Matthew McNeill has been stung by bees numerous times in the past two years. There will surely be many more unpleasant stings in his future, yet this doesn’t quell his interest and enthusiasm for what he loves to do.

McNeill is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois Honeybee Research Facility, which has been in existence for 22 years and is located at 3515 S. Lincoln Ave. He received his doctorate in neuroscience from the University of Iowa, and has been a part of the research team since January of 2010.

“When I was (considering) a postdoc position as I was finishing my Ph.D., I was looking for labs that were interested in looking at the genetics behind complex behaviors,” McNeill said. “When I talked with Gene and read papers that came out of Gene’s lab, I was very interested in the kinds of things they were finding.”

The Bee Research Lab is headed by Gene Robinson and contains about 65 colonies of bees. Robinson was the director of the neuroscience program for 10 years, from 2001 until 2011, when he took the position of interim director of the Institute for Genomic Biology. This year, the directorship position has become permanent and keeps him busy, along with the responsibilities of the bee lab.

There are currently 32 members of Robinson’s team, made up of postdoctoral associates, graduate students, undergraduate research assistants and lab personnel.

Jonathan Massey, senior in LAS studying entomology, has been an undergraduate research assistant since he was a freshman.

“I decided to (join Robinson’s lab) because I actually read a book called ‘The Communication among Social Bees,’” Massey said. “And I just liked the idea of studying insect behavior.”

His freshman year, Massey took a honeybee-keeping class taught by Professor Alex Wild, which hadn’t been offered at the University for 30 years. Massey had never worked with bees before then, but he was interested in starting. Now, Massey plans to continue until he graduates at the end of this school year.

The lab focuses predominantly on honeybees because they are considered to be a social organism. Robinson’s group studies Apis mellifera, the Western honeybee. The way that the colony functions is through multifaceted, interconnected social means — not simply a monarchy headed by the queen. This societal complexity allows the lab members to research social systems and processes within the organisms.

Currently, Robinson and his team are studying how genes influence social behavior, how the social environment affects brain gene expression and the general evolution of bee society.

Some comparison studies are also conducted with Drosophila melanogaster, a species of fruit fly, to help the team understand the bee processes better and to relate the bee research to other species.

“We work hands-on with honeybees,” Massey said. “We do the fieldwork, but once August approaches, it gets to be too cold and the resources are too low for the honeybees to be functioning properly for our research, and we … transition into more laboratory, molecular work.”

In the winter, most of the colonies are kept outside, and the bees naturally go into a hibernation-like state, keeping close together and vibrating their bodies to survive the cold.

Two of the colonies are brought indoors for any further fieldwork in the winter, but these “winter bees” tend to act differently than “summer bees.” As a result, the winter and summer data may not always be consistent.

Researchers in Robinson’s lab therefore learn to do both fieldwork with the bees outside and molecular work inside in the laboratory.

There is a myriad of different disciplines that are represented in the lab: from entomology to neuroscience to ecology. Robinson intentionally aimed to blend these backgrounds, therefore bringing different perspectives to the research.

“We are all interested in understanding the mechanisms and evolution of social behavior from a comprehensive perspective,” Robinson said in an email. “It is necessary to wed these disciplines, and more (genetics, genomics, evolution, physiology) to do so.”

In this marriage of subject areas, McNeill learned to open his mind to different ways of looking at this particular subject of honeybee sociality, or their social disposition and inclinations.

“I’m trained as what you would call a ‘reductionist,’” he said. “What this means is that you reduce everything to its simplest parts and you look at a very narrow perspective as to how something functions … Gene’s lab looks at it quite differently in a lot of ways. They take what’s called a ‘systems biology perspective,’ which approaches how a system of units are functioning together as a network.”

In other words, Robinson not only joins different areas of study, but he also joins different ways of thinking: the small-scale, reductionist approach and the large-scale (systems biology) perspective.

In this way, the lab not only researches bees; it explains their contribution to the ecosystem and to the general process of being social.

So, one bee (and several bee stings) at a time, Robinson and his student researchers continue to investigate these creatures at the University’s Bee Research Facility.

Reema can be reached at [email protected].