With the completion of our activities in 2019 we are now planning our 2020 efforts.
For 2020 we plan to extend our activities, but in a more focused effort. Specifically we plan to address some of the limitations of our 2019 research.
"We had sporadic success in propagating blue orchard bees (BOBs) in Arizona. Our results are complicated by exogenous effects such as the sun/shade above, bees emerging early, bees not emerging or simply dispersing without using the supplied habitats."
Our initial effort will address two key limitations of our 2019 efforts:
1. Bee dispersal: When released the bees simply flew away. Where to? We don't know.
2. Quantity and quality of pollen: The Arizona locations had limited flowering plants to provide pollen for the bees. In addition, we learned later that the pollen collected by our bees (retrieved from the habitats) was of low quality.
Note that the two issues above may be related; the bees flew away because there was not adequate pollen in the available flowers.
Our initial effort will be to place BOBs in an enclosed structure (so they can't fly away) and provide an 'artificial', supplementary source of pollen. We will explain this further in subsequent posts.
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