News

Dr. Asmi Jezeera rejoins the lab as a post-doctoral researcher. She will be working on understanding the effect of pesticides on the native honey bee species in India.

A very warm welcome to you!

Sajesh is awarded the HFSP fellowship to carry out his post-doctoral research work at Western University, under Dr. Natasha Mhatre.

We wish him all the very best.

Sudeep receives the ISEB travel grant to attend the 19th ISEB Congress in Melbourne, Australia. This will allow him to present his work on the floral constancy of Apis dorsata to the international community.

We are very happy for him and wish him all the best.

Amal attended the Sixth Bangalore School on Population Genetics and Evolution at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences. The school spanned over two weeks from 12th Feb to 23rd Feb 2024, to teach experimental evolution, molecular evolution, and population genetics.

Sajesh gets a post-doctoral fellowship in Dr. Natasha Mhatre’s Lab at the Western university, Canada. We wish him all the best for his work! See you soon!

Sajesh Vijayan successfully defended his Ph.D. Thesis on the 14^th of February 2024. His thesis was on understanding the behavioral and visual ecology of the Asian giant honeybee Apis dorsata. His work involved both behavioral and field-based studies of his study species. The defense lasted for more than an hour and was very engaging. He has successfully paved his way to the scientific field of honeybees! Congratulations Sajesh, may you mentor more bee enthusiasts.

      

 

Picture: Dr. Sajesh with Prof. Gadagkar and Prof. Hema and a Beehive (Left), The lab dinner for Dr. Sajesh’s defense (Right).

 

Prof. Raghavendra Gadagkar gave a talk on the “Division of Labour in the Indian Paper Wasp Ropalidia marginata”. He gave insights into how reproductive and non-reproductive division of labour are established in newly founded colonies and maintained in established colonies. He also spoke about the decentralised regulation of dominance behaviour and foraging regulation. Subsequently, he also spoke on how excess food reduces dominance behaviour and starvation increases dominance behaviour in the study species. He finally concluded by shedding light on how the process of science is as important as the product.

Picture: Prof. Gadagkar giving the talk

Pic courtesy: Sachin Bhaskar

The BEE lab’s participation at the Frontier Symposium, 2^nd-4^th Feb 2024 at IISER TVM. Manish and Amal presented posters of their work. Sudeep gave a flash-talk.

  

Pictures: Manish (left pic) and Amal (right pic) presenting their work to the audience.

Picture Courtesy: Dr. Sajesh Vijayan

Prof. Martha R. Weiss from Georgetown University gave a talk on the 14th of Nov 2023, about resource pulses (a sudden increase of resources), where she spoke about the emergence of periodical cicadas and their ecology. She also shed some light on how their emergence affected the trophic cascade in the ecosystem.

Dr. Divya Uma from Azim Premji University spoke about the commensal spiders Philoponella feroka and their interactions on the webs of Indian social spiders on the 15th of Nov 2023. She talked about how the web area and maintenance affect the abundance of these commensals. She also gave insights into the interaction between these two species on prey-capturing approaches.

 

    

Left picture: Prof. Weiss presenting her work; Right picture: Dr. Uma delivering the talk.

Lab group photo(Read from top left, clockwise): Aakash, Sajesh, Prof. Hema, Prof. Weiss, Manish, Vishwathiga, Aparna, Kavya, Malavika, Sudeep, Nandhu, Dr. Divya, Sanath, Amal, Gifty and Azmi.

Pic courtesy: Aakash Kumar Pathak and Gifty Alin Jacob

 

Aakash and Sanath have joined the lab for their PhDs in the monsoon intake of 2023. We welcome both of you!