Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration

Bees are important pollinators. However, their numbers and diversity are in decline which poses a serious threat to plant pollination and affects food production. The Big-Bee project (http://big-bee.net) launched in 2021 to research bee ecology and taxonomy through the digitalization of bee specimens. Bees’ ocelli are important navigational organs that receive and evaluate light intensities. The project aims at exploring the impact of bees’ sociality on potential variation in ocelli morphology. By measuring median ocellar width between sexes, I firstly tested whether sexual size dimorphism occurs in ocelli between sexes in the same bee species. Then, I evaluated whether the sexual size dimorphism exists based on social versus solitary bees. The results indicated the existence of a different median ocellar size between males and females within one species. However, such existence does not occur in males and females based on sociality categorization, indicating the sociality might not be a driver in causing the dimorphism. This poster was presented at UC Santa Barbara Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities Poster Colloquim on May 3rd, 2022.