Bees!

Wow! What a busy week this has been for me! This week I worked on my ASU transfer application and my TRAIN application for the fall along with everything else that I normally do. I started the week off on Sunday by meeting up with Dr. Ortiz and Dr. Jennifer Sweat on campus to capture and mount bees. This experience was very interesting because I was able to see the method used for the entire process. Plastic bowls were placed in the garden and around the future site of the native pollinator garden, the bowls had been spray painted with fluorescent spray paint to attract insects and then filled with soap water to kill the bees. Most of the insects that we caught were flies but we had a few sweat bees and also a lady bug (the lady bug survived and we released it, in case you were worried). Dr. Sweat had brought some honey bees with her that she had previously caught in case we didn’t catch any, these were the bees that we looked at under the dissecting microscope and then mounted (photo below). This was a great experience because it is relevant to my field of interest which is plant biology, insects and plants have complex relationships to say the least. Early Thursday morning I met up with Matt in the garden and we attempted to drill four more pitfall-trap holes for my research project, the soil was very hard to drill into after a certain depth because of its clay consistency so we had to stop after drilling two holes so that our drill would not overheat. We will work on the remaining holes next week. Another exciting thing happened and that was the arrival of my Associates degree in the mail (photo below), it’s very pretty and nice to look at! I hope everyone else is having a great week, see you around!