A bit over 100 F today. We met as a group for the first time today (see pic of students). A great mix of students who all are interested in being involved in research and ready for a special challenge. They are from Texas, New York, Oklahoma, Michigan and Arkansas. We did some paper work with Virginia Hatton an administrative assistant (she has taken care of a lot of stuff for us) . John Hranitz (Bloomsburg University, PA) met us in the morning and gave us a taste of what is coming. Dr. John Barthell the PI for the project, Oklahoma Central University, gave an interesting introduction to the project and an overview of the travels sprinkled with travel advice. We saw a PPT presentation. We all thought, are actually going to be in these seemingly magical places? We began to think about experimentally tackling some of the questions presented by Dr. Barthell. Basically we are interested in 2 plants Yellow Star Thistle and Vitex agnus-castus (native to the area we are going to). The thistle plant is also found in the US spreading from the west as an invasive. Dr. Barthell has studied this plant and bees on Santa Cruz Island off the coast of California, a place that has a similar climate to the one we will encounter in 1 week. We are shaping the study looking at bee visits to the Yellow Star Thistle compared to Vitex agnus-castus. We are starting to work ideas out with Dr. Bartell.
The College Student Crew. All happy and excited about their trip coming up.
The main places that the REU team will be visiting and working in
could you bring home some of that "yellow star thistle"? Maybe our bees would like it too?
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