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Show CampusNews Page 2 Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012 As students bundle up, bees become active BY TMERA BRADLEY staff writer While most insects are dormant for the cold season this time of year, the research bees on USU campus will become active again within the next few weeks. Hundreds of queen bumblebees are being stored in boxes in a refrigerated cooler on the north side of campus. "We're doing two projects," said James Strange, United States Department of Agriculture research entomologist. "One is to look at wintering these bumblebees for commercial uses. If you can keep all these queens in a refrigerator situation over the winter, you can then take them out and start a nest with them." "It's just like a walk-in cooler that they'd have in a restaurant or any other lab," said Cory Stanley, USU Extension bee specialist. She said each species of bee has a different requirement for wintering temperature, but that the cooler is set at four degrees celsius. Strange said one of the issues in commercial production is having the ability to store bees when they don't need them and bring them out when they do. "The trick then is to learn to control the amount of time that they're sort of under," Strange said. Strange said the regulated cold temperatures in the cooler forces the insects into hibernation, allowing researchers to store them and have them ready when needed for research. Commercial sellers also keep bees this way to time the dormancy and be able to meet markets. "We'll bring those out of their hibernation probably within the next few weeks and get them going artificially in the greenhouse," Strange said. "We'll have nests of bumblebees over the winter when they would nor- mally be dormant in nature." Strange said the simulated winter can be conducted during any season even summer. In the life cycle of most bees, there's an obligatory winter period where a season of dormancy is necessary for the bees to fully develop. The queen bumblebees are stored while dormant, then activated in a greenhouse. A colony is started by taking the queen out of winter hibernation and giving her a nest box in the lab. Strange said it takes a couple months for the queen to get the colony up and running to where it becomes an economically viable pollinating unit. During this process, the bees can't fly outside in the cold or they would die. "That means all the food has to come from us," Strange said. The lab researchers collect pollen over summer to use as food for the bumblebees in the lab during the winter. Strange said it's a labor intensive process and big commercial companies pay quite a bit for employees to do the job. "It takes a fair amount of work," Strange said. Strange said the second project underway is something new this year. "Unlike honey bees that live in a hive and during the winter, bumblebees don't have a hive," Strange said. The queen bumblebees leave the nest and burrow in a little soil pocket, or hibernaculum, where they spend the winter remaining relatively dormant. It is nearly impossible to locate these queens once they are under the soil and snow. "We have an outdoor arena that's screened in where we're doing some experiments looking at more natural situations and trying to understand how deep they go," Strange said. The queen bumblebees are brought into the screened area, where the tent is removed after hibernation and before the first A HIVE FROM THE CAMPUS BEE LAB is home to hundreds of insects used for research. SAMANTHA BEHL photo snowfall. The bees spend the winter underground until the screen is placed over the area once more to contain the bees when they emerge in the spring, usually during April. Strange said it's the fifth year of keeping bees in the lab over the winter. "We've began to learn more and more how to do it, and as we go our success increases," Strange said. This is the first year the screenhouse experiment will be conducted. "We just set that up this summer," Strange said. "In fact, this will be the first year we've had any bees in there. We didn't have a lot of bees to put out at the end of the season because we wanted most of them for in the lab." Stanley said there are more than 900 species of bees native to Utah, and at least 10 species of bumblebees. According to the BBC, bumblebees are the primary pollinators of crops grown in greenhouses, as well as other crops and wildflowers. There is a large market for bumblebees and millions of dollars of bees are sold each year. They are particularly effective with tomatoes, as their buzz frequency releases large pollen loads. "The reason we can have tomatoes in the winter now is because we have bumblebees in greenhouses doing the pollinating," – tmera.bradley@aggiemail.usu. edu BIKE: During transportation week students encouraged to walk, cycle *From page 1 people just get wrapped up in how they commute. They just get in this mindset of `OK, this is how I get to school,' or `This is how I do this.' They don't really consider some of the options, even though they might be viable for their lifestyle. The prizes are kind of that incentive to make the change." Kristin Ladd, a Student Sustainability office intern, said air quality in Cache Valley is a big reason for the event. "So we want to really draw attention to how we can use alternative transportation, especially in the winter," she said. "I think that's when people just start to drive their cars. We wanted to show that you can use buses, carpooling, or if you are really ambitious or live close to campus you can walk or bike." Tomlin said she hopes the week helps students realize there are alternatives to driving. Students who live on campus will still be able to participate in the event by using alternative transportation when they leave campus and return. "It's for students, faculty and staff. Anyone on campus can participate," said Tomlin. "The idea was to have them look at some of their own transportation habits and see if there are ways to make adjustments to them when possible. We're not telling anyone they shouldn't drive, we're just asking people to see if there are ways they can include something like carpooling once or twice a week or maybe ride the bus once a week." – rmhenline@gmail.corn STUDENTS WHO BIKE, walk or take the bus to campus can swipe their student ID cards at Agie Blue Bikes for a chance to win prizes during Alternative Transportation week. CURTIS RIPPLINGER photo illustration FREE: Journals provide students access to valuable research *From page 1 experiences with open access, but he's concerned the push for open information might make unreliable research findings available. In his role as president of the Space Physics and Aeronomy section of the American Geophysical Union, Sojka said he's had an inside view of the journal review process. "In our journals, there is a failure rate," Sojka said. "If the reviewers don't like your article and can make the argument scientifically, 'Here's what's wrong with it,' the editor will agree with the reviewer and it doesn't get published." Sojka said he agrees with the ideology behind open access, however. As publishing costs rise, it's more difficult for small scholarly societies to publish journals, and open access repositories can help — as long as peer-review practices aren't abandoned and researchers can tell how credible an article is. USU is one of many universities that have started gathering research articles to put in their online open-access repositories, Wesolek said. Wesolek oversees USU's Digital Commons, which now contains more than 1.1 million full-text articles as well as other materials such as conference presentations and books published by the University Press. The Digital Commons started four years ago, but about 700,000 articles were added to the repository in the last year alone. "The goal of that initiative is to capture, preserve and promote all the research that's conducted here at USU," he said. Earlier this year, USU adopted a policy designed to increase the size of the Digital Commons. When a researcher writes a scholarly article, it will be added to the Digital Commons unless otherwise specified, Wesolek said. When the article is submitted to a journal, under the policy the researcher should ask to retain publishing rights so the article can be used in the Digital Commons. The policy was designed to cause as little inconvenience to researchers as possible while helping them to maintain access to their own work, according to Becky Thorns, a copyright librarian at USU. Thorns said often, an author will forfeit the right to publish or distribute their own work without fully realizing it, so they can't legally email an article to a friend or print it off for a class. If the article is in the Digital Commons, however, researchers have ready access to it. The policy has an automatic exclusion clause, so if a journal doesn't agree to let USU have the copyright necessary to add the article to the Digital Commons, the author can still publish the article in the journal. "The idea is to make the author feel like they're not standing on their own when they're trying to negotiate with the publisher," Thoms said. Thorns said although users can read materials in the Digital Commons free of charge, the material isn't public domain. USU and the authors retain the copyright of scholarly articles, the material isn't available for users to copy or redistribute, she said. As part of Open Access Week, Thorns will give a presentation entitled "Understanding Your Rights" on 4 p.m. Wednesday in the library. She said the presentation will be useful for professors and faculty as well as students who write and co-write scholarly articles. – steve.kent@aggiemail.usu.edu |