Elliott Chaparral Reserve

06 Apr, 11 PM - 30 Jun, 01 PM

We will bring and keep a colony of honey bees (approximately 2000 workers) to Elliot Natural Reserve under a canopy located about 200m from the field station, 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 mashes 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 setup 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 entrance for manipulations and used as controls. We will mark the foragers with a tri-color combination by painting two dots of color at the thorax and one dot on the 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 #9719 @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 Apr 6 - Jun 30, 2006 (86 days)
Constantine Lau Apr 6 - Jun 30, 2006 (86 days)
Constantine Lau Apr 6 - Jun 30, 2006 (86 days)

Reserve Resources(s) | Create Invoice