Robert E. Page, Jr.

That's the title of a newly published book written by Robert E. Page Jr., one of the world's foremost honey bee geneticists.

In his 224-page book, published by Harvard University Press, Page sheds light on how 40,000 bees, "working in the dark, seemingly by instinct alone, could organize themselves to contstruct something as perfect a a honey comb."

Page, former professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, marvels at how bees can accomplish these incredible tasks. In synthesizing the findings of decades of experiments, he presents "a comprehensive picture of the genetic and physiological mechanisms underlying the division of labor in honey bee colonies and explains how bees' complex social behavior has evolved over millions of years," according to the Harvard University flier.

Page, now vice provost and dean of the Arizona State University's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Foundation Professor of Life Sciences, still keeps his specialized stock of honey bees at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility 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 his book, Page talks about  the coordinated activity of the bees and how worker bees respond to stimuli in their environment.  The actions they take in turn alter the environment, Page says,  and "so change the stimuli for their nestmates. For example, a bee detecting ample stores of pollen in the hive is inhibited from foraging for more, whereas detecting the presence of hungry young larvae will stimulate pollen gathering."

Division of labor, Page says, is an inevitable product of group living because "individual  bees vary genetically and physiologically in their sensitivities to stimuli and have different probabilities of encountering and responding to them."

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.

In 2004--the year Page retired from UC Davis--ASU recruited him as the founding director and dean of the School of Life Sciences. 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.

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.

Add this one to the list: The Spirit of the Hive.

Plants communicate. They do.

Ecologist Richard Karban, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Entomology, points out that one of the simplest forms of communication involves shade.

When a plant is shaded, it grows away from the plant or other object that's shading it.

Today he published research in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences that is truly amazing readers. It involves kinship, communication and defenses.

Basically, if you’re a sagebrush and your nearby kin is being eaten by a grasshopper, deer, jackrabbit, caterpillar or other predator, it’s good to be closely related. Through volatile (chemical) cues, your kin will inform you of the danger so you can adjust your defenses.

 If you’re not closely related, communication won’t be as effective.

Kin have distinct advantages when it comes to plant communication, just as “the ability of many animals to recognize kin has allowed them to evolve diverse cooperative behaviors," Karban says. For example, fire ants can recognize kin. “Ants will destroy queens that are not relatives but protect those who are."

That ability is less well studied for plants--until now.

“When sagebrush plants are damaged by their herbivores, they emit volatiles that cause their neighbors to adjust their defenses,” Karban said. “These adjustments reduce rates of damage and increase growth and survival of the neighbors.”

“When sagebrush plants are damaged by their herbivores, they emit volatiles that cause their neighbors to adjust their defenses,” Karban said. “These adjustments reduce rates of damage and increase growth and survival of the neighbors.” 

“Why would plants emit these volatiles which become public information?” he asked. “Our results indicate that the volatile cues are not completely public, that related individuals responded more effectively to the volatiles than did strangers.  This bias makes it less likely that emitters will aid strangers and more likely that receivers will respond to relatives.” 

The research, “Kin Recognition Affects Plant Communication and Defense,” is co-authored by two scientists from Japan and two from UC Davis: Kaori Shiojiri of the Hakubi Center for Advanced Research, Kyoto University, and Satomi Ishizaki of the Graduate School of Science and Technology, Niigata University; and William Wetzel of the UC Davis Center for Population Biology, and Richard Evans of the UC Davis Department of Plant Science.

To simulate predator damage, the researchers “wounded” the plants by clipping them and then studied the responses to the volatile cues. They found that the plants that received cues from experimentally clipped close relatives experienced less leaf damage over the growing season that those that received cues from clipped neighbors that were more distantly related. 

“More effective defense adds to a growing list of favorable consequences of kin recognition for plants,” they wrote.

The researchers performed their field work on sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) at Taylor Meadow, UC Sagehen Creek Field Station, near Truckee. They conducted four field experiments over three years “that compared the proportion of leaves that were damaged by herbivores over the growing season when plants were provided with volatile cues clipped from a close relative versus cues from a distant relative,” the scientists wrote. 

For closely related kin, they snipped stem cuttings (clones), potted them, and then returned the pots to the field. They determined relatedness “by using microsatellites that varied among individual sagebrush clones.”

The result: “Plants responded more effectively to volatile cues from close relatives than from distant relatives in all four experiments and communication reduced levels of leaf damage experienced over the three growing seasons,” they wrote. “This result was unlikely to be caused by volatiles repelling or poisoning insect herbivores.” 

Karban, who has studied plant communication among the sagebrush at the site since 1999, likened the plant communication to neighbors “eavesdropping.” They “hear” the volatile cues of their neighbors as predators damage them.

Eavesdropping. Kinship. Plant communication. Plant defenses.

Fascinating stuff.

Who knew?

Jim Cane

A good place to learn about them is at the UC Davis Department of Entomology seminar on Wednesday, Feb. 6.

James “Jim” Cane, a research entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service’s Biology and Systematics Lab, Utah State University, will speak on “The Spectrum of Managed Nesting for Pollination by Non-Social Bees”  from 12:10 to 1 p.m. in Room 1022 of the Life Sciences Addition, corner of Hutchison and Kleiber Hall drives, UC Davis campus.

Host is graduate student  Leslie Saul-Gershanz of the Neal Williams lab.

“Most bees nest underground; the remainder largely nesting above-ground, either in beetle holes in deadwood or in pity stems,” Cane says. “The vast majority of bees are non-social, yet only a very few of these species of each nesting habitats are managed for crop pollination.  They will be used to illustrate realized and sustained population growth under management, as well as the factors that allow or impede broader use of non-social bees for agriculture.”

