We study foraging and thermoregulation in honey bees to understand emergent collective behavior.
Specifically, we study two behaviors: foraging and thermoregulation. These behaviors provide the perfect multi-level framework to study collective cognition.
Collective Fanning Behavior
Honey bees work together to cool their colony. They perform a behavior called fanning, where they stand at the entrance of the colony and fan their wings to circulate air. Ideally, this keeps the colony below 95F, above which developing larvae can die.
Fanning behavior provides an ideal system to disentangle the interactions between social and environmental information, and how that information is valued and communicated between individuals to elicit the collective response.
Collective Foraging Behavior
Honey bee colonies collect thousands of pounds of nectar and pollen to sustain themselves. As individual bees forage, they learn various characteristics about the flowers they visit, such as odor and color. How individuals learn changes how the colony makes foraging decisions.
I integrate lab techniques from experimental psychology with field techniques from behavioral ecology to understand how individuals learn and communicate information that scales to collective decisions.
My work has shown that bees do not fan when they are alone. They utilize social information from each other and from larvae to know when to fan, and will even begin to fan sooner when they sense increasing temperatures.
Chelsea feeding a harnessed bee. Photo by Charlie Leight/ASU Now
Check out the podcast
I was a guest on PolliNation, a podcast by Andony Melathopoulos at Oregon State University focused on exploring great discoveries about pollinators. Listen to my interview here!
What we are learning
01.
My most recent work shows that colonies make different foraging decisions when they are comprised of different populations of attention-focusing bees. It was recently published in PNAS!
02.
Foraging honey bees often divide labor between scout honey bees that look for new food sources and recruited honey bees that revisit known flowers. I found that scouts exhibit a behavior called “latent inhibition” and are able to learn to ignore familiar odors in the lab better than recruited bees.
03.
Groups of honey bees anticipate rapid temperature changes better than small groups or isolated bees. When faced with quickly increasing temperatures, groups of 10 bees begin to fan sooner, while small groups or isolated bees do not.