My Journey with Bees

I was born and raised in a remote area of Colombia, a country renowned for its biodiversity as well as its political challenges. I earned my BS in Biology from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá. During my first semester, I joined the Bee Lab led by Guiomar Nates, who introduced me to bees. Struggling to identify the Colombian bees, I reached out to Charles Michener, who, despite being retired, invited me to work with him at the University of Kansas (KU). Before visiting Kansas, I was an intern at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama under the mentorship of Bill Wcislo, a former Michener student and a KU alumnus. On Barro Colorado Island, I studied the social behavior of nocturnal sweat bees and discovered that adults engage in trophallaxis (food exchange), a behavior previously observed only in honey bees, bumble bees, and stingless bees. I later completed my PhD at KU under the mentorship of Michael S. Engel, Charles Michener, and Deborah Smith, focusing on the systematics of the family Megachilidae and the evolution of leaf-cutting behavior in bees. I did my postdoctoral training in the USDA Bee Lab in Logan, Utah, where I collaborated with Terry Griswold on the systematics and evolution of wool carder bees, incorporating fossil bees into my phylogenetic analyses. I have also pursued other fields, including evolutionary ecology, behavioral ecology, pollination biology, ethnobiology, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Recently, I have been exploring the impact of environmental stressors on bees to anticipate their responses to climate change. I actively participate in academic and educational events with government and non-government organizations to raise public awareness about the science and conservation of native pollinators. I serve as instructor at The Bee Course, an immersive ten-day annual workshop at the Southwestern Research Station in Portal, AZ, which is organized by Bryan Danforth of Cornell University. My research has taken me across North, Central, and South America, as well as to the eastern Mediterranean, where I have focused on bees in Turkey and on the Greek island of Lesbos as part of a National Science Foundation REU program. Working with bees in KU’s collection and studying them across these diverse regions has deepened my understanding of their global diversity. Throughout this journey, my family has been a constant source of support and inspiration.