Hello FLOG!
Hope you all had a wonderful Monday. Here, at the Echinacea Project, we had to wait a little bit to get our outside work started. It rained all morning and through lunch but very conveniently stopped as the time came to resume the work day. Since the plots were too wet the team decided to pick up with some demography and search for this year’s flowering plants out at Loeffler’s corner.
Throwing it back to this morning, I think it’d be fair to say that a team Echinacea trapped indoors is still a productive team Echinacea. The rainy morning called for computer time, during which many of us made progress on our independent projects and other various jobs. While the team congregated around a table in the main room of Hjelm, I took to the basement to work at my pinning station. I now have over 100 bees pinned and labeled with specimen IDs. I can use the IDs to trace each bee back to the vial and trap that it came from, along with the date it was collected. My next step was to roughly organize the bees by morphospecies(pictured below). The picture does not do them justice, but these bees are COOL! I’m excited to look at them closer and identify the many unique traits that the different species have. Allison Grecco paid us a visit today as well and it was very nice to get to share with her my project update! Best of luck with your master’s Allison!
John also shared with us at lunch, his summer project update. He has a unique opportunity to take what we do at the Echinacea Project in the summer and incorporate it into his teaching at West Central Area High School. He has a lot of fun and engaging activities planned for his students this coming school year. I’m excited for you all to hear/read more about it!
Until next time,
Shea Issendorf
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