PolliNation was joined this week by Drs. Margaret Couvillon and Roger Schürch from Virginia Tech. As you will learn in this episode, the Couvillon Lab investigates the dynamics of how pollinators collect their food in the landscape, with a specific focus on honey bee foraging, recruitment, and health. Dr. Couvillon is in the Department of Entomology at Virginia Tech. Dr. Schürch is a Research Assistant Professor studying the Behavior, Ecology and Evolution of Insects. Over the last few years he has become increasingly interested in the honey bee waggle dance both as a tool for foraging ecologists, as well as from a basic science perspective. Today they talk about their collaborative work on using honey bee dance behavior as a way to assess habitat quality for bees.

Listen to today’s episode to find out what we can learn from bee dances, and how home gardeners can make a difference creating their own pollinator habitat.

[aesop_audio src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/pollination/PolliNation_-_57_-_Drs._Margaret_Couvillon_and_Roger_Schurch.mp3″ loop=”off” viewstart=”off” viewend=”off” hidden=”off”]

You can Subscribe and Listen to PolliNation on Apple Podcasts.

And be sure to leave us a Rating and Review!

“Let’s say you want to assess a large area for bee forage availability. If you are a traditional ecologist, you would walk transects and catalog the flowers you see, collect nectar and pollen samples to determine how much each flower is producing, and you have to account for competition. […] Even if you could do all that we calculated that it would take over 1,600 days to cover 90 km2. This is why we turned to the honey bee. The honey bee can do a lot of this hard work for us.” – Dr. Margaret Couvillon

Show Notes:

• How to measure the efficacy of small pollinator habitats
• Why the size of the habitat may not as big of a factor in pollinator population growth
• Why a bee’s dance can point to their pollen sources
• How researchers are able to use the bee’s dance to extrapolate useful data
• How a bee’s dance moves dictate distance and direction of food
• What we can learn from the inaccuracy of a bee’s dance
• How Margaret and Roger are using this research to develop habitat restoration for pollinators
• What one can answer with this research
• What our guests will be focusing on in their upcoming research
• The techniques Margaret and Roger use to create the most useable data in researching bee dances
• What can be learned from studying the miscommunication of the bee dances

“If you put an observation hive in a landscape and observe the duration of the honey bee dances, which translate into foraging distance, you will be able to say [whether a habitat is good or bad for the bees] at a given time.” – Dr. Roger Schürch

Links Mentioned:

• Watch this video on Honey Bee Waggle Dance from Virginia Tech
• Check out “Waggle Dance Distances as Integrative Indicators of Seasonal Foraging Challenges”
• Watch dancing bees cast their votes on the best land-types and areas for their food collection
• Check out our guest’s favorite books:
  • Dr. Couvillon: On the aims and methods of Ethology (1963), Nikolaas Tinbergen
  • Dr. Schürch: The Origins of Virtue (1996) Matt Ridley
• Learn more about our guest’s favorite tools:
  • Dr. Schürch: GNU Emacs (text editor)
  • Dr. Couvillon: Observation hive (and duct tape)
• Find out more about our guest’s favorite bees:
  • Dr. Couvillon: Honey bee (of course) but runner up the stingless bee Frieseomelitta varia
  • Dr. Schürch: Halictus rubicundus
• Connect with Drs. Margaret Couvillon on her website
• Connect with Roger Schürch at his website