Please join us on for our next meeting to be held on Sunday 5 Nov 2023 from 1—3 pm AEST (Qld) / 2—4 PM AEDT (NSW/ Vic)

ATTEND in person or by Zoom

All are welcome to attend in person at Bulimba Community Centre, 1 Barramul St, Bulimba, Brisbane. Free for members, $5 for non-members.

ANBA members can attend by Zoom, a link to join will be sent by email about 3 days prior to the event.

The guest speaker will Dr Lisa Evans speaking on the topic: Town bee, country bee: how does environmental complexity affect learning performance in bees?

Did you know that bees can learn? We know that many insects are capable of modifying their behaviour based on past experience – and bumble bees show variation in learning potential between individuals within a colony, and between independent colonies. The evolutionary drivers for this variation are unclear – fast learning bees don’t always do a better job at supporting their colonies. We have investigated whether response to varied environmental complexity maintains this diversity of learning potential in a multi-year field study funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden Fund.

Dr. Lisa Evans is a research scientist with the New Zealand Institute for Plant & Food Research. She leads the Pollination Ecology science team, working on crop pollination, pollinator management, and insect behaviour in both Australia and New Zealand. Lisa’s particular areas of interest are delivering reliable crop pollination in protected growing environments (netting and glasshouses) and the foraging behaviour of bees.