Assistant professor of biology and animal behavior

Hot summer days finds bees buzzing around the blooms and swarming around their hives. Everybody's familiar with such scenes, but most people probably don't know that bees need practice flights to learn how to find their way from their hives to their food sources and back again.

For that knowledge we can thank Elizabeth Capaldi, director of the university's highly acclaimed animal behavior program. An expert in invertebrate behavior, she has shown through her research that even though bees' brains are tiny, they can learn by doing, and can process and store complex information.

"The main question I'm interested in is, how do animals get around in the world - and bees are a good model for that kind of behavior," Capaldi says. "Through my research, I'm trying to find out what common strategies insects use to solve these basic problems, whether there are relationships between the structure of their brains and their ability to solve problems, and if invertebrate brains work like vertebrate brains."

Capaldi conducts her research in central Pennsylvania as well as in Panama as a Smithsonian fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI).

Teaching areas

• Animal Behavior
• Social Insect Biology
• Tropical Ecology
• Neuroethology
• General Biology

Research interests

• Neuroethology
• Studies of the insect brain
• Studies of honey bee biology, including harmonic radar
• Comparative studies of tropical bees, brains, and behaviors
• Native bee distributions in Pennsylvania

Recent publications

• Sullivan, J.P., Fahrbach, S.E., Harrison, J.F., Capaldi, E.A., Fewell, J.H. and G.E. Robinson. 2003. Juvenile hormone and division of labor in honey bee colonies: Effects of allatectomy on flight behavior and metabolism. Journal of Experimental Biology 206: 2287-96.
• Capaldi, E.A., A.D. Smith, J.L. Osborne, S.E. Fahrbach, S.M. Farris, A.S. Edwards, D.R. Reynolds, A. Martin, G.E. Robinson, G. Poppy, and J.R. Riley. 2000. Ontogeny of orientation flight in the honeybee revealed by harmonic radar. Nature 403: 537-540.
• Capaldi, E.A. & F.C. Dyer, 1999. The role of orientation flights on homing performance in honey bees. J. Exp. Biol. 202: 1655-1666.
• Giurfa, M. & E.A. Capaldi, 1999. Vectors, routes and maps: new findings about navigation in insects. Trends in Neurosciences 22(6): 237-242.
• Capaldi, E.A., G.E. Robinson, & S.E. Fahrbach, 1999. Neuroethology of spatial learning: the birds and the bees. Ann. Rev. Psych. 50: 651-682.

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