Food for Thought: Gene Robinson on What Honey Bees Can Teach Us About Cooperation and Resilience

Honey bees are best known for their essential role in pollinating much of the food we eat, but their importance extends far beyond agriculture. In a Q&A for World Bee Day, leading neuroscientist and entomologist Gene Robinson reflects on what bees reveal about the evolution of cooperation, communication, and resilience. From the molecular foundations of social behavior to emerging signs of resistance to devastating parasites, Robinson shows how honey bees offer both practical solutions to global food challenges and profound insight into the biology of social life. 

Why are honey bees so important? 

World Bee Day is meant to highlight the vital role bees and other pollinators play in food security. Honey bees are the world’s most important pollinators. They are essential for the production of numerous fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seed crops, including almonds, apples, blueberries, cucumbers, and melons. In the United States alone, the value of honey bee pollination is estimated to be more than $15 billion annually. But honey bees are not only beneficial to us as premier pollinators; they also serve as inspirational models in the study of the mechanisms and evolution of social behavior. Research in my lab and others has helped reveal the foundations of the evolution of social behavior through conserved “molecular toolkits.” This research has identified specific genes and neurogenomic pathways involved in regulating how individuals respond to social challenge and social opportunity across distantly related species, from honey bees to vertebrate animals, to humans. Since bees and humans have evolved social life independently, this means that these mechanisms have been repeatedly used during the evolution of complex social life. These studies demonstrate how social evolution can emerge not from entirely new biological machinery, but from the reorganization of ancestral molecular pathways. Honey bees thus provide us with both food for sustenance, and food for thought. 

Your research has explored the social behavior and communication of honey bees. What do bees reveal about the evolution of cooperation and collective decision-making? 

Honey bees live in complex societies, with numerous channels of communication to integrate the activity of individual society members. Research led by former postdoctoral associate Andrew Barron in my lab helped reveal the molecular foundations of the evolution of cooperation through a “me-to-we” framework, showing how mechanisms that originally evolved to regulate individual behavior can be co-opted to support social behavior. One striking example comes from studies of the famous honey bee dance language. Cocaine was administered, and whereas cocaine in humans and other animals enhances reward pathways linked to individual gratification (“me”), in honey bees it increases waggle dancing, a behavior used to communicate food location to nestmates (“we”). Following up on this, former postdoctoral associate Matt McNeill in my lab identified components of ancient neural reward systems—brain regions and genes—that mediate dance communication. These studies demonstrate how the reorganization of ancestral molecular pathways can shift behavioral priorities from individual survival and reproduction toward collective behavior and cooperation. 

Bees are often discussed in terms of crisis and decline. What’s one thing about bee resilience or adaptation that gives you hope right now? 

The evolution of resistance to Varroa destructor represents one of the clearest contemporary examples of honey bee resilience. Since the global spread of Varroa mites in recent decades, many managed and wild honey bee populations have experienced severe colony losses due to direct parasitism and transmission of debilitating viruses. Yet some populations have evolved behavioral and physiological mechanisms that improve survival under chronic mite pressure. These include enhanced grooming behavior, in which workers remove mites from themselves and nestmates, and hygienic behavior, in which workers detect and remove mite-infested brood before the mites can reproduce successfully. As scientists and bee breeders embrace the latest methods of CRISPR-assisted bee breeding, hope is building that resistant strains of honey bees can be efficiently produced and disseminated in the industry to improve the health of honey bee populations world-wide.