Darren Incorvaia on Bumblebees

On this week’s The Sci-Files, your co-hosts Chelsie and Danny interview Darren Incorvaia about his research on bees, here at the Michigan State University. Darren is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Integrative Biology.

Social insects, such as bees, require many resources in order to build and maintain a nest, produce and nourish workers, and reproduce. To ensure the colony forages effectively, social insects have numerous communication strategies including the dance language of honeybees and odor trails of ants. Since bumblebees face similar selective pressures and do not have a dance language or odor trails, how do they ensure that they are exploiting the best possible resources? Darren’s research focuses on this. Through both field experiments and an agent-based computer model, Darren hopes to show that bumblebees use social information in the nest to inform their individual foraging decisions.

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