About

Roger Schürch is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Entomology at Virginia Tech, with a focus on behavioral ecology and social evolution, particularly in insects. His research emphasizes cooperative and communicative behaviors within insect societies, exploring how individuals, even closely related ones, display consistent behavioral differences, often referred to as personalities or behavioral types, in contexts of cooperation and communication. He investigates how complex systems like insect societies evolve to respond adaptively to rapidly changing environments, including social and climate changes, using empirical, quantitative, and theoretical approaches. Schürch's background includes a Ph.D. from the University of Bern, Switzerland, where he studied individual variation in life-history and behavioral types in the highly social cichlid Neolamprologus pulcher. His professional experience encompasses postdoctoral research at Ohio State University, the University of Neuchâtel, and the University of Sussex, as well as a position as a senior statistician at the University of Bern. Since 2017, he has been involved in research at Virginia Tech, studying behavioral, ecological, and evolutionary questions in insects along the social gradient from solitary to eusocial, with a particular interest in eusocial insects such as bees, wasps, ants, and termites. His work aims to better understand social evolution and cooperation in animal societies, which has ecological, evolutionary, and economic relevance.

Research topics

• Biology
• Ecology
• Geography
• Agronomy
• Toxicology
• Botany
• Physical therapy
• Agroforestry
• Medicine
• Internal medicine

Selected publications

• Pollinators: Honey bees shift tolerance to attacks with seasonal decline in flower availability

  Current Biology · 2025-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Concrete consequences: construction on prime honey bee habitat doubles foraging distances

  Biology Open · 2025-05-07 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Human-induced land-use change is a well-documented driver of species decline, including bees, but its true cost may be underestimated. The effects of habitat conversion on honey bee foraging metabolic costs are not well documented. Here, we quantify the impact of land use change on the foraging of freely flying honey bees (Apis mellifera) before (2018-2019, n=382) and after (2022, n=502) their historical foraging habitat is developed. We decoded and analyzed honey bee waggle dances, through which returning foragers communicate the vector of forage. We found that bees increased (from 2.4% to 8.4%) their use of undisturbed microhabitat within the development. The small-scale developments, covering just 1% of the foraging range, nearly doubled flight distance and energy expenditure. Average distance increased from 0.69 to 1.28 kilometers (from 7 to 13 Joules). Our study updates our understanding of land development costs on local bees, revealing concrete consequences to changing land upon which pollinators depend.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Individuality impacts communication success in honey bees

  Current Biology · 2025-02-01 · 7 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Dancing on the edge: honey bee recruitment networks are sparse and affected by individuality in waggle dance behavior

  Frontiers in Bee Science · 2025-09-22

  articleOpen access

  Social network analysis is increasingly and fruitfully applied to study the collective structure and function of animal societies across space and time. Honey bees ( Apis mellifera L.) are a particularly tractable model system that is rich in social relationships and dynamics. Despite the rich body of literature describing the social life of the honey bee, including the famous waggle dance by which foragers recruit nestmates to profitable resources, relatively little is known about the networks that arise from waggle dance communication. Here we conducted a field experiment with fully-marked experimental colonies (N = 2 colonies, 3,000 bees each) to characterize the honey bee waggle dance recruitment network structure and function. Particularly, we studied network density, burstiness in waggle dance bouts, and the effect of individuality in waggle dance communication behavior on network structure. We simulated a maximally-efficient honey bee recruitment network using a deterministic susceptible-infected model. Then we used this simulated network as an upper bound for network density to calculate the proportion of successful recruitment events in observed networks compared to the simulated maximal network. Next, we characterized the burstiness, or temporal distribution, of waggle dance bouts. Finally, we tested whether inter-bee differences, or individuality, in waggle dance communication affected the recruitment network structure. We found that (1) real recruitment networks are sparse, with each individual recruiting up to 3.5% as many nestmates as predicted by the simulated maximal network; (2) individual bees danced steadily, not in bursts, and (3) that individuality in waggle dance calibrations was positively associated with successful recruitment and thus the propagation of the recruitment network (p = 0.008). Our results offer the first empirical and biologically-informed descriptive statistics for honey bee waggle dance networks and may be informative in the parameterization of bio-inspired computing models.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Sublethal glyphosate exposure reduces honey bee foraging and alters the balance of biogenic amines in the brain

