A Weald of a time!

One of the great aspects of conducting a PhD is imparting our knowledge to others, whether they want it or not! So Saturday the 22nd of April rolls along and Veronica (my amazing colleague) and I set off to the lovely Weald in Kent to give an inspirational talk to the Weald beekeepers. At least we thought that’s where we were headed. Driving down some lovely country lanes, singing along to some top quality tunes (well, I was) and commenting on the beautiful scenery passing us by, blindly following the satnav god. “You have arrived at your destination”. Had we though? Looking around we see a sign for Sevenoaks, Veronica looks a little confused, checks on her phone the postcode and turns to me saying, we’re in the wrong place. Panic takes over, it turns out my phone reverted to an old search and had taken us 30 minutes away from where we were actually meant to be. Luckily for us we had left with at least 40 minutes to spare, just enough time to turn around and bomb it to the bee keepers. Now at this moment I was beginning to get flustered, got a good state of mind to be in when driving in a place you don’t know down some pretty windy narrow country lanes, no longer so lovely. After a few wrong turns and a rather aggressive, probably ilegeal, U turn we are finally heading in the right direction on a large, easy to follow, A road. At this point Veronica turns to me again and asks if I had brought a cable to connect the computer to the bee keepers projector. More panic, no I hadn’t. Veronica double checks the email, and bursts into hysterical laughter, Gavin, the organiser of the event had told us, quite a few weeks ago, that we should probably bring our own cable as he couldn’t guarantee he’d have one. Had we done this? Of course not. So not only had we managed to go to the wrong place, making us late, but we also didn’t have the cable they had told us to bring! Absolute disaster.

We finally get to where we are going, myself slightly hot and bothered, and the lovely Gavin comes out to meet us. He says he knows we are the talkers as we’re quite a bit younger than anyone else at the meeting. Luckily for us the man with the projector has a cable that fits one of our computers, meaning that one of the members doesn’t need to run home and grab his HDMI cable from the back of his TV, and we are able to get started!

Veronica starts us off with a great introduction into previous work at LASI which helps explain her work on competitive exclusion between bumblebees and honeybees and how this can change with the seasons. Competitive exclusion is when two or more species are competing for a limiting resource, in this case nectar, resulting in one species being excluded from said resource. A previous LASI member, Nick Balfour, managed to show this was happening with the plant Lavender. They noticed that Lavender would often have loads of bumblebees foraging on it, but not many honeybees. By excluding the honeybees he found that the number of honeybees present would then increase in numbers by 14 times! The bumblebees were out competing the honeybees for the nectar.

Veronica spoke about this and how she followed on this research and took it further to see if this changed in the different seasons due to different resources being available. And they did! Honeybee numbers increased on Lavender in mid- summer when bumblebees were exclude, however in early summer and early autumn, they didn’t. Veronica has hypothesised this is due to the mass flowering of two major resources. Bramble in early summer and ivy in early autumn. The bees don’t need the Lavender as they have plenty of other food available elsewhere! Veronica is hoping to examine this further with the bramble, so watch this space for more information on that research!

I was up next and spoke about my work on wind and the solitary bees, which I have already spoken about in previous blogs so won’t repeat here. Once finished, we had a nice chat and some pretty tasty cake with the lovely bee keepers and were then on our way.