The natural world has had billions of years of evolution to perfect systems, creating elegant solutions to tricky problems.
The natural world has had billions of years of evolution to perfect systems, creating elegant solutions to tricky problems. CU Boulder Assistant Professor Orit Peleg’s work hopes to illuminate and explore those solutions with the long-term goal of applying the answers she finds to the materials we interact with daily.
Her most recent research with bees, recently published in Nature Physics, is a small step toward that goal. The project looked at the honeybee cluster swarms that hang in cone shapes from tree branches and are made up of hundreds of individual insects clinging to one another. While these swarms are hundreds of times the size of a single organism, the individual bees that comprise it are able to maintain the structure’s stability despite wind and gravity forcing changes in the overall shape.
Peleg, who is based in the Computer Science Department and the BioFrontiers Institute at CU Boulder, conducted the research during her time as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard in 2017. She said the use of bees for the project “was a bit crazy,” but presented a good opportunity to work more on modeling and testing these types of systems at a low cost and with relatively simple imaging equipment.
“It is a good way to connect experiments to theory and go back and forth until we have a good understanding of the system,” she said.
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