An unusual study that involved bar coding and tracking the behavior of thousands of individual honey bees in six queenless bee hives and analyzing gene expression in their brains offers new insights into how gene regulation contributes to social behavior.
Bees and humans are about as different organisms as one can imagine. Yet despite their many differences, surprising similarities in the ways that they interact socially have begun to be recognized in the last few years. Now, a team of researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, building on their earlier studies, have experimentally measured the social networks of honey bees and how they develop over time.
For years, scientists have attributed animal behavior to the coordinated activities of neuronal cells and its circuits of neurons, known as the neuronal network (NN). However, researchers are pushing the boundaries in understanding animal behavior through the integration of gene regulation.
Gene Robinson, IGB director and a professor of entomology, has been named interim dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.
Starting July 1, Robinson will fill the role for one year while a national search is conducted for the dean’s position. Robinson is taking the place of Feng Sheng Hu, the current Harry E. Preble Dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, who is leaving to become dean of Arts & Sciences at Washington University.
The College of Liberal Arts & Sciences has established the LAS Dean’s Distinguished Lecture to provide wider opportunity for people to hear from faculty who are leaders in their field. The inaugural lecture featured Gene Robinson, professor of entomology and director of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology.
The Earth BioGenome Project (EBP) is a confederated network of partner organizations and affiliated projects that have a common goal of sequencing and annotating the genomes of all 1.5 million known species of eukaryotes on the planet in 10 years. The EBP aims to create a digital backbone of sequences from the tree of life that will serve as critical infrastructure for biology, conservation, agriculture, medicine, and the growing global bioeconomy.
For anyone trying to tease out how the brain makes sense of the world, the honey bee is a perfect choice of study organism. It’s a social animal, living in a complex society where the jobs are divvied up. It has its own special language: the waggle dance, which scouts use to tell their nestmates exactly where to find the best flowers. It’s a champion navigator, using the sun and other cues to find its way to floral resources sometimes miles away and then bring them back to the hive. It harvests and then processes – some would say “cooks” – its food.
There’s plenty of sweet irony in a new partnership between Illinois and St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch, LLC, that will raise money for bee research at the university.
Anheuser-Busch has pledged $5,000 to The Healthy Bee Fund at Illinois. In addition, the company will donate $1 to the fund for every case sold of b, a new alcoholic honey beverage scheduled to go on sale in the Northeast U.S. in March.
More than a decade after the identification of colony collapse disorder, a phenomenon marked by widespread loss of honey bee colonies, scientists are still working to untangle the ecologically complex problem of how to mitigate ongoing losses of honey bees and other pollinating species. One much-needed aid in this effort is more efficient ways to track specific impacts on bee health. To address this need, a group of Illinois researchers has established a laboratory-based method for tracking the fertility of honey bee queens.
The Earth BioGenome Project (EBP), a global effort to sequence the genetic code, or genomes, of all 1.5 million known animal, plant, protozoan and fungal species on Earth, officially launches today (1 November) as key scientific partners and funders from around the globe gather in London, UK to discuss progress in organising and funding the project.
