Results of urban pollen monitoring pilot study

Some of the pollen collected during this project. I have not yet had time to go back and identify the pollen. If you are interested in doing an independent study, thesis, or dissertation related to this work, let me know. 

Conceptual framework for a study of how land use, pollen forage, and beekeeping interact.  The dashed line indicates the feedback linking back to land cover. As beekeeping becomes more difficult and pollination services more expensive or harder to procure for bee-dependent crops, more land may be converted to agriculture to make up for shortfalls in crop production.

Amino acid composition for the pollen collected from a colony at the 5th Street Apiary in Lexington, KY.  Although these samples were collected approximately one month apart from the same hive, they show significant differences in the quantities of amino acids. The most essential amino acids for honey bees are isoleucine, leucine, and valine. HPLC chemical analyses were at UK in the Environmental Research Training Laboratory.

This is a plot of temperature inside the hive, in blue. Note how the colony maintains a steady temperature. The higher temps may be related to thermoregulatory changes in the hive in association with reproduction. By comparing intermal hive temperatures with those in the surrounding land use context around the hive one can get a more nuanced picture of the environmental heterogeneity experienced by honey bees.