March Meeting

Join us for what is sure to be a fascinating talk (as well as Q&A opportunity) with leading honeybee researcher, Jon Snow of Barnard.

“Housewarming: Thermoregulation in Honey Bee Colonies”

The honey bee colony has often been called a “superorganism”, because the individual bees cannot survive by themselves for extended periods and work together like a single organism to address the needs of the community. One of the key needs of the colony is to maintain a constant temperature in the hive through thermoregulation, or the ability of an organism to keep its body temperature within certain boundaries, even when the surrounding temperature is very different. Honeybee colonies use coordinated behaviors in which the individuals play specific roles in regulating temperature in a hive. In maintaining this colony temperature, individual honey bees undergo extreme heat stresses. We have evidence that normal stresses, such as those caused by thermoregulation, synergize with atypical stresses such as those thought to be important in causing the recent decline in honey bees, known as colony collapse disorder. Current work is aimed at increasing our knowledge of how cooperation of stresses affects the health and disease of these critical pollinators.

Jon’s Bio:

Jonathan Snow joined the Barnard faculty in 2012 after serving as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Williams College.  Dr. Snow received his Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences from the University of California, San Francisco, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School. His graduate and postgraduate work focused on signal transduction, regulation of gene expression, and organismal stress responses in blood development of mammals. He subsequently became fascinated with the honey bee and changed his research focus to the study of these same biological processes in this key pollinator. He continues his avocation as a bee-keeper while teaching and maintaining an active research laboratory.