Why Deep Learning May Prove to Be the Bee’s Knees

In Bee Movie, an animated feature from 2007, a friendship between a bee (voiced by Jerry Seinfeld) and a young woman (Renee Zellweger) leads to the world’s bee population reclaiming the honey it produces. A decade later, a young woman who is real and with a self-described “penchant for cute, round things” — working with NVIDIA engineers and GPU-powered deep learning — may help to minimize the impact of a destructive parasite and lead to domesticated bees being returned to the almond-shape hive design that serves them so well in the wild. Jade Greenberg, a 17-year-old junior at Pascack Hills High School in Bergen County, N.J., zeroed in on honey bees and the causes of colony collapse as the subject of a research project for her molecular genetics class.