoring Program, Monarch Joint Venture
• Western Monarch Count, Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation
• Monarch Butterfly Conservation, Xerces Society
• Spreading Milkweed, Not Myths, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 
• Habitat Corridor Project, Views on milkweed
• Tropical Milkweed Doesn't Deserve the Bad Rap, Bug Squad blog, views on the ban of tropical milkweed by UC Davis emeriti professors Art Shapiro and Hugh Dingle, and Washington State University entomologist David James,  who studies migratory monarchs. 

UC Davis distinguished professor Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology, is the recipient of the 2023 Exceptional Faculty Award from the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CA&ES).

Kimsey, a recognized authority on insect biodiversity, systematics and biogeography of parasitic wasps, urban entomology, civil forensic entomology, and arthropod-related industrial hygiene, is a 34-year member of the UC Davis entomology faculty and a UC Davis alumna. She has directed the Bohart Museum since 1990. 

Kimsey will be honored at the CA&ES Award of Distinction dinner on Thursday, Nov. 2 in the UC Davis Activities and Recreation Center (ARC) Ballroom. The event begins at 5:30 p.m. with a reception, followed by the dinner and awards ceremony. Registration ends Friday, Oct. 27; register online here.

"A renowned hymenopterist and taxonomist, Dr. Kimsey has brought worldwide distinction to our department, college, and the university for her research, teaching, public service, leadership, development funding, mentoring, and outreach," wrote Steve Nadler, then the chair of the Department of Entomology and Nematology, in his June nomination letter. "She works tirelessly to make insects and entomological knowledge more accessible to scientists and the public, and her influence and impact are felt internationally."

When former department chair Richard Bohart (for whom the museum is named), founded the museum in 1946, it was a “hole in the wall” in Briggs Hall that included only 400 insect specimens. Under Kimsey's tenure,  it has grown to a global collection of eight million insect specimens in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building, 455 Crocker Lane, and is the seventh largest insect collection in North America.

"The importance of what Dr. Kimsey does and the importance of insect specimens in museums cannot be overstated," Nadler wrote. "They are a valuable resource for the agricultural community, public health, forensic entomology, medicine and criminology, environmental biology, and the pest control industry, as well as the public." 

The Bohart draws an average of 15,000 visitors a year, adds an average of 30,000 new specimens annually, and loans an average 7000 specimens yearly to scientists worldwide. It supports campus classes with specimens, live insects and exhibits in keeping with its mission:  “Understanding, documenting and communicating terrestrial arthropod diversity.”

It is also the home of a year-around insect-themed gift shop (proceeds benefit the Bohart's educational activities) and a live “petting zoo” that includes Madagascar hissing cockroaches, stick insects and tarantulas. Children delight in holding the “hissers” and the walking sticks."

Unlike other directors of insect museums, which are working environments for scientists, Kimsey encourages visits by the public. Says UC Davis doctoral alumna Fran Keller, now a professor at Folsom Lake College: “Lynn….believes that allowing the public in to see the collection, to see scientists working, to talk to entomologists about insects is the most important thing we should be doing as entomologists. Lynn stressed that we should be willing to talk to anyone and provide information to anyone who asks a question about insects or who walks in the museum doors. She has focused on making the collection available for the public to see and to learn about what happens in an entomology museum.”

The Bohart takes its outreach programs to nearly 40 institutions annually. This includes schools, state and county fairs and libraries.

"Dr. Kimsey is a legend not only on the UC Davis campus but is called upon as an insect expert at the state, national and global levels," Nadler wrote. "She consults with international, national and state agencies; she identifies some 2000 insects every year for scientific collaborators, public agencies and the general public; she has answered an estimated 30,000 questions from the public and news media. They include bed bugs, yellowjackets, spiders, moths, butterflies, crane flies and Asian giant hornets (what the news media dubbed 'murder hornets').  She encourages a greater appreciation of insects through the Bohart Museum's many open houses, workshops and lectures. She also directs the support group, the Bohart Museum Society, and writes quarterly newsletters (nearly 100 to date) and fact sheets (80 to date) on insects and other arthropods). She compiled crucial information on human skin parasites and delusional parasitosis, important topics available on her website. The Bohart also sponsors summer BioBoot camps for middle-school and high school students."

Kimsey served as president of the International Society of Hymenopterists from 2002-2004, and as a member of the board of directors of the Natural Science Collections Alliance in 2000 and 2001. The Pacific Branch, Entomological Society of Ameica (PBESA) singled her out for its highest honor, the C. W. Woodworth Award, in 2020. She received the PBESA Systematics, Evolution, and Biodiversity Award in 2014 and was a member of 'The Bee Team' that won the PBESA Outstanding Team Award in 2013. The UC Davis Academic Senate honored her with its Distinguished Scholarly Public Service Award in 2016 in recognition of her outstanding work.