  Journal of Experimental Biology · 2025-05-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Glyphosate is a broad-spectrum herbicide that inhibits the shikimate pathway, which honey bees (Apis mellifera), a non-target beneficial pollinator, do not endogenously express. Nonetheless, sublethal glyphosate exposure in honey bees has been correlated to impairments in gustation, learning, memory and navigation. While these impacted physiologies underpin honey bee foraging and recruitment, the effects of sublethal glyphosate exposure on these important behaviors remain unclear, and any proximate mechanism of action in the honey bee is poorly understood. We trained cohorts of honey bees from the same hives to forage at one of two artificial feeders offering 1 mol l-1 sucrose solution, either unaltered (N=40) or containing glyphosate at 5 mg acid equivalent (a.e.) l-1 (N=46). We then compared key foraging behaviors and, on a smaller subset of bees, recruitment behaviors. Next, we quantified protein levels of octopamine, tyramine and dopamine, and levels of the amino acid precursor tyrosine in the brains of experimental bees collected 3 days after the exposure. We found that glyphosate treatment bees reduced their foraging by 13.4% (P=0.022), and the brain content of tyramine was modulated by a crossover interaction between glyphosate treatment and the number of feeder visits (P=0.004). Levels of octopamine were significantly correlated with its precursors tyramine (P=0.011) and tyrosine (P=0.018) in glyphosate treatment bees, but not in control bees. Our findings emphasize the critical need to investigate impacts of the world's most-applied herbicide and to elucidate its non-target mechanism of action in insects to create better-informed pollinator protection strategies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Good Fences Make Good Neighbors: Adjacent Honey Bee Colonies Locally Partition Their Foraging Across Landscapes

  Ecology and Evolution · 2025-05-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Optimal foraging theory (OFT) predicts that animals employ foraging strategies that maximize a particular currency, such as net energetic efficiency, to meet their nutritional demands. Two nonexclusive patterns that arise from OFT are convergence on high-quality resources and resource partitioning. Honey bees make collective decisions by integrating their individual foraging with social recruitment behaviors: returning foragers communicate the approximate vector to high-quality resources using waggle dances. Because we can eavesdrop on their communications, waggle dance decoding is a valuable tool for exploring OFT predictions as it allows us to map how honey bees use landscapes. In this study, we analyzed 8049 dances from colocalized colonies across three landscapes to investigate whether neighboring colonies forage by not partitioning patches (i.e., converging their food collection on the same patches), by partitioning at the landscape level, or by partitioning at the local level. To differentiate between these three possible scenarios, we examined three metrics: (1) interdance distances between and within colonies; (2) k-nearest neighbors; and (3) k-means clustering. We observed no difference in the distances between dances performed by bees from the same colony compared to those from different colonies. Also, we found at each of the three field sites that dances from the same colony were not more likely to appear as close neighbors to each other. Finally, k-means cluster analysis demonstrates that dance locations advertised by the same colony aggregated nonrandomly in the three sites, where dances from the same colony comprised a significant majority of dances within k-means clusters and 62% of clusters consisted entirely of dances from a single colony. Together, these results support a foraging scenario where honey bees partition their foraging, but at the local level. This strategy may help limit intercolony foraging competition.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Airborne metofluthrin, a pyrethroid repellent, does not impact foraging honey bees

  Journal of Insect Science · 2024-09-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Outdoor spatial mosquito repellents, such as mosquito coils or heating devices, release pyrethroid insecticides into the air to provide protection from mosquitoes within a defined area. This broadcast discharge of pyrethroids into the environment raises concern about the effect on non-target organisms. A previous study found that prallethrin discharged from a heating device did not affect honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) [Hymenoptera: Apidae] foraging or recruitment. In this second study, there was no significant difference in foraging frequency (our primary outcome), waggle dance propensity, or persistency in honey bees collecting sucrose solution between those exposed to metofluthrin from a different heating device and bees exposed to a non-metofluthrin control. One measure, waggle dance frequency, was higher in the metofluthrin treatment than the control but this outcome was likely a spurious result due to the small sample size. The small particle size of the emissions, averaging 4.43 µm, from the heated spatial repellent products, which remain airborne with little settling, may play an important role in the lack of effect found on honey bee foraging.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Treatment of cattle with ivermectin and its effect on dung degradation and larval abundance in a tropical savanna setting

  One Health · 2024-12-12 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  When ingested as part of a blood meal, the antiparasitic drug ivermectin kills mosquitoes, making it a candidate for mass drug administration (MDA) in humans and livestock to reduce malaria transmission. When administered to livestock, most ivermectin is excreted unmetabolized in the dung within 5 days post administration. Presence of ivermectin, has been shown to adversely affect dung colonizers and dung degradation in temperate settings; however, those findings may not apply to, tropical environment, where ivermectin MDA against malaria would occur. Here we report results of a randomized field experiment conducted with dung from ivermectin-treated and control cattle to determine the effect of ivermectin on dung degradation in tropical Tanzania. For intact pats, we measured termite colonization, larval numbers and pat wet and dry weights. Pat organic matter was interpolated from a subsample of the pat (10 g wet weight). Additionally, we counted larvae growing in the treated and untreated pats in a semi-field setting. We found that termites colonized ivermectin pats more readily than controls. Despite this, wet weight decreased significantly slower in the ivermectin-treated pats in the first two weeks. As water was lost, sub-sample dry weight increased, and organic matter decreased similarly over time for the treatment and control. Interpolated for whole pats, total organic matter was higher, and larval counts were lower in the ivermectin-treated pats after the first month. Our results demonstrate an effect of ivermectin and its metabolites on dung degradation and fauna in a tropical savanna setting. Because slow dung degradation and low insect abundance negatively impact pastureland, these non-target, environmental effects must be further investigated within the context of real-world implementation of ivermectin MDA in cattle and weighed against the potential benefits for malaria control.

