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2.01.2024
Herewith, I announce that I will close this blog because my two years Maria Skłodowska-Curie fellowship is over. It has been a fantastic journey, and I have improved many of my skills and scientific research. Now, I am composing the project report. If someone has found a bit of new and exciting information from this blog, then it has fulfilled its purpose.
Photo: Gyula Pinke
18.12.2023
Last week I had a two presentations in the universities related to fellowships results. First one was in Széchenyi István University, Mosonmagyaróvár, Hungary. The second one in University of Szeged, Hungary. Both went fine I and was happy to share my project outcome with the students.
Photo: Gyula Pinke
10.12.2023
It's been a while since I made my last blog post. There are two reasons. I had a holiday and also was hard to find a topic for the message. Related to work, has been a very routine time period - analyzing the data and preparing the manuscripts. Not so easy to make blog post such a routine work.
Last week I was lucky to visit again like last year my secondment group and supervisor Prof. Thomas Frank in Austria. Was so nice to see and chat with Austrian colleagues and visit the famous Vienna Weihnachtsmarkt close to the city hall.
22.08.2023
I share another video about my project and the fieldwok. I made this video for one Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Science-Policy Pitch Competition. Unfortunately, I did not "win"... This means that for the competition, 172 different videos were submitted and as the organizers wrote: "and most of them were of excellent quality". Still, the number of candidates for second round selection (special communication training in Spain), however, was limited to 15 and my video was not selected... Still, I think this video making was justified, because at least I can share it in my blog and introduce my work to the wider audience.
7.08.2023
In July, I had the opportunity to present my fellowship studies results at two African congresses (IALE Congress in Kenya and ICCB Congress in Rwanda). In both congresses, I made oral presentations on my ongoing studies. It was a very good way to network and have an overview of other studies and new experiences as well as visit the great African continent for the first time in my life.
I do not want to share my photos, but I am posting a bee hives, which we saw in time between two congresses. I am not aware of bee hives' history but I can imagine the very first bee hives maybe been quite similar to nowadays people use in Central/Eastern Africa. It is interesting since my project is also related to pollinators. Honeybees are one of the most abundant pollinators group in the world.
12.07.2023
A gear honour to present my Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship preliminary results in landscape ecology IALE world congress in Nairobi, Kenya. This was my very first presentation outside Europe ever – and this time in Africa. Everything is well organized here, and the organizers are extremely helpful and offer the best hospitality. The only “negative” thing is the time. Time is a bit flexible and dynamic in Africa, that's why the schedule is quite often "a bit late". My Estonian colleague said that “Everything happened when it happened…”. TIA!
5.06.2023
Last weekend I addended Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt (DBU) seminar for Alumni in München, Germany. It is an annual seminar for previous years' alumni. It is not directly related to my current grant but actually, earlier DBU scholarships and grants have significantly impacted my career. When I was last year's PhD student, I got my first scholarship in 2013 and stayed one year in Teja Tscharntke agroecology group at the University of Göttingen. My main supervisor there was Péter Batáry. Now, 10 years later, I work in Hungary, but my host supervisor is Péter! All this long collaboration is related to DBU, where I have applied for several small grants, which have given to me the opportunity to network. Thus, never underestimate even small grant influences for the career.
12.05.2023
Last week I had a session in Talentia program (the topic was Google Earth Engine), where I shared my knowledge with colleagues and students related to my host institute. This is also one part of my Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship.
I have to admit, I am rather a begginer there, who still struggles a lot with the javascript code. Still, I was able to make a presentation and also to demonstrate 5 different examples related to Google Earth Engine. I showed how simple it is to download Sentinel2 aerial photos via R and use them in QGIS, how to calculate large area land surface temperature and how to extract long-term land surface temperature time-series data. I also showed how to get the data about forest cover loss and calculate concurrently median NDVI index over multi-polygons at a large scale. I think the latest is very important because even half year ago, I had to calculate it one by one for each polygon and it is very time-consuming as well very boring work. So I like the Google Earth Engine because it can make our work as ecologists much more effective and opens totally new ways for the research.
