Modeling bee data

I completed watching all of my video data of bees visiting pumpkin flowers from last summer! I am now in the works analyzing and modeling the data. Though this summer's data was preliminary, the modeling practice will come in handy with larger data sets consisting of multiple treatment scales like farm diversity, floral strip type and farm location.

Here's the run-down on the lingo above...In science you always want to isolate a variable that you want to test. We use the word "treatment" to describe that. For every treatment, you must have a "control", which is set-up in the same manner of the treatment, but is spared the actual treatment. For example, I wanted to test how pumpkin plants are affected by planting floral strips by them. Are the pests reduced? Are the pumpkins bigger? Do the bees transfer more pollen? To do this I set up 6 farms that will have floral strips (treatments), and 6 farms that will not (my controls). Each farm will use similar planting practices to make all of my plots as close to identical as possible. This allows me to see the effect of the floral strip, unobscured by the many other factors that may affect pumpkin.

On top of that basic experiment I have more treatments! Holy moly! My 6 floral strip farms are also nested within a gradient of environments, and matched with my 6 control farms. I have 4 farms (2 floral strip farms and 2 control) in areas surrounded by agriculture, 4 farms surrounded by a high ratio of forests and grasslands to farmland, and 4 farms located in areas somewhere in between those two extremes. With data coming from all of those locations I can attempt to answer questions like "how does the surrounding area affect the types of insects I find in the floral strips and in the control plots?".

The results of this may sound definitive, but this will only reveal a small part of the big picture. And even then, only if everything works. You can never completely control the interference which may affect your data, and that's why it takes a lot of repetition to flesh out the big picture. I am standing on the shoulders of giants before me who tested similar theories, and more research will proceed after me. Each one of us takes a wack at a great piece of marble, if you will, chipping away a little more mystery until a sculpture is formed.