Now that we have significant bee activity at our Gilbert Site1a2h, we will be monitoring the progress as they fill the habitat tubes.
We have updated the Home page, to include an overall status for the two sites in Gilbert and Payson/Flowing Springs.
We have continued to count the tubes filled in the three Site1a2h habitats; a small 6 by 8 wooden block, another 8 by 13 wooden block and the "large" 57 by 29 foam block.
Here is today's count:
We have some issues on the counting process. Here is a history of the count:
The regular counting is an attempt to measure the progress rate and distribution of the bee's activities. Here's the graph of tubes filled versus date:
It seems to be a fairly linear growth. But we have seen a drop off of observed bee activities (coming and going) over the last 4-5 days.
Here's a video of the activities on 8 June 2020 and some comments on humidity.
The humidity concern was prompted by this article that stated "Leafcutter bees need a constant temperature of 35 C/84 F and humidity ranging between 40%-90%, at these temperatures the bees will take 23 days to emerge."
Our humidity is typically well below that range. As a test, we sprayed the location with water twice over a period of several hours on the morning of the 8th.
You can see the humidity jump from the 15-20% baseline to almost 60 %. The effect lasts for hours (main horizontal division in graph above is one hour). The second wetting was much more thorough than the first. This suggests some experiments/activities for future research.
Similarly the temperature decreases as the humidity is increased.
Next we will discuss the rationale for our study from this article...
...and a preliminary analysis of results.
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