The above photo was taken at 0500 on Thursday morning at the site of my first field experiment! I'm attached to that hovering ball of light by a headband.
The first thing we did was pick out the flowers we bagged the night before that had bloomed and assigned treatments to them. Above is a picture of one of our ambient pollinator treatments. These flowers were recorded all morning on a video system developed by Matt Grieshop, from Michigan State University. We returned in the afternoon to collect the stigmas from half of these flowers, and left the other half to develop into a full pumpkin for a seed count.
Mary waits patiently in the above photo while timing a bumblebee in a female flower. She collected the bee and the stigma so we can figure out how much pollen an individual bee species can transfer in one visit.
Got a honeybee!We returned on Friday to do another repetition of this experiment. The frustrating part was picking flowers the night before only to find out that they weren't ready to bloom on the morning of the experiment! Next week I will be repeating this experiment again in Piketon.
Ok this is a dumb question....but here it is anyway:
ReplyDelete"Mary collected the bee?" What happens to the bee after it is collected??
~Michele
PS If Scott reads this he'll laugh....he knows about my "bee issues!!"
The bees are kept in our research collection Michelle to make sure that we know which bee pollinated which flower. But I guess we could just send them to you since you love them so much! :)
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