Insect pollinator nutritional & behavioral ecology
This January, most members of the Tufts Pollinator Initiative (TPI) traveled to Costa Rica as part of Tufts University’s Tropical Ecology and Conservation course. In this course, students spend the fall semester preparing a proposal and planning a research project for the tropics. Over winter break, the students visit the tropics to carry out their […]
As a kid, I thought that all scientists dressed in a white coat and goggles, ready to mix chemicals and use fancy equipment in a lab. I didn’t realize that in playing outdoors, catching insects, and asking questions, I was doing science. Now as a field biologist, I am constantly inspired by the natural curiosity […]
2018 was a busy year for me: I successfully defended my PhD, I got married, and I started a new job studying a new study system! Read about my (and other’s!) 2018 research highlight and favorite conference/field experience on the Insectes Souciaux blog here.
Just south of Olympia, WA, my new field site is a lively 180-acre prairie. There are queen bumble bees searching for nests, barn swallows doing acrobatics, and some of the strangest flowers I have ever seen. I half expect the Alice-in-Wonderland-esque flowers to break into song. This week, I had the opportunity to write my […]
Back in June, I attended the National Communicating Science Conference (#ComSciCon) in Cambridge, MA and one of the many awesome people I met was Sadie Witkowski! Sadie is the host of a podcast, PhDrinking, where she interviews a scientist about their research over a drink. I had the pleasure of being one of Sadie’s interview-ees […]
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 […]
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 […]
This year marks my first bee installation! Although I have been studying and keeping bees for about 3 years now, I had only worked with observation hives. I don’t actually install the bees in the observation hives—I bring empty observation hives to our bee guy (Rick Reault, owner of New England Beekeeping). Then, Rick installs […]
Providence Pollinator Lab 