UC Davis-trained honey bee scientist Robert E. Page Jr., known as “the leading honey bee geneticist in the world,” has been named the recipient of the Exceptional Emeriti Faculty Award, from the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CA&ES). 

He will be honored at the CA&ES Award of Distinction dinner and celebration awards ceremony on Thursday, Nov. 3 in the UC Davis Activities and Recreation Center Ballroom.

Page, emeritus professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and an emeritus professor and administrator at Arizona State University, “is a pioneering researcher in the field of evolutionary genetics and social behavior of honey bees, and a highly respected and quoted author, teacher and former administrator,” wrote nominator Steve Nadler, professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.

“One of Dr. Page's most salient contributions to science was to construct the first genomic map of the honey bee, which sparked a variety of pioneering contributions not only to insect biology but to genetics at large,” Nadler pointed out. “It was the first genetic map of any social insect. He was the first to demonstrate that a significant amount of observed behavioral variation among honey bee workers is due to genotypic variation. In the 1990s, he and his students and colleagues isolated, characterized and validated the complementary sex determination gene of the honey bee; considered the most important paper yet published about the genetics of Hymenoptera. The journal Cell featured their work on its cover. In subsequent studies, he and his team published further research into the regulation of honey bee foraging, defensive and alarm behavior.”

A native of Bakersfield, Kern County, Rob holds a bachelor's degree in entomology (1976), with a minor in chemistry, from San Jose State University. He received his doctorate in entomology in 1980 from UC Davis, where he studied with his doctoral research mentor, Harry H. Laidlaw Jr.,  “the father of honey bee genetics” for whom the university's bee facility, the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility on Bee Biology Road, is named.

Page joined the UC Davis entomology faculty in 1989 and chaired the department from 1999 to 2004 when he transitioned to emeritus and was recruited by Arizona State University (ASU)  to be the founding director of its School of Life Sciences. His career at ASU led to a series of top-level administrative roles: from founding director of the School of Life Sciences (2004-2010) to vice provost and dean, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (2011-2013) and then to University Provost, 2014-2015.

While at UC Davis, Page worked closely with Laidlaw. Together they published many significant research papers and the landmark book, “Queen Rearing and Bee Breeding” (Wicwas Press, 1998), considered the most important resource book for honey bee genetics, breeding, and queen rearing.

For 24 years, from 1989 to 2015, Page maintained a UC Davis 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. 

Since his retirement from UC Davis, Page has published 65 research papers, eight major reviews and two scholarly books, many using his UC Davis affiliation. He authored “The Spirit of the Hive: The Mechanisms of Social Evolution” (Harvard University Press, 2013) and the “Art of the Bee: Shaping the Environment from Landscapes to Societies” (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Now residing near Davis, Page continues to focus his research on honey bee behavior and population genetics, particularly the evolution of complex social behavior. His continuing academic activities bring credit to bee biology and UC Davis, Nadler said. “His large number of publications and citations continue to be an important component of the high national rating of our entomology department.”

To date, Page has published more than 250 research papers and articles, edited or authored five books, and is listed as a “highly-cited author” by the ISI Web of Knowledge, representing the top 1/2 of one percent of publishing scientists.

Page continues to work closely with UC Davis professors and students, offering advice, helping them with grants, and editing manuscripts. A few years ago, he held an international workshop at the Laidlaw facility. He teaches courses (including “The Social Contract: from Rousseau to the Honey Bee,” and “The Song of the Queen: Thrilling Tales of Honey Bee Mating Behavior”) for the UC Davis Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI).

“Not surprisingly, Dr. Page humbly considers his most far-reaching and important accomplishment, the success of his mentees, including at least 25 graduate students and postdocs who are now faculty members at leading research institutions around the world,” Nadler wrote. “He 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. His public service now extends to working as a Fellow with the California Academy of Sciences.”

