The Sci-Files – 4/28/2019 – Darren Incorvaia – Bumblebees
April 28, 2019
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.
For more information on the MSU Bug House, click here.
If you’re interested in talking about your MSU research on the radio or nominating a student, please email Chelsie and Danny at [email protected] You can ask questions about future episodes here. Check The Sci-Files out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube!
Chelsie is a Biomedical Engineering Ph.D. student at Michigan State University. She studies what happens to the extracellular matrix of cells after they have been stressed. She co-hosts "The Sci-Files" with Daniel Puentes. Together they explore the different topics that MSU students research on "The Sci-Files" at WDBM.
Daniel is a graduate student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, where he does research at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory. His research involves measuring the mass of radioactive nuclei, and how it can tell us how protons and neutrons are arranged inside of a nucleus. This research also helps scientists understand how the elements were created in different stellar environments! At WDBM, he and Chelsie Boodoo co-host The Sci-Files.
