Last Friday, Revelle College junior Shannon Jarrell and graduate student Adam Bussell suited up in protective white jumpsuits, zipping mesh hoods over their faces. They lit a fire in a small tea-kettle contraption, opened a wooden crate filled with 2,000 honeybees and wafted smoke at them.
Though it sounds more like a challenge handed to contestants on ‘Fear Factor,’ this routine is commonplace for apiarists ‘mdash; students who study bees. The bees react to the smoke as if it were from a forest fire, and they disperse, allowing the scientists to survey the colony without injury.
In this particular situation, Jarrell and Bussell were checking on a new queen bee they had recently introduced to the colony. They wanted to make sure she hadn’t been killed ‘mdash; a common consequence of bringing an unfamiliar visitor into the hive.
According to Bussell, the sun-baked Earl Warren College bee colony probably contains enough hives for student researchers to start an underground honey-making ring.
Instead, the honeybees ‘mdash; cared for by students at an isolated field lab facing the Warren College apartments from across the canyon ‘mdash; are the subjects of a wide variety of research projects.
The bees are currently helping student researchers study colony communication and the effects of certain pesticides on bee navigation ‘mdash; vital in demystifying colony collapse disorder, a phenomenon first described in 2006 when western honeybee colonies began disappea
ring en masse. According to professor James Nieh, principal investigator and head of the Nieh Bee Laboratory, this plunge in the bee population was particularly devasting to farmers because, without bees, agricultural crops around the globe would remain unpollinated.
‘[The disorder] is definitely a problem for native pollinators because they are responsible for so many of our crops, but also for maintaining our natural areas,’ Nieh said. ‘Many of the plants we have in native habitats, these native California plants also rely on pollination. It’s affecting agriculture and could be affecting native plants.’
Fortunately, beekeepers have recorded smaller losses over this past winter, but concerns remain and investigations continue.
Daren Eiri, an Earl Warren College senior who works in Nieh’s lab, is researching the effects of a common pesticide containing imidacloprid ‘mdash; a chemical banned in most European countries but still widely used in the United States.
‘If we could make a link between pesticides and the navigation of bees, and this failure to come back to the nest, it would suggest ways of perhaps not using certain kinds of pesticides,’ Nieh said.
In order to test a colony’s navigation skills, researchers must first train the bees to eat from a small jar of sugary solution called a feeder. The colony is placed in an indoor hive attached to a tube running out through the adjacent wall. The feeder sits at the other end of the tube and provides the bees with a food source.
Periodically, the feeder is moved further from the hive. When the bees have been trained to travel a certain distance to find their feeder, Eiri leads them down one of two long, black-and-white striped tunnels. This design creates the illusion of traveling a longer distances and allows Eiri to determine if the bees can maintain their ability to navigate the distance, then communicate it to nestmates after exposure to pesticides containing imidacloprid.
‘Collapsed colonies are [still] healthy colonies with healthy food [sources],’ Eiri said. ‘The queen should still be there, but the workers are missing, and the foragers are missing … so we want to see if there’s any implications of foragers getting lost.’
Before the experiment, bees must be marked for observation. As they emerge from the hive and pause to drink from the feeder, Jarrell dips a brush in a plastic set of primary paint colors and runs it over each bee’s abdomen. It’s important that each bee have its own individual color, so that it can later be tracked in experiments.
‘Once we get out here and we actually collect data, we can say, ‘Oh, that’s pink bee,’ so we’re not recording the same bee three times,’ Jarrell said. ‘You have to get really creative sometimes, when you have to mark 30 or 40 bees. I’ve made up some new colors.’
Bussell will observe the same colonies as Eiri to study what scientists call the tremble dance ‘mdash; a form of communication in which bees begin erratically shaking. Though bee savants know this communication is somehow related to the waggle dance ‘mdash; in which bees wiggle their abdomen and strut in a figure eight to relay details about their food source ‘mdash; the tremble dance remains largely mysterious.
‘Basically, the aim of my research is to define the tremble dance better,’ Bussell said. ‘What is it communicating and what parts of it are being paid attention to by the other bees?’
Once Bussell collects enough data to theorize why the bees tremble, he plans to plant a robotic bee in the colony that will imitate the motion. In the end, he hopes to discover similarities between the dances.
‘I think what I’ll be able to do is really show that it’s one communication system, that maybe these things aren’t so distinct from one another, that they all kind of flow together,’ Bussell said.
Though most researchers at the lab don’t have a particular affinity for bees, they all agree that studying the insects’ complex social systems is valuable to a greater understanding of animal cognition and communication.
‘For me, it is interesting because of the complexity of their social system in communication, but I think there’s a nice link to general human interest because we see so much of ourselves in a bee society,’ Nieh said. ‘Just like in our society, we have professors, we have lawyers, we have doctors and so on. In a bee society, there are bees who are nurse bees, that are like nannies, that take care of the young. There are trash bees that take out the trash of the colony, there are bees that build the comb, there are bees that guard the colony and prevent other bees from coming in and then there are bees that forage and collect the pollen and nectar that they need.’
Readers can contact Alyssa Bereznak at [email protected].