Honey bee colony (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

Honey Bee Researcher Juliana Rangel Posada to Give Next ENT Seminar

She'll Speak on Protein-Lipid Regulation on Oct. 7

by Kathy Keatley Garvey
October 02, 2024

Juliana Rangel Posada, honey bee researcher

Juliana Rangel Posada of Texas A&M University (TAMU), an international leader in honey bee research, will speak on "Don't Compromise: Food Lipid Content Shapes Protein-Lipid Regulation in Honey Bee (Apis Mellifera) Nurses" at the next UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology (ENT) seminar.

Posada will deliver her seminar at 4:10 p.m., Monday, Oct. 7 in 122 Briggs Hall. Her lecture also will be on Zoom. The Zoom link: https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/95882849672.

"Regulating nutrient intake is a fundamental and multidimensional challenge for all animals," Posada says in her abstract. "Typically, animals prioritize macronutrient intake, and we know much about protein-carbohydrate regulation. In contrast, we know relatively little about protein-lipid regulation, especially among palynivores like bees that feed on food (pollen) that has high, but variable, protein and lipid content."

"Using a Geometric Framework or nutrition experimental approach, we show that nurse honey bees (Apis melliera) maximized their protein-lipid intake on diets that had a 3:2 protein:lipid ratio and that it was lowest on highly lipid-based diets," she continued. "In choice experiments with nutritionally complementary diets, bees self-selected a protein-based diet. However, total consumption was suppressed when a lipid-biased food was present. Our collective results suggest bees actively regular the intake of both protein and lipid, but that lipid regulation is particularly strict. Our findings have implications for honey bee and palynivore ecology, and nutritional ecology more broadly."

Doctorate from Cornell

Posada, a native of Colombia, South America, holds a bachelor's degree in ecology, behavior and evolution, cum laude (2004), from UC San Diego. She received her doctorate in neurobiology and behavior from Cornell University in 2010, studying with major professor Tom Seeley, and then served as a National Science Foundation biology postdoctoral fellow at North Carolina State University, Raleigh.

Posada joined the TAMU College of Agriculture and Life Sciences faculty in January 2013. She is active in the Texas Beekeepers Association and has addressed dozens of beekeeping associations across the United States and internationally. At TAMU, she teaches "Honey Bee Biology," "Introduction to Beekeeping," and "Professional Grant and Contract Writing."

In a 2017 interview with insectessociaux, when she was an assistant professor at TAMU, she related: "When I was an undergraduate student at the University of California, San Diego, I emailed Dr. James Nieh, who had just started his position as Assistant Professor in the unit of Ecology, Behavior and Evolution, which was also my major. Coming from Colombia, I wanted to get experience with research, especially in projects that were being conducted in the tropics. Coincidentally Dr. Nieh had a research project in Brazil studying communication mechanisms in stingless Melipona bees. I worked for a semester analysing sound pulses produced by Melipona mandaçaia foragers upon being trained to feeders… I really liked what I was doing! Then Dr. Nieh invited me to be his research assistant in Brazil working with actual colonies… the rest is history. I worked with stingless honey bees for the rest of my undergraduate years, and in 2004 I started a doctoral degree in the department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University still working with stingless bees. My project wasn’t going fast enough so a couple of years into it my Ph. D. advisor, Dr. Tom Seeley, suggested that I switched to working with Apis mellifera. I have worked on several research projects exploring various aspects of reproductive biology of queens and drones ever since, and I love it."

Miticide Effects

Posada and her research group at Texas A&M found that a widely used pesticide—the miticide amitraz—used to protect honey bees from mite infestation, has an effect on mating among the queens. (See Entomology Today, a publication of the Entomological Society of America)

The honey bee scientist received her college's Dean's Outstanding Achievement Award in 2023. Among her other awards:

2024 Association of Former Students Award for Teaching Excellence, College Level, TAMU
2023 Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching for Tenured-Tenure Track Faculty
2023 Excellence Achievement Award in Teaching, Southwestern Branch of the Entomological Society of America

Recent Publications

Among her recent publications:

Reams, T., Rueppell, O., & Rangel, J. (2024). Honey bee (Apis mellifera) nurse bee visitation of worker and drone larvae increases Varroa destructor mite cell invasion. Journal of Insect Science. 24(3), 16.

Dickey, M., Whilden, M., Ellis, J. T., & Rangel, J. (2023). A preliminary survey reveals that common viruses are found at low titers in a wild population of honey bees (Apis mellifera). Journal of Insect Science. 23(6), 26.

Rangel, J., Lau, P., Strauss, B., Hildinger, E., Hernandez, B., Rodriguez, S., Bryant, V., & Tarone, A. M. (2023). Pollen associated with a Texas population of blow flies-(Diptera: Calliphoridae) highlights underappreciated aspects of their biology. Ecological Entomology.

Powell, J. E., Lau, P., Rangel, J., Arnott, R., De Jong, T., & Moran, N. A. (2023). The microbiome and gene expression of honey bee workers are affected by a diet containing pollen substitutes.PLoS ONE. 18(5), e0286070-e0286070.

Nematologist Amanda Hodson, assistant professor, is coordinating the ENT seminars. The full list is here. For more information or for technical issues, contact Hodson at akhodson@ucdavis.edu.

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