*waves at world*

[enismirdal]

Happy Birthday alexcat!! I hope you have a lovely day!

I'm really scarily chirpy at the moment, which seems a bit worrying since all the other 3rd years seem to be stressed out of their minds... Odd. I blame the daylight lamps. We have to have bright daylight bulbs up in the lab so the bees have pseudo-natural light to forage in. I'm under them for maybe 3-5 hours a day, 3 days a week. I guess it's sort of like getting free SAD treatment, so woohoo!

In other good news, it seems my Seraphim CD that I thought the Porters had lost forever is going to reach me after all! Either Caiman have taken THREE BLEEPING MONTHS to dispatch the CD from their US depot (!!), or else the Porters sent it back and Caiman have dispatched it a second time. Either way, I got an e-mail the other night saying, "Your CD has shipped". And so I'll get that in the next couple of weeks! So now I am waiting on two shiny and seriously cook CDs!

Also, yay to mdavison. He very patiently and wonderfully cleared out my fan (which was very dusty and ewww, hence the overheating problem with my computer, at least in part), did lots of Clever^TM stuff, and now it is running SO much cooler than before. It might be that there are other issues too, but for now at least things are MUCH better.

Well, Bee White 90 remained the coolest bee in the world through all of Monday and Tuesday - so cool, in fact, that she finished her tests faster than all the other bees, so she was not needed for experiments¹ on Tuesday. However, she still wanted to play, so in the end she was getting in the way a bit as she was queuing up with the working bees to get out.

Bee Red 93 who I started training last week carried on her training for the first half of this week. Although very fast, she isn't terribly accurate. Still, we got data points. Yay data points!

There was also Bee Yellow Paint [2]. Like Bee Red 93, she was fast but messy, and a bit faffy about coming home once she was full. But again, data.

Sad news, however. The researcher in London who we are working with wants information about the relative sizes of our star bees. The only way to keep the bees the same size as they are now, and prevent them escaping, and make sure they don't die in the nest or anything is, unfortunately, to euthanase them. So farewell, Bee White 90 and Yellow Paint. They are now in the freezer.

But I suppose it's sort of fitting that a bee I dubbed Elenwë should meet her end in a freezer...

On the other hand, there is also good news! The Queen has been doing what she does best - making babies! The colony seems to have replaced every bee we lost by two new fluffy ones. And some are really good.

Yesterday we found our new star bee (and she was AWESOME!!): Bee Green Paint (Georgina). She was possibly the coolest bee ever. She was a big whopper of a bee, so big she jammed at the narrow point in the access tube sometimes, so we had to sort of squeeze it slightly to let her through! The cool thing about her was that she does the experiment for the sake of doing the experiment, not just for the sugar reward! As in, she actually seemed to like making choices purely for the fun of it. She'd fly into the maze, fly towards the flower very distinctly, then rather than landing on it and guzzling sugar water, she looked at the flower, flew away back to the access tube and turned around in there, before coming back out to make another choice. This meant whereas we were waiting 5-10 minutes per data point with most bees, we'd be able to get 10 data points in half an hour with Georgina. Cool or what? She was so motivated and bubbly - my supervisor thought I was loopy when I said to him she was doing this, until he saw for himself.

I draw attention to tha past tense - yeah, we had to freeze her too.

Current subject is Bee Blue Paint (Roberta). She has a slight left bias, so whenever she got it wrong, it was when the flower was on the right. She started out well, but SO faffy. Buzz buzz look at flower, buzz buzz look at wall, buzz buzz crawl around on floor, buzz buzz try to escape... Still, she was fast and accurate.

And then she got bored. Yeah, she just decided she didn't want to go home, she didn't want to do experiments either, so she was just going to wander around on the floor looking vacant and occasionally climb up the wall, fall off and land on her butt. Thank you, Roberta.

Bees are just sooooo cool.

¹Before an animal rights protestor shoots me or hits me or something, yes, although I am technically "experimenting on animals", it's really nothing like the tortured kitties and bunnies they show you on the anti-vivisection sites. The bees are getting bribed with their favourite food - sugar water - to do something they do naturally - fly to flowers and forage. Really not a bad life for them! I'm not pumping weird poisons into them or anything!

OK, this is turning into a long and rather sickeningly optimistic update. I'll go and do some reading or something before you all die of the sugar content!

Comments

[ilanin.livejournal.com]

Mm. I tend to use a straw, this both a) concentrates the airflow making the blowing more effective, and b) gives you a bit more separation, meaning you get less dusty afterwards.