Why Bees?

Gro Amdam’s fascination with honeybees grew out of her dissatisfaction with a foray into conservation biology while at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Controlling experiments and predicting the outcome is difficult in conservation biology. It is nearly impossible to design and tinker with isolated variables in complex ecosystems.

Amdam is now an assistant professor with ASU’s School of Life Sciences. And an admitted control freak. She says that she needed more concrete answers from science. So she turned to bees.

“With honeybees, I found it was possible to work with a very complex system and still have full control over the experiment,” Amdam says.

She received funding for her doctoral studies in 2000 and began designing simulation models. The models would depict the interplay between physiology and social behavior in bees.

During her work as a doctoral student, Amdam completed the first successful RNA interference knockdown in an adult honeybee. The knockdown is a modification to an organism’s genome that reduces the expression of one or more genes. Based on that success, Amdam realized that bees would make an ideal organism for studying the molecular aspect of social evolution.

“Bees have been kept for honey and wax production for a very long time. People already know how to handle and work with them,” Amdam says. There also is a wealth of available information about bees, she adds. “People have been studying bees since the time of Aristotle.”

Amdam explains that there are several important steps to understanding the origins of sociality in bees. One of the most important is having a complete honeybee genome sequence.

The latest version of that genome was published in May 2005 by the Human Genome Sequencing Center at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas.

The honeybee genome is only about one tenth the size of the human genome. Scientists use it to study a variety of health issues such as allergic reactions, longevity, and antibiotic resistance, as well as social behavior.

“In 10 to 15 years, I want to be seen as a pioneer in establishing the bee as a model organism for the molecular foundations of social evolution,” Amdam says. “As our understanding of the evolutionary linkages between solitary and social behavior increases, our knowledge will be propelled to places it has never been before.”

And what about the bee stings?

“I’ve only been stung a few times,” Amdam says with a laugh. “After a few stings, you really learn how to use the safety gear.” —Michael Price