Week Three

Week Three is in the books! It was a very long week, but we accomplished a lot, and got caught up with a ton of lab work.

On Monday and Tuesday morning, Sam, Estany, Lauren, and I set up twelve experimental plots in some of the fields here at the station for Sandy. Other than that, we spent the rest of the week in the lab.

On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, Sam and I worked on pinning insect samples from Starkey Experimental Forest where Sandy is doing research. The purpose of Sandy’s research is too look at the effect of different types of grazing on bee communities. At Starkey, Sandy has three different pastures that she does experiments in. Within each pasture, there are different levels of grazing: Deer and Elk, Livestock (Cattle), All (Deer, Elk, and Cattle), and None. She also has three methods of bee collection which include blue-vane traps, pan traps, and hand-netting. Within each sample, we separated the bees and non-bees (beetles, flies, etc). Unlike with Lauren’s samples, we pinned everything in the samples instead of just bees. It was really interesting to see the huge variety of insects collected at Starkey.  Altogether, Sam and I pinned around 2,300 insects in three days!

After we finished the samples from Starkey, we continued to work on Lauren’s samples. We finished with all of the samples from 2014 and the samples from June 2015 from Boardman. Now, we are pinning this year’s samples from the Umatilla and the Zumwalt. We also had some really blue bees in a couple of the Boardman samples!

We accomplished a lot this week, and it’s nice to be finally be almost caught up with lab work! I’m really excited to get out of the lab though. We have a lot of field work coming up next week!