  PublisherDOI

• Agricultural grasslands provide forage for honey bees but only when nearby

  Agriculture Ecosystems & Environment · 2023-09-21 · 12 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Knowledge of foraging currencies and costs is important for understanding honeybee food collection economics and to parameterize their foraging behaviors as indicators of habitat quality, which is important in the identification of management targets in human-altered landscapes. Previous research has yielded inconsistent results regarding the relationship between honey bees and important agroecosystems, such as agricultural grasslands. Waggle dance decoding provides a method for resolving these inconsistencies by mapping and quantifying bee recruitment to agricultural grasslands using statistical methods that appropriately account for foraging distance, or cost. Here we decoded 3881 dances across two foraging years to investigate when and where honey bees forage in a mixed-use landscape in Virginia, with a particular interest in honey bee use of agricultural grasslands (pastures and haylands). We initially observe that bees recruited heavily to agricultural grasslands compared to croplands, developed lands and forests, where the percent foraging to that land type was at 30.7% (CI: 29.4–31.8%), and thus significantly higher than its representation in the landscape (c. 23%). Honey bees also recruited heavily to agricultural grasslands across months, with percent foraging ranging from 26.9% (23.5–30.1%) in August to 38.8% (31.3–46.9%) in October. However, when we examined distance-corrected foraging rates, which allowed us to compare land type attractiveness when flight cost is removed, we found that the agricultural grasslands were not more attractive than the broader landscape and were significantly less attractive than, for example, croplands. We additionally identify potential forage gaps in agricultural grasslands during June and August, while also distinguishing them as a possible source of forage in October before colony overwintering in this landscape. Furthermore, we qualitatively observe a hot spot, demonstrating high foraging interest that is composed of agricultural grasslands, developed lands, and croplands and is itself a mixed-use area. Together, these results demonstrate that honey bees utilize heterogeneous land areas and underscore the importance of statistical analyses that incorporate biological knowledge. Lastly, these data will be important in informing future management aimed at pollinators in agricultural grasslands.

  PublisherDOI

• Fast range expansion of the red imported fire ant in Virginia and prediction of future spread in the United States

  Ecosphere · 2023-08-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract The red imported fire ant (RIFA), Solenopsis invicta (Buren), is a notorious, invasive species with broad impacts on ecosystems, economies, and human health. While incidental reports to the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (VDACS) indicate a recent range expansion in Virginia, the full extent of RIFA spread in the area is currently unknown. In this study, we examined the distribution of RIFA in Virginia using multiple data sources: (1) during the summers of 2020 and 2021, we conducted a series of prospective visual surveys along public roadways in southern Virginia, (2) we used data from multiyear VDACS infestation reports covering the period 2016–2021, and (3) we surveyed local naturalists, county extension agents, and land managers. We compared the resulting data with an earlier predictive model quantifying the potential spread of RIFA and constructed a species distribution model to explore the potential range expansion of RIFA in the United States based on new occurrence data and bioclimatic variables. RIFA was found in seven Virginia counties beyond the current federal quarantine zone, and our data show that it has spread much further than predicted 15 years ago. Our species distribution model suggests that the range of RIFA is likely to increase further under the currently projected climate change scenarios, both in Virginia and more generally across the United States, with the lower Midwest expected to be one of the most affected areas. This study provides insights into the range expansion of RIFA at the border of its suitable North American habitat and elucidates some of the environmental factors associated with its current and future spread. In doing so, it provides information to advise sound management practices and prevention efforts.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Margaret J. Couvillon

  Virginia Tech

  40 shared

• Francis L. W. Ratnieks

  University of Sussex

  17 shared

• Bradley David Ohlinger

  Virginia Tech

  17 shared

• Mary R. Silliman

  12 shared

• Dik Heg

  University of Bern

  11 shared

• Taylor Steele

  11 shared

• Ash E. Samuelson

  Royal Holloway University of London

  8 shared

• Fardo Witsenburg

  University of Lausanne

  6 shared

Labs

• Roger Schürch LabPI

Education

• PhD, Behavioural Ecology

  Universität Bern

  2008