Insect pollinator nutritional & behavioral ecology
As the holidays draw near (where did the time go?), I am here to share reviews of some bee-themed kid’s books in my collection. A book (especially one about bees) is always a great gift! Show Me the Honey, Author: Tish Rabe, Illustrator: Christopher Moroney What is it about? Nick and Sally are out of […]
This Halloween, I carved a bee-themed jack-o-lantern. The shape, and size, of my pumpkin was perfect for a skep carving (and a couple bees of course). Humans have a long history with keeping bees; a skep is an artificial hive that beekeepers have been using for over 2,000 years. In nature, European honey bees (the […]
A couple weeks ago, I wrote a research update for the Tufts Graduate Admissions blog (lots of guest blogging lately!). You can read that update here. And update to the update: I just got the pollen data back from Jonah Ventures this week! I have lots of data to sift through.
I wrote a guest blog post for Insectes Sociaux reviewing a recent study on group decision-making in Asian honey bees. Check it out here.
I wrote a guest blog post for Dispatches from the Field, an amazing blog about life and science in the field! Check out my post here.
This semester, I am a teaching assistant for Tufts University’sExperiments in Ecology (a.k.a. BIO 51). BIO 51 is a team taught class where undergraduate students learn about three different study systems, and design their own experiments. This semester’s study systems are honey bees, snails, and tea. The honey bee unit is led by my adviser […]
Last week, I tweeted that one of my newly installed observation hives had two queens. Unfortunately, I only have these not-so-great-quality-phone-through-Plexiglas photos. But, you can see that one queen has a fading, white paint mark on her back, and the other does not. How can this be? Each hive is only supposed to have one […]
While I was in Exeter, UK for theInternational Society for Behavioral Ecology (ISBE), I got a message from my two interns: the bees looked sick. In five of our eight observation hives, some of the worker bees had white dots stuck to their back. Even one of the queens had it! The only thing I […]
Everyone knows that bees are busy. Many know that their hives work like a well-oiled machine. But did you know that a bee’s life is basically organized chaos? Take this video for example. Slowed down to ¼ the speed, these foragers aren’t as graceful as they first appear. At the beginning of the video, a […]
My interns (James and Joanna) and I recently installed pollen traps on our observation hive at Tufts University. We installed the pollen traps to control which amino acids our bees eat. Since pollen is basically the bees’ only source of amino acids (there are small amounts of amino acids in nectar), pollen traps allow us […]
Providence Pollinator Lab 