STEPs grant Research Grant for the Conservation of Bushland for 2026 has been awarded to Georgie Brennan, a PhD student at the Behaviour, Ecology and Evolution lab at the University of Sydney on the pollination behaviour of insects visiting flowers. She has provided the following description of her project.

I’m a PhD student with the BEE Lab at the University of Sydney.

My interest in pollinator behaviour began with Sydney’s stingless bee, Tetragonula carbonaria. They are one of our few native eusocial bee species and are considered generalist foragers. Many studies concerning bees as pollinators centre on the females, as they must actively collect pollen for their young. I aimed to instead assess the capacity for male stingless bees to transport pollen, as males must also visit flowers for nectar.

I found that not only do male bees carry pollen, but it is distributed on different parts of their body and carried for longer relative to females. I also found that their floral preferences may differ to that of their sisters; see paper here, DOI: 10.1007/s13592-026-01248-6.

This work led me to consider how differences in the flower-visiting behaviour among insects goes on to affect the flowers’ reproductive success. I was also interested in understanding how all these different behaviours may interact when insects forage simultaneously.

Plants with generalist pollination systems are common in Australia, especially among the Myrtaceae family, many of which can attract hundreds of insects when flowering. Unfortunately, generalist pollination systems are also very complex!

At present, I’m using the dwarf apple gum Angophora hispida as a model plant to observe pollinator behaviour. I will be filming foraging insects; assessing their behaviour while on the flower; and measuring the subsequent seed viability of their fruits.

Compared to insects, plants are a lot slower-moving. Learning how to conduct field-based experiments with them has been very rewarding and I’ve seen plenty of fascinating behaviours so far, which I’m excited to share!