Blog Post #8: Research Project Update - Bugs on Drugs

• Name of the research project

Bugs on Drugs, Apis Mellifera

• Names of the research group members

Grace Stringer, Horea Oprean, Brian Tran, Jonathan Hong

• Photo of your research in progress

Multiple colors of the same flower to isolate a preferred color for the bees.

A photo of our flowers being placed by Jonathan and Horea and then ignored by the bees.

Proof that the bees do indeed exist and pollinate flowers.

• Update us about the current state of your research project.

We’re going back to the drawing board a bit on the design of the fake flowers, since our initial tests resulted in nothing but evaporated sugar water and lonely craft projects.

• Tell us about your initial results!

We prepared a 1 ppm concentration of nicotine in sugar water for the bees, in accordance with research that indicates that this is the concentration to which the bees have shown any preferential behavior.  

We drilled holes into all the fake flowers for the trimmed eppendorf pipet tips that will contain the sugar water, glued the flowers back onto their stems and inserted them into cups to keep the wind from blowing them over.

Upon initial testing of three different flowers for color preference, we ran into a small snag. Despite there being hive activity, with bees buzzing in and out at a steady rate, our flowers had zero visitors in the 45 minutes we tested. We tried placing the flowers approximately three feet from the hives in the hopes that their proximity would encourage the bees to pollinate them, but outside of one bee accidentally bumping into the pedals of the blue flower, our nectar remained uncollected.

Upon retrieving the flowers at the end of the testing period, we noticed that the 0.1 mL of nectar inside each flower had completely dried up, and we suspect this could be a cause of the poor attraction power of our imposter flowers.

• Have you had any revisions to your experiments?

We haven’t revised our experiment yet, but we are going to try replacing our realistic flowers with colorful plastic plates and a capacity to hold much more sugar water. Perhaps the larger size of the plates and the fact that they won’t dry out as quickly will attract more of the honeybees.

• What do you have planned for the final 2 weeks?

Once a bee’s favorite color “flower” is nailed down, we’ll start pairing the sugar water flower with a doped flower of identical color placed somewhere else in the garden, in order to test a preference to either the nicotine or the caffeine.