Edinburgh Bumblebee Brigade

@suzstathatos @cv4ecology This has me in stitches 🤣

How it started vs. how it ended 😅🧡 so grateful for this experience @cv4ecology and getting to know everyone involved.

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 Wildlabs.net 🥳 #tech4wildlife

@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.

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.

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

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 youtube.com/watch?v=jDTRKe…

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

@HydeHives @pollinisation What a great photo!

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

@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 🐝

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

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 🐝

@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 😊

#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

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: epicurious.com/recipes/food/v…

@BambiraptorF @JeffOllerton Congratulations!

@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 🔊

@EdiBeeBrigade @TheBotanics @SBSatEd Amazing! What kind of low frequency microphone are you guys using? Thanks!

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

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

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.