Research Projects

Bumblebee population health in roadside environments (Undergraduate research project)

In brief the project identified the number of colonies foraging at a selection of different environments and used this information to make a comparison between these environments to identify if roadsides planting schemes were creating a suitable environment for bumblebees. The techniques used also allow for the identification of diploid males, which are indicators of poor population health.

This project was unable to find a significant decrease in colony numbers between the different environments. But was a good opportunity to combine field work with lab work and statistical analysis. Requiring fieldwork skills such as plant and insect identification as well as capture and sample collection. In the lab DNA extraction, PCR amplification and the use of tagged florescent primers were performed to prepare the samples for analysis. Finally the computational analysis was performed using Peak Scanner, COLONY and the R statistics language.

While this project is now complete the data could still prove useful in determining roadside planting choices. Additionally the Peak Scanner software used required a windows computer (or windows emulated environment), which prompted me to start work on a cross platform alternative in Python. But this still needs further work to be a useful alternative for parsing the .ABI files.