HMC BeeLab

hmcbee.blogspot.com

When new students pick up an old coding project, the transition isn't always smooth. Before they can begin, they need to learn things like the unix command line, snakemake & managing dependencies. Sometimes that takes the whole semester! https://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-riveting-tale-of-why-it-doesnt-work.html
The bad news? It takes longer to get to the fun part: computer vision & machine learning! The good news? They learn a ton along the way, and figure out ways to make the process smoother for the next students.

hmcbee.blogspot.com

When using computer vision to extract info from biological images, color is useful, but doesn't capture everything we'd like to know: e.g. how can we tell these California buckwheat flowers from similar-colored rocks on the ground? In his latest blog post, Berlin explains how to calculate texture features & what they reveal https://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2021/12/that-looks-rough-extracting-texture.html

Honey bees dance to tell *each other* where to find food, but we've got a lot to learn from watching their dances too! Annabelle explains the waggle dance and how scientists use it to learn about bees & their environment in this new blog post: https://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2021/12/why-boogie-when-you-can-waggle.html

Are you interested in open data science and reproducible workflows? A common Python-based tool that many bioinformaticians use is called Snakemake. Learn how it allocates computational resources in an efficient & scalable way -- and what that has to do with knapsacks -- in Adam's new blog post: https://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2021/12/snake-in-knapsack.html

What does it take to keep an ant colony happy and well-fed? Katie walks us through a day in her job as an ant caterer: https://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2021/11/my-job-as-ant-caterer.html (Hint: it requires a lot of dexterity with a paintbrush!)

You may think of ants as picnic thieves, but many ants are actually farmers! Some species tend flocks of aphids & protect them from hungry predators. Learn more about how the ants & their aphid-cows interact in Fletcher's latest blog post: https://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2021/11/ant-macdonald-had-farm.html

Designing Networks for Geometric, Spatial, and Destination Comprehension

If you were making a map of a tree branch, how would you label each junction? What naming scheme would be most intuitive? In his blog post, Carter explains how the answer depends on your perspective, and the purpose of the map: http://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2021/08/designing-networks-for-geometric.html?m=1

Designing Networks for Geometric, Spatial, and Destination Comprehension A blog about social insect behavior, especially ants & honeybees, including field ecology, computer vision, and mathematical and simulation models.

This summer we constructed tree-like mazes for our turtle ants to explore. Cat writes about her work using computer vision to reliably & consistently detect all the branching points in the maze, so we can figure out where the ants are going -- and hopefully why. https://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2021/07/detecting-y-shaped-junctions-with.html

Once you start thinking about networks, it seems like they are everywhere you look. Why is that? Summer research student Kenneth blogs about how a summer of immersion in ant networks led him to see human language and the brain in a new way: https://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2021/07/its-small-world-network.html (Image: Ant movement model network by Kenneth Mitchell)

How can you tell a bee from a fly dressed up in a bee costume (a bee-mimicking fly)? It's pretty hard, but Fletcher offers some tips from their summer research experience: https://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2021/07/a-fly-in-bees-clothing.html (original art below by Fletcher Nickerson)

In the bee lab, we've been studying how arboreal turtle ants collectively choose where to nest (hint: location matters). For this summer's project the students designed & built a tree-like ant maze. Read Simon's story about the process and product: https://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2021/07/we-make-trees-for-ants.html

Trees may not have bones, but they do have skeletons! Lab member Ria explains how to go from a laser-scanned point cloud representing a tree to a skeleton describing its structure in the latest HMC Bee Lab blog post: http://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2021/07/skeletonization-of-trees.html We're interested in this because if we can describe the structure of the trees our ants live in, we can better understand how they move through those trees and where they choose to nest. (Figure from Du et al. Remote Sens. 2019, 11(18), 2074; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11182074.)

A few weeks ago, the HMC Bee Lab received 10 new packages of bees in boxes, and we set them up in empty hives. What have they accomplished since then? In her latest blog post, Morgan tells the story of how the bees set up house in their new hive, and learn to get along with their new queen: http://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2021/05/uneasy-lies-head-that-wears-crown.html

Two steps forward, one step back: reverse evolution in turtle ants

What does an ant colony have in common with a chess set? Read more in rising junior math major David Pitt’s new blog post about the evolution of turtle ant soldiers’ armored heads: http://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2021/05/two-steps-forward-one-step-back-reverse.html

Two steps forward, one step back: reverse evolution in turtle ants A blog about social insect behavior, especially ants & honeybees, including field ecology, computer vision, and mathematical and simulation models.

Biologists Explore How Human Networks Can Be Made Ant-like | College News | Harvey Mudd College

Did you know that ants build transportation networks that are a bit like subway systems? Engineers have long been inspired by invasive Argentine ants, which build low-cost networks that are highly susceptible to disruption. Could studying other species, like wood ants and turtle ants, help inspire new, more flexible algorithms for network design? https://www.hmc.edu/about-hmc/2021/05/12/biologists-explore-how-human-networks-can-be-made-ant-like/

Biologists Explore How Human Networks Can Be Made Ant-like | College News | Harvey Mudd College Ant behavior has been a source of inspiration since at least the time of Aesop, and 2,500 years later, it appears these insects still have a certain kind of wisdom to impart—perhaps to engineers building subways. “Each individual ant doesn’t know much about the world beyond her own antennae,.....

The HMC Bee Lab's got bees! This summer, postdoctoral researcher Morgan Carr-Markell will be starting up a new series of experiments with honey bees. In her latest blog post, she tells the story of bringing home 100,000 bees and placing them in their new hives:
https://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2021/05/when-youve-only-got-hundred-thousand.html

You might know that colors can be represented as RGB (red-green-blue) and HSV (hue-saturation-value), but do you know when to use one or the other for computer vision? Did you know there are lots of other ways to represent color too? Read more in the new blog post by Catherine: "Painting a picture of color spaces" https://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2021/05/painting-picture-of-color-spaces.html

Improving Ant Tracking Software: Now with a Partner!

