Roger Schürch

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A New Toy for Serious Science Allows for Individual Honey Bee Forager Tracking. Read about exciting work from Stentiford, Harrap et al. from the Straw lab that delivered a decisive one–two punch to the long-standing challenge of tracking foraging honey bees.

authors.elsevier.com/a/1mkeE3QW8S...

Scientists: for a new story, I have one big question—>

What is a “good day” in the lab?

I’m looking for epic examples of the best day ever to general criteria for what constitutes a “good day” compared to a nothing-burger day.

Ping me if you have examples to share!

Re-posts appreciated!

A honey bee forager is sitting on an artificial feeder that is placed on a small table covered in blue table cloth. The bee is marked on her thorax with a yellow number tag. The blurry background is green grass. The feeder is an inverted jar that holds sugar syrup stuck in a base with grooves that dispense the syrup to the bees. The bee sticks its tongue into a groove to slurp up the sweet, sweet syrup.

A good day is when the ladies have found the feeder and data collection is within our grasp ...

Using our bee-tracking drone, we discovered that honey bees 🐝 have highly precise and individual routes. Now published at @currentbiology.bsky.social : doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...

Replication studies: a win-win for early-career training and behavioral ecology Replicating previous research builds confidence that results are real and meaningful. But close replications are rare due to limitations in resources and d

How do we know our research results are REAL? We replicate them! Most folks agree but lament on how hard it is to publish these replications.

My dearest gentle reader, lament no more! Delighted to unveil: Replication Studies, a new section of Behavioral Ecology 1/

academic.oup.com/beheco/artic...

Incidentally, at that time we tied onions to our belts ...

Why are you coming at me so hard?!

(Yesterday, k1 asked when he can have a moped, and I told him that I had to cycle uphill 3 km to school, and he can have one when he can do that ...)

Empseb is simply the best. If you're a PhD student of evolutionary biology, do go there!

🚨 Tenure-track professorship at Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany, with a focus on evolutionary ecology of social hymenoptera 🐝🐜

Initially for 6 years:
www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/pr...

That is so cool! Looking forward to reading the pre-print!

Have you ever wondered what you would find if you could keep your eyes on a bee for more than a few meters? Us, too!

preprint (with videos!) + thread 🧵

Precise, individualized foraging flights in honey #bees 🐝 revealed by multicopter drone-based tracking

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

1/9

Our survey of #bees & #wasps visiting #soybean flowers is out: doi.org/10.4039/tce..... This work shows most 🐝s visiting soy🌼s carried soy pollen. #Bumblebees & ground-nesting 🐝s were the most common 🌼visitors suggesting that management practices supporting these #pollinators will benefit 🇨🇦growers

Zopf - Wikipedia

As I am eating Ankezopf (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zopf) every Sunday for breakfast, and me and K2 could not live without it, and K1 needs his Rösti (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6...) with just the right cheese, I have to go with A. But it would make me very sad ...

Hey I started a new section of my website called Derek's Tech Corner, come check it out: www.derekhennen.com/derekstechco.... It's where I'll share various software and other tech tools for cool kids that will save you time--so that you can go look for more bugs.

Love the "under construction" banner. I feel right at home in that timeline. Not sure about the choice of editor though ;-)

Awesome, thanks! With teaching starting soon, I imagine it will not be anytime soon. But I will keep it in mind when I do!

Thanks so much! I will have a read and then I only need to carve out time to learn something new ... That should be easy, right?!

Oh, do you have any code that is shareable (e.g., published alongside a MS)? I dabbled in Clojure for a web app (should get back to that as well, shouldn't I?), but I have only done ABMs in NetLogo. I would be interested to learn how to implement them in Clojure.

I second Inkscape and GIMP. Inkscape can either embed or just link the photos. In the latter case, if photos are edited (e.g., in GIMP), the changes propagate into the overall composition.

Honey bees nearly double their foraging distance by shifting and consolidating their preferred sites to remaining, isolated habitat patches within the larger land use changes. (A) Aerial imagery in 2022 of the study area in Blacksburg, VA, USA. Grey polygons represent all the lands converted in 2020-2021. Orange represents small patches of undisturbed microhabitat left within the developments. Black circle denotes the location of the hives. (B) Honey bees nearly double their communicated foraging distance in 2022 (sample size n=502) compared to 2018-2019 (sample size n=382) (mean±c.i, two-tailed likelihood ratio test used for analysis). Here each datapoint is a decoded waggle dance. (C) Honey bee foraging, as determined by dance decoding before (2018-2019, blue) and after (2022, red) the land use change, demonstrated that the bees shifted recruitment to the more distant, remaining orange patches within the grey, especially in the northern corner of the new housing development.

Robert Ostrom, @schuemaa.bsky.social and co show concrete consequences of changing land, as honey bees need to travel almost twice as far during foraging flights after construction. doi.org/10.1242/bio....

I feel the same moving from Europe to the US. Everything is very familiar-ish, but I cannot ID anything. One of these days I have to spot the insect ID class in the department ...

We're hiring two PhD and two postdoc positions! Interested in pollinators, soils, agroecology, pesticides? Then come and work with us and with collaborators and all over Europe! stanleyecologylab.org/vacancies #findaphd Please share!

@freelyflyingbees.bsky.social also beat me to this one: Here we used the #HoneyBee #WaggleDance to study how bees shifted their foraging in response to new construction on their former prime habitat.

@freelyflyingbees.bsky.social bees beat me to it. Here is our latest published work using the #HoneyBee #WaggleDance as a tool to solve a basic research question on how colonies partition the landscape.

But do they dance?

USGS Bee Lab at the Eastern Ecological Science Center The USGS Bee Lab supports research on native bees. As part of that program we and our co-located USFWS partners develop identification tools and keys for native bee species, take public access hi reso...

The legendary USGS Bee Lab is being shut down. The 2026 budget proposal defunds the Ecosystem Mission Area, which supported the lab. If their science helped your work, there’s still time to make your voice heard. Read below. (1/4)
🧪 #pollinators #Pollinators #USGS #Entomology #Hymenoptera 🪲🪳

A marked honey bee forager collects sucrose solution, either treatment or control, from an artificial feeder.

Former graduate student Dr. Laura McHenry peers at a bee while it forages at the feeder

The herbicide glyphosate is globally ubiquitous. Here we report in a new paper on the sublethal effects to the behavior and brains of bees, a non-target organism that might encounter the herbicide while foraging in agricultural landscapes. Photo creds LC McHenry & R Schurch
doi.org/10.1242/jeb....

Entomologist <p>The Smithsonian Institution is the world&rsquo;s largest museum, education, and research complex, with 21 museums and the National Zoo.&nbsp; This position is located in&nbsp;Park Management, Natio...

Smithsonian (Not normal Fed) is hiring an IPM Entomologist to manage the pest control programs for the National Zoo in Washington DC.

Salary Range: $84,601 - $109,975 per year
#entomology