Elliott Chaparral Reserve

27 Mar, 01 AM - 04 Apr, 11 AM

Vehicle 1: Licence Plates: 2WIX354 and Vehicle 2: VIN: WDBRF61J01F059921 This research requires training honey bee foragers to artifical feeders, but location of our lab and greenhouse in UCSD do not provide appropriate condition to the training. The major difficulty is that our honey bees are attracted to natural food around the campus, and the bees are not interested in our feeders. On the other hand, the Elliott Reserve is a large natural habitat that has, at certain times of year, relatively reduced flowering vegetation. Our research on honey bee stop signal requires a study site that has very few flowers, and we expect that using Elliott as a study station increases the efficiency and production of our project. We will bring and keep a colony of honey bees (approximately 2000 workers) to Elliot Reserve under a canopy, and the bees are kept in a wooden observation hive (56.5x78.7cm), consisting of three rectangular combs covered by Styrofoam on top of metal or fiber glass meshes in a wooden rectangular box with wood doors to keep the colony in darkness. This observation nest is mounted on a circular rotating wooden base that allows access to both sides. The honey bees are free-flying when observers are present during our experiments. We will set up one or two feeders setup in each experiment. Each feeder is composed by a clear glass cylindrical bottle inverted on clear plastic plate with grooves radiate out from the center. The feeder is placed half way into a blue bowl on a tripod. We will provide 2.5M sucrose solution in each feeder along with and a piece of lemon-scented filter paper at the top of each for training, feeding and experimenting the honey bees. Feeders are placed 50m away from the hive entrancefor manipulations and used as controls. We will mark the foragers with a tri-color combination by painting one dot of color at the thorax of foragers who went to a specific feeder. In order to distinguish the individuals, two colors will be painted at its abdomen that adds up to three painted dots on a forager for identification. Then we will allow the bees to feed for an hour and observe the behavior of the marked foragers at the major dance floor on one side of the hive for another hour after manipulation; meanwhile, we will record the foragers? motion and sound with a high-speed video camera and use a microphone to identify the stop signal by its specific "beeping" sound at 300-400Hz uncovered in the hive. There will be one researcher at each feeder and two researchers observing and video-recording the hive in each experiment that requires up to 5 persons for each visit.

Visit #9633 @Elliott Chaparral Reserve

Approved

Under Project # 6541 | Research

Honey bee foraging and stop signal communiation at Elliott Reserve

graduate_student - University of California, San Diego

Reservation Members(s)

Group of 3 Graduate Student Mar 27 - Apr 4, 2006 (9 days)
Constantine Lau Mar 27 - Apr 4, 2006 (9 days)
Constantine Lau Mar 27 - Apr 4, 2006 (9 days)

Reserve Resources(s) | Create Invoice

Grounds use only 5 Mar 27 - Apr 4, 2006