Of bees and dancing

Tags

dance, Field, rhinestones, weather

After getting started on my field work in late March, the last month has yielded a frustrating lack of nice weather. Bees are like people; they don’t like being cold, and they don’t like getting rained on. Unfortunately, Boston has been giving us plenty of both these last few weekends. The one weekend it was nice enough go out, I was out of town. Just my luck…

At last, we have a nice weekend! High of 67°, sunny, and 0% chance of precipitation. Just the way bees like it. Pretty much the way I like it, too.

Now the fun part of the story. I have a ballroom dance competition this weekend. I danced yesterday (Saturday) morning, and I will be dancing again this evening at about 5pm. Which is all fine and good; I can just head out to the Arboretum, set out the bowl traps, net for a few hours, and head home and to the competition (it’s at MIT, so not far). Which is exactly what I’m doing. The catch? Hairstyles for ballroom competitions can be very intricate, which means that if your competition spans two days, you are not about to redo your hair for the second day. So, today, I am going to catch bees at the Arnold Arboretum with a lot of rhinestones glued to my hair. It’s going to be hilarious.

And We’re Back in Business!

As a note … this post was supposed to be published on Saturday morning. For some reason, WordPress didn’t save my post, and I spent two days thinking I had actually updated this page. Oops!

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It’s been a while.

After a fantastic summer spent collecting and learning about bees, it was time for a break. I spent my sophomore year surviving (and sometimes even enjoying) organic chemistry, the summer in Costa Rica learning how to be a biologist, then I jumped back in at the start of junior year. Most of the last few months have been spent preparing for the spring and figuring out where to go. Well, it is spring, and I have a direction!

Essentially, it’s time to start resampling. My goal is to find out if there are any patterns in the species distribution at the Arboretum. Now that Boston has remembered that winter is over, the bees might even start coming out! This weekend will be nice and warm, so there’s step one. I probably won’t find much this weekend, but it’s always nice to have a start.

This time around, I will be doing 24-hour samples… setting out the bowl traps one day, then coming back the next day to pick them up at the same time. There are advantages and disadvantages, but the biggest advantage is that I don’t have to spend the entire day at the Arboretum to get data. This is especially nice because my spring and fall sampling will have to be balanced with my coursework and studying, so I won’t be limited to just weekends for sampling.

For now, I just have to get my spring field work in and make sure I have a place to live this summer. Some friends and I are exploring apartments around Harvard Square, and I’m waiting to find out if I received some grants for the summer, so here’s to high hopes!

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Obviously, these thoughts are a few days old, but I felt that my first post in a year and half should be introductory. More coming soon on the bees (and the dogs!) from my first field trip.

A similar survey the UK

Professor Farrell sent me a link to this report done by the BBC on a insect survey being done in urban and rural areas of the UK:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14380658

While the idea that urban gardens are a more reliable source of food than farmland and nature reserves might have merit, it seems to me that they haven’t thought about (or, more probably, haven’t reported on) certain other factors.

I’ve always gotten a great catch, both from netting and from bee bowls, while working in the cultivated gardens at the Arbortetum, particularly the Bradley Rose Garden and the Leventritt Shrub and Vine Garden. There’s no doubt that bees will flock to gardens. But they shouldn’t discount the role of weeds and wildflowers in the fields; I’ve seen little white grass blooms I would not have otherwise considered flowers crawling with honeybees, and I got my largest catch of bees ever from a field of overgrown grass and wildflowers. In that catch, I saw many of the same bees I’d seen in the gardens (some in greater numbers), but I also saw several types of bees that were totally new to me; strangely shaped black bees with fat thoraxes and skinny abdomens, bees with wide, short abdomens with yellow stripes that don’t quite meet in the middle, even one with yellow spots instead of stripes! So, I wonder if they might not find greater numbers in the cities’ gardens but greater diversity in the fields.