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.
