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Denmark is a heavy farming country. More than 60% of the surface is cultured landscape by farmers. In May the country is more or less yellow. You will see it when flying over the country. This year we have around 160.000 hectare of rape fields. Rape is a very good nectar and pollen flower give the main flow in Denmark. Rape honey is a very light and creamy honey. Danish customers love this honey. On the other side, it is a very intensive crop. From the putting the seed into the soil to the harvest, on average the rape culture is sprayed up to 6 times with pesticides.
Flemming Vejsnæs

Pollen sampling by citizen scientists (CS) is underway in several countries. How to store the pollen until molecular analysis? How to transport the pollen between the CS and the lab? These are important questions addressed by INSIGNIA. Storage and transportation will influence DNA quality and quantity, both important features for reliable botanical identification via metabarcoding. INSIGNIA compared storage in ethanol with freezing. It turns out that storage in ethanol assures good DNA quality quantity, which makes storage and transportation easier.
Alice Pinto

The first official sampling period is right around the corner, so it is time to talk about the sampling procedures in detail. Citizen scientists sample beebread from colony 1 and colony 3. Originally, the idea was to use a specially developed and homemade so-called “beebread collector” to collect the beebread. Nevertheless, in the last few weeks we concluded that simple straws cut in pieces are a better solution. They are even cheaper than the BB-collector, disposable (no exchange of diseases or pesticides) and easier in handling. The aim is to sample in total 3 g of beebread per colony, which is equivalent to 60 cells or about 5 cm of beebread in the straws.

Continue reading “Collecting beebread”

Some blog entries ago we introduced an elegant way of holding the Beehold tubes in colony 3 by inserting 4 holes into a sliding gate. This innovative solution was based on the idea of one of our citizen scientists from Austria. As mentioned in the previous blog posting, bees of colony 1 had or still have issues to get used to the experimental setup but for our citizen scientists this is no reason to throw in the towel. Instead, one of our participants (clever, Roland!) invented a nice, cheap and easy solution to improve the adaption of bees to the new circumstances: firstly, he mounted a landing board to facilitate the traffic of bees; secondly, he installed a mechanism to open and close the pollen trap without disturbing them even if the adapter for Beehold tubes is mounted. Now, that is the magic of citizen science.

Reminder: in colony 1 all of the four sampling matrixes are tested. Thus, bees not only have to get used to the pollen traps but also to the Beehold tubes and the corresponding adapter. This might be “overwhelming” for some of the colonies and in a consequence, several messages from worried citizen scientists arrived us during the last week. They all reported similar problems, observed in colony 1: bees have issues to find the right path into their colonies and they congregate in front of the hive entrance; bees show increased aggressive behavior; bees use the drone entrance to get into the hive and some of them were also observed to fly into the neighboring colonies.

Continue reading “Colony 1 – Bees not finding their way easily”

Hello all,

Our tool boxes are ready to be posted  to Citizen Scientists! They have everything, at least for the start. Only towel paper is missing! Note that 2 pollen traps are also included. Unfortunately a third pollen trap did not fit in the box!

Lets start then!

Hello! We tried out the collection of beebread with the use of a normal straw, cut in the midle. As you can see it is easy to collect form 1 cell, but then each one you add it gets more difficult. we think that up to 5 cells is ok and the weight of this bee bread is between 0.3 and 0.45 g.

Therefore, 3 straws can be used to sample 5 cells each, even 6, from each colony.