After taking an early weekend, the Bellflower team (minus Sara, who was working hard in the lab!) set out Sunday morning to set up our arrays. We were in the greenhouse shortly after 7am, and we all worked quickly to grab the plants we needed for the long day ahead. It was a long drive (for Dr. Ison) to our site at the Cascade Valley Metro Park, but we were rewarded with a beautiful American Bellflower population and some good data!

Jack and I displayed some excellent coordination and teamwork as we recorded and videotaped bees visiting our “mixed” pollen color array. Our array consisted of six white pollen flowers and six purple pollen flowers. Display sizes were cut down to two  male phase flowers and two female phase flowers. Meanwhile, Ashley worked diligently to collect her seed set, pollen removal, and pollen deposition data.

While we hustled over to Akron, the bees were taking it easy and got a late start to the morning. Around noon, the bees got busy and we were able to collect a lot of data. Our mixed pollen array received 38 visits, a majority of which were megachile. We got a handful of visits from Halictid and Bombus, as well as a single visit from a wandering honeybee.

We wrapped our day up by spending some time in the greenhouse sorting and tagging plants for our next outing. All in all, we had a good day out in the field and hope to get some more data this week!