Michael Smith
Auburn University, AL·Ecology & Evolution
Animals shape the structures they build, and a structure with a consistent layout may serve a purpose. Western honeybees (Apis mellifera) follow a clear pattern inside their nests.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Biology
Plant Science & Agriculture
- Topics
honeybee
Apis mellifera
social insects
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Produce the first 3-dimensional description of how Western honeybee (Apis mellifera) nests are organized as colonies grow, develop and reproduce, using a field-ready photography rig to image combs over time.
- Test whether nest organization contributes to colony function by experimentally disrupting the 3-dimensional arrangement of brood and honey and measuring the effects on colony performance.
- Test mechanisms by which worker bees generate and maintain nest patterns at the whole-nest, per-comb and per-cell scales, using an automated image classifier that identifies comb cell contents.
More about the research
Workers raise young bees, called brood, in the center of the nest and store honey at the top. This basic layout has lasted through more than 34 million years of honeybee evolution, which hints that it is useful. Yet no one has tested whether it actually matters for the colony. There is also no 3-dimensional picture of how a nest develops over a colony's life. This gap matters in practice, because many beekeeping techniques disrupt nest organization, and the effects of doing so are unknown.
Why it matters
Honeybees are the leading agricultural pollinator, and many standard beekeeping practices rearrange the nest without knowing the consequences. Knowing how colonies naturally organize their nests, and what happens when that order is disrupted, could help beekeepers manage hives better. The work also shows how groups of individuals divide up shared space without a central plan. This could inform thinking about decentralized design.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Svjetlana Kruse
Rowan University, NJ·Biology·Early-career
Test whether altering the honey bee gut microbiome changes individual learning and memory, measured with the proboscis extension reflex, a conditioning test in which bees learn to associate an odor with a sugar reward.
Simon Garnier
New Jersey Institute of Technology, NJ·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether ant colonies regulate their collective energy when energy demand or availability changes weakly or strongly, and how this affects productivity, using computer-vision behavioral tracking and physiological measurements.
Eugene Maurakis
University of Richmond, VA·Ecology & Evolution
Determine how dissolved oxygen levels change the link between an egg's position in a mixed-species nest and its survival, using field measurements and computational fluid dynamics simulations of water, silt and oxygen inside minnow mound nests.
The school
Auburn University: 11 labs on PI Pages, $394M a year on research, 327 research doctorates a year.
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