This is the second short news article written by students, during the professional development class of Spring 2025, about each other's research.
Student Spotlight: Marie Muñiz
By Quinn Hankinson
When it comes to highly specialized skill sets, not all bees are created equally. Even honey bees look on in awe at the adeptness of buzz pollinators, who pollinate more than 20,000 species of flowering plants. These plants include important agricultural crops such as tomatoes, blueberries, and kiwi.
Buzz pollination is a behavior utilized by bees in over 70 genera to pollinate plants with poricidal anthers. These structures pack in pollen that can only be released by a strategic disturbance. A buzz pollinator can achieve this by grasping onto the anthers of a targeted flower and rapidly contracting its flight muscles, creating powerful vibrations that dislodge the pollen. Previous research has shown that when certain crops, such as tomatoes, are buzz-pollinated, it results in bigger, juicier fruits.
While highly advantageous, “buzz pollination is an energetically costly behavior that heats up the internal temperature of the bee,” explains Marie Muñiz, a graduate student in Assistant Professor Heather Grab's Applied Systems Ecology research group at Penn State. Bees pollinating crops are exposed to two stressors that might negatively impact buzz pollination. First, they can be exposed to pesticides that are used to control pests on crops. Second, the frequency, intensity, and duration of heat waves is increasing, and so bees may need to perform heat-generating behaviors under hot conditions.
Muñiz was inspired to investigate the interactive effects of heat and pesticide stress on buzz pollination. Previous research suggests that when buzz pollinators are exposed to neonicotinoid pesticides, buzz pollination is inhibited and bees collect less pollen.
“There's also the possibility that hindered buzz pollination could affect the quality of fruits in specialty crops like tomatoes,” says Muñiz.
To test this association, Muñiz will expose bumble bees to pesticides via neonicotinoid-laden pollen and simulate heat waves using a controlled heated foraging chamber. The bees will then be offered tomato flowers. To monitor a bee's buzz pollination effort, the Insect Eavesdropper, a device originally designed to detect the presence of insect pests, will be used to record buzz vibrations. Tomato plants will then be grown to produce fruit, which will be assessed for quality.
Muñiz notes that, "understanding how animal behavior is changing as a result of anthropogenic stressors is crucial for conservation efforts, and in the case of buzz pollinators, can have cascading effects to the quality of our fruit crops."
Marie Muñiz is a MS student in the research group of Heather Grab in the Department of Entomology at Penn State University. Muñiz's research is support by funding from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE1255832. Muñiz is also a Trainee in the “Interdisciplinary Studies in Entomology, Computer Science and Engineering Network” (INSECT NET) graduate training program, which is funded by the National Science Foundation Research Traineeship Program (Award Number (FAIN): 2243979, PI Grozinger).
