Bees Move In

Dr Adrian Dyer

Thermographic Image of Bumblebee on Flower showing temperature difference, Bee Group Wuerzburg.

It’s a well known fact that most of the School of Biomedical Science’s hundreds of researchers will relocate into the STRIP buildings in early 2009. But at the Jock Marshall Reserve in the bucolic north-eastern corner of Clayton Campus, an entirely different group of creatures is moving in.

For the past 18 months, Dr Adrian Dyer has housed his bees at a variety of sites off campus. Now, in order to study the surprisingly complex behaviours of these fascinating creatures, Dr Dyer will move his bees into an environment which allows him to investigate how bees use colour vision to interact with and pollinate important flowers.

“Having the bees on campus in these highly-regulated facilities will allow a wider variety of research questions to be asked, and will allow student projects and collaborations with other university groups,” Dr Dyer says.

He established his sensory neuroscience laboratory in the school’s Physiology Department midway through 2006, assisted by a grant from the US Air Force.

“Bees make an ideal research model because they have a small brain that is quite capable of learning very complex tasks”, he says.

In October last year, the influential Nature magazine published the bee genome, showing that humans share more genes with these tiny cousins than with other insects for which the genome has been sequenced.

“Individual forager bees are very altruistic, collecting food to contribute to the entire colony; this means that it is possible to train individual animals for several hours a day to investigate how their brain learns to process information. And the bees are easy and inexpensive to maintain, making them a great model for research and teaching,” says Dr Dyer.

He has received both a Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship and five-year grant from the Australian Research Council in October 2007, the latter of which he shares with Professor Marcello Rosa. Their new study will focus on finding out how bees efficiently use their colour vision to find particular flowers in complex environments.

The research could kick-start developments in robotic vision, and will also hopefully lead to computer modelling of the way in which environmental factors such as climate change might affect a bee’s choice of flower types, including commercially-farmed plants. A paper published in Nature by Dr Dyer and collaborators from the University of Cambridge recently showed that bees preferentially visit warmer flowers.

Bees are major pollinators for 90 per cent of commercial crops in North America, and are estimated to contribute an economic benefit of around $18 billion to the US economy. An illness currently felling honey bees in the USA is thought to have erased around $2 billion worth of revenue from the Californian almond industry in the past year. Models to understand pollinator-plant interactions are vital for good financial management.

The latest instalment of pop culture’s fascination with the black and yellow insect stripes manifests as the Bee Movie – a big-budget animation feature driven by comedian Jerry Seinfeld. And while this film’s fuzzy main character Barry will flit across the screen for mere weeks, the Monash bees in the keep of Dr Dyer are here to stay.

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