Due to last night stormy weather, most of us could not keep collecting data as in previous days. Marie could not measure her plants; Kory and I did not observe as many pollinators as normally we do. Only Sarah B. maintained her data collection immutable. Consequently, I went to the Hjelm house to start pinning the pollinators that I have been collecting since Sunday. After Jennifer and Stuart explained the principles of pinning insects, I could pinned fourteen of the twenty one insect collected during this week. Definitely, it will facilitate identification of pollinators enormously.
Personally, this week was a very revealing week for me since I had the opportunity of witness the presence of the three species of echinacea in this region. Since my research involve the interaction among these species of echinacea, I have been very involved in observe the flowering and the location of the different species in this area. Thus, introduced Echinacea pallida started flowering (White pollen) at the Hegg Lake on Sunday while native angustifolia did the same on Tuesday (Yellow pollen).
After looking for four times, I finally found echinacea purpurea in a restored prairie at the 27 road. Although I am really interested in including this other introduced echinacea species in my pollinator and phenology research, it has been really hard to reach and effectively located the entire population of this type of echinacea. For now, I just got a picture of an almost ready to flower individual of Echinacea purpurea.
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