About This Project

The leafcutting bee plays a critical role in our society by pollinating wild and cultivated plants and supporting production of seeds, fruits, and vegetables. Synchronization of flower bloom and bee emergence is critical; bees need nectar and plants need pollination. Climate change is increasing climate variability, impacting rhythms of natural events. When Mother Nature gives mixed signals, we aim to understand how bees keep time, using specially engineered clocks!

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Climate change is expected to increase temperature variability and episodes of spring frost. It is projected that mismatches will occur between emerging pollinators and plants that are blooming in the spring. The majority of wild bees are solitary (do not live in a hive) and nest in cavities, although it is largely unknown how emergence is mediated from these cavities. Temperature fluctuations may be a stronger cue than light, however, bees may use light as a cue to synchronize adult emergence if temperatures are misleading. This would be a more reliable cue for synchronizing development, because it is unaffected by climate change. Light patterns have been found to affect emergence rhythms across many insect groups. It is not clear what cues are important for spring emerging bees.

What is the significance of this project?

Pollinator decline is a phenomenon that requires immediate attention. We need to understand the impacts of a changing climate on bee emergence due to their importance to ecosystems and society. Development is a dynamic process that is constantly altered by the environmental conditions. These processes are partly controlled by environmental cues, such as temperature and light patterns which synchronize them with their surroundings. However, very little is known about which aspects of the environment affect emerging bees, as measuring emergence for a population would be very difficult in nature. Understanding how environmental cues control emergence is crucial for understanding the responses of pollinators to climate change. How do bees keep it all straight in a changing world?

What are the goals of the project?

By bridging electrical engineering and biology fields, we can discover phenomena that cannot be recorded in such detail with the human eye alone. For example, we are building incredible clock-like machines that measure when bees emerge for the first time, for thousands of bees in a single experiment. Currently, we would like to continue to develop or "hack" more complicated clocks to gain even more insight into the secret world of developing bees in a changing climate.

We aim to determine if adult emergence is regulated by a circadian rhythm.

We aim to determine how adult emergence is regulated by temperature and light patterns in a changing climate.

We aim to determine how our findings apply to the field.