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Some blog entries ago we introduced an elegant way of holding the Beehold tubes in colony 3 by inserting 4 holes into a sliding gate. This innovative solution was based on the idea of one of our citizen scientists from Austria. As mentioned in the previous blog posting, bees of colony 1 had or still have issues to get used to the experimental setup but for our citizen scientists this is no reason to throw in the towel. Instead, one of our participants (clever, Roland!) invented a nice, cheap and easy solution to improve the adaption of bees to the new circumstances: firstly, he mounted a landing board to facilitate the traffic of bees; secondly, he installed a mechanism to open and close the pollen trap without disturbing them even if the adapter for Beehold tubes is mounted. Now, that is the magic of citizen science.

Reminder: in colony 1 all of the four sampling matrixes are tested. Thus, bees not only have to get used to the pollen traps but also to the Beehold tubes and the corresponding adapter. This might be “overwhelming” for some of the colonies and in a consequence, several messages from worried citizen scientists arrived us during the last week. They all reported similar problems, observed in colony 1: bees have issues to find the right path into their colonies and they congregate in front of the hive entrance; bees show increased aggressive behavior; bees use the drone entrance to get into the hive and some of them were also observed to fly into the neighboring colonies.

Continue reading “Colony 1 – Bees not finding their way easily”

Hello all,

Our tool boxes are ready to be posted  to Citizen Scientists! They have everything, at least for the start. Only towel paper is missing! Note that 2 pollen traps are also included. Unfortunately a third pollen trap did not fit in the box!

Lets start then!

Hello! We tried out the collection of beebread with the use of a normal straw, cut in the midle. As you can see it is easy to collect form 1 cell, but then each one you add it gets more difficult. we think that up to 5 cells is ok and the weight of this bee bread is between 0.3 and 0.45 g.

Therefore, 3 straws can be used to sample 5 cells each, even 6, from each colony.

In 2019, INSIGNIA will sample in 4 countries. In Austria, Denmark, Greece and United Kingdom we have 4 to 5 apiaries with 3 colonies each. Below is a map with the locations that are studied!

The second stage; from year 1 sampling to the evaluation of the results.

We depart for the second stage. Most of the preliminary studies planned in stage 1, from kick-off to sampling commencement, are done, coming to an end in the months to come or will start soon. Surely new questions will raise and are to be addressed in the project course. Within six months after the attribution of the Grant Agreement in the last week of October 2018, the sampling begins this weekend of 28 April 2019. After the preparations as there were  telemeetings, study set-up discussions, and agreements on numbers of colonies, number of apiaries, number of samplings, matrices replications and combinations, development of the APIStrip, local organization of the beekeeper citizen scientists, picture manual, tutorials and other instruction tools, questionnaire, preliminary pollen- and pesticide residue binding- and deterioration tests, practical lab and field work, initiation of the sociological study, the dissemination structure and a lot of everyday issues, the field work starts. This is exciting because we are doing pioneering work with the non-invasive sampling, with the non-biological matrices APIStrip and Beehold tubes, the new beebread collection tool, the familiar pollen trap, apiculturist citizen scientist for pesticide monitoring and the first sociological evaluation of apiculturist citizen scientists. We will encounter a lot of practical issues like swarming, drought, heavy rainfall, supersedure, and issues we can not imagine now. It is up to the Insignia team to find answers and solutions. It will be as challenging as stage 2 and the Insignia team is aware of this and accepts.

According to the 2019 study setup, colony 1 combines all 4 sampling methods. The combination of the beehold tubes and the pollen trap is not that simple. We have already shown the adapter we build to integrate the tubes.

Now it is needed to apply the adapter to the colony and make it bee-tight, which is tricky, as first of all bees often find an alternative way in and out their colony, and second because bees need to get used to how the hive entrance looks and where they can enter the colony. The way through the beehold tubes and later the pollen trap is not easy…