The nominating team described Kimsey as a favorite among the news media, with her ability to translate complex subjects into lay language, and her love of people. Over her 34 years at UC Davis, Dr. Kimsey has granted thousands of interviews to news outlets, including British Broadcasting System, New York Times, National Geographic, Associated Press, and Los Angeles Times.

Kimsey holds two degrees in entomology from UC Davis: a bachelor's degree (1976) and a doctorate (1979).  She served served as the vice chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology in 2005-2006 and again in 2009-2010.

2023 CA&Es Award of Distinction Recipients:

Alumnus of the Year
James Finch '89

Early Career Alumni
Jeffrey Sparks '14

Distinguished Friend of the College
Tony Turkovich

Exceptional Faculty Award
Lynn Kimsey

Exceptional Staff Award
Lisa Nash Holmes

Just in time for Halloween, the next UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology seminar will be on spiders.

Arachnologist Rodrigo Monjaraz-Ruedas of San Diego State University's Department of Biology, will speak on "Ring Species, Ring Speciation or a Ring of Species? An Example with California Mygalomorph Spiders" at 4:10 p.m., Monday, Oct. 30 in Room 122 of Briggs Hall. It also will be on Zoom.

The Zoom link:
 https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/95882849672 

"Ring species can be defined as a chain of interbreeding populations which expands along two pathways around a geographic barrier, where terminal forms can coexist without interbreeding," Monjaraz-Ruedas writes in his abstract. "A broken ring species model preserves the geographic setting and fundamental features of an idealized model but accommodates varying degrees of gene flow restriction through evolutionary time. Members of the genus Calisoga are distributed around the Central Valley of California, and previous genetic studies have shown that this is a lineage-rich complex of mygalomorph spiders, with evidence to suggest that Calisoga might be a case of ring speciation. Here we examine broken ring species dynamics in Calisoga spiders, using UCEs and mitogenomes we test key predictions of timing, ancestry, connectivity and terminal overlap. I will discuss why ring species should not be viewed as homogeneous entities, but rather as heterogeneous units with different predicted evolutionary dynamics in different geographic parts of the ring."

Monjaraz-Ruedas joined the Marshal Hedin lab at San Diego State University as a postdoctoral research fellow in 2020. He studies "Phylogenomic, spatial phylogenetics and conservation prioritization in trapdoor spiders (and kin) of the California Floristic Province."

The Hedin lab focuses on arachnids, with particular emphasis on mygalomorph spiders and Opiliones (harvesters)," according to its website. "Species discovery, delimitation and description is important to us--although the biological world is amazingly diverse, most biodiversity remains undiscovered and undescribed. We spend a considerable amount of time conducting fieldwork--the western US and Appalachian mountains are hotspots for our research efforts. Cave arachnids interest us!  In the lab we strive to be integrative, but our strength lies in molecular phylogeography and phylogenomics."

Monjaraz-Ruedas' most recent publications include:

• Cruz-López, J. A., Monjaraz-Ruedas, R. Colmenares, P. A. & Francke, O. F. 2021. Historical
  biogeography of a neglected family of armoured harvestmen (Opiliones: Laniatores: Icaleptidae) with the first record and a new genus for tropical Mesoamerica. Invertebrate Systematics. 35: 493– 513.
• Francke, O. F., Monjaraz-Ruedas, R., Cruz-López, J. A. 2021. Biodiversity of Huautla Cave System, Oaxaca, Mexico. Diversity. 13: 429.
• Monjaraz-Ruedas, R.,. Francke, O. F. & Prendini, L. 2022. World Travelers: parthenogenesis and ecological tolerance enable multiple colonization events by the widespread short-tailed whipscorpion, Stenochrus portoricensis (Schizomida: Hubbardiidae). Insect Systematics and Diversity. 6(1): 7, 1–17.
• Monjaraz-Ruedas, R., Mendez, R.W., Hedin, M. (2023). Species delimitation, biogeography, and natural history of dwarf funnel web spiders (Mygalomorphae, Hexurellidae, Hexurella) from the United States / Mexico borderlands. Zookeys. 1167: 109–157.
• Monjaraz-Ruedas, R., Starret, J., Dean Leavitt, D., Hedin, M. (In Review). Ring species dynamics in California mygalomorph spiders (Nemesiidae, Calisoga). The American Naturalist.

Monjaraz-Ruedas holds three degrees from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM): a bachelor's degree in taxonomy; a master's degree in morphological systematics; and a doctorate in molecular phylogenetics.  His doctoral dissertation:  “Systematics of the genus Stenochrus Chamberlin, 1922 (Schizomida: Hubbardiidae).”

He has guest-lectured on arachnids at San Diego State University, and was a member of the UNAM science faculty, serving as a lecturer in systematic biology from 2019 to 2020. He also worked as an assistant collection manager of the arachnids collection, UNAM Biology Institute, from 2010-2013.

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.