Student Stories
Daniel Najera
Lawrence, Kan.
Doctoral student, entomology
“To have funds handed to me because someone is interested in the generation of new knowledge really energizes me. When someone gives you money because of an idea you’ve had, you don’t want to let anyone down.”
Everyone knows bees are busy, but research at KU is revealing that they’re also surprisingly smart. Daniel Najera studies honeybees’ ability to link concepts of physical location, time of day and sequence of events.
“This organism makes honey, which is a lot of work,” Najera said. “Its survival depends on intelligence. Bees must know where food is all day long.”
Najera leads a group of students working with Rudolf Jander, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, to test bees’ cognitive abilities. To do this, they manipulate feeding stations. If they move a station in a repeated pattern through several days, the bees learn to predict the pattern. Similarly, they’ve discovered that bees can work out the more complex interactions of multiple factors, such as location plus odor plus time of day.
Najera says the work helps lay a foundation for understanding how neural networks operate.
“We don’t know how nervous systems work,” he said. “It’s one of the top four or five gaps in human knowledge. How do you generate the concept of physical pain? We have no clue. Let alone love, grief, things like that.”
Two KU Endowment scholarships have supported Najera’s work over summer sessions: the R.H. Beamer Scholarship and the John M. Deal Scholarship.