In collaboration with my graduate student Eva Horna Lowell and Dr. Julie Morris who teaches non-STEM students at the University of Denver about the life sciences, we have been studying both honey bee behavior and also how to increase interest and appreciation of STEM by undergraduate students.
Bee Research
Foraging honey bees (Apis mellifera) seem to use the presence of conspecific foragers as cues for flower quality. However, there is disagreement regarding how a conspecific cue is perceived by other foragers; a bee on a flower may attract other bees to the same flower or may deter other foragers. Most studies manipulate the total number of bees foraging in an arena or the presence or absence of a bee on a flower, and then observe the behavior of one forager in response to a single conspecific, which does not reflect natural foraging. We first tested how a range of conspecifics on flowers affected on which flowers foraging honey bees landed. We found that foragers land more frequently on flowers occupied by more conspecifics, which supports the hypothesis that conspecifics are cues for local enhancement (Horna Lowell et al. 2019). In other work, we have also tested how bees on neighboring flowers affect how many bees land on a focal flower (Horna Lowell and Murphy, in review). Our resultsincrease our understanding of how honey bees forage once at a flower patch.
STEM Education Research
For all of our bee research, we work with students enrolled in ecology and life science classes at the University of Denver. Most of these students are in our non-majors biology classes, but we have also worked with biology-major students enrolled in our General Ecology course. We train students from these classes to collect data as part of authentic Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs). These experiments allow our students to engage with a novel research question and to participate in the iterative nature of data collection, while simultaneously teaching them about the importance of pollinators in our natural and agricultural systems. In turn, these students help us collect large data sets in short periods of time (often during a single week of the lab courses), which would have otherwise taken us a lot longer to collect. We are currently assessing the impact of this work on students’ performance and attitudes about science.
Relevant Publications
Horna Lowell, E. S.* and S. M. Murphy. In Press. Neighborhood effects and honey bee foraging behavior. Journal of Apicultural Research (online early April 2022)
Horna Lowell, E. S.**, J. A. Morris, M. C. Vidal*, C. S. Durso, and S. M. Murphy. 2019. The effect of conspecific cues on honey bee foraging behavior. Apidologie 50: 454-462.
Bee Research
Foraging honey bees (Apis mellifera) seem to use the presence of conspecific foragers as cues for flower quality. However, there is disagreement regarding how a conspecific cue is perceived by other foragers; a bee on a flower may attract other bees to the same flower or may deter other foragers. Most studies manipulate the total number of bees foraging in an arena or the presence or absence of a bee on a flower, and then observe the behavior of one forager in response to a single conspecific, which does not reflect natural foraging. We first tested how a range of conspecifics on flowers affected on which flowers foraging honey bees landed. We found that foragers land more frequently on flowers occupied by more conspecifics, which supports the hypothesis that conspecifics are cues for local enhancement (Horna Lowell et al. 2019). In other work, we have also tested how bees on neighboring flowers affect how many bees land on a focal flower (Horna Lowell and Murphy, in review). Our resultsincrease our understanding of how honey bees forage once at a flower patch.
STEM Education Research
For all of our bee research, we work with students enrolled in ecology and life science classes at the University of Denver. Most of these students are in our non-majors biology classes, but we have also worked with biology-major students enrolled in our General Ecology course. We train students from these classes to collect data as part of authentic Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs). These experiments allow our students to engage with a novel research question and to participate in the iterative nature of data collection, while simultaneously teaching them about the importance of pollinators in our natural and agricultural systems. In turn, these students help us collect large data sets in short periods of time (often during a single week of the lab courses), which would have otherwise taken us a lot longer to collect. We are currently assessing the impact of this work on students’ performance and attitudes about science.
Relevant Publications
Horna Lowell, E. S.* and S. M. Murphy. In Press. Neighborhood effects and honey bee foraging behavior. Journal of Apicultural Research (online early April 2022)
Horna Lowell, E. S.**, J. A. Morris, M. C. Vidal*, C. S. Durso, and S. M. Murphy. 2019. The effect of conspecific cues on honey bee foraging behavior. Apidologie 50: 454-462.