Page's colleagues praise his strategic vision, his leadership and his contributions to science. ASU Professor Bert Hoelldobler described him as “the leading honey bee geneticist in the world. A number of now well-known scientists in the U.S. and Europe learned the ropes of sociogenetics in Rob's laboratory.”

“Rob is one of the most gifted scientists, administrators, and teachers I have had the privilege to know in my 42 years in academia,” said James R. Carey, a UC Davis distinguished professor of entomology.

Bee breeder-geneticist Susan Cobey of Washington State University, former manager of the Laidlaw facility, emphasized Page's importance to the bee breeding and beekeeping industry. She has based her entire career on the Page-Laidlaw Closed Population Breeding. “The beauty of this system is that it is practical and addresses the unique challenges of honey bee stock improvement,” she related. “Queens mate in flight with numerous drones and selection is based upon complex behaviors at the colony level, influenced by the environmental. Hence, traditional animal breeding models do not apply well to honey bees.”

When Page addressed the 2016 meeting of the International Congress of Entomology (ICE), he was introduced as “an engaging, energetic, humorous and highly intellectual speaker; this will be a memorable, entertaining and highly educational lecture by one of the most important entomologists of the 21st^t century. His background is in behavior and population genetics, and the focus of his current research is on the evolution of complex social behavior. Using the honey bee as a model, Dr. Page has dissected their complex foraging division of labor at all levels of biological organization, from gene networks to complex social interactions.”

Among Page's many honors:

• Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
• Awardee of the Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award (the Humboldt Prize - the highest honor given by the German government to foreign scientists)
• Foreign Member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences
• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Elected to the Leopoldina, the German National Academy of Sciences (the longest continuing academy in the world)
• Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin
• Fellow of the Entomological Society of America
• Awardee of the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Fellowship
• Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences
• Fellow, Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation, Munich, Germany, September 2017-August 2018
• Thomas and Nina Leigh Distinguished Alumni Award from UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
• James Creasman Award of Excellence (ASU Alumni Association)
• Regents Professor, Arizona State University
• UC Davis Distinguished Emeritus Professor

Noted honey bee geneticist Robert E. Page Jr., a UC Davis and Arizona State University emeritus professor and administrator, has authored a newly published, invited article in the journal Genetics on “Societies to Genes: Can We Get There from Here?” that highlights his three-decade scientific career.  

 “I was thrilled to be invited to write this perspectives/review of my scientific career; it is a collection of 30 years of single-minded focus on one question,” said Page, who is renowned for his research on honey bee behavior and population genetics, particularly the evolution of complex social behavior, and for his work on the first genomic map of the honey bee.

"The editors contacted me to write a perspectives/review that focuses on my own work, a study in complex adaptation,” Page related. “This is the first time they have done a perspectives article like this.  I was, of course, honored.  More than half of the work was done at UC Davis.”

“Understanding the organization and evolution of social complexity is a major task because it requires building an understanding of mechanisms operating at different levels of biological organization from genes to social interactions,” Page wrote in his abstract. “I discuss here, a unique forward genetic approach spanning more than 30 years beginning with human-assisted colony-level selection for a single social trait, the amount of pollen honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) store. The goal was to understand a complex social trait from the social phenotype to genes responsible for observed trait variation.” 

“The approach,” Page wrote, “combined the results of colony-level selection with detailed studies of individual behavior and physiology resulting in a mapped, integrated phenotypic architecture composed of correlative relationships between traits spanning anatomy, physiology, sensory response systems, and individual behavior that affect individual foraging decisions. Colony-level selection reverse engineered the architecture of an integrated phenotype of individuals resulting in changes in the social trait. Quantitative trait locus (QTL) studies combined with an exceptionally high recombination rate (60 kb/cM), and a phenotypic map, provided a genotype–phenotype map of high complexity demonstrating broad QTL pleiotropy, epistasis, and epistatic pleiotropy suggesting that gene pleiotropy or tight linkage of genes within QTL integrated the phenotype. Gene expression and knockdown of identified positional candidates revealed genes affecting foraging behavior and confirmed one pleiotropic gene, a tyramine receptor, as a target for colony-level selection that was under selection in two different tissues in two different life stages. The approach presented here has resulted in a comprehensive understanding of the structure and evolution of honey bee social organization.” 

