This week was very exciting and tiring. After finishing safety trainings I got to go directly to the field. I went with Sandy Debano to Starky Experimental National Forest outside of La Grande. This was a beautiful place filled with trees and flowers.
Sandy is researching how grazing patterns of animals affect bees. We did this by collecting samples of bees from four different types of pastures that are either grazed by deer, grazed by cattle, grazed by both, or grazed by none. We set out two different set of traps, pan traps and blue vain traps. The pan traps are the three different colored cups in the picture below. These cups are painted florescent blue, yellow, and white to attract bees. Soapy water is used kill the bees. The blue vain traps are also pictured below. The traps concept is the same as the pan traps though are thought to possibly attract different bees.
At Starky we also did a floral bloom count to understand percentage of blooming plants and to know what flowers are blooming. This should tell us what bees may be feeding on at the time of capture. There was many beautiful flowers in this area which some of them I learned their scientific name.
After the trip to Starky National Forest the week was filled with literature research and other paper work, as well as a quick tour of HAREC. This literature research consisted of searching on OSU web of science Database on the invasive rusty crayfish. I went back to papers published in 2014. From there I copied the information and the abstract to a word document and organized the papers. Since I will be working with Dave on researching this crayfish this summer having papers to look to will be beneficial.
This week I got to meet one of my awesome co-workers Keelie. I will also be working with Sam who is an intern but she will be starting next month. Needless to say I am excited for this summer.
