Insect pollinator nutritional & behavioral ecology
For National Pollinator Week, I shared a pollinator photo, accompanied with a pollinator fact, on social media each day. In case you’re not on Instagram or Twitter, here are my photos with their fact. I hope you learn something new! Day 1 Day 1 of #NationalPollinatorWeek! First up, this cute little mining bee foraging on […]
“The hive was like Grand Central Station at rush hour. Commuters moving in every direction, purposeful, industrious, and functioning in organized chaos.” Such an eloquent and accurate description of a honey bee hive on a warm summer day. As 2017 comes to a close, there are countdowns and “best of” lists almost everywhere you look. […]
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.
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 […]
Last week, I was lucky enough participate in the first ever Plant and Pollen Metabarcoding Workshop at the University of Würzburg in Würzburg, Germany. The workshop was organized and led by Dr. Alexander Keller. In addition to Alex, we had two amazing teachers: Wiebke Sickel (PhD student, teacher for the lab portion), and Markus Ankenbrand […]
Providence Pollinator Lab 