If you upset one bee, what determines whether the entire swarm will decide to avenge its wrong? A $1.2 million grant will help UC Riverside researchers answer questions like those about how honeybees communicate.

One in three bites of food you eat was pollinated by a bee. They are crucial to global food production, but since 2006 there have been alarming die-offs. One solution to this problem is to use special bees that are more resistant to pests and diseases that kill managed honeybees.

Commonly found in Southern California, the surviving bees appear to be resistant to deadly mites, as well as extreme heat and drought. Genetically, they are the most diverse honeybees in the world, with a mix of African and European genes. However, they tend to behave more defensively than the European honeybees currently used in agriculture.

Defensive behaviors can include hitting the beekeeper’s veils, chasing, or stinging entities perceived as threats. To breed these behaviors in bees, scientists need to know what triggers them.

“If we understand what stresses surviving bees, it could help us develop different beekeeping strategies, as well as design a breeding program that helps disentangle these defensive behaviors,” said UCR entomologist Barbara Baer-Imhoof, who co-leads the program with UCR colleagues entomologist Boris Baer and insect neurobiologist Ysabel Giraldo.

Baer and Baer-Imhoof run CIBER, the Center for Integrated Bee Research at UCR, where they study the stressors responsible for declining bee health and work on solutions to these problems, including new tools for monitoring bee health in managed hives.

Under this grant, scientists will determine how environmental threats are perceived and processed by individual bees, and then how they are transmitted to other members of the hive. This chain of communication is a fundamental but still unsolved challenge in science.

Another aspect of this grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation is to find out whether scientists should reconsider the way they think about bee societies. In addition to communication between bees, this project will determine how honeybees pass on information to subsequent generations of offspring, beyond the lifespan of a single generation.

Because beehives can store information, scientists say there should be a paradigm shift in how bees are studied. “The fact that they can do this is a cultural achievement,” Baer said.

As in human societies, there is great variation among individual members.

“Some bees have different personalities. They’re not like little robots that give the same predictable response to every odor or situation. Why? That’s part of what we want to know,” Baer said.

Because bees communicate using vibrations, chemicals, smells, sounds, and movements, Giraldo’s lab plans to use genetic tools to learn more about the brain cells that control these interactions.

“Our tools are powerful enough to allow us to understand the responses of individual brain areas in real time and give us a high-resolution picture of what is happening,” Giraldo said.

A bee has only a million brain cells, which isn’t much compared to mice, which have an average of 70 million neurons. But bees can solve math equations and dance for each other.

“They can do complicated things,” Baer said. “They have to be incredibly efficient on an individual level to leverage the brain power available to them for complex tasks like these.”

Based in Los Angeles, the W.M. Keck Foundation was established in 1954 by the late W.M. Keck, founder of Superior Oil Company. The foundation’s grantmaking focuses primarily on pioneering efforts in medical research and science and engineering. The foundation also supports undergraduate education and operates the Southern California Grant Program, which provides support to the Los Angeles community, with a special focus on children and youth. For more information, visit www.wmkeck.org

“On behalf of the UCR community, I extend my heartfelt thanks to the W.M. Keck Foundation,” said Chancellor Kim Wilcox. “Funding from the foundation will support innovative projects that develop new strategies to understand and protect bees. These efforts are critical because pollinators play a critical role in the health of ecosystems and food production around the world.”

Boris Baer and Barbara Baer-Imhoof discuss killer bees and the important role they play in the future of agriculture. Listen here.

(Cover photo: James Nieh/UCSD)