30.04.2023
One part of Maria Skłodowska-Curie project is to learn new skills. I stared to think, what I have learned during one year and four month period.
For me, a significant step was fieldwork planning and carrying out last year fieldwork, where we have totally related 10 persons (in each fieldwork day at least 4 persons involved). Even though I didn't totally arrange all the logistics by myself and had assistance, it was nonetheless difficult and has helped me gain valuable experience.
My statistical knowledge has increased, and I've gained new expertise in meta-analysis, spatial data models, and continuous space-time modelling over the past year.
I also started to learn Google Earth Engine – a very powerful raster GIS environment, but still need to learn and understand javasript, which is not so common for ecologist. I see very big potential for this kind of GIS analysis, making better ecological studies.
Last but not least. Open AI is available now about half year. Like many of my frieds and colleagues, I also started experimenting with AI, and I would say today, it can be useful in our studies. At least it have helped me with a few coding issues in R as well in Google Earth Engine. I was completely unaware of any of these opportunities when I was writing my Maria Skodowska-Curie project. Therefore, sometimes learning new things can take completely unexpected turns.
17.04.2023
Approximately year ago we stared out bumblebee experiment fieldwork. I am happy that already last year results showed our expectations and there are no need to repeat time and human-resources needed fieldwork this year. Thus now I mostly need to concentrate for the analysis and later publishing. Also we have two students, who makes their diploma work related to the project.
I am trying to finish meta-analysis data extraction, which also have been very time consuming and I have done it already approximately three months. One month even longer than I expected, but hopefully this week I will finish the task.
I also get accepted for two conferences. This also takes preparation time. It is not only time to go for the conference, but this is rather longer process. Everything actually starts with abstract writing, then communication with the co-authors and the abstract submission. Then need two wait couple of months to get the results (oral, speed, poster presentation). After that need to find suitable flight tickets, accommodation, need to pay conferences fees and prepare all the travel logistics. This is not very scientific work, but also needs time and it is part of the work.
23.03.2023
I am still extracting data for the meta-analysis, which will investigate the pollinator's dispersal from field edges toward the field centre. It is very routine and time-consuming work and therefore it is challenging to make the blog post.
As a "side-project", I have a co-author article published in the Journal of Applied Ecology with the title: "Afforestation and abandonment of semi-natural grasslands lead to biodiversity loss and a decline in ecosystem services and functions". We showed that both grassland degradation due to abandonment, as well as grassland afforestation, have significant negative impacts on biodiversity, on the supply of multiple important ecosystem services and on the ecosystem multifunctionality. March 2023.
# paper attached. link: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.14375
6.03.2023
Last Friday I had a presentation to my former colleagues at Estonian Environmental Agency. This is one of the outreaches to a wider audience, not only the scientific community. These people's one work task is to supervise also the environmental ministry employees in their decisions. Thus, it is very important to share the project results in alternative ways.
Currently, I extract the data for the meta-analysis. It is rather routine and time-consuming work. Therefore hard to find even suitable blog post topics related to the project (therefore also the silence in the blog). Actually, this can be very common in scientific work. We have to do a lot of basic/robust/routine/time-consuming (hard to find suitable word here!) work for a long time and then we get a reward as a scientific publication or oral presentation at the conference. But this is only the tip of the iceberg and does not show the hard work, done earlier.
Photo: Gyula Pinke
7.02.2023
Here I post another video from the fieldwork. It does not fully show, how was an average working day, but at least gives some feeling. Fieldwork days were very long and we did not have time to make videos. Here we used GoPro camera to put this video together.
24.01.2023
Herewith I share one study by Hiruni Samadi Galpayage Dona and co-authors. They asked a question: "Do bumblebees play?" And the answer is, "Yes they do!". Bumblebees play and enjoy the like also like for instance humans, animals and birds.
