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enismirdalIt's been an atrocious few days for the bees - if I'd known I'd end up having so much of my time at the weekend wasted, I wouldn't have bothered coming into the lab at all!
So on Saturday the only bees that came out at all were ones I'd tested already or stupid naive bees that didn't know a flower from their own behinds and were useless. On Sunday, some untested but semi-trained bees came out, but these seemed completely incapable of making the huge intellctual hurdle from visiting the training chips (clear perspex chips with a black abstract pattern underneath) to the test chips ("flowers") (clear perspex tiles with a piece of coloured card underneath).
Today, I started out as I left off on Sunday. Namely, frustrated.
I managed to mark another bee that seemed to be good at visiting training chips - Yellow Splodge Bee. And Blue and Red from the previous day was coming and going. Neither of them seemed to want to touch the test chips. I eventually realised that Blue and Red was being a devious little monster and was using the drop of sugar solution on the chips as a visual cue and refused to land if she could see the drop wasn't big enough. (You make the drops small on test chips so the bee has to visit more "flowers" and thus give you more data before she is full.)
So I sighed and double-loaded all the coloured chips, and after a couple more runs she FINALLY got the hang of the coloured chips. Of course, these now had so much sugar solution on that I was only getting 2 choices per foraging bout. Bearing in mind that bees sometimes faff for 5 minutes between bouts and it often takes another 5 minutes to get that bee and only that bee to come into the flight arena to forage, data collection was SLOW. I somehow had to get 100 choices out of her before the end of the day, but at the current rate it would have taken me till midnight...
Gradually I decreased the amount of sugar on the chips until she was giving me more choices, and then she was great. She made LOADS of choices each bout and I managed to get her to 100 choices by working through lunchtime and finishing up about 3:30pm.
Then I got some food, did some admin, drank some coffee, and managed to mark another bee for testing tomorrow. White Stripe Bee had better be good...but I'm optimistic.
Meanwhile, the Naughty Bee Box is an endless source of entertainment for me. I put in some tissue as I thought they might like to chew it up and play with it - they're a bit like puppies, really, digging in the cat litter and carrying stuff around in their mouths. But they all weed on the tissue and it was a bit stinky, so I tried to remove it. Unfortunately one bee appeared to have adopted the tissue as her blanky and WOULD NOT let go. I was trying to sneak it out and she was hanging on for dear life; getting out the tissue without the bee was quite a challenge! In the end I let her win and keep the corner of her blanky, as it wasn't too dirty. Silly creature.
So on Saturday the only bees that came out at all were ones I'd tested already or stupid naive bees that didn't know a flower from their own behinds and were useless. On Sunday, some untested but semi-trained bees came out, but these seemed completely incapable of making the huge intellctual hurdle from visiting the training chips (clear perspex chips with a black abstract pattern underneath) to the test chips ("flowers") (clear perspex tiles with a piece of coloured card underneath).
Today, I started out as I left off on Sunday. Namely, frustrated.
I managed to mark another bee that seemed to be good at visiting training chips - Yellow Splodge Bee. And Blue and Red from the previous day was coming and going. Neither of them seemed to want to touch the test chips. I eventually realised that Blue and Red was being a devious little monster and was using the drop of sugar solution on the chips as a visual cue and refused to land if she could see the drop wasn't big enough. (You make the drops small on test chips so the bee has to visit more "flowers" and thus give you more data before she is full.)
So I sighed and double-loaded all the coloured chips, and after a couple more runs she FINALLY got the hang of the coloured chips. Of course, these now had so much sugar solution on that I was only getting 2 choices per foraging bout. Bearing in mind that bees sometimes faff for 5 minutes between bouts and it often takes another 5 minutes to get that bee and only that bee to come into the flight arena to forage, data collection was SLOW. I somehow had to get 100 choices out of her before the end of the day, but at the current rate it would have taken me till midnight...
Gradually I decreased the amount of sugar on the chips until she was giving me more choices, and then she was great. She made LOADS of choices each bout and I managed to get her to 100 choices by working through lunchtime and finishing up about 3:30pm.
Then I got some food, did some admin, drank some coffee, and managed to mark another bee for testing tomorrow. White Stripe Bee had better be good...but I'm optimistic.
Meanwhile, the Naughty Bee Box is an endless source of entertainment for me. I put in some tissue as I thought they might like to chew it up and play with it - they're a bit like puppies, really, digging in the cat litter and carrying stuff around in their mouths. But they all weed on the tissue and it was a bit stinky, so I tried to remove it. Unfortunately one bee appeared to have adopted the tissue as her blanky and WOULD NOT let go. I was trying to sneak it out and she was hanging on for dear life; getting out the tissue without the bee was quite a challenge! In the end I let her win and keep the corner of her blanky, as it wasn't too dirty. Silly creature.
