Abby has successfully obtained honors for her thesis entitled, “Discrimination between and preference for differing peppermint odor preparations by the bumblebee Bombus impatiens“

Our computational investigation into what cues are available to searching bumblebee foragers came out today in Scientific Reports, and can be downloaded here. This work has been the spring board for current experimental studies on the relative roles of vision and olfaction in bumblebee foraging.

Welcome to Vanessa Pham and Jess Sommer! Vanessa will be working on odor coding via PER, while Jess will be training under Katie to become our new wind-tunnel guru before Katie graduates. The hardest part of an undergraduate research lab is how quickly we have to say goodbye.

Dr. Nigel Raine wrote a compelling summary of pesticide pressures on bumblebees in Nature’s News & Views that is worth reading (doi: 10.1038/d41586-018-05917-0)

SprayLab hosted three fantastic high school students for a week of research: Bronwyn Meldrum, Melissa Peters, and Julia Sysko. In four afternoons they learned how to do PER in bumblebees and collected data on learning of integrative visual and olfactory information. They were here for Brain Camp, a week of learning about Neuroscience funded by the Sentience Foundation.

Catching bees in the dark

Bombus impatiens ready for testing

Bronwyn trying to tempt bees

Melissa training bees

Bronwyn running a test trial