Pathway to Ecology

As a child, Sean was curious about nature, exploring the outside in his backyard and watching nature documentaries. However, it was in 2015 when he was watching the Rhododendron bush in his parent’s yard, that he noticed there were bumblebees that looked different from each other. “From a nature documentary, I knew that there were stingless bees, and also that there were honeybees and bumblebees in general. I then looked it up and found out that these bumblebees belonged to six, seven different species. And I was just mind blown,” Sean explained. From that day on, he continued to explore to see what other species existed in his surrounding environments, that he had previously overlooked.

Identification of bees through smell

Sean’s journey wasn’t direct but eventually led him back to biology and bees. It was during his bachelor’s study that a visiting anthropologist was observing the students to see how studying biology affects their enchantment and understanding of nature, which allowed for self-reflection. During a field excursion, Sean was asked what senses he uses to explore his surroundings. He answered mainly visually, but also sometimes feeling and hearing, but never with smell.

Later on, during another field excursion, he instinctively caught a male red-tailed bumblebee. “And for some reason, I just got the impulse to smell it. It was like this acidic kind of fecal kind of smell, but not in a bad way. And then I started smelling bees and other things. It was going down this path of discovery of figuring out, this one smells weird, this one doesn’t always smell, or it loses its smell quickly when I pick it up.”