As research subjects, bees have a lot of advantages. They have a lot of complexity in behavior and neural biology that is similar to people. But their brains are smaller, and we have a lot more options for manipulating the system.
We see changes in the bee's physiology based on the role it's playing in its society. As bees mature, they move through a series of roles, depending on the needs of the colony, from nurse bees for the brood to comb builders and guards. Ultimately they'll become foragers, the oldest bees in the hive, bringing food back to the colony.
Say a bear destroys part of the colony and foragers are lost. Younger bees can grow up more quickly and become foragers. If there are lots of foragers and the colony needs more bees caring for the young, they can remain in the nurse stage. Or if a bunch of nurses are lost for some reason, some of those foragers can go backward — in essence become younger again. So it's a very interesting model of aging. We see incredible plasticity in the system.
NSF is looking for research about basic questions such as, can you prepare for stress, and how do you recover from stressors in extreme environments like the desert? Heat shock response is a cellularlevel response. Things that we learn at the cellular level are often applicable across organisms. What I'm interested in is how that scales up to the whole organism.
When we write a grant, we try to place it in a big context. You have to go up and rattle the cage of a big question. You have to say this is how I'm going to approach this big question in a small way.
I had a really great high school Advanced Placement biology teacher who had us apply for an NSF summer program. You had to identify schools where you might want to do your summer internship. My family is very blue collar — I was the first one to go to college — so she helped me go through the list of topics and schools because I didn't even know what some of the words meant. While I didn't get the internship, I spent the summer reading textbooks about biopsychology, and I was just hooked on this idea that you could know the mechanisms of a behavior.
Once I'd opened a few colonies and had the experience of a bee walking across my hand, I said, "This isn't so bad."
We hear more about the Africanized bees as pests, and so the connection in many people's minds is not that these animals are providing a service but that they're something to be afraid of.
People think the business of keeping bees is making honey, but really the business is pollination. Most of the things you think of that you buy at the grocery store — cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, corn, almonds, apples — any number of everyday things, rely on pollination by bees.
The European bee protects its home right at its home. The Africanized bee's idea of its home is larger. And it's also got an easier trigger for aggressive behavior.
Honey is a very good preservative; even the bees know that. I've always wondered if that's how early people figured it out, because we have cave paintings of honey robbers. So we know that people have been exploiting bees' ability to make honey for many thousands of years.
When researchers teach, students not only get that sense of excitement but they also get that science is not dead facts in a book. It's a process that's ongoing, that people engage in.
What inspired me the most as a student was hearing professors talk about their own work. I still remember a professor who worked on neurons giving a standard lecture, but he was showing us pictures of neurons from his own work. At one point he looked up and said, "I threw these three in because I think they're beautiful." That was the moment when I knew he loved what he did.
I have undergraduates working in the lab right now doing cutting-edge techniques. Many of them are interested in health careers. They're learning things like how you measure a protein — it doesn't matter what kind of protein it is, the process is the same. So the techniques they're using here with the honeybee tissue are techniques they can use anywhere.
It's fun to teach in the classroom. But it's a lot different to have students you actually work with in the field and lab. And they know me in a different way, too. Once you've gotten into the bee getup and you've opened a colony together, it's a very different learning experience than a lecture.
