A little more than 40 years ago, a young boy stepped from the back door of his home in suburban Westchester County outside New York City. He crossed his backyard, probably stopping for a bit before walking into an undeveloped lot behind the homes lining his street. The boy, named Scott, called this tract of wild meadow "Beeland" because he had been stung by bees there on previous trips. But those stings had not fazed him. Indeed, he ended up spending hours and hours in Beeland examining not only bees, but all sorts of flora and fauna from this small slice of the natural world. For Scott, Beeland was a place to explore, a place to discover. A place to learn.

Right: Entomologist Scott Camazine gives his daughter, Caela, a new perspective on nature as his wife, Sue Trainor, looks on. The family is posed near Scott's "Beeland" study area near their home.

Fast forward four decades to an office in the Agricultural Sciences and Industries Building on the University Park campus. Scott Camazine, assistant professor of entomology, is still talking about bees. The chat soon meanders from bees into other fields, both literal and figurative. A talk with Camazine often becomes an exploration in itself. He might tell you how a bee stinger works or ask about art, all within the same sentence.

"Even in kindergarten I was collecting bugs," Camazine says. "I spent most of my childhood walking around the woods, apparently deaf to calls to come home for dinner. At one point, my parents sent me to the doctor to have my hearing checked because I was out there in my own little world."

"He is off in his own world, but it's a good world," laughs Camazine's wife, Sue Trainor, a cardiac care nurse at Centre Community Hospital. "He literally grabs hold of whatever he's interested in and pursues it in a very intense way. Of course, sometimes I'll be talking to him and he seems to be listening and I'll say 'I've just contracted hepatitis,' and he'll say 'Well, that's fatal,' and continue on with what he's doing."

Scott's parents, Murray and Ruth Camazine, encouraged their fledgling naturalist to follow his interests. "I had a little home museum with insect collections and stuffed birds, all neatly labeled," Camazine recalls. "I remember bringing home roadkill animals to study and my mother being very encouraging. Once, I collected a dead wood turtle and I was boiling it in a huge pot to remove the meat from its bones. My mother told me it was past my bedtime and I asked her to keep stirring the turtle, which she did."

Camazine's explorations as a youngster wandered from plants to animals to insects. He says he would be struck by an observation or a collected specimen and then learn all he could about the subject. This intense interest in nature eventually brought him to Harvard University. He had decided to study insects, but a single meeting led him down another path. "Harvard really didn't have a large number of courses for undergraduates interested in entomology, so I was sent to see a graduate student," Camazine laughs. "He was in this dark office, chain-smoking and surrounded by aquariums of turtles he had rescued from a lab. He told me how he had become the world's expert on a fairly obscure beetle. I remember thinking if this field has such a narrow focus, maybe this is not what I want to do."

Most of Camazine's fellow biology students were applying to medical school and he thought his interests could be applied to the medical profession. With visions of parasitology and medical entomology as career options, Camazine entered Harvard Medical School in 1974, graduating with an M.D. in 1978. Insects were never far off his radar screen, though. He spent much of his senior year in medical school examining insect anatomy, following that up with a year as a research fellow in the medical school's Department of Neurobiology. "I spent most of that time looking through a microscope dissecting moth brains," he says.

From 1979 to 1980, Camazine worked as a surgical resident at the University of California-San Diego with every expectation of becoming a surgeon. He says medical school and residency is every bit as exhausting as it is portrayed on the TV drama ER, but the experience was harder for him because by the end of his second year, he had realized a career in clinical medicine was not for him. The question was, what exactly was the right path? "I remember at some point after getting off the medical path, my father let it all out, telling me 'You can't spend your whole life playing in Beeland!'" Camazine says. "I thought to myself, 'Oh yeah? Just watch me.'"

Acting on the suggestion of a medical school mentor, Camazine accepted a research position studying the chemical ecology of insects at Cornell University in 1980. Supporting himself by working as an emergency room physician, Camazine spent the next 15 years at Cornell. During that time he managed to write two collections of science essays, The Naturalist's Year and Velvet Mites and Silken Webs. He also began a side career as a wildlife photographer. His photographs of insects and other subjects have appeared in Life, The New York Times Magazine, and other publications.

He also decided, around 1983, to switch his interest yet again--this time, to bees. "Bees have a lot of appeal," Camazine says. "You can study a single insect, or you can study an entire colony. It's a great subject for maintaining interest in scientific research." Camazine's own wide-ranging interests began to focus on bees after he took classes from Roger Morse, a renowned bee researcher at Cornell. While maintaining a schedule as an ER doctor, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher and eventually enrolled as a graduate student in biology.


"Scott and I met at Cornell when he was already a research fellow and I was only a graduate student," recalls P. Kirk Visscher, assistant professor of entomology at the University of California-Riverside, who recently collaborated with Camazine on research projects on bee stings and bee swarming. "When we started working together at Cornell, our roles reversed as I became a research fellow and he became a graduate student, which is kind of typical of the way Scott has pursued his career."

In his studies at Cornell, Camazine became an expert in the social organization of honey bees. He published research papers on pattern formation in honey bee colonies, population dynamics of varroa mites, how bees regulate pollen foraging, Africanized bees, and thermoregulation in honey bee swarms. As part of those projects, he taught himself computer programming and has published software as teaching models for insect self-organization, chaos theory, and artificial life. He is collaborating with Visscher on a project studying bee decision-making during swarming. He also heads a Penn State project investigating how parasitic mites are affecting the health of honey bee hives (see Where Have All the Bees Gone?).

"One of my strengths is that I haven't focused in one area," Camazine says. "Having broad interests in a lot of areas can pay off when approaching a problem."

"He comes as close to defining the Renaissance man as anyone I know," says Penn State entomologist Michael Saunders. "He always can contribute something to any conversation." Saunders and Camazine are collaborating to develop instructional computer software for insect identification. "Diverse knowledge can help you and hurt you, though. Knowing a large array of subjects helps you scientifically, yet people's jobs are defined by a very narrow description. Luckily, entomology is one field that can reward a vast range of experience."

In part, Camazine sees his academic career in the same terms, pointing out that he earned his Ph.D. in biology, not entomology, and has taken few entomology courses. Yet he can bring his eclectic background to bear on his interest in bees. "If you think about it, all my experience really comes together in this Penn State position," he says. "I can work on research that allows me to explore a variety of topics. My medical background helps in approaching the bee health project. I'm the bee doctor."

Sue Trainor says Camazine has been able to find a metaphorical Beeland as a Penn State bee expert. She also points out that metaphors are hard to grab hold of when you can build the real thing. "We bought a 30-acre farm near Lamar," she explains. "One of the first things Scott did was clear about an acre of ground to create an insect habitat. Now he has his own Beeland 300 yards from the back door."

Camazine admits he's emerging from his naturalist's world a bit late in life. He married in his 40s. He's an active, proud father to Caela, who reached her first birthday recently. He points out that his Penn State job is the first full-time job he has held, saying "What other person can say they're getting paid for doing exactly what they were doing when they were six years old?"