See the authors video in Youtube.
And the study itself:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347222002366?via%3Dihub&fbclid=IwAR07DPcLzLz2anct2aCuG6r7233RuUlwe0Ea5sIjGhnLvkGLIJ5z2a2gXXs
9.01.2023
I am happy that laboratory work is now finished. It took me several months to finish the counting of queen brood cell numbers in each colony. The upper photo illustrates how look queen brood cells compared with the worker's cells. They are, on average approx. 25-35% larger.
The photo below illustrates how vary the workers and queen sizes. Queens was rather easy to identify, but the worker's size varies remarkably.
Over all the studied colony, the summa of queen brood cells numbers was 4440!
Photos: Edina Török
15.12.2022
One part of my study is to investigate pollinators' movements on the agricultural landscape. In last year's fieldwork, we marked approximately 300 individuals and made homing (translocation) experiment with them. Another part of my study is to investigate the same topic but based on already the published literature. In our LACE group, we usually conduct meta-analysis for this. Meta-analysis is like a summary study based on earlier studies. This helps us to make stronger conclusions to describe ecological patterns based on several case studies.
I study the edge and spillover effects of pollinators. I am interested, who are the species that are more common on the field edge and who are more common in the centre of the field - thus, the dispersal gradient from the field edge towards the field centre. For this, I did two literature searches in the Web of Science as well in Scopus databases. It ended up with 1095 different articles. Then I filtered all of these studies based on the titles and got 568 studies. Then I filtered all of these studies based on abstracts and ended 145 studies. Now I started to check them for full-text filtering and make decisions that can in include the study and extract the data suitable for meta-analysis, or I reject the study because I cannot use it. This is a very simple description of how to conduct the meta-analysis studies filtering.
2.12.2022
Last week in SFE2-GFÖ-EEF conference in Metz, France. I had an oral presentation about the effectiveness of agri-environment schemes for pollinators as well for agricultural yield. I had never had a talk in such a big auditorium with two levels. I think that the room capacity was more than 1000 people.
This week I finally finished sorting bumblebee colonies material. My main interest was to count queen brood cells numbers as well as take a random samples measurement from workers and queen cell sizes.
23.11.2022
Last week I visited my Marie-Sklowska Curie Fellowship secondment group led by Prof. Thomas Frank, Institute of Zoology, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU), in Vienna, Austria.
I presented there a seminar talk entitled "Insect pollinators along gradients in differently structured landscapes: the importance of the edge effect and small- vs. large-scale agriculture".
Was very nice to work one week in a new environment and meet so many very nice and friendly colleagues.
Left upper photo: me and my secondment supervisor prof. Thomas Frank.
Left lower photo: me with my seminar talk poster.
8.11.2022
Routine time in research. I am sorting fieldwork material and same time preparing different presentations. Communication is a very important part of the research. Currently, I have during a short time period four presentations. Yesterday I had a seminar talk in Showcase project (https://showcase-project.eu/) seminar. I talked about arthropods, including pollinators, agro-environment schemes and yield relationships.
Next week I will visit my secondment institution BOKU in Vienna (https://boku.ac.at/en/), Austria and have a seminar talk there. I will talk about my earlier and current studies, as well as introduce my fellowship project and its preliminary results.
The week after next week I will visit GFÖ conference, Metz, France (https://sfe2gfomeeting.sciencesconf.org/index/pagenotfound). I will repeat my talk about arthropods, including pollinators, agro-environment schemes and yield relationships.
And in the beginning of December, I will introduce my fellowship in my host institution (https://lace.ecolres.hu/ and https://ecolres.hu/en/home/) about a new meta-analysis plan as well going to speak about my earlier three meta-analyses related to agri-environment schemes' effects on arthropods across European farmlands.
17.10.2022
After participating animal movement ecology course in Möggingen, Germany (11-24 september) I had a small holiday and therefore a bit longer silence in the blog.
