Edinburgh Bumblebee Brigade

Bumblebee acoustics group at @SBSatEd @EdinburghUni 🌻🐝 Part of the Silvertown and Stone labs.

[Edinburgh Bumblebee Brigade @EdiBeeBrigade]

@suzstathatos @cv4ecology This has me in stitches 🤣

[Edinburgh Bumblebee Brigade @EdiBeeBrigade]

A huge thank you to our friends @WILDLABSNET for highlighting our bumblebee acoustics research 🐝🎧 We look forward to sharing more about how we use bee buzzes in bee conservation on https://t.co/eiPypqc4ia 🥳 #tech4wildlife

[WILDLABS Community @WILDLABSNET]

Ellie here reporting live from the #tech4wildlife @cv4ecology summer school at The California Institute of Technology! Today I'm learning from students' final presentations on the models they've worked on for the past three weeks, and talking with them about their experiences.

[Edinburgh Bumblebee Brigade @EdiBeeBrigade]

@DCrainium @TheBotanics Hi @DCrainium! Shoot us a DM and we'd be happy to explain our research to you in more detail 😊 In short, the tagging is for our group leader Alix's PhD thesis on the acoustics of bumblebees and how they can be used in bumblebee conservation.

[CV4Ecology Workshop @cv4ecology]

Alixandra Prybyla, a PhD student and Darwin Trust Scholar at @EdinburghUni, will work with the @EdiBeeBrigade to train models to monitor bumblebees in acoustic data, identifying species-diagnostic signatures in a continuous stream of real-time sounds.

[Edinburgh Bumblebee Brigade @EdiBeeBrigade]

CITATION:
Heinrich, Bernd. "Bumblebees out in the cold." The Hot-Blooded Insects. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 1993. 227-276.

[Edinburgh Bumblebee Brigade @EdiBeeBrigade]

How do 🐝s stay cool during the #hottestdayoftheyear? In a #heatwave, bees regurgitate a droplet of fluid and keep it in motion by flexing their proboscis. This causes evaporative cooling of the droplet. The bee's head is cooled up to 2°C! #AcademicTwitter
https://t.co/dAPHunJ7rt

[Hedgehog Society @hedgehogsociety]

With the temperature set to soar across the UK we are asking you all to offer some shallow bowls of water for hedgehogs and other wildlife - pop in a few pebbles to ensure insects can escape. Please share!

🎥 Paul Bunyard

[Edinburgh Bumblebee Brigade @EdiBeeBrigade]

@HydeHives @pollinisation What a great photo!

[Edinburgh Bumblebee Brigade @EdiBeeBrigade]

Did you know that only 24 of the ~270 known bee species in the UK are #bumblebees? The majority are solitary bees: each female has her own nest.

You can still find solitary bees, like Andrena dentiulata and a Lasioglossum sp., foraging side-by-side with eusocial bumblebees!#PhD

[Edinburgh Bumblebee Brigade @EdiBeeBrigade]

@ElizaCoulson @TheBotanics That is a lovely Bombus hypnorum, or a Tree Bumblebee! They came over from France in the early 2000s and have since established themselves all over the UK. Many nests exist around the Botanics 🐝

[Susan Eshelman 🌾 @eshelman_s]

Got to be a member of the @EdiBeeBrigade today! 🐝 Best way to enjoy a sunny Scottish summer day is to play #BingoBees at @TheBotanics. Great to see #CitizenScience at work! Follow @EdiBeeBrigade for more information on their research and future events

[Edinburgh Bumblebee Brigade @EdiBeeBrigade]

Local to #Edinburgh and want to get involved with a family-friendly #citizenscience project?

Join us at @TheBotanics' Demonstration Garden on Sunday, July 10th from 12PM - 4PM for a game of #BingoBees 🎲 Play bingo by finding our tagged bumblebees, gather data, & win prizes 🐝

[Edinburgh Bumblebee Brigade @EdiBeeBrigade]

@craftygreenpoet It's always a treat to see multiple types of pollen in a pollen basket! This one in particular was very beautiful. We spent quite a while admiring the bee's hard work 😊

[Edinburgh Bumblebee Brigade @EdiBeeBrigade]

#Bumblebee pollen loads are monospecific 44%-65% of the time (i.e. they come from one flower species).

When 🐝s forage from multiple species, they create beautifully layered pollen loads. We think Y89's pollen load looks like strawberry ripple #icecream 🍦#365DaysWild #PhdChat

[Edinburgh Bumblebee Brigade @EdiBeeBrigade]

Scientific citations: Free, J. B. "The flower constancy of bumblebees." The Journal of Animal Ecology (1970): 395-402.

&

Willmer, Pat. "Pollination and floral ecology." Pollination and floral ecology. Princeton University Press, 2011.

Ice cream image: https://t.co/GzcIeJq0Lx

[Edinburgh Bumblebee Brigade @EdiBeeBrigade]

@BambiraptorF @JeffOllerton Congratulations!

[Edinburgh Bumblebee Brigade @EdiBeeBrigade]

@nicrodemo @TheBotanics @SBSatEd We use a unidirectional parabolic microphone. The parabolic dish is specially shaped so that it can direct lower frequencies (as low as 80-100Hz) towards the microphone 🔊

[Edinburgh Bumblebee Brigade @EdiBeeBrigade]

What does an acoustic survey look like? 🎧

For our #PhD #research, it involves a specialized microphone to pick up low-frequency #bumblebee buzzes, two netters to catch the 🐝s, and a cooler to bring our 🐝s to torpor for handling/measurements!

#PollinatorWeek #AcademicTwitter

[Edinburgh Bumblebee Brigade @EdiBeeBrigade]

@ymilesz @SBSatEd Welcome to the Stone lab! Very excited to meet you.

[Edinburgh Bumblebee Brigade @EdiBeeBrigade]

Would you believe these #bumblebees were the same species? Yellow 73 (left) exhibits Bombus hypnorum's common ginger morph. Yellow 74 (right) is much darker--almost black! She is a great example of a melanistic/melanic morph 🐝 We 🧡🖤 🤍 phenotypic variation.