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Busy as a bee this week! In my battle with native bee identification I was honorably defeated. I will prevail and try again, but in the meantime there is much to do. The bee specimen are now organized and looking beautiful. In total we have 43 different species visiting Echinacea, and a lot of my time this week was spent cooped up in our beautiful little library soaking in the natural light and learning endless fascinating facts about these many species. For example, the big and blustery Bombus fervidus is known to pursue potential threats for hundreds of yards. The Hylaeus bee carries pollen in a special, stomach-like organ in her abdomen rather than on her legs and then regurgitates it back when she reaches her nest. And this is the one that really got to me: The female Ceratina will guard the entrance of her brood chamber and die right there over the winter from the cold, but her body continues to block the entrance, thus keeping her brood safe. Also, this species can produce eggs without mating. Ceratina has got it all figured out.
Next week I hope to get all this information online for everyone to peruse! Bee prepared!
It’s been almost a week since I was extracted from my nice, cozy seed head: the only home I had ever known. Sometimes I still miss it- I had chewed through at least a third of the achenes there, and made nice holes in the base. I don’t know if I’ve ever been more comfortable than when I was firmly lodged within an achene. I also don’t know if I’ve ever been more uncomfortable than when I found myself squished in the grasp of a pair of tweezers. Suddenly, my home and everything I’ve known fell away, and I landed in a pit with lots of others like me. The floor was cluttered with achenes, but the structure was nothing like my old seed head. Moreover, the walls were clear. It looked as if escape would be quick- it is not, believe me, I tried. Something about plastic just doesn’t connect well with my prolegs. Speaking of prolegs, I, and all my kin, have four. It’s a trait characteristic of us caterpillars. Those silly humans probably thought we could have been flies or beetles before looking at our prolegs.
Today is significant, because our numbers have grown to the point where our measly petri dish jail was no longer doing us justice. After a rough and tumble fall into a new container, we’re all feeling a little better. Here we’ve been given a seed head and soil, just in case we decide either of those places are where we’d like to pupate. Things are starting to look up.
(Q: Wait, where did 84 come from? A: We have found about 14 caterpillars, each of whom has 6 pairs of eyes.)
(Q: So, what species are the larvae? A: We still don’t know. It’s possible they are codling moths, but those tend to prefer fruits like apples- more juicy than achenes. It’s also possible they’re banded sunflower moths, which appear just as pink in later larval stages as these larvae do),
Today we kicked off week two of three of our externship. After a restful weekend checking out downtown Chicago, everyone’s back to work on their respective projects. While Belle’s been busily researching the lab’s collection of bees, Jackie and Audrey have been hard at work trying to process all of our remnant seed heads so we can do some data analysis. It turns out we have a lot more heads to process than we thought! With the entire process—cleaning the heads, scanning them, counting the number of achenes, randomizing samples for x-raying, and x-raying for the presence of seeds– each head takes a long time to get completely ready. So, we’ve decided to scale back our analysis to just randomly selected flowers for now, instead of looking at a random sample as well as heads with extremes of early and late flowering times. Audrey’s been busy trying to get all the scanned heads ready for x-raying, so lots of selecting random samples and labeling of clear plastic bags. Jackie’s been busy cleaning—even testing out the Optivisor to see if magnifying the heads speeds things up:
We’ve also found four more larval friends! We’ve gotten around 10, now.
Things are truckin’ along in the lab. Belle has kept on organizing and categorizing the bees, making slow but steady progress. Audrey and Jackie have kept on cleaning seed heads, and finding a significant amount of those hungry, yet unidentified little larvae. In fact, the two have found more larvae than has been found on any seed heads for the past ten years. Needless to say, something interesting definitely happened with this insects’ population this past growing season. Everyone is pretty excited to see the final distribution of seed heads damaged with characteristic chewed up achenes. Audrey and Jackie, while they are certainly excited to try to solve the larval mystery, are doing their best to mitigate and keep careful track of the effect this predation might have on their seed set data.
Hopefully, by trying to raise multiple larvae under varied environmental conditions, the team can get a couple to live and develop into adult stages, where they’d be much more easily identified.