Last week I made first longer talk about my fellowship project and introduced the very preliminary results in our institute seminar days.
13.09.2022
I am participating animal movement ecology course in Möggingen, Germany. The days are long here. We start at 9 AM and finish 9 PM. So this is challenging. However, I see how important is the course is for me to to teach new techniques, statistical methods, visualization etc. In my project, I made this year homing experiment with bumblebees, which is one of the basics in movement ecology, because, amongst the other parameters, time, distances and habitat use are still highly important in ecology.
I have also minimal earlier experience with farmland birds GPS data, but now I see a variety of new methods, which I can use with these earlier datasets as well.
Kamran Safi presentation.
Home ranges or range distribution?
31.08.2022
One important aspect of science (as in everyday life) is communication. One good option for scientific communication is to share your results, skills and ideas at the conferences. The conferences are also a very good option to collect new ideas and for networking with colleagues around the world. Thus, last week I also participated 6th European Congress of Conservation Biology “Biodiversity crisis in a changing world” (Prague, Czech Republic). I had one oral presentation about plant-bumblebees foodwebs. I also organized with Edina Török a special symposium about pollinators in urban environment.
After the congress, we had a group tour of Dresden and the surroundings to acquaint different pollinators' habitats in the natural and city environment.
With Edina we organized and led the session about urban pollinators.
With Edina we organized and led the session about urban pollinators.
After the congress, our whole group visited Dresden and its surroundings to familiarise different habitats in the city and natural environment. This is a very species-rich allotment garden in Dresden, Germany.
After the congress, our whole group visited Dresden and its surroundings to familiarise different habitats in the city and natural environment. This is a very species-rich allotment garden in Dresden, Germany.
Photo Edina Török.
15.08.2022
Last week I participated with Edina Török in a children’s camp in Vácrátót (Hungary). We talked about bumblebees, birds and in general biodiversity. The children were very interested in wildlife. Also, they liked to speak also their own experiences about what they have seen, what they have found etc. I think that biological conservation education has to start with the children. They have to understand the main issues already when they are young. Only this way we can solve the main issues that we face globally.
8.08.2022
Small addition for a previous blog post. We found that for bumblebees' traffic rate (the workers flying in and out of the colony), the most important factor was the crop type (is it winter oilseed rape or winter cereal). In the numerical way, these colonies which were close to the oilseed rape field, the average bumblebee traffic rate was 43 individuals flying in or out from the colony during 15 minutes time period. In the winter cereal field margins, the value were 28 individuals. This can be explained with the suitable food availability very close to the colony. During the experiment, winter oilseed rape was blooming and therefore bumblebees used these available food resources and collected very actively the food (flying in and out the colony), whereas the traffic rate was lower in winter cereal field, where the bumblebees needed to fly a longer distances to get suitable food.
Me conducting bumblebees colony traffic rate counting - the workers flying in and out of the colony during 15 minutes.
Photo: Gyula Pinke.
During the fieldwork, we also met the farmers, who kindly let to conduct the experiment at their field edges. Here is Andrássy László and me in one Hungarian study area.
Photo: Gyula Pinke.
27.07.2022
I am analyzing my project results and the first ones are coming. One of the study variable was landscape configuration (field size differences between two countries). We assumed that bumblebees fly more actively in and out from the colony (we call it colony traffic rate) in Austria than in Hungary.
We found that field sizes played less role in bumblebees colonies' traffic rate since we did not find statistical differences between the colonies placed in two countries. The average traffic rate was actually higher in Hungary (mean 38), than in Austria (mean 33). However, the traffic rate statistically speaking was not different.
One fieldwork area in Hungary.
Photo: Gyula Pinke.
One fieldwork area in Austria.
Photo: Gyula Pinke.
