About Associate Professor Madeleine Beekman
I have always been intrigued by why animals (including humans) behave the way they do. By studying the way insect societies work I hope to understand how societies evolve and what makes them stable.
Madeleine is interested in behavioural ecology in general and uses social insects (ants and bees) as model systems.
My main research interests are reproductive conflict in honey bees and the organisation of work in insect colonies. I do a lot of fieldwork in South Africa and Thailand. I get great pleasure out of working in the field and observing the bees. In South Africa I work on a rare race of honeybee, the Cape honeybee Apis mellifera capensis. This bee is special as its workers can produce clones of themselves and this allows them to become social parasites of other bee colonies. Previously I have shown that worker-larvae elicit extra feeding from host workers. Because larval feeding affects an individual’s reproductive capacities, receiving more than one’s fair share allows the parasitic workers to develop the queen-like characters they need to exploit their host. This was an important contribution because it was previously assumed that larvae of social insects cannot influence their own feeding regime as they depend on nurse workers (larvae of social insects are leg-less grubs). More recently we found that workers of the Cape honeybee contribute significantly to the production of new queens. Hence, in genetical terms the workers are reincarnated as queens because the queens are their clonal daughters.
My other major contribution is in nest-site selection in honeybees. Honeybees need to find a new nest-site after the colony has produced a reproductive swarm. A swarm clusters a few tens of metres from the mother-colony and scout bees then begin searching the environment for suitable nest sites for the colony’s new home. Only about 5% of all the bees in the swarm are involved in the decision-making process, while the rest remain quiescent within the cluster. Successful scouts report the location of suitable sites to other bees by performing communication dances on the surface of the swarm cluster and recruit others to visit their discovery. Recently I hypothesized that the unique dance language of the honeybee has evolved to allow the bees to select a new nest-site. Currently we are comparing the use of the dance language between the cavity-nesting honeybee Apis mellifera and the open-nesting species A. florea. Luckily the latter species lives in Thailand, and this allows me to have 2 field seasons in one year, as I can spend Australian winter in Thailand.
I often collaborate with mathematicians and computer scientist and together we translate our field or lab observations into mathematical models.
Selected publications
- Hughes WO, Oldroyd BP, Beekman M, Ratnieks FL. (2008) Ancestral monogamy shows kin selection is key to the evolution of eusociality. Science 320:1213-6. PMID: 18511689 A comparative analysis that shows that high relatedness was most likely essential to the evolution of sociality in the Hymenoptera.
- Jordan LA, Allsopp MH, Oldroyd BP, Wossler TC & Beekman M. 2008 Cheating workers produce royal offspring. Proceedings of the Royal Society London B: 275: 345-351. PMID: 18048282 This is the first study to investigate the maternity of new queens produced by colonies of the Cape honey bee. We revealed that the majority of new queens are clonal offspring of workers, most of which were shown to be social parasites.
- Beekman M, Fathke RL & Seeley TD. 2005 How does an informed minority of scouts guide a honey bee swarm as it flies to its new home? Animal Behaviour: 71(1): 161-171. In this paper we designed an innovative experimental protocol to determine the mechanism by which honeybee scouts lead a swarm of uninformed bees.
- Beekman M, Komdeur J & Ratnieks FLW. 2003 Reproductive conflicts in social animals: who has power? Trends in Ecology and Evolution. 18 (6): 277-282. Here we bring together all social animals, from invertebrates to mammals, and use a unifying concept to understand conflict over reproduction among group members.
- Sumpter DJT & Beekman M. 2003 From non-linearity to optimality: pheromone trail foraging by ants. Animal Behaviour. 66 (2): 273-280. This paper is a rare example of where a collaboration between a mathematician and a biologist led to a thorough understanding of the problem under study, in this case of the organization of foraging in a social insect.
- Calis JNM, Boot WJ, Allsopp MH & Beekman M. 2002 Getting more than a fair share: Nutrition of worker larvae related to social parasitism in the Cape honey bee Apis mellifera capensis. Apidologie. 33: 193-202. We describe how larvae of the Cape honeybee manipulate nurse workers into feeding them better.
- Martin SJ, Beekman M, Wossler TC & Ratnieks FLW. 2002 Parasitic Cape honey bee workers, Apis mellifera capensis, evade policing. Nature 415: 163-165. PMID: 11805832 Here we show that parasitic Cape honeybee workers evade an essential safety mechanism of their host colony by laying eggs that are not recognized as worker-laid.
- Beekman M, Sumpter DJ & Ratnieks FLW. 2001 Phase transition between disordered and ordered foraging in Pharaohs’ ants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America 98 (17): 9703-9706. PMID: 11493681 This paper shows the first phase transition in a biological system.
- Beekman M, Calis J N M & Boot WJ. 2000 Parasitic honey bees get royal treatment. Nature 404:723. PMID: 10783876 This paper is the first ever to show that larvae can, and indeed do, manipulate nurse workers to their own advantage.
- Beekman M & van Stratum P. 1998 Bumblebee sex ratios: Why do bumblebees produce so many males? Proceedings of the Royal Society of London series B. 265: 1535-1543. Previous authors had claimed that bumblebee sex ratios do not fit theoretical predictions but our empirical and modeling work showed that bumblebee sex ratios perfectly fit theoretical predictions.