Entomologists, Engineers Work Together to Weigh a Bee
🌐 Original language: English
📰 Source: ucdavis.edu
Entomologists, Engineers Work Together to Weigh a Bee
- by Andy Fell
- July 06, 2016
A yellow-faced bumblebee (Bombus vosnesenskii) approaching a California poppy. UC Davis entomologists are trying to learn all they can about how colonies of these pollinators respond to changes in the environment. Recently, they teamed up with electrical and mechanical engineering students from UC Davis to build a device to weigh individual bees. (Photo: Kathy Keatley Garvey)
Quick Summary
- Bumblebees are important wild pollinators
- Seeks to understand how bee colonies respond to environment
- Interdisciplinary team of engineering students, entomologists worked together
How do you weigh a bee? That’s the question that brought together insect specialists at the University of California, Davis, and two teams of UC Davis engineering students this year, to try to solve what turns out to be a tricky technical problem. But the consequences are important: ultimately, understanding how California’s native bumblebees respond to changes in the environment and the availability of flowers, and how we can protect these insects that are so vital to both agriculture and wild plants.
Read the full article at the source →
Source: ucdavis.edu
This page is a short summary of the article; copyright belongs to the original source.