11.07.2022
The first popular science article is now published related also to my project. It is about plants-and bumblebees' food webs in an agricultural landscape. This article is in Estonian and published in the July issue of Eesti Loodus (Estonian Nature). After three months it will be open access for everybody. This is the oldest popular science journal in Estonia. The fist issue was published in year 1933.
https://www.loodusajakiri.ee/eesti-loodus-72022/
27.06.2022
Lately, I have been mostly working with fieldwork data digitizing, cleaning and searching potential outliers (bumblebee colony growth, traffic rate and homing experiment).
I am also preparing for two presentations. The first one I will do in Prague at the end of August in ECCB conference (https://www.eccb2022.eu/). There I will speak about bumblebees and plants food webs. The second one will be in Vienna, Austria. On 15th November at BOKU seminar I will speak about the first results of the fieldwork.
26.05.2022
End of the fieldwork we got a very nice surprise. Although we mainly focused on the bumblebee studies, we carried out also botanical survey. Gyula re-discovered plant species, which was determined extinct in Hungary. The species is Scandix pecten-veneris, location close to Sopronhorpács.
Photo: Gyula Pinke.
15.05.2022
We had a very heavy fieldwork season and therefore I rarely find time to make the blog posts.
We are now finished and collected the colonies. The next step is to analyze what is inside the colonies (number of queen brood cells and if possible, collect also pollen from the colonies).
Full-protective clothes for collecting bumblebees colonies.
Photo: Edina Török.
Hunor gave a great help for the translacation experiment.
Photo: Gyula Pinke.
One tagged bumblebee arrives to the colony.
Photo: Edina Török.
Bumblebee collecting red pollen from Lamium sp.
Photo: Gyula Pinke.
Group photo after successful fieldwork day.
Photo: Gyula Pinke.
27.04.2022
Today is again windy and rainy weather, and therefore I have the possibility to make a short blog post.
We are making the fieldwork in Hungary and Austria based on the study protocol. One part of the study is to collect also pollen samples of individuals. Below I add a few photos how what pollen looks like. Interestingly, in the colonies, which are close to the winter oilseed rape field, the individuals do not collect only oilseed rape pollen but also other potential resources. This is surprising, and I did not expect that.
A few Gyula photos as examples from the last few days.
Our fieldwork team from left to right: Márton, Gábor, Gyula, Edina and me. We are waiting for the individuals back in homing experiment.
Photo: Gyula Pinke.
Bumblebee at right probably carry the oilseed rape pollen.
Photo: Gyula Pinke.
Bumblebee carry probably Lamium maculatum pollen. Surprising is that these individuals are caught from "oilseed rape colony", not a winter cereal colony. So at least some individuals also collect pollen from natural resources, not only mass flowering crops, even, the latest is available close to the colony.
Photo: Gyula Pinke.
We also weight each colony for studying the colony growth during study period.
Photo: Gyula Pinke.
Agricultural landscape from Austria.
Photo: Gyula Pinke.
22.04.2022
Today is rainy weather and we can do “office work” including this blog.
A few days ago, we started this year's experiments. 10 days ago, we placed all bumblebees’ colonies in the landscape. Then we gave time for the bumblebees to adapt to the situation as well as learn the landscape and now we started the experiment. We have four main tasks. In each colony we study the colony traffic rate (how often the individuals fly in and out the colony), we measure each colony's weight, we collect pollen samples from 5 individuals and additionally, we translocate 5 individuals within one kilometre radius and study their average speed and returning rate to the colony.
The days have been long approximately from 8 AM until 6 PM. I have got a lot of support from colleagues and students. Without th,em I cannot make the experiments alone. I am very thankful for them.
Here are a few Gyula photos from the last few days.
Mátyás assist with bumblebee tagging.
Photo: Gyula Pinke.
Edina conducting the experiment.
Photo: Gyula Pinke.
Gellért translocate the bumblebees for the homing experiment.
Photo: Gyula Pinke.
Agricultural landscape from Austria.
Photo: Gyula Pinke.
