Our speaker will be Dr. Boris Baer of UC Riverside. The topic will be The Crazy Sex Life of Social Insects.

Boris says “We have studied social insect reproduction for several decades, and every time we look more closely, we uncover something new— from sperm competition and the remarkable long-term sperm storage of queens to the ways males physiologically influence queens. Our latest work on how honey bee societies ear their future queens provides just another example of that story.”

Boris uses honeybees, leaf cutting ants and bumblebees to study aspects of social insect reproduction and immunity. He takes an integrative approach, which combines biochemical technologies such as proteomics and evolutionary biology. The goal is to help building a new field of research, referred to as evolutionary proteomics. Evolutionary proteomics will not only aim to understand evolutionary processes at the protein level, but will also attempt to quantify variations in proteomic profiles and investigate their consequences for natural and sexual selection.