While much of what we do is driven by theory, we are also keenly interested in applying this to the cognitive ecology of bees. Here we use observations and knowledge from natural history, combined with theory on how animals deal with changing environments, to make predictions about the cognitive differences we will find in natural populations. We have been doing this work with North American bumble bees, orchid bees, and sweat bees.

Much of this current work is focused on the foraging behavior of bees in the Saint Louis area, taking advantage of aspects of the urban to rural gradient as well as differences in habitat and land use across the region.