During these past four months, the Dream Stream who is made up of Eric Gale, Kirstin Miner, and Cade Walker, had the opportunity to work with Ms. Boyer, the nurse at Glenside Elementary. Glenside is in Berks county. Not everyone may know this, but Berks county is having problems with an invasive species called the  Spotted Lanternfly. They are from China, India, and Vietnam. These bugs are potentially very harmful to the ecosystem because there are no natural predators to keep the population under control. These bugs like to eat and live on trees, mostly fruit trees or hardwoods. Our first mission was to go to Glenside and figure out what we needed to do to help.  Nurse Boyer is in charge of the garden club at Glenside and she asked us to come help get rid of these annoying bugs. Glenside’s property, and especially the garden where her club meets, has a lot of trees that these bugs love to take over and hatch out of. Because Nurse Boyer works with elementary aged kids, she was worried about how they would react if the lanternflies would jump on them. Our first action we did was going to the garden to see what needed to be done. The very first tree we looked at had a lot of egg masses on them and at that point we realized the problem was worse than we expected. After getting the materials and finally getting a good day to do it we met at Glenside at 8am to start working on getting rid of these nasty bugs. We were at the school till about noon, during this time we went around to all the trees and took something to scrape them off with. We used a credit card or gift card but you can use anything to that will scrape it off. But you can’t just scrape them off onto the ground, you need to scrape them into a bag filled with alcohol and then double bag it. The alcohol is to make sure these bugs are dead. If you just put them into the bag without killing them something may cause the bag to open and who knows where this bag will be. It may cause an outbreak somewhere it’s not already at. Once we got all the sacks we could off the tree we went around with this very strong fly tape and put it at the base of these trees. We did this because when the eggs we missed hatched, they would crawl down the tree and get stuck and die. This will stop them from hatching and causing Nurse Boyer headaches when the kids start running around because they have lanternflies all over them. The second main part of our service was the poster Nurse Boyer wanted. The poster was to inform the children about what was on the trees and why we taped the trees. This whole process took just about 4 hours to do, between finding a way to get the best information but keeping it at a level the kids would understand, to putting the poster all together, and then finally getting to Nurse Boyer so she could inform the children about these bugs. This was an amazing experience and Nurse boyer was very helpful. Before this experience we had no idea what and how much damage these bugs could do. We even used whatever extra tape we had and taped trees in our own backyards to try and stop them from killing our trees. I hope the kids learned what these bugs were and what we were doing to try and stop them. I hope that they too told their parents about what we did and encouraged them to go out and tape their own trees.

On 4/14 we all meet in Gaige to tell our class mates and anyone else who wanted to come about our research and service work. We had pictures of Glen side trees and we brought the tape in to show people what they can use to tape there trees. This was a great experience and we got to talk to a lot of people.

As part of our service Miss Boyer asked us to do a poster board to help the kids learn about lantern flies. So we added the life cycle, why there is tape on the trees, what they look like, where do they come from and why they are bad. We had to make this kid friendly because kids are in the grands k-5. This poster took about 2 hours to make. The life cycle was the hardest part to find.

On March 29 2019, our team all got together at 8 am at Glen side elementary school to tape trees to help kill the lantern flies. Yes, these bug fly but the reason we taped the trees is when the bugs hatch they climb down the tree instead of flying. So as they walk down the tree they get stuck on the tape. But before we taped the trees we went around to about 30 trees and scraped the egg sacks off the tree and put them in a bag of alcohol to kill them to make sure they don’t come back. This all took about 4 hours.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today we all meet in the library to work on our topic for our research project. That topic is Whaling, killing whales is illegal and has been illegal for many years but that doesn’t stop some people. Some countries like japan, Iceland, Norway and Korea are still killing whales for the meat and blubber to sell in markets around the world. If people keep killing whales, the ecosystem will be affected because there will be no whales to keep control of other fish species population.

We are the Dream Stream, we are working with Ms. Melissa S. Fisher who is part of Glenside elementary school and we have been assigned to work on the Spotted lantern flies project. Right now we do not know much about what we are doing and who we will be working with but the main thing is research on how to scrape and tape trees to prevent the spotted lantern flies on local trees.We should find out more about this in the coming weeks.  The members of our team are Eric Gale, Kirstin Miner, Cade Walker.  Eric Gale is a sophomore criminal justice major. He loves to play baseball, he plays for Penn State berks as a catcher. He also loves hunting and fishing. Kirstin Miner is a sophomore Information Science and Technology major. She loves to play video games and take pictures of nature. Cade Walker is a sophomore studying ist. I love to snowboard but i don’t like the cold.