Page, who received his doctorate in entomology (1980)  from UC Davis, joined the UC Davis entomology faculty in 1989, and chaired the department from 1999-2004. In 2004, Arizona State University recruited him as founding director of its School of Life Sciences.  His career advanced from dean of Life Sciences, to vice provost and dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, to university provost. Today he holds the titles of  ASU provost emeritus, ASU Regents professor emeritus, and UC Davis distinguished emeritus professor, an award bestowed in 2019.

At UC Davis, Page worked closely with Harry H. Laidlaw Jr., (the father of honey bee genetics) for whom the university's bee facility is named. 

For 24 years, from 1989 to 2015, Page maintained a UC Davis honey bee-breeding program, managed by bee breeder-geneticist Kim Fondrk at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility. Together they discovered a link between social behavior and maternal traits in bees.

Page has authored than 250 research papers, including five books: among them, The Spirit of the Hive: The Mechanisms of Social Evolution, published by Harvard University Press in 2013. His most recent book is The Art of the Bee: Shaping the Environment from Landscapes to Societies, published by Oxford University Press 2020. (See news release on why bees are both artists and engineers.)

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.

DAVIS—Honey bees are both artists and engineers, says eminent honey bee geneticist and biologist Robert E. Page Jr. 

As environmental artists, bees are "responsible for the brilliantly colored flowers in our landscapes," and as environmental engineers, they engineer “the niches of multitudes of plants, animals and microbes.” 

Page, with UC Davis roots and Arizona State University wings, has just authored a 256-page book, “The Art of the Bee: Shaping the Environment from Landscapes to Societies” (Oxford University Press), to be published Aug. 6.   

“It's a long time in the making,” said Page, who received his doctorate in entomology at UC Davis and served as a professor and chair of the Department of Entomology (now Entomology and Nematology) before heading to Arizona State University (ASU), where he advanced to school director, college dean and university provost.  

“Twenty-five years ago, my friend and mentor Harry Laidlaw (for whom the UC Davis bee facility is named) wanted to write a honey bee biology textbook,” Page recalled. When they finished the outline, “it looked very much like the excellent book by Mark Winston The Biology of the Honey Bee, published in 1987 by Harvard University Press. I decided we didn't need another one, and we still don't.” 

The book differs in that it's a collection of “sparkling essays” that “read like mystery stories,” said Rudiger Wehner, professor and director emeritus of the Institute of Zoology, University of Zürich. “With these lucidly written stories, Page takes us on a delightful journey through the many biological traits that on the whole constitute the honeybees' social contract.”

“But don't be fooled by the amiable and personal style—the book is comprehensive—from colony collapse disorder to colony-level evolution—and chock full of the latest results, presented with clarity and depth, leavened with razor-sharp insights into social evolution,” noted Gene Robinson, director, Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and Department of Entomology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Page said his book is geared toward  “the person who has a basic knowledge of biology and a fascination with bees, perhaps an educated hobby beekeeper--there are a lot of them--or an undergraduate or graduate student with an interest.”

 “Prior to the rise of flowering plants, the landscape was dull,” Page begins. “The first plants invaded land more than 450 million years ago. Species of ferns, horsetails, club mosses, and other “primitive,” non-seed-producing, non-flowering plants dominated. The earth was painted from a palette of green and brown. The first seed plants were gymnosperms, which originated around 100 million years later and eventually gave rise to the conifers that dominated the earth with massive forests. The first flowering plants, the angiosperms, appeared perhaps as early as 250 million years ago. The rise of flowering plants resulted in a burst of new plant species as they adapted to their insect pollinators, mostly beetles and short-tongued flies. Think of how the landscape changed. “

In addition to chapters on environmental artists and environmental engineering, Page includes  chapters on social contracts, superorganisms, reproductive competitions, and concludes with “The song of the queen.”