Fun fact: the Echinacea Project has collected over 1000 bee specimen and each is more beautiful than the next, especially when viewed from under a high-powered microscope. My task over the three weeks of my externship is to inventory and organize these lovely little pollinators and then create a database on the Echinacea webpage that project members can refer to in the field when they observe a pollinator visiting a purple coneflower.
So far, no easy task! Most of the bees have been previously identified, but some remain nameless and nomadic, species-less and in need of a home. Thus, a crash-course in bee identification was necessary. I think I’ve gotten pretty good at, if not identifying native bee species, then plowing headfirst into identifying native bee species and confidently writing down the complete wrong answer. Notable characteristics that are friends when identifying native bees include the colors of the mandibles (not the “jaw”, Belle) and the color of the little fuzzy hairs on the top of his or her head. More difficult characteristics whose identification I have yet to master include the specific color of the hair in between the T3 and T2 apical bands, above the rim but sometimes moving towards the center, and not characteristically white. Honestly, it’s Greek to me at this point and when this is all done I have a bone to pick with whoever wrote out these characteristics on DiscoverLife, but I hope to learn the language over these next three weeks. The fun part is that each bee is special in its own persnickety little way, which allows for little battles with these little beasts all day long as I try to reason with them. Currently, I am not winning.
In the next few weeks I hope to wrangle these bees into their place and get them neatly organized and classified. Hopefully I will post some close-up views of these hard-working ladies and gents from under the microscope soon, but it seems the lights have had enough today and need a bit of a break before turning on again. But I bee-lieve in them.
Jurassic Bee (or a “bee killer”)
Halfway through our first week of the externship, things have started getting exciting! While Belle has been busy cataloguing, Jackie and Audrey have made some new friends: larvae we’ve found living in the seed heads. The mystery larvae are unfortunately eating the achenes we’re trying to collect, but to make the most out of a bad situation, we’ve been collecting larvae, too! The count in our petri dish is about 8, and growing! Most of these have been found by Audrey, who in a twist of cruel irony is the most startled to find them. The larvae are pretty big relative to the head and easy to spot (they’re pale pink and the heads are dark brown), but we still haven’t figured out how to predict which achene we pull out will have a larva behind it. We still have a lot more heads to clean and find larvae in, so we hope to find out where they’re coming from and maybe even see what they turn into.
Pictured below: Jackie and Audrey’s first larval finds.
Hello! I have created a webpage that displays the different parts of an Echinacea angustifolia seedhead. It is available at: https://echinaceaproject.org/background/our-study-species/echinacea-seedheads/. The page defines the parts of a seedhead and many of the types of chaff found while cleaning heads, with pictures!
Monday the 30th of November marked the start of two exciting new externship projects in the lab. All three undergraduate students are from Carleton College. Belle Kinder is taking inventory and creating a database for bee specimens. Audrey Lothspeich and Jackie Culotta are working on quantifying and analyzing the seed sets from various remnant populations.
On the first day, the externs were oriented to the lab and the Plant Science Building’s facilities. They learned the basics of Echinacea reproduction from an orientation lesson with Stuart. After listening to a presentation by a community biologist about the relative importance of intraspecies variation and species turnover in accounting for total population change (and eating lunch) they got right to work.
All externs discussed with their associated long-term interns (Belle with Amy, and Danny with Audrey and Jackie) about the the specifics of their projects, and their desired outcomes. After that, Belle set about deciding what needed adjustment with the current collection of specimens. Having an action plan is always important! Audrey and Jackie got right into dissecting and cleaning their first seed heads.
Stay tuned for 3 more exciting weeks of externship!
Read this article about prairie conservation from the Glencoe newspaper.
Some observations about phenology in p1: the peak day of flowering seems to vary quite a bit from year to year. In 2007, peak was the earliest observed, on July 3 (!) and in 2008, 2013, and 2015 the peak was latest, on July 27. Curiously enough, 2008, 2013, and 2015 were all burn years. But then again, so was 2006. Hopefully we’ll be looking into this dataset more closely this year. Stay tuned for updates!
| Year |
Peak |
| 2005 |
12-Jul |
| 2006 |
12-Jul |
| 2007 |
3-Jul |
| 2008 |
27-Jul |
| 2009 |
14-Jul |
| 2011 |
24-Jul |
| 2012 |
4-Jul |
| 2013 |
27-Jul |
| 2014 |
19-Jul |
| 2015 |
27-Jul |
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