The Bee health and behavior lab
Hagai Y. Shpigler
Principal Investigator
Scientific Research
About the lab
Hagai Y. Shpigler
Hello!
In our lab we study the most amazing creature on earth - the bees!
Our scientific interest lies in fields of bees' health, endocrinology, and behavior.
We ask questions on bee pathogens and their interactions with the physiology and behavior of the bee.
We use an integrative approach including genomics, neurological, endocrinological and physiological tools to study these questions.
Our main animal models are the honey bee (Apis mellifera) and the bumble bee (Bombus terrestris).
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The lab is located at the Volcani Institute Rishon LeZion, Israel
The Lab Motto:
“The bee's life is like a magic well: the more you draw from it, the more it fills with water.” (Karl von-Frisch)
Queen monitoring system
The honey bee queen
The reproductive system of the colony
Tracking egg laying is a tricky business as the queen do it in the darkness of the hive. To expose this fascinating behavior we developed a system that allows us to track egg laying in tens of queens outside the hive under controlled environment. We used it to find the effect of nutrition on egg laying and to find the influence of light regime on the queen egg laying rhythm.
Honey bee aggression
Agonistic social interactions
Honey bee workers behave aggressively to bees from other colonies. Using a lab assay for aggression we tested the effect of short past aggressive interaction on future behavior. Using genomic tools we looked for genes which are involved in the process of embedding of social experience.
The movie show aggressive interaction between bees in a lab assay.
Honey bee
Social sensitivity
Bees social behavior - Are there autistic bees?
Honey bee lives in a huge social community, but do all of them have the same social capabilities? We have tested this question by exposing groups of bees to series of social signals and tracked their behavioral response. We found that bees like human have wide spectrum of social sensitivity from nonresponsive to highly sensitive. Surprisingly the nonresponsive bees brain gene expression share many genes with similar social syndrome in human - Autism.
Interview in Hebrew
Contact information
Phone
Address
+972-50-6340630 - contact me on WhatsApp!
HaMaccabim Road 68, Rishon LeZion , Israel
Honey bee
Nursing behavior
Alloparental care
Honey bee workers take care of their sister larvae (alloparental care), feeding cleaning and worming them up. To study the nursing behavior we developed a lab assay to track nursing behavior in a petri dish. This new method allow us to study factors that control this fascinate behavior.