14.04.2022
We had two very long fieldwork days, but we managed to place all bumblebee colonies in the study areas in Hungary and Austria. Beginning of the next week, we will plan to start the fieldwork and experiments. We need a good, warm weather without strong wind, as well winter oliseed-rape blooming.
One colony in Austria at the winter oilseed rape field edge.
Agricultural landscape in Austria. Note the very narrow winter oilseed rape field.
The first bumblebees came out very quickly.
12.04.2022
Project small leaflet in different languages (in Hungarian, German and English).
Added below.
Happybee_leporello_hun (1).pdfHappybee_leporello_de.pdf
5.04.2022
Last week we checked all potential study sites in Austria.
As I expected, not all of pre-selected sites we not suitable. Luckily I had some extra areas and not I have all the needed study sites based on the study design. Sites in Hungary and in Austria, sites close to oilseed rape field or winter cereal as well as close or far to forests and semi-natural habitats.
It was a bit strange to make fieldwork in Austria where are extremely big windmills (as the background in the photo). We saw also quite a lot of new constructions of them. So they really want to use green energy, not to mention that approximately 60% of agricultural areas are organic in Austria.
Little bit warmth and its start blooming.
Windmills constructions.
Winter oilseed rape is quite high already in Austria.
Narrow fields in Austria.
29.03.2022
Very busy time to prepare for all this year's fieldwork.
Today we ordered bumblebees colonies for the fieldwork. Before that, I had a lot of digitizing the potential Austrian fields one by one, since GIS layer was not available. Tomorrow and the day after tomorrow we plan to visit all potential Austrian fieldwork sites.
I would say it is quite a classical researcher work - have to focus many things at the same time - definitely multitasking.
18.03.2022
I selected all Hungarian fieldwork areas.
Two days ago I got also information about Austrian fields. So second round digitizing of potential study areas in Austria
On the photo, there are left QGIS and right Austrian field borders portal: https://gis.bgld.gv.at/WebGIS/synserver
7.03.2022
Fieldwork areas checking in Hungary. The Hungarian study areas will be around Csepreg and Mosonmagyaróvár. Luckily the majority of the study areas were suitable for fieldwork and experiment.
As I expected, a few of the pre-selected areas were actually not suitable for the experiment, but as I had a few extra pre-selected areas I have now all study areas for Hungary.
Now need to select study ares for Austria side.
One suitable winter oilseed rape field for the study.
One suitable winter cereal field for the study.
Fieldwork. In the beginning of March, the weather was nice and warm.
Protected flowers (Galanthus sp.) around on pre-selected site.
21.02.2022
I am glad that preliminary study landscapes in Hungary are now selected. It took me about a week to digitize all fields and later few days to determine potential study areas.
In the end of the March or beginning of April, I plan to visit all potential study landscapes one by to confirm their suitability for the study.
11.02.2022
Yesterday I made a presentation in my host group seminar. I talked about plants and bumblebees food webs from my previous study. Here is the short summary about the study.
Plant and pollinator diversity has declined concurrently in Europe in the last half-century. We studied plant–bumblebee food webs to understand the effects of two Estonian agri-environmental schemes (AES; environmentally-friendly management and organic farming) vs. conventional farming, landscape structure (homogeneous, heterogeneous) and seasonality (June–August) interactions. We found that both AES and landscape structure influenced the generality (redundancy in the use of flower resources) of food webs. In homogeneous landscapes, environmentally-friendly management, including restrictions on the application of glyphosates, enhancement of bumblebee habitats (permanent grassland field margins), the allocation of a minimum of 15% of arable land to legumes, contributed to a higher number of visited plant species in July, whereas organic farming did so in August. Therefore, both AES are important to support plant–bumblebee food webs. Food webs generality and Shannon index are affected by a significant interaction between seasonality and landscape structure: food web diversity varied in homogeneous landscapes between the three survey months, whereas food webs were more diverse in heterogeneous landscapes. In homogeneous landscapes, resource limitation is an issue for bumblebees in certain time periods. For supporting bumblebees, avoiding resource limitation is important and this can be secured with a combination of AES management practices.
