Field Experience
Students get involved in research project
By Mari Olson

It’s not often that students get to go on field trips, and even rarer for those outdoor excursions to take them to a marshy field by a river, hanging beer from poles.

Dr. Brian Patrick’s ecology class – consisting of seven students – participated in a North American pilot study to examine the efficacy of a simple trap design to monitor yellowjackets, hornets, and bees, including native and honey bees.

To conduct the study, the students had to choose four habitats, four liquid attractants and hang 128 bottles in two sizes – 20-ounce and 2-liter – in order to lure their test subjects to the party. The study went on for almost a month this fall and the data took about three weeks to collect.

The class worked with Sam Droege at the United States Geological Survey (USGS) office in Beltsville, Md., and with another undergraduate class at Georgia Southern University, taught by Dr. Alan Harvey.

The goal was to create a practical protocol to monitor species of bees, wasps, hornets and yellowjackets that could be carried out by citizen scientists across North America, Patrick said.

“It is important to monitor these groups because they are sensitive to changes in their environment,” Patrick added. “Thus, establishing a long-term monitoring program could help alert scientists to any changes in the diversity and/or abundance of the target groups. If these changes can be detected early, then the causes of these changes in diversity and/or abundance might be more quickly fixed or stopped.”

After receiving the initial guidelines, Patrick’s class decided to veer in a few directions to study the results. The original study was created for the forested areas of Europe, primarily The Czech Republic, but North America offers sporadic forests and eastern South Dakota almost none so some scientific creativity was applied.

The students chose four habitats: a wetland along the James River; an upland grassland; a lowland “orchard”; and a lowland gallery forest along Firesteel Creek.

“Wayne and Mary Puetz were kind enough to let my class use their property east of town to do the sampling,” Patrick said.

The Czechs used a variety of attractants, including cider vinegars and various beers, but eventually settled on Heineken beer as the best at attracting a wide variety of the target groups of bees, wasps, hornets, and yellowjackets, he said.

“Because Heineken is a European beer, the students wanted to know if North American bees, wasps, hornets, and yellowjackets prefer American beer,” Patrick pointed out. “They chose Blue Moon beer because it is a beer that is more similar to Heineken than some others, and because it is known to be served mixed with slices of fruit.”

The four attractants were: orange juice, sugar water (brown sugar boiled into water), Heineken beer (as the control study), and Blue Moon beer with diced apples (for an American touch).

“One of the biggest aggravations was that we don’t have a lot of wooded areas, so not a lot of trees from which traps could be hung. This forced the students to be creative in how the bottles were hung, resulting in an angle iron attached to an electric fence pole,” he said. “This allowed the traps to be deployed in any habitat, and it shows that a little creativity could allow citizen scientists who do not live around wooded areas to also help with this monitoring effort.”

The absolute results are still pending, “However, we do know that we caught species that had not previously been caught by others across North America – some small native bees,” he said. “Our preliminary results indicate that orange juice may have been the most effective at capturing the most specimens, and possibly the greatest number of species. Heineken and Blue Moon beers were also quite good. Sugar water, however, did not do nearly as well.”

They not only caught bees and wasps, but also caught flies, spiders, lacewings and many other insects and arachnids, though the surplus insects were discarded.

“The students really had fun in the field – even when it was cold and raining – because they had designed the experiment, monitored the experiment, and were responsible for the experiment. This was really applied learning at its very finest!”