Entomology

Anson and I went to the Science Cafe at the Museum of Natural Sciences last week to hear an NC State Professor of Entomology talk about bees.  He gave a brief intro and then opened it up for Q&A.  The session was fun and people asked a lot of great questions.  I was surprised at the quality of the questions, actually, especially considering how diverse the crowd was.

After the session, I approached Dr. Tarpy to ask about the affect of sun or lack thereof on my hives.  He said that it would be preferable to have morning sun but it is not imperative.  Then he mentioned that a grad student of his is conducting a study about diseases of urbanized bees and requested I contact the student because of the location of my hives being downtown.  The following day I did and the student was excited to have hives in Five Points to study.  He asked if he could come by 3 times in 3 week intervals to take a sample of 60 bees each time from my hives.  I declined to include the nuc in the study and offered the stronger hive.  He came by this morning with a net and about 10 tubes for bee collection.  He is only capturing foragers as the study includes some feral hives and he would not be able to collect anything but foragers from those hives.



After standing at the entrance with a net for 30 seconds, Holden would then swoop the net around attempting to contain as many additional bees as possible.  Then he had to insert a tube into the net and try to get them all to go inside the tube.  He did this until he had collected 60 bees which took almost an hour.

Attempting to capture all the bees in the net into a tube.

Tube of bees.

Hopefully by the fall he will have some analysis for me.  He did keep a watchful eye for any disease-like activity and noticed a bee that carried out a dead larva from the hive.  He was interested but not concerned about that being related to disease.

Dead larva we examined after noticing a bee carried it out of the hive and dropped it outside.  There were a few others on the ground near it.

I'll keep ya posted about the results of the study once I get them back.  It will be a long time though.