James Nieh

Professor and Vice Chair
Section of Ecology, Behavior and Evolution, UCSD

e-mail: jnieh@ucsd.edu
Lab Homepage: Nieh Lab

    Research in the Nieh lab focuses on the evolution of foraging communication and behavior in the social bees and on honey bee health. There are five different topic areas detailed below. For further information, please view the Nieh Lab Homepage.

		Evolution of communication      Social bees have evolved complex methods of communicating to recruit nestmates for resources. Our lab studies multiple bee groups: honey bees, stingless bees, and bumble bees to learn how this communication works and how it may have evolved.
		Honey Bee health      Concern is growing over pollinator declines. Our lab examines the effects of pesticides on honey bee health, focusing on how neonicotinoid pesticides such as imidacloprid affect foraging and orientation.
		Superorganism inhibitory communication       What happens if conditions change and the communicated food source becomes depleted, contested, or dangerous? The honey bee stop signal provides negative feedback that counteracts the positive feedback of honey bee waggle dances. Using field studies and mathematical models, we are studying this signal in detail and exploring conditions under which negative feedback signals may evolve.
		Olfactory eavesdropping and competition       What selective pressures have shaped bee recruitment communication? We study chemical espionage in stingless bees and the role this may have played in the evolution of potential "counter-espionage" strategies such as encoded communication inside the nest.
		Neuroethology of bee learning and memory       Despite their small brain size and limited number of neurons relative to the central nervous systems of many vertebrates, social insects have evolved sophisticated learning and memory abilities and are therefore important models for animal cognition.

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James Nieh Publication list

Nguyen, H., and Nieh, J. C. (2011) Colony and individual forager responses to food quality in the New World

Sánchez, D., Nieh, J. C., and Vandame, R. (2011) Visual and chemical cues provide redundant information in the multimodal recruitment system of the stingless bee Scaptotrigona mexicana (Apidae, Meliponini). Insectes Sociaux, in press.

Lichtenberg, E.M., Hrncir, M., and Nieh, J.C. (2011) Optimal eavesdropping by foraging stingless bees: empirical and theoretical support. Behavioral Ecol. Sociobiol. 65: 763-774.

Sadler, N. and Nieh, J. C. (2011) Honey bee forager thoracic temperature is tuned to broad scale differences in recruitment motivation. J. Exper. Biol.. 214: 469-475.

Johnson, B.R., Nieh, J.C. (2010) Modeling the adaptive role of negative signaling in honey bee intraspecific competition. J. Insect Behavior. 23: 459-471.

Ramírez, S.R., Nieh, J. C., Quental, T.B., Roubik, D.W., Imperatriz-Fonseca, V.L., and Pierce, N.E. (2010) Molecular phylogeny of the stingless bee genus Melipona (Hymenoptera: Apidae) and the evolution of recruitment communication in eusocial Apidae. Mol. Phylogenetic Evolution. 56: 519-525.

Nieh, J. C. (2010) A negative feedback signal that is triggered by peril curbs honey bee recruitment. Curr. Biol. 20: 310-315.

Lau, C.W. & Nieh, J.C. (2010) Honey bee stop signal production under overcrowded feeder conditions. Apidologie 41: 87-95.

Lichtenberg, E.M., Imperatriz-Fonseca†, V.L., and Nieh, J.C. (2010) Behavioral suites mediate group-level foraging dynamics in communities of tropical stingless bees. Insectes Sociaux 57: 105-113.

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   Dr. Nieh received his BA from Harvard in 1991 and his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1997. He completed a NSF-NATO postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Würzburg, Germany and was a Harvard Junior Fellow from 1998-2000.