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Hey everyone-
Thanks to all of you who gave me such great input for my poster and/or the powerpoint!
I attached a PDF of the finished poster as well as my slides for the powerpoint presentation because I know I was freaking out about fitting everything in 5 slides! So you can see how it turned out, and I have 4 extra slides if I get questions. haha.
KochkREU10.pdf
power point presentation.pptx
Now I need to practice, practice, practice the presentation! I’ll post one more flog update for how it goes on Friday. Eeek!
-Katie
let me know of you can open this one..
ExportForStats2.csv
I analyzed my data and put together a couple of tables and figures.
I do have large standard deviation error bars.. but that is due to the pollinators being so variable. Within the same species, one bee could stay on Echinacea and shrivel a ton of styles while another could spend not even a minute collecting pollen and only shrivel a few styles. But overall, I believe the data gives a sense for which bee is the most effiecient and by how much. Take a look for yourself 🙂
tables and figures.pdf
one thing that is interesting to me is that each species of bee was more sucessful in pollinating styles that had been 2 days old rather than 1 day old styles. hmmm? Maybe styles that are out for more than a day are more susceptable to shriveling..?
Also, when Gretel compiles the data for CG phenology into a figure, I will use the figure to match up dates for when I did the insect visits and which species I saw most on those days. It should be interesting because it seems to be that in the beginning of flowering and towards the end of flowering, the smaller bees such as Augochlorella appear. Whereas during the peak of flowering, Melissodes dominated and I didn’t see any Augochlorella.
-Katie
I have some pictures of pollinators, but more to choose from would always be helpful for putting together my poster in a couple weeks.
I know Gretel and Josh said they had some, anyone else?
If so.. I would like any good pictures of Melissodes, Agopostemon, Augochlorella, Ceratina, and Lasioglossum. Preferably on Echinacea.
If you could go through them and put them on a USB for me, that would be greatly appreciated. And I would acknowledge you for the picture if I use one of yours.
Thanks,
Katie
So this past week I was able to work on my project because the Echinacea has started flowering in the common garden! So far so good, but it is going slow…
The painting is going really well. I am able to distinguish one and two day old styles wonderfully based on how I am painting the brachts. However, the pollinators take their sweet time to visit my flowering Echinacea head when I want to do the single insect visit. I was under the silly impression that I would remove the pollinator exclusion bag and a bee would come flying to the flower, do its pollinating thing, and let me move on to the next plant. Wrong! Sometimes it takes a bee 30min to and hour to land on the flowering head, which means I am sitting there patiently watching a single Echinacea head for a long time. UffDa!
I do video tape the bees in case one lands that I cannot identify in the field. Plus, it’s nice to have video for my presentation later. BUT the video camera’s battery dies after a couple hours. So we may have to purchase a back up battery…
I have had 8 insect visits this week so far, and have noticed that they have all been after 10am. Maybe 10 – noon is the peek time for bees to collect pollen? Not sure yet.
The visits I have had are pretty exciting! I have had 3 Augochlorella visits, 2 Agopostemon visits, 1 Melissodes visit, 1 Lasioglossum visit, and 1 Ceratina visit. Quite a diversity!
The interesting thing is: when observing the shriveling or lack of the day after, Melissodes shriveled 1 style and only had a 3 second long visit! Both Augochlorella’s shriveled 1-2 styles each and they spent 5-7 min each on the Echinacea head! Looks like they are not very efficient pollinators, most likely do to thier small size and they barely touch the styles when collecting pollen from the anthers. Same with the Lasioglossum, which is around the same size as Augochlorella and it didn’t shrivel any styles. The Agopostemon spent a few minutes gathering pollen and shriveled 5 styles! I am curious to assess the shriveling of the other Agopostemon and the Ceratina (another small sized bee) tomorrow because those were the visits I had today.
A concern of mine is all the bags that are on the flowering heads in the common garden. Several people, including myself, are using pollinator exclusion bags. So maybe if the bees know that they wont be able to collect pollen as readily from the common garden, maybe they do not bother visiting as much as they would if the bags were not on the heads. Any thoughts?
The bags may also contribute to a lower pollinator efficiency if the bees are not able to transfer pollen as they would be if the bags were not on :/ …However, there will be more flowering plants as the season progresses and hopefully there will be a good number of them that do not have bags on them. So I am guessing I will see an increase in pollinator efficiency as the season progresses.
Also Gretel- would you be able to provide me with the peak flowering data from within the common garden when the time is right so that I can compare that to a peak in pollinator efficiency (if I see one)?
I believe thats all for now! I look forward to giving another update on pollinators next week! 🙂
Later,
Katie
Well, it’s been almost 2 weeks since my last post. How time flies.
Accomplishments:
- Friday the 25th my seed envelopes (of remnant and restoration plants) arrived all sorted from IL. Thanks to my father and all the volunteers for working so hard to get that all done! Great job!
- We finished measuring the first 9 trays of my seed plugs. I think almost eveyone in the team has been helping with this, so my thanks are profuse to you all.
- Laura and I have been working hard to sort all of the purchased seeds into coin envelopes. (30 envelops for each species and source (3 species/3 sources) = 270 envelopes; 20 seeds per envelope = 5,400 seeds).
- Laura and I have also been working on her project together. It’s a lot of fun to visit her remnant sites and see how the floral neighborhoods change over time. Her data’s going to be very exciting!
- Early this week I was given verbal permission to plant my 10×10 meter plots of seeds and plugs at Hegg Lake, Runestone Park, and Bob Mahoney’s. I will hopefully have all the paperwork done soon for that!
- I’ve spent some time working on FNC and pollinator data, but not nearly enough. Hopefully, I’ll be able to devote more time to it soon, especially because I have less than 3 weeks to finish putting together my poster! Eeep!
To Do:
The big goal is to get my plants in the ground ASAP! To that end:
- Today, Laura and I will be marking out my plots.
- We need to finish measuring the 2nd group of 9 flats. It’s particularly important to get the Alive/Dead status for each plug, so I can plan for next week. I hope I can wrangle up more volunteers here, although I know everyone is working hard on their own projects. (Btw, special shout out to Lauren and Hillery who’ve been helping a lot with this!)
- I need to assemble my data to create new envelope labels with the location information for the plots, I’m hoping to get that done and and envelopes labeled by the end of the weekend.
News:
Parents are arriving today for a 4th of July visit! Hopefully they’ll get here in time to enjoy burger night at the K-town bar and grill, but if not they can meet everyone Friday morning.
We will be exploring Starbuck Heritage Days on Saturday (people are free to join us). There will be fireworks at 10 pm.
Some pictures from the weeks news:
I realized not everyone can access a .docx file, so here is a PDF file link…
revised proposal.pdf
Hello everyone!
For those of you who aren’t familiar with me, I’m Katie. I attend Lakeland College in WI. I’m going to be a Junior this year majoring in Biology, and I’m excited to be writing my first FLOG entry 🙂
Here is a file link to my outline of the research I will be doing this summer! If you have any questions or possible additions to the experiment, do not hesitate to comment!
revised proposal.docx
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