In Darrell Moore's lab at East Tennessee State University in 2007, we wrapped up an interesting little project looking at what temporal information honey bees pay attention to when forming a time memory for food availability (Edge et al., 2011). We were using yellow squash flowers (Cucurbita pepo), which have a very stereotyped nectar pattern. Darrell suggested we look for a plant with a different temporal pattern of nectar secretion, so I started measuring sugar concentration in the nectar of nearby trumpet flowers (Capsis radicans). Andrea Edge then came on board, and she and I led this crazy, labor-intensive project over three years. The results turned out not to be anything close to what we expected. It turned into a very plant-centric study on speciation and pollination syndromes. After arriving at the University of Manitoba, Anne Worley, a true pollination ecologist came on board, and we finally made sense of the results. THIRTEEN years after we started, this thing is finally in press in Ecological Entomology.

Several months ago, I was asked by the editors of JUNE to submit a Technical Paper on how to train a honey bee. I have been using these training methods to lure forager honey bees to a distant artificial feeder for more than a decade. Once at the feeder, one can ask the bees to jump through hoops or memorize cues, and many sophisticated neuroethological questions can then be asked. Everything I know about training honey bees I learned from Dr. Darrell Moore at East Tennessee State University, so I invited him to write the paper with me. While these methods go back a century to the great bee scientist Prof. Karl von Frisch, Darrell has modernized and perfected the methods over the last few decades. Thus, he has at least as much ownership of these methods as I do, and for all his mentorship over the years, I was honored to coauthor this paper with him. We packed as many tips and tricks in as we could, along with the basic steps necessary for training bees, and we believe this Technical Paper may be helpful to people who have access to bees but do not know how to train them either for pedagogical or research purposes. 

This is my second pedagogical honey bee paper in JUNE this year. The first was "The olfactory proboscis extension response in the honey bee: a classroom exercise in classical conditioning" (J Undergrad Neurosci Educ 16: A168-A176).