Author Archives: dwk5369

Today’s work went swimmingly! Thanks in very large part to all the work Patrick put into cutting out all the pictures and text we had prepared, mounting them on yellow paper, and mounting all that on sturdy poster board. Ultimately, all we had to do was glue everything down in an eye-popping arrangement, and we were golden and buzzing! See you all on Tuesday!

Afterwards, we retrieved the giant barrel of bamboo that Patrick had cut at his house, and Jamie and I took it down to the Horticulture Center to prepare some bamboo bee houses. We were initially having trouble keeping our bamboo together, but then Jamie and John went to find some pieces of PVC pipe we could use to hold our bamboo. The best part is? No adhesive necessary. Just stuff the pipe full enough and the bamboo will stay.

As you can see, we slid some wire through them, and they are ready to hang! We’ll have these as well as our hypertufas (the bee huts from last week, made from perlite, peat, and Portland concrete.) next Tuesday! A hypertufa is a substance mixed together to resemble rock, literally “extremely rock-like”.

Until then, stay beesy!

Before we talk about our work today, here are two pictures that didn’t make it into our last post:

Patrick carting our massive load of bamboo home with him, and…

…cutting them on his 100-year-old band saw!

And now, today’s work.

Patrick got us a black poster board, and I set about printing out the pictures we want to include on our display! We ran into a few snags – something was sent to the printer double-sided by accident, and I ran out of printer pages partway through. But by the end of the period, we had the design for our board planned out, and movements in motion to prepare for a productive class Thursday!

Long time no bee!

It’s been some time since last we updated, but in that time we can confirm that Patrick has cut our bamboo down to size, and it has dried! So in the next week or two we’ve set a goal to each prepare some kinda frame to stick our cut bamboo in to hang. According to John, he has several places in mind for them to hang across the street from the greenhouse. We aim to have these ready by April 19th!

Meanwhile, we took advantage of the extra class time to go down to the greenhouse and make some bee huts! These are for solitary bees such as bumblebees. Our bamboo houses are for bees like the honey bee, who make individual nests in small holes.

To make these huts, we first mixed equal parts peat moss, perlite, and Portland concrete. Once thoroughly blended, we added water, and kept mixing until the mixture started to clump together. Then we were ready.

The necessities for our huts are twofold: an open space in the center, and a tunnel for bees to get in from outside to this nest area. To accomplish these, we first took a small flower pot and turned it upside down to use as a base. Making the tunnel was simple enough. We cut a small piece of PVC pipe, and cut a small hole in our pots to fit the pipe into. From there, we could go to work moulding our peat/perlite/Portland mixture around the pot and tube.

Now we could let our creativity run wild. Jamie decided to make a lion paw, and I went a bit more ambitious with mine. Now I’m no artist, but I wanted to make a Nittany lion head. It was difficult, especially moulding the ears, but after Jamie pulled up a reference on her phone, I think I managed a decent product.

Now that our huts are finished, we covered them up and left. According to John, they need to dry slowly over the next week. The longer they dry, the stronger they will become. Once dry, they will go on a solid, clean surface, where we can leave some dryer lint inside for bees to nest in. The hollow construction allows for them to be easily cleaned – just lift up, and go.

We’ve dedicated the weekend to working on our individual portions of our research paper, as well as planning for our class project time next week. We hope to produce an interesting, informative poster for display on April 19th! The center display will focus on pictures and descriptions of our work up to this point, and we’re planning to fill the folds with pictures and descriptions of bees native to the area, information about pesticides threatening bees, and information on how to provide habitat to bees! Stay tuned for more information! BEE good!

The leafcutter bee is a gentle pollinator who lays its eggs in long, thin, tubes, be that in wood or other material. It lays eggs one at a time in the tube, sealing each in with a cut out leaf. The eggs then hatch, and the young push their way out of the tube and into the world. From reading up on them, we’ve found that the rose leaf has just the right level of thickness and strength for these bees to use for their young.

These are the kinds of bees we’ll be building habitats for – those who lay eggs in long, thin tubes.

Today, Jamie and I returned to the bamboo patch to harvest more bamboo. Like an intrepid explorer, Jamie ventured into the patch to cut more bamboo at an optimal thickness, leveling it with her reciprocating saw and dragging it out into the open. From there, I trimmed it down, and piled it up.

Overall, I believe we harvested more bamboo than we did last week. We carried the collection back to the greenhouse in the back of Jamie’s car, and left it there for Patrick to pick up at his convenience. He will then take it and cut it down into the segments that we will use to build our habitats, once he manages to get our bamboo haul home. Good luck, Patrick!

We’re excited about the state of our project coming out of our review with Dr. K on Thursday. The habitats we finish by Earth Day can be hung across campus to be a part of the festivities here at PSU Berks. This also gives us an opportunity to design some creative signage to accompany them for this day, a chance that I’d love to tackle. We will be busy bees this semester, looking to finish our bee hotels in time for Earth Day!

Until next time, BEE safe and have a BEEutiful spring break!

Happy Friday to our fellow teams!

Yesterday, our team met with John Rost down at the greenhouse to discuss the scope of our EACAP project. This semester, we’ll be building solitary bee nests, to be hung outside in our area. The nests are composed of a collection of hollow bamboo shoots, cut down to size. By bunching them together into a hangable shape, each bamboo shoot becomes the perfect size for a single bee to enter, lay its eggs, and leave. According to Mr. Rost, the eggs are packed in with leaves, and when they hatch, the young bees push the leaves out and leave, leaving each hole ready for a new bee to enter and nest in.

The bamboo patch out behind the sheep barn here at PSU Berks – taken by Jamie Ernesto

So, to start out, we’ll be harvesting bamboo and cutting it down to size from the bamboo patch and leaving it to dry. Bamboo shrinks when it dries, so ideally we want our bamboo to dry as much as possible before we make any nests. Below is an example of the sort of habitat we’ll be making.

If the bamboo dries out completely before we construct the habitat, then we can bundle the cut shoots together with little worry for them shrinking further and moving about. We can then design and start collecting materials for building our habitats. We’re looking forward to being able to work with Mr. Rost more throughout the semester, and we’re really excited to learn more from him.

One fact he mentioned that I specifically found intriguing concerned the European honey bee. Apparently the bee was never in the United States until European settlers arrived. There are plenty of species of pollinator bees native to America, but the European honey bee out-competes them. Additionally, when we changed our farming style to accommodate more open fields, it unintentionally eliminated bunches of wood and brush between fields that native species of bees needed for habitat. If you’re interested in reading more on this, the article here is a very good read on the subject.

Until next time, we are the BEES! Have a fantastic weekend, everyone!