Spring update

Eventually…

As the latest snowstorm heads into town, we’re starting to make plans for Spring/Summer 2019, which include:

• Saying farewell :( to Dr. Felicity Muth, who is heading to start her own lab at UT Austin :)

• Attending the 2019 International Pollinator Conference (UC Davis) and giving talks at Evolution

• Beginning sabbatical leave!

It’s been a busy and productive year so far, with USDA-funded new postdoctoral researcher Sarah Richman joining the lab, and new PhD student Anna Tatarko starting up electrophysiological experiments with Dennis Mathew. The past few months have also seen a new paper out on how pollen fatty acids influence bee learning, and (very shortly) we think our first in a series of neonicotinoid papers written by Felicity Muth will be out. Stay tuned!

L'Oreal USA/AAAS Fellowship to Felicity Muth!

Exciting news in the lab! Felicity has been awarded a highly prestigious L'Oreal USA Postdoctoral Fellowship for Women in Science!

This fellowship will allow her to take her research on bees, pesticides, and cognition in some new and exciting directions! For a full breakdown, check out the official Press Release!

Summer 2017

Measuring nectar

We're wrapping up a great summer by attending the BOMBUSS conference in Logan, Utah. This first-of-its kind meeting was an intensive immersion in methods for bumblebee researchers.

Felicity gave a lightning talk and poster about the new FMPER technique, which we are using to measure learning in wild bees. Excitingly, the paper describing the method is now out (Methods in Ecology and Evolution). The FMPER technique is not only awesome for our research, but also makes a great undergraduate lab activity (contact us for details).

After co-leading a session on "Foraging and Nutrition" with Hollis Woodard (UC Riverside), and spending 3 days talking Bombus non-stop, very excited to get back to lab and try out some of what we've learned!

We're going to keep BOMBUSS spirit alive at UNR this semester, with EECB Colloquia by Hollis Woodard, Maj Rundlöf (Lund University./UC Davis)  aaaaand Felicity Muth herself this semester!

Bees on a sugar rush? New Animal Behaviour paper out!

Most flowers offer visitors some combination of nectar AND pollen, but nearly all research on bee cognition involves nectar alone (or, increasingly, pollen alone). We wondered how well bees learned an association between color and a given resource (pollen) when they were also collecting the alternative resource (nectar).

The paper tells a complex story that can be easily summarized: while collecting pollen had no effect on bees' ability to learn a nectar-color association, collecting nectar impaired their ability to learn a pollen-color association.

Read the whole story for our thoughts on why this might be happening, and what it might mean for plant fitness. This paper was a long time in coming, so it's nice to see out!

NPR's Science Friday!

Felicity demonstrates a new system for marking bees with magnetic thorax tags.

Dr. Felicity Muth, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab, is due to be on Science Friday today! (March 3, 11-1 PST). Felicity will be discussing new research on bee intelligence, alongside host Ira Flatow and UK researcher Dr. Lars Chittka.

Listen to the 17 minute segment, and read a few more details available at: http://sciencefriday.com/segments/the-secret-smart-life-of-bees/

If you found your way here after listening to the show, here are links to Felicity's:

• Scientific journal articles
• Interview with Smithsonian
• Personal website
• Bumblebee World Cup video! (just for fun-- the original bees playing soccer!)

British bumble bees bobble balls; we comment.

Anne Leonard interviewed in Science

Felicity Muth interviewed on Smithsonian website

Be a Bee: NYT's interactive piece features lab research!

Choose your own bee-venture!

Felicity and I were excited to be interviewed for this piece, which reports on a few recent findings that have expanded our understanding of the bee's sensory world. Among all the other great aspects of this article, nice to get links to the Muth et. al. and Russell et al. papers in Animal Behaviour!

AAUW Fellowship

Felicity in the field

Congrats to Dr. Felicity Muth, who received a postdoctoral fellowship from the American Association of University Women! You can read about Felicity's award in Nevada Today!

Bees have good taste: new Biology Letters paper out!

**Update: this got a lot of press! Science, Nature and Scientific American**

In our new Biology Letters paper, Felicity, Jake and I showed that bees responded differently to pollen blends adulterated with a sweet (sucrose) or bitter (quinine) substance. The taste of pollen affected how much of it bees collected from a flower, as well as their tendency to land subsequently on a visually-similar flower. We're excited about the implications of these findings for looking at pollen chemistry in a new light! This was also a fun chance to use our thermal camera :)

Request a copy on ResearchGate!

What floral features do bees learn based on pollen? New paper out!

View fullsize

Bees might learn that the colors of petals, anthers, or pollen itself predicts pollen rewards.

In our new Animal Behaviour paper (Muth et al. 2016 or try ResearchGate) , Felicity pushed the study of pollen learning forward by 1) demonstrating that bees can learn based on reinforcement by floral-collected pollen and 2) exploring what features of flowers they can learn, and how long they remember these associations.

Do bees find themselves "lost in the (floral) supermarket"? New Biology Letters paper out!

We're excited about our new publication, "Colour learning when foraging for nectar and pollen: bees learn two colours at once" out today in Biology Letters. It was a fun experience to prepare a short-format manuscript, and Felicity's experiment uncovered some exciting findings about basic aspects of bee foraging.

When most people think about bee learning, they think of sugary nectar rewards. However, many bees collect both nectar and pollen (their source of protein) on a foraging trip. Felicity was interested in the cognitive aspects of this "multitasking". At least here when the rewards are on different flowers, bees can indeed learn to associate color + reward type. Doing so may come at a cost, as we found some evidence that bees focusing on a single reward performed better (more on that in forthcoming publications).

From the plant POV, it's interesting that bees seem to form expectations about what kind of reward a plant will offer based on its color. Could this have consequences for co-flowering plant species?

Good and bad vibes: Using vibration to train spiders and stress bees

Two papers on the use of vibration in learning experiments are now out!

Long, S.M., Leonard, A.S., Carey, A.*, and Jakob, E.M. 2015. Vibration as an effective stimulus for aversive conditioning in jumping spiders. Journal of Arachnology 43:111-114.

Muth, F., Scampini, A.V.*, and Leonard, A.S. 2015. The effect of acute stress on learning and memory in the bumble bee. Learning and Motivation.