Honeybees are Chaotic in the Most Positive Way!

Dr. Traniello, Lewis-Sigler Scholar, Princeton University

https://kocherlab.princeton.edu/#people

Love at first summer 😊

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Dr. Traniello’s interest in bees developed ‘organically and also, accidentally.’ His undergraduate major in neurobiology and systems physiology started his interest in behavior, leading to his fascination with social behavior. More specifically, he wanted to understand social behavior in molecular terms and investigate the system to study what is most interesting to him. When he connected with Professor Gene Robinson who became his Ph.D. advisor, he started working with honeybees. Unlike Professor Snow (Barnard interview), it was perhaps not love at first sight for Dr. Traniello, but ‘love at first summer’ definitely! Three months of working with bees made him realize that he wanted to work with these creatures for the rest of his life. According to the professor, “There are so many dimensions and perspectives you can take related to bees..and there is so much these creatures can teach us.”

Some Instances of his work. Automated Behavior Tracking, Deformed Wing virus.

During his graduate student days, he worked with Dr. Tim Gernat and his other co-researchers to understand the automated behavior tracking of bees. Automated behavior tracking is a broad umbrella term referring to the use of technology to track bee behavior. This helps to avoid the tedious colony monitoring by individual researchers, which is only feasible for a couple of bees at a time, and challenging to do so for 24 hours, 7 days. Thus, automated tracking reduces the misses of in-person monitoring. It can be also referred to as Computational Ecology, which uses technology to dissect bee behavior. As Professor Traniello discusses, this usually involves putting a small bar code on hundreds of bees using a little bit of glue (doesn’t hurt them) and then fixing a camera at the entrance and exit point, along with another camera at the top to see bees going out and coming in. This helps to record bee behavior and activities 24/7, consequently gathering behavioral data and helping researchers to understand things like trophallaxis behavior of bees (tongue to tongue food sharing) and much more.

Apart from automated tracking, one other research area the professor mentioned was how he and Professor Adam Hamilton and their co-researchers accidentally came across the challenges of the deformed wing virus. In this regard, Gene’s lab utilizes RNA sequencing (using short-read technology) where researchers identify what genes are being expressed in any tissue at any given time.

Researchers get a bunch of reads and map those to the genome of the host animal from which the tissue has been taken. Then they count the reads of the various genes and what they want to get is that the reads are aligning with the genome, and quite often they find a 90 percent or so match. So, when Dr. Traniello and his co-researchers conducted RNA sequencing on honeybees, they were getting far less than the usual 90 percent of reads aligning to the honeybee genome which was mystifying. At that point, Professor Hamilton, who was a graduate student at that time suggested that there was an RNA virus that was then compromising beekeeping activities everywhere. And it could be these genes which were not aligned to the bee genome, are sequencing fragments of that virus, specifically, the deformed wing virus. Professor Traniello said that was so true, and that’s exactly what they found! Going back to their data sets over the course of almost eight years, they realized the deformed wing virus was present in all of their data sets, although at varying degrees. Consequently, they built a statistical model that predicted gene expression of the brain when this virus is present.

Interestingly, they found that the bees most infected with this virus tended to look older, that is, it took the gene expression profile of forager bees, which usually happens later in a bee’s life. They assumed that the presence of the deformed wing virus led to premature transitioning to foraging. Thus, all the datasets being contaminated with the deformed wing virus led to their studying the virus by accident. According to Dr. Traniello, “It was a fun and sobering study that happened by accident.” Hence, Dr. Traniello urges us to be open to whatever comes our way, as sometimes, this can lead to surprising and cool endeavors!

He further adds that he heard some of his colleagues are still facing the challenges of the deformed wing virus. For him though, these regular, daily challenges with bees make bee research interesting and drive him to continuously work with bees. Quite often animal research involves observing animals not in a naturalistic context, studied animals are likely deeply inbred or kept in a sterile environment. This is not always feasible for bees. In fact, some of the bee species can’t be reared in the lab and need to be studied in the natural setting, that is, in their hives, making it more challenging. As the professor says, when it comes to honeybees, one gives up that control. And at the end of the day, it's all worth it! He further adds, there is so much more to learn from these creatures, it's always challenging, and quite often researchers don’t have the appropriate tools that compromise the amount of control they can have over this system of bees, making bees more personally interesting for him to study. Like many of our other interviewees, Dr. Traniello urges our teens to go out in their backyard, and appreciate the beautiful nature around us, and perhaps this will help us to learn more about the extraordinary diversity we find in the bee species.

One word…chaos! And, finally, what is this one word that comes to Dr. Traniello’s mind when he thinks of honeybees? So far, other interviewees have mentioned words like ‘interesting,’ ‘fascinating,’ ‘golden,’ ‘dance,’ etc. …... Dr. Traniello gives us our first ‘chaos,’ or ‘chaotic.’ However, he adds that “I say it with all the positivity, it's chaotic to us, but that’s their way of life…, and that’s very special!”.

Yes, agreed! After all, bees exist in an organized chaos within the hives and our knowledge of these absolutely fascinating creatures is still in this chaotic phase, so much more to learn, yet unknown.

Dr. Traniello, it was an absolute pleasure interviewing you. We wish you the very best in your current bee endeavors and hope to read more about your research in the future!