Day two, research

Not sure if I will get anything done tomorrow; there's a chance of storms. I'm going to set my bee traps again in the morning, but will have to watch the sky and run out and grab them if it looks stormy.

I'm finding the traplining more challenging than I expected; not a lot of things are active and it gets frustrating. I did record all the stuff flowering along a couple transects and outside of black medic and green milkweed and a few late hangers-on of a verbena, there's not much right now. (I'm not sure how much the medic is used; I saw few pollinators on it, and few on Indian paintbrush). There's a lot more butterfly activity than bee activity. Pretty much the only really active bees are the huge carpenter bees and some kind of small, non-honeybee fuzzy bee. Maybe some kind of leafcutter bee? I had really hoped it was easier to tell the bee groups apart.

And of course, I start wondering if I'm equipped to be doing this - I kind of know the butterflies, and can identify some of them on the wing (but have a hard time with the skippers, and can't quickly tell a Painted Lady from an American Lady, and I get confused by the sulphurs). The bees are even tougher on the wing, even the experts just group them by family, but I don't even really know the families yet. So of course my Inner Critic goes into overdrive.

I was thinking, "There are so many people who would be so much better at this than I am" but then again, they're not out doing it; they're doing other things. I don't know. This early work may not be worth much, I'm still learning things. Maybe I will get better later on and the stuff I do at the end of the summer will be publishable. (One of the challenges of being at a small school - I can already hear reviewers going "Why didn't you just get a bunch of little cameras and mount them in the field, and use image-processing software, rather than depending on your admittedly poor eyesight?" Because we don't have a bunch of little cameras, we don't have funds to buy them, and the  field sites are "public" enough that the cameras might disappear if I didn't sit there babysitting them....)

Again, I don't know. I still feel very "I don't know what I am doing" with this but maybe that's a big part of doing research - I usually feel that way when starting a new project.

I wish I were better at doing the Mythbusters thing and going "Failure is always an option!" except with tenure review and expectations that I present some kind of report to the granting group at the end of this....it isn't. Failure is always an option when you're entertaining a television audience; not so much when you have people who might go, "What exactly WERE you thinking? Did you really think you could do that?" when you try to present your not-very-amazing research findings.

I did spend a couple of ten-minute stretches just sitting next to a patch of flowering stuff and recording every pollinator that came through (That's when I realized butterflies are running about 12 to 1 to bees). If I were better at identifying, I'd feel better about that....but maybe this is just a calibration phase where I learn stuff. (I did take my butterfly book out in the field with me and was relieved that I was identifying some correctly).

Maybe it will go better later in the season if more stuff is flowering; most of our really bee-attracting flowers seem to be the late summer stuff like goldenrods. I do plan to set up some evenings while my privet is flowering and just watch and see if I can get better at identifying stuff on the wing.....maybe even bring a sweep net home and try catching some of the things to get a close up look.

ETA: I feel some better, I looked up what I thought was a leafcutter bee (and wrote it down as thus in  my notes) and I was right. Maybe I'm  not so dumb at this after all. I got really good really fast at identifying prairie plants; maybe that skill will cross over for bees.