Meeting 1209 Minutes

Minutes from the 1209th Meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club

President Sang il Kim called the 1209th meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club to order at 7:35pm on Tuesday March 9th 2021. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the meeting was held on Zoom. Approx. 37 members and guests were in attendance.

New business: The April meeting was cancelled.

President Sang sent a notice requesting nominations for Club officers for 2021-2022.

Old business None

Our speaker was Dr.Jake Peters, postdoctoral research fellow in the Collective Embodied Intelligence Lab in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Cornell University.

Jake discussed several of his investigations into the behavioral mechanisms that enable honeybee colonies to coordinate their collective physiological responses and control their microenvironment through indirect communication (stigmergy).

Examples include:

Temperature control. Bees “fan” their wings to ventilate their nest in response to stale air or warm temperatures and in cool conditions, they shiver to warm the nest.

Swarming. During swarming, bees locate and congregate around their queen through a scent-fanning behavior that creates an odor plume

(which is difficult to track under experimental conditions).

Adaptation to weather conditions. In an experiment meant to mimic windy conditions, Jake devised a moving platform and found that bee swarms can change their collective shape to maintain stability, successful for horizontal perturbations but not so much vertical ones.

The meeting was adjourned at 8:46pm.

Respectfully submitted, Andrea Golden, CEC Secretary