![]() ![]() One of Combes’ graduate students, James Crall, was using radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags to monitor the behavior of bees. He assumed that he’d be investigating dragonflies, which was what his first graduate advisor, Stacey Combes, concentrated on. Nor did he plan on studying bees when he came to Harvard in 2012 (after graduating from Gonzaga University in 2010 and spending two years teaching middle school science in Gallup, New Mexico-“the hardest thing I ever did,” he claims). As a kid growing up in Bozeman, Montana, he didn’t give much thought to bees, which can be found throughout his home state and, indeed, on every continent save for Antarctica. ![]() An Increasing Preoccupationīut Switzer wasn’t always so entranced with members of the Apidae family. He’s even taken up leather craft as a hobby, currently making a belt that has six different bees and flowers carved into the sides. He wore a T-shirt that said “The Bee Course,” referring to a nine-day workshop he attended in Arizona. ![]() During an interview with this magazine in June, Switzer spoke nonstop about bees for several hours straight with no ostensible waning in enthusiasm. It doesn’t take long to sense an obsessive quality to his labors. Switzer, for one, finds the bee’s tactic fascinating, both from a biomechanical point of view and from the standpoint of adaptation and evolution. While the bees gather pollen in this way, some of those precious grains may inadvertently be delivered to the female stigma of another flower, allowing the plant to reproduce by making seeds. Bumblebees accomplish this by grabbing the anthers with their bodies and mandibles (or jaws) and then creating a “buzz”-vibrating themselves at the right frequency until the pollen comes free. His research is centered on “buzz pollination”-an unusual method by which bumblebees and other select bee species liberate pollen from a flower’s male anther in order to amass food for their respective colonies. For Switzer, these early measurements laid the foundation for his subsequent PhD work, which he expects to wrap up in spring 2017. ![]()
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