Blog Assignment #10: Research Project Reflection (individual)

By Brian Tran

The most interesting thing about our research experience was finding that the butterflies do not like nicotine like some literature has found. I also liked learning about the new beehives on campus from going to the bee meetings with Mary. As we’ve said many times before, the weather was definitely a difficulty. On many days that we needed to do research, it was raining outside and the bees don’t like that. Another difficulty was the fact that the bees, when they did come out, didn’t go to our flowers with nectar in them. They preferred the real flowers in the garden instead.

I was proud that we were able to break through at the last minute because before that we essentially had no usable data. I mean, we did know a little about bee preference by our observational studies but since they didn’t come to our flowers we didn’t have what we needed. I feel like I could’ve persuaded the group to give up on bees earlier and find something else but hindsight is 20/20. I also spilled some sugar water so we had to make a new batch. I was surprised that the bees didn't come at all to our flowers. Every time we went out to observe how our flowers did I had renewed hope that we would finally have some data just to have my soul crushed when no bees came. We even tried disguising our flowers to blend in with real flowers that they were on but even when they accidentally fell in they flew out almost immediately. In 5 years, I’m gonna remember everyone in our class, including Grace. It was such a small class, it felt more personal than if I were in Jonathan’s class.