Hollis Woodard sees bumblebees as the pandas of the insect world.
“They are a very charismatic bee,” she said. “They are big and chunky and fuzzy. They move kind of slow, so you can watch them bumbling around. People are pretty attracted to them.”
But what fascinates Woodard about bumblebees goes beyond their endearing fuzziness. As an assistant professor of entomology at the University of California, Riverside, she studies bumblebees in the lab and tracks them in extreme environments from the Alaskan tundra to the Sonoran desert.
Woodard is exploring how bumblebees evolved their social behaviors. She is also monitoring how these bees are faring as climate change transforms their habitats. And she is providing insights about what we can do to protect these pollinators and the crucial part they play in our food supply.
HOOKED ON CLASSICS
Woodard was born in the Outer Banks of North Carolina and grew up in Ocean Isle Beach, a small coastal town near the South Carolina border. It was a poor area with pig farms and tobacco fields dotting the surrounding countryside. Her mother was a special education teacher, and her father was a banker.
As a girl, she showed few signs of the biologist she would become.
“I don’t think anyone would have met me as a kid and said, ‘This girl is going to turn out to be a scientist,’ ” Woodard observed. “I was a bit wild. I was interested in running around outside and looking at things, but I wasn’t interested in a formal way.”
Her reading tended toward classic English literature. Jane Eyre was her favorite book and English was her favorite subject in school. “I was really into literature and writing,” she said. “The fact that there are metaphors within things and they have deeper meanings has stuck with me.”
Science classes, on the other hand, “didn’t inspire anything in me,” she said.
She had plenty of ideas about what career she might pursue. “I wanted to be a veterinarian and a writer and all kinds of different things,” she remembered. “That idea of having no clue of what I wanted to be was with me through college. I switched my major six or seven times.”
EVOLVING INTERESTS
For her undergraduate studies, Woodard chose a nearby college, the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She started with the idea of studying English or literature. Then she got interested in history. Her parents were both history buffs, and her older brother was getting a degree in history. Later she switched to anthropology.
In her second year of college, she began reading popular-science books, including works by evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould and astrophysicist Carl Sagan. But it was a book by E.O Wilson, the world’s leading expert on ants, that marked a turning point for her. “He was the person whose work spoke to me and got me interested in social insects,” she said.
Woodard began taking biology classes. “I was really interested in how things evolve to be social, from a human to an ant to a bee,” she said. She received her bachelor’s degree in biology and anthropology in 2005.
BITTEN BY THE ENTOMOLOGY BUG
Another turning point came when Woodard read a paper titled “Sociogenomics: Social Life in Molecular Terms” by Dr. Gene Robinson, an entomologist at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“There are always things floating around in my head that I am interested in,” she said. “I read this paper, and everything clicked. I knew I wanted to work on molecular basis of social behavior in bees.” She headed to Urbana-Champaign to pursue her PhD. Robinson, known for his role in sequencing the honeybee genome, became her adviser.
Why bees? “I just really like them,” Woodard said. “There’s some sort of affinity there. I think they’re really cute.”
But beyond that, they piqued her scientific curiosity. “They have evolved sociality multiple times, whereas ants or termites have evolved sociality just one time,” she explained. “Does this evolution occur the same way each time?”
For her PhD research, Woodard analyzed genetic sequences of various bee species to look for changes that might account for their differences in social behavior.
She also experimented with live bees kept in colony boxes in the lab. “The idea was that we could compare patterns of gene expression to find out how sociality operates,” she said. “Maybe we can compare what is going on in the brain of a queen bee and a worker bee.”
At first Woodard worked with honeybees, but she found herself drawn to their wild cousins, the bumblebees.
Bumblebees differ from honeybees in several ways. Honeybees live in hives tended by human keepers. Bumblebees live mostly in the wild in much smaller colonies. We tend to think of honeybees as key pollinators, but bumblebees are important pollinators, too, for crops ranging from hothouse tomatoes to apples, berries, and cranberries.
To learn how to handle bumblebees in the lab, Woodard made the trek to Israel to study with Dr. Guy Bloch, a bumblebee expert at Hebrew University.
BEES IN TROUBLE
Woodard got her PhD in Biology in 2012 and then began a postdoctoral program with Dr. Shalene Jha, a conservation biologist at the University of Texas, Austin.
Woodard received a U.S. Department of Agriculture fellowship to study how bumblebees are responding as human activities alter the landscape. “We have turned a lot of habitat into other things, so it doesn’t provide them with the food they need,” she said. “We need to know more about what type of food they need, how much they need. . . and how we should be managing resources for bees out in the wild.”
Up to that point in her career, Woodard hadn’t thought much about the challenges facing women in science.
“When I was getting into science, all my mentors and everyone whose books I was reading and who I wanted to emulate—they were all men,” she noted. “But honestly, that never occurred to me . . . I was in a bubble because my adviser was a strong proponent of women.”
But working with Jha led Woodard to think more about the need to encourage female researchers. “She is a huge advocate for women in the field – she’s really thinking about it and talking about it,” Woodard said. “So that’s when it really clicked in my mind and I became proactive about it.”
A BEE HOTSPOT
In 2015, Woodard joined the Entomology Department at UC Riverside. She was drawn to the campus because of the strength of its entomology program, recently ranked No. 2 in the world by the Center for World University Rankings.
But beyond that, Woodard noted, the Southwest Desert is a “bee hotspot.” “There’s just a ton of weird bees that live in the desert,” she said. “It’s like a playground for bees.”
At UC Riverside, Woodard has continued her lab studies on the evolution and social behavior of bumblebees. She and her lab team also go into the field frequently to collect data on how bumblebees are responding to the warming of their environments. Her fieldwork caught the attention of The New York Times, which chronicled her expedition to Alaska in 2016 in search of the elusive Arctic bumblebee.
See WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM BEES IN EXTREME ENVIRONMENTS (below) for more on Hollis Woodard’s research.
And what about the obvious occupational hazard of Woodard’s work? She is allergic to honeybee stings, but bumblebee stings don’t faze her. “It’s not uncommon to get stung every day or every couple of days,” she said. “Everyone laughs at me because when I get stung, I say, ‘Oh, a bee stung me.’ Other people jump up and down.”
THE ART OF COMMUNICATION
Woodard’s lab group is made up mostly of women. “A lot of the female students seem really motivated,” she said. “We are a very supportive lab. We are mostly young women, and everyone is really driven.”
The lab’s website chronicles the group’s research with stunning photos and videos of bees and their habitats. Lab members also share their exploits on Twitter and Instagram. Woodard believes it’s important these days for scientists to communicate clearly about their work.
“I really want people to understand why the work we do is important,” she said. “We all feel this urge right now to communicate with people and to make things clear. Everyone in the lab is on the exact same page about it.”
Woodard’s husband is a curator of cactus and succulents at the Botanic Gardens at UC Riverside. They share their home and 1½-acre property with four Australian cattle dogs – perhaps not a surprising arrangement for a scientist fascinated by social behavior.
“I tell everyone that has just one dog that they need another one,” she said. “Now I have a pack.”
Watch a video on Hollis Woodard’s bee-hunting expedition to Alaska.