Students in the lab are working on software to detect ants moving across regions of a video marked in red. In today's blog post, Josh writes about why having a partner is so awesome: you consider more ideas & justify your choices.

Improving Ant Tracking Software: Now with a Partner! A blog about social insect behavior, especially ants & honeybees, including field ecology, computer vision, and mathematical and simulation models.

Many ants build amazing & super complex nest structures. How do they keep them just the right temperature? Find out more in Fletcher’s latest blog post: https://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2021/03/its-alive-microorganisms-ants-and-their.html (Image credit: Michal Kukla)

Engineering “with” Ants

This semester we have a new research student "in the lab": a first-year student who has yet to come to Harvey Mudd College. He's designed & built some cool play structures for ants, which I'm now testing out with the ants in my kitchen http://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2020/12/engineering-with-ants.html The ants & I hope to meet him soon! 🤞

hmcbee.blogspot.com A blog about social insect behavior, especially ants & honeybees, including field ecology, computer vision, and mathematical and simulation models.

What is an individual and how do we find them?

What is a biological individual? Is an ant colony an individual in the same way an ant is? Read Miguel's new blog post for a new perspective on this topic, from the mathematical theory of information: http://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2020/12/what-is-individual-and-how-do-we-find.html. In it, he summarizes a new paper from David Krakauer & colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute & the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences.

hmcbee.blogspot.com A blog about social insect behavior, especially ants & honeybees, including field ecology, computer vision, and mathematical and simulation models.

New blog post from junior neuroscience major Tristan! Did you ever wonder how ant brains can accomplish so much with so little? Read more about ants’ amazing navigation skills and the neurobiology behind them here: https://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2020/11/ant-navigation-big-functionality-in.html

What I learned from watching 900 minutes of ant videos

This summer we couldn’t do new lab experiments, so Fletcher watched videos of old ones & learned a lot in the process. Read about jumping ants & more in their new blog post: http://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2020/10/what-i-learned-from-watching-900.html

hmcbee.blogspot.com A blog about social insect behavior, especially ants & honeybees, including field ecology, computer vision, and mathematical and simulation models.

The newest Harvey Mudd Magazine features a spread on the HMC Bee Lab, including many former & current lab members as well as one forever lab member. Congratulations to Arya and Elena, at left, who are graduating this weekend! https://magazine.hmc.edu/spring-2020/social-animalia/

Argentine Ants: Appearances Can Be Deceiving

Argentine ants: what makes these seemingly nondescript little ants so incredibly invasive? HMC BeeLab member Tristan writes about them in his latest student blog post: https://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2020/04/argentine-ants-appearances-can-be.html (Photo from http://alexanderwild.com, of course)

hmcbee.blogspot.com A blog about social insect behavior, especially ants & honeybees, including field ecology, computer vision, and mathematical and simulation models.

A Deadication to Tidy Graveyards

Did you know that ants make graveyards? Learn more about this creepy-yet-fascinating behavior in Nora's new blog post: http://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2020/01/a-deadication-to-tidy-graveyards.html

hmcbee.blogspot.com A blog about social insect behavior, especially ants & honeybees, including field ecology, computer vision, and mathematical and simulation models.

Good bye awesome summer research team: Tom, Kate, Macallan, Jarred and Marylin! So long, and thanks for all the ants!

When honey bees go shopping, what sorts of stores do they prefer? Macallan writes about the field research she did to answer this question in her recent blog post: http://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-bee-nanza-of-data-collection-in.html

The Politics of Ants

How do ant queens cultivate and maintain the loyalty of their workers? What happens to their rivals? Read about the politics & intrigue of ant royalty, in Kate's new blog post. (Photo copyright of Alex Wild.)

hmcbee.blogspot.com A blog about social insect behavior, especially ants & honeybees, including field ecology, computer vision, and mathematical and simulation models.

What do ant colonies and subway systems have in common? Traffic flow! This summer, we've been exploring how ants alter traffic in response to changes in the structure of their substrate. Rising sophomore Jarred writes about his work using computer vision to automate detection of regions of interest in videos, so we can quantify ant traffic along specified paths.
http://hmcbee.blogspot.com/2019/07/finding-regions-of-interest-in-ant.html

Biology with a Side of Engineering

Right now, turtle ants in the HMC Bee lab are exploring this complex playground, choosing nests & building a transportation network between them. Engineering student Marylin Roque '21 describes the iterative design process that produced it.

hmcbee.blogspot.com A blog about social insect behavior, especially ants & honeybees, including field ecology, computer vision, and mathematical and simulation models.

How We Found and Collected Turtle Ants in the Florida Keys

To kick off Summer Research, three Bee Lab members came with me to the Florida Keys to collect turtle ants. Collaborator Scott Powell led us on a 12-day quest for our elusive subjects. Read all about it in Tom's new student blog post!

hmcbee.blogspot.com A blog about social insect behavior, especially ants & honeybees, including field ecology, computer vision, and mathematical and simulation models.

The Benefits of Masquerading as an Ant

Ants are everywhere -- and so are ant mimics! The picture below is of an ant and a spider... can you tell which is which? Read Elena's new blog post about why spiders, caterpillars, beetles, & many more masquerade as ants. (Photo by Alex Wild)

hmcbee.blogspot.com A blog about social insect behavior, especially ants & honeybees, including field ecology, computer vision, and mathematical and simulation models.