I published this work approximately a year ago.
I published this work approximately a year ago.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1439179121000645
8.02.2022
Exactly a year ago I won Maria Skłodowska-Curie fellowship grant. This gave me a good opportunity to plan my studies as well make already a pilot study with bumblebees colonies the last summer. Now I mostly prepare the this year fieldwork. Currently, it means a lot of digitizing the potential study areas fields. My colleague Gyula Pinke helped me to and provided me with the data of potential winter wheat and winter oilseed rape fields. However, I have to check each field real location in the landscape one by one! Since the dataset is more than 800 Excel rows, this means so many queries in the open-access database. It is back to the basics. I remember digitizing the fields when I started my first university research works more than 15 years ago. And I am still doing it...
The fieldwork planning is really time-consuming, but there is no other way to do such research.
28.01.2022
A short description of my project is now published also my host institute Centre for Ecological Research homepage.
This is the English version: https://www.obi.ecolres.hu/en/node/15765
Here is also Hungarian version: https://www.obi.ecolres.hu/node/15764
22.01.2022
Last week I did training for this year's work. Here you can see the photo of the bumblebee colony how that looks inside. It is a commercial Bombus terrestris colony, and I collected it last year mid-October. Different sizes of cells are developed for the workers and queens. From small cells become workers, and bigger ones become queens. Unfortunately, not easily recognizable from this photo. The majority of the cells from this photo belongs to worker larvae cells and old pupal cocoons.
My colleague Costanza Geppert and her co-authors discovered in their research that one colony can have 0 up to 53 queen broods cells. The authors also found that each colony has 0 up to 10 queen brood cells in the majority. One part of my study is also to investigate queen brood cells numbers. I found in my colony, for example, four queen brood cells.
Constanza found that queen brood cells numbers increase with the size of organic fields, where the numbers of queen brood cells were relatively stable in conventional fields. Next year, I will also study the queen brood cell numbers related to field sizes in Hungary (where are larger fields) and Austria (where are smaller fields) and their relation to proximity forest and semi-natural habitats.
Here is Costanza study for more details: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2664.13682
11.01.2022
As my earlier projects, where I have been involved, also my personal Maria Skłodowska-Curie fellowship start is but „chaotic“. Most of the energy goes for organizing and planning for the next steps to conduct next year's fieldwork and research. Therefore not so much time to do scientific work.
In my first fellowship week, I had to do the following: set up this blog here (the first blog in my life), conduct new meta-analysis planning, visit Gyula Pinke in Mosonmagyaróvár for fieldwork areas selection. I also visited a few potential study areas. Compare to my home country, the fields in Western-Hungary are much-much larger!
However, my first Maria Skłodowska-Curie fellowship week was a classical example of scientific work. Scientists rarely do scientific work or discover something new on an everyday basis. This is actually much broader work, including reading other colleagues' studies, applying for money and writing new projects, fieldwork or laboratory work, visiting conferences, making presentations, watching online seminars nowadays, meetings with stakeholders, online discussions, giving interviews etc. Definitely not only quiet office work...
3.01.2022
This is the first bumblebee colony, which I have ever seen. In the summer of 2021, I placed it in our institute´s experimental field. I will make research about bumblebees’ movement in the agricultural landscape in the next years.
The species, who live in the colony, is buff-tailed bumblebee (in Latin Bombus terrestris, in german Dunkle Erdhummel, in Hungarian földi poszméh). It is a very common species and one of the most numerous bumblebee species in Europe. It is also common species, which is used in greenhouses for cucumber or strawberry pollination. Both, nature and domesticated individuals have large colonies with more than 100 workers.
Buff-tailed bumblebee workers are able to learn flower colors and forage efficiently both wildflowers and crops (including oilseed rape and clover).
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