Eric Platon on Farcaster

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I recently had the opportunity to present my research on native bee host interactions at Santa Rosa Junior College’s Advanzando conference with funding from the NSF!! The poster is linked below, but if you love bees (or at least the ecosystem services they provide), here’s the summary ⬇️

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1. native bee populations have been in decline because of habitat loss and fragmentation, pesticides, diseases and competition from non-native managed bees.

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2. The purpose of this study is to determine which floral hosts (flowers the bees are pollinating or residing on when caught) are the most important to native bees in California, specifically in the North Bay.

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3. My teammates and I caught the bees at 8 sites on campus, killed them (to examine them, more on that later), used iNaturalist to survey the floral hosts and survey data, froze them, and then later pinned and identified them.

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4. We found the 3 most adbundant bee genera were Xylocopa bees (carpenter bees) at 54.4% of the captures, Halictus bees (sweat bees) at 16.2%, and Ceratina bees (small carpneter bees) at 8.8%. Full graph top middle.

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5. Native bees were collected from 17 native host plant species and 10 non-native host. Top 3 were Escholzia californica, Allium unifolium, and Diplacus aurantiacus. Full graph is at the bottom middle.

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6. In conclusion, we now determined the best native flowering plants to introduce into gardens in urban environments locally!! We still need to research more on the bees’ distribution in spots off of campus and between preserves.

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7. Thanks for reading!!! ALSO, killing the bees literally tore me apart😭😭😭 I thought I was capable of doing so because a scientific basis would describe this as a huge help to bees while killing a tiny number of their population (<50-100 bees/season), BUT it hurt me inside to do so.

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Would there be a way to invent a device that takes high resolution pictures over large flower patches, and identification would be done on pictures? That could be a great research project, clearly motivated, and reproducible all over the world.

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ROC cameras could be justified here? @faust Science with reliably traceable data is a super bounty.

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We developed a system that uses camera and algorithms to weigh chickens without touching them---huge reduction in animal stress, some saying this helps contribute to animal welfare in farming. Here might be a similar idea, so studying bees may not need to kill any, or way fewer 💛2🐝

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