A World Without Bees: simulating important agricultural insect pollinators

Insects are essential to agriculture, but their populations are changing in poorly understood ways that are likely to
impact on human food supplies. This Project will construct evolutionary agent-based models of change in croppollinating
insects: honeybees, bumblebees, stingless bees, and flies. It will model how these population changes
affect production, predicting floral traits to breed into crop plants for ongoing pollination success - for economic
viability, and national and global food security. One major practical outcome will be a flexible "artificial life"
plant/pollinator simulation of insect-specific visual perception, innate and learned foraging behaviour, important
physiological factors, and inter-species interactions.