In the epilogue, Page ponders the complexity of individual bees and their colonies, comparing them to humans. “Members of complex societies live close together in closed nests, shared home sites, villages, etc., or in closely connected nomadic tribes. As groups, they typically have a set of tacit rules by which they live that involves working for the good of the group, systems of group and resource defense, internal mechanisms of policing cheaters that don't cooperate and live by the rules, a division of labor often associated with group defense and gathering and sharing resources, and usually asymmetries and rules associated with reproduction. These same general characteristics seem to apply broadly across eusocial insects (aphids, termites, bees, ants, and wasps), eusocial rodents (naked mole rats), higher apes, and humans. Why? The similarities are inescapable due to the nature of social contracts; they must have specific elements to protect the power and will of individuals, whether citizens of the United States of America or workers in a honey bee colony. The contract binds individuals to a society, but the specific social organization evolves by reverse engineering. Natural selection acts on the whole colony; social structure evolves to fit the needs of the group within a given environment. “

“Honey bees look like little people with frozen faces, staring at us from the entrance and top bars of a hive,” Page observes. “It's easy to believe that they, like us, plan their future, feel satisfaction in caring for the family, love their queen, hate their enemies, and have emotional highs and lows with good days and bad. To view them in that way has a term, anthropomorphic, or anthropocentric, meaning like us, or human-centered.”

Page points out that “Anthropocentric thinking can obscure the way we view nature and lead to false conclusions. Look at Aristotle and honey bee division of labor: For more than 2,000 years it was thought that the bees that work in the nest were postpubescent old men because they're hairy! In fact, the older bees forage and aren't hairy because the hairs break off as they age. I now see my work in a new light; we aren't so different, bees and humans. The elements of our social structures, and how they come about, have many similarities.”

Page is known for his research on honey bee behavior and population genetics, particularly the evolution of complex social behavior. One of his most salient contributions to science was to construct the first genomic map of the honey bee, which sparked a variety of pioneering contributions not only to insect biology but to genetics at large.

At UC Davis, he maintained a honey bee-breeding program for 24 years, from 1989 to 2015, managed by bee breeder-geneticist Kim Fondrk at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility. They discovered a link between social behavior and maternal traits in bees.

UC Davis named him the 2019 distinguished emeritus professor. Nominator Steve Nadler, professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, praised Page as “a pioneer researcher in the field of behavioral genetics, an internationally recognized scholar, a highly respected author, a talented and innovative administrator, and a skilled teacher responsible for mentoring many of today's top bee scientists…he is arguably the most influential honey bee biologist of the past 30 years.” 

Page has authored more than 250 research papers, including five books. Among them “The Spirit of the Hive: The Mechanisms of Social Evolution” (Harvard University Press, 2013) and “Queen Rearing and Bee Breeding,” with Harry H. Laidlaw (Wicwas Press, 1997). He 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.

Page, who received his doctorate in entomology from UC Davis in 1980, joined the UC Davis faculty in 1989 and left as emeritus chair of the Department of Entomology in 2004 when ASU recruited him for what would become a series of top-level administrative roles.  He advanced from director of the School of Life Sciences to dean of Life Sciences; vice provost and dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; and university provost. Today he holds the titles of provost emeritus of ASU and Regents professor emeritus, as well as UC Davis department chair emeritus, professor emeritus, and UC Davis distinguished emeritus professor.

Page is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Brazilian Academy of Science, Leopoldina (the German National Academic of Science), and the California Academy of Science. He is a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award (Humboldt Prize, 1995), the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Fellowship (2013), James W. Creasman Award of Excellence at ASU (2018). 

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