James Nieh, Principal Investigator

jnieh@ucsd.edu
View CV

James Nieh is interested in the evolution of multimodal communication in social bees and factors that influence honey bee health. He focuses on the proximate mechanisms involved in foraging, food alertment, and recruitment in the social bees (Bombini, Apini, and Meliponini). His goal is develop a greater understanding how such foraging information flow works and how it has evolved. Recently, he has begun to focus on the effects of pesticides and pathogens on honey bee behavior and health. His field sites include San Diego; Tapachula, Mexico; Barro Colorado Island, Panama; and São Simao, Brazil where he collaborates with researchers from Harvard and UC Riverside; El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, and the University of São Paulo Ribeirão Preto.

Lee BenVau, Master's Candidate
2011 to Present

leebenvau@gmail.com

Lee is examining the links between an egg precusor protein, vitellogenin, which is associated with honey bee longevity, health, and immune function and the ability of bees to resist pollutants such as pesticides.

Spencer Huey, Master's Candidate
2011 to Present

sdhuey@ucsd.edu

Spencer has been a Master's student in the Nieh Lab since 2011. His work focuses on how honey bees and native bee pollinators respond to insect and spider predators.

Allison Bray, Master's Candidate
2011 to Present

abray@ucsd.edu

Allison has been a Master's student in the Nieh Lab since 2011. Her work examines how honey bees detect and avoid predators while foraging on flowers.

Kyle Burks, Independent Researcher
2009 to Present

kyleburks@gmail.com

Since 2009, Kyle is studying the function of bumble bee labial gland secretions inside and outside the nest. Labial glads secretions play an important role in stingless bee recruitment, but its function in bumble bees is not known.

Daren Eiri, MS, Independent Researcher
2007 to Present

deiri@ucsd.edu
View CV

Daren Eiri has been involved in the lab since 2007 and originally worked on bumble bee acoustic recruitment. His Master's research focused on the sublethal effects the pesticide, imidacloprid, on honey bee foraging behavior. Daren graduated from UCSD in 2009 with a B.S. in Ecology, Behavior and Evolution and received his Master's in Biology in 2011. He is now looking at how Nosema infection affects the development of honey bee larvae.

Oscar the Cat, Honorary Lab Member
2005 to Present

Oscar, a Bengal cat, is currently working on a four chapter opus entitled "The Art of Sleep." Although his degree completion prospects are dubious, his valiant efforts are appreciated.

Meg Eckles, PhD Candidate
2004 to 2012

meckles@ucsd.edu
View CV

Meg joined the lab in 2004 while she was an undergraduate, and began UCSD's PhD program in 2005. Her work focuses on cognition in bumblebees, how stingless bee use optic flow to measure distance and height, and testing functionally referential communication in the stingless bee Melipona panamica. Her previous work has included behavioral thermoregulation in yellowjackets (Vespula pennsylvanica) and optic flow use in bumblebees (Bombus impatiens). Her general research interests include cognition, learning and behavioral ecology of wasps and stingless bees. Meg graduated from UCSD in 2005 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Environmental Systems: Ecology, Behavior and Evolution. She received her PhD from the Division of Biological Sciences at UCSD in 2012.

Eben Goodale, Visiting Scholar

egoodale@ucsd.edu
View CV

Eben joined the lab in 2010 as an ornithologist excited about the possibilities of working with social insects. Eben's research focuses on interspecific communication and its effect on community ecology. His past work has focused on alarm calling and vocal mimicry in mixed-species bird flocks, mostly in Sri Lanka. In the Nieh lab, Eben focused on interspecific information exchange about foraging between honey bees and bumble bees. In 2012, he began a new faculty position in China. For more details see his website.

Tyler Jack, MS
2009 to 2012

tjack@ucsd.edu

Tyler was been a Master's student in the Nieh Lab since 2009. Tyler graduated in 2012. His work focused on aversive learning and inhibitory signaling in honey bees and demonstrated that attacks from natural honey bee predators can elicit a signal that inhibits waggle dancing, the stop signal.

Brian Park, MS
2009 to 2012

brpark@ucsd.edu

Brian Park is a former Masters student (graduated in 2012) studying seasonal influences on honey bee foraging in a semi-urban setting to determine what pollen resources, native and introduced, are important to bees throughout the year. He used genetic barcoding of collected pollen to identify the plants visited and the honey bee dance language to determine where bees have foraged.

Guntima Suwannapong, Fulbright Scholar

guntima@buu.ac.th
View ResearchGate Profile

Guntima Suwannapong was a Fulbright Thai Visiting Scholar visiting the lab to conduct research determining the function of the honey bee mandibular gland. Dr. Suwannapong is a faculty member in Biology at Burapha University, Thailand where she studies honey bee chemosensation and the effect of Nosema infection on honey bee health.

Elinor Lichtenberg, PhD
2005 to 2011

elichten@ucsd.edu
View CV

Elinor joined the Nieh lab in 2005. Her thesis research focuses on use of heterospecific scent marks (olfactory eavesdropping) by stingless bees. General research interests communication, foraging behavior, social information use, aggression and competition. As an undergraduate, Elinor studied a visual communication system in stalk-eyed flies (Cyrtodiopsis whitei) in the lab of Dr. Jerry Wilkinson. Prior to beginning UCSD's PhD program, she participated in an internship at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., seeking to improve captive kori bustard (Ardeotis kori) breeding success through behavioral research. Elinor obtained her Bachelor of Science (Biology: Behavior, Ecology, Evolution and Systematics) from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2003.

Jessica Hagbery, MS
2008 to 2011

jhagbery@ucsd.edu

Jessica studied foraging division of labor in bumble bees (Bombus impatiens), focusing on how individuals and colonies adapt to the loss of pollen foraging specialists. She demonstrated that generalist foragers could adaptively shift their preferences and collect significantly more pollen after pollen foraging specialists were removed and showed that these same generalists reverted to their original preferences when pollen specialists were restored.

Brian Johnson, former Postdoctoral Fellow
2008 to 2009

brnjohnson@ucdavis.edu
View website information

Brian is currently a faculty member in the Department of Entomology at UC Davis where he uses honey bees as a model system to examine multiple questions in the areas of Behavioral Ecology and Behavioral Genetics.

Felipe Contrera, former Postdoctoral Fellow
2005 to 2006

felipe@ufpa.br
View website information

Felipe is currently a faculty member at the Universidade Federal do Pará in Belém, Brazil, where he studies the highly social bees, focusing on stingless bees as model systems. His research interests include Behavioral Ecology, Animal Communication, and Meliponiculture.