“I will then summarize ongoing experience with methods and materials to multiply other native cavity-nesting bees, notably species of Osmia, desired to pollinate tree fruits, bramble fruits and native seed crops, highlighting the costs and challenges that emerge  at larger scales of management.”

 Cane has spent many of the past 25 years studying the nesting and pollination ecologies of native non-social bees of North America and elsewhere.  He has worked with pollination and pollinators of alfalfa, cranberries, blueberries, squashes, almonds, raspberries and a host of native seed crops used for restoration seed.  He is currently multiplying three species of Osmia bees for these applications. 

For the past 13 years, Cane has worked for the USDA at the Pollinating Insect Research Unit at Utah State University in Logan, Utah.  Prior to that, he was on the faculty of Auburn University in Alabama and was a post-doctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. He received his doctorate from the University of Kansas. 

The seminar will be videotaped for later posting on UCTV.

Eric Mussen

These are terrible blood-sucking parasites that attack bees and raise havoc in the hive. They transmit a variety of diseases and can destroy a hive.

In one of his many talks last year, Extension apiculturist Eric Mussen of the UC Davis Department of Entomology pointed out that honey bee mites include the (internal) tracheal mite (Acarapis woodi), first detected in the United States in 1984, and the (external) Varroa, first discovered here in 1987.

"The tracheal mite killed half of the nation's bees in five years as it expanded across the country," he said. "It was mostly ignored in the last few years."

Then when the Varroa mite arrived, "it killed half of the remaining colonies in five years as it expanded across the country. It killed practically all feral colonies in 1995-96."

"Mite feeding lowers pupal blood protein, resulting in underweight bees, and it shortens the lifespan," Mussen said. "Mite feeding suppresses the honey bee immune system. And, mite feeding vectors RNA virus diseases of honey bees."

Varroa mites, bee scientists agree, are definitely a key factor in the mysterious malady known as colony collapse disorder (CCD). They think CCD is caused not by "a single bullet" but by a multitude of factors, including diseases, pesticides, pests, parasites, malnutrition and stress.

Mussen defines CCD as "the failure of colonies to survive to the next season," and "there's an overwhelming quantity and quality of honey bee stresses."

With CCD, the adult bees abandon the hive, leaving behind the queen, brood and food stores.

So sad. Empty-hive stories, such as this one we heard today from a Davis beekeeper are troubling: "I went to check on my bees yesterday and found the hive empty. The wood was a little mildewy, I think they absconded because hive design needs work. I saw a couple dead yellowjackets in the hive, too, but I don't know if they attacked when there were still bees there or not."

Says Mussen: "Honey bees are stressed by many things. It begins with less naturally occurring food plants. The plants lack the mixed pollens essential for honey bee nutrition."

"It continues with loss of blood and lifespan, as well as infectious inoculations, from Varroa mite parasitism; infections by exotic microbes, especially Nosema ceranae and RNA iruses; and exposure to toxic or 'made toxic' (by adjuvants) chemical residues."

"Is it any wonder that our honey bee colonies are having a hard time surviving?" Mussen asks.

You can catch up on what's troubling the bees and the scientific research under way by reading his bimonthly newsletter, from the UC apiaries, posted on the UC Davis Department of Entomology website.

"Landscape Conservation for Rare Insects!"

That's the title of a seminar to be hosted by the UC Davis Department of Entomology on Wednesday, Jan. 23. 

Nick Haddad, the William Neal Reynolds Professor of Biology at North Carolina State University (NCSU), Raleigh, N.C., will speak from 12:10 to 1 p.m., in Room 1022 of the Life Sciences Addition, corner of Hutchison and Kleiber Hall drives. Pollination ecologist Neal Williams, assistant professor of entomology, will introduce him.

The seminar promises to be riveting. 

"I will discuss studies of landscape approaches and how they may be used to conserve rare insects, focusing on rare butterflies," Haddad said. "In one experiment, we are studying how landscape corridors may be used to increase insect dispersal and population viability.  In a second experiment, we are asking whether habitat restoration creates population sources, or instead creates unintended population sinks for rare butterflies.  These experimental approaches that consider mechanisms of dispersal and demography can be used to inform large scale conservation and restoration in a changing world." 

One of his endangered subjects, found only in North Carolina, is a brown butterfly, Saint Francis satyr (Neonympha mitchellii francisci). See the photo below by Melissa McGaw.

Haddad recently launched a new website, Conservation Corridor, aimed at connecting science to conservation.

Haddad received his doctorate in ecology from the University of Georgia in 1997, and his bachelor's degree in biology, with honors, from Stanford University in 1991. He served as a researcher in the Guatemala Program, Center for Conservation Biology, Stanford University, from 1990 to 1997, and as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota from 1997-1999 before joining the the North Carolina State University faculty in 1999.

He advanced from assistant professor of zoology to associate professor of biology to professor of biology. In between, he headed west to UC Davis to become a sabbatical scholar, hosted by Marcel Holyoak, from 2006-2007.

Haddad has published his work in Conservation Biology, Journal of Insect Conservation, Ecology, Ecology Letters,Conservation Genetics, PLoS ONE, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Population Ecology, Science, and Ecography, among others.  

Assistant professors Brian Johnson and Joanna Chiu are coordinating the Department of Entomology's winter seminars. All the winter seminars are being video-recorded under the direction of James R. Carey and will be posted at a later date on UCTV.

Meanwhile, there's lots of good information on his Conservation Corridor website. You can also "like" his Conservation Corridor Facebook page.