This semester, I
research Nosema, a fungal gut
pathogen, in bumble bee workers and the relationship between Nosema infection and bumble bee food
choice. I became interested in my project last spring after taking a class with
my current mentor, Dr. Forkner. I wanted to have experience with both field and
lab research techniques and joined an
ongoing research project on bumble bee queens. After I started working, I
decided to expand the research to examine worker bees and collaborated with my
mentor to develop a project for URSP. I
am fascinated by the research because it is critical to preventing the current
decline of bumble bees, which are essential crop pollinators.
My long-term
goals are to go to graduate school in biology and to pursue jobs in the
conservation field. I would enjoy
working as a researcher at either a non-profit, aquarium or zoo, or even in the
federal government and being able to apply my research outcomes to make a
difference. This research project helps me learn field and lab techniques I
will need in the future, and provides me with experience in species
conservation. All of these skills will make me able to conduct research on my
own in the future.
Over last spring
and the summer, I collected all the bumble bee workers I needed while helping
to collect bumble bee queens. Since the semester has started, I have been
processing my worker bees to make pollen slides to assess food diversity and to
check the pollen and bees for Nosema. More recently, I have been counting and
analyzing the pollen diversity of the fuschin-stained pollen slides. After the
data have been collected, I will analyze the data with regression tests and
seeing if there is a correlation between pollen diversity and Nosema infection loads and will use ANOVA
to look for species differences in infection rates and food choices.
I have
discovered that research is a creative process overall. In undergraduate
courses, the labs have usually already been practiced hundreds of times and the
process and techniques have been perfected. Working on your own research
requires you to be flexible and adaptive to changes that you need to make. You
have to be willing to try something new or change techniques in order to get
the data necessary for your research. Over the semester, my process and project
has evolved and changed to what works best with the available equipment and
what I can complete in a semester.
