Who we are and what we are up to

Welcome to the social behavior lab at the Colorado State University where we study the dynamics of social groups using honeybees as a model system.

November 2023: Kord and Lizzy present their work in the annual meeting of the Entomological Society of America.

May 2023: New undergraduates joining the lab for the summer: Lizzie Reifsteck, Asa Hood and Mafalda Descamps, welcome all!

April 2023: Lizzy and Kord are working with Michael and Arian at the USDA Baton Rouge lab to breed our metabolic rate lines, very excited about this new collaboration and the new approach to breeding.

January 2023: We have a new NSF grant to continue our work with slow-fast phenotypic variability, super stoked and looking forward to launch this new work!

December 2022: Dhruba makes a second trip to India on the Fulbright Felloship to do some more work with the tropical honeybees, this time collecting some data on thermoregulation

August 2022: Julian’s paper on how metabolic rate affects optimal foraging is accepted in Behavioral Ecology – it’s a study that was long on the wish-list

July 2022: Julian presents his research at the Animal Behavior Society meeting and Dhruba presents the lab research at the Society for Experimental Biology meeting.

June 2022: Lizzie joins the lab as a grad student. Welcome! Julian defends his thesis and is moving on to the next step in his career. Congrats!

May 2022: Julian wins the GDPE award for excellence in teaching and mentoring. Congratulations Julian!

January 2022: Carrie’s paper on interindividual variation for social learning is out in Proc R Soc B. Dhruba is out there in India on his Fulbright fellowship, working with tropical honeybees in Axel Brockmann’s lab and developing some modeling iedas. Kira joins the lab as an undergraduate student and we now have a computer science graduate in the lab. Welcome Kira! Time to start coding!

December 2021: Carrie’s invited review on cognitive phenotypes is accepted in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

November 2021: Julian attends the annual EntSoc meeting and wins 2nd prize for his presentation on foraging economics of Slow and Fast bees – Good show, Julian! Stephen’s paper on metabolic diversity is accepted in American Naturalist.

October 2021: Carrie leaves the lab to join Mathieu Lihoreau for a post-doc, she will be heavily missed. Julian gets a travel grant from GDPE to attend the annual EntSoc meeting.

Summer 2021: Kord joins the lab as a grad student. Burak Onbasi from Chris Mayack’s lab spends 6 weeks working with us.

April 2021: Carrie successfully defends her Ph.D. dissertation and publishes her paper on the compairson of cognitive traits in 4 species of honeybees in Animal Cognition. She also gets a Fulbright fellowship to continue this work. Julian is awarded a small research grant from GDPE.

November 2020: Carrie gets a small research grant from GDPE

September 2020: Stephen’s “Pace of Life” paper is “Featured Student Research” in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology

June 2020: Carrie’s “Cognitive Phenotypes” paper is selected as “Editor’s Choice” in Animal Behaviour

June 2020: Stephen defends his thesis and moves to Emory, leaving everyone in the lab brokenhearted

May 2020: Brielle defends her senior thesis

March 2020: Carrie goes to India to complete her Asian honeybees project and has to return hurriedly due to Covid

February 2020: Carrie successfully completes her Ph.D. candidacy exam

January 2020: Dhruba gets the Fulbright fellowship