Halmos College Faculty Discusses A Bee’s View on Food      

This fall, Halmos College faculty member Lauren Nadler, Ph.D. published a new popular science article in the Outside JEB section of the Journal of Experimental Biology (JEB), entitled, “Making a bee-line for food with octopamine”. In this article, Dr. Nadler describes a recent scientific study in the journal Biology Letters (by Tianfei Peng and two of his colleagues from the University of Mainz in Germany) that examined how bees find food and perceive its value. The researchers found that the brain compound octopamine (equivalent to the fight or flight hormone noradrenaline in vertebrates like humans) was involved, with bees increasing foraging by almost 75% following an octopamine-laced treat. This publication highlights the important role of the brain in driving the behavior of animals both big and small.

The Outside JEB section reports on the most exciting developments in experimental biology. The articles are written by a team of active research scientists highlighting the papers that JEB readers can’t afford to miss. Dr. Nadler has been contributing to Outside JEB since October 2018.