Newt Powers 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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8. High-key I had days where I wished the bees would leave before I swung my net 😩 we’re all interconnected, yk I feel bad! I did at least introduce myself to tge bees I did capture and before killing them said why I was doing it and apologized.

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9. All in all, I’m kinda learning maybe the sort of biology I want to do in the future is not one that actively involves killing the test subjects, which is good information to know because I will hopefully do grad school in it one day!!

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Here’s a link to the poster if you want to read more: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AwHYKz_gt7l_uizbT84l7b_yk3RdgeII/view?usp=sharing

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Picture version!!

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