Hi Akhansha,

Thanks so much for sharing your hypothesis and experimental design for your project. Petals can be a very important part of attracting pollinators. I have a few suggestions for your procedure:

• Try to get clumps of flowers, not just single flowers, if you can! Pollinators, especially bees, are often attracted to large patches of flowers from afar and then zoom over to visit them individually. If you're able to increase the number of flowers in each observation category, I think you might be able to get good data. You might consider cutting clumps of flowers and placing their stems in a bucket of cold water, and then placing them out on a sunny day for your observations.
• You probably don't have to walk so far away from the flowers for your observation trials -- three to five feet away is just fine! And it will be easier to see the pollinators when they do visit.
• Think about what time of day you'll be doing your pollinator observations - most pollinators are very active on sunny days, and there is less pollinator activity on cold, gray, or rainy days. I would check your weather forecast and make sure you time your observation periods as best as possible. In my research, some times I get delayed in collecting my data because of bad weather. The bees don't like bad weather! :)
• If it's too cold to observe pollinator activity, or if you can't get any pollinators to visit, what do you think might be a good back-up plan? I always try to have back-up plans for all of my experiments, in case something doesn't go right. I like your idea about petals enticing pollinators. What kind of signal would big petals tell a bee, compared to small petals?? Does a big-petaled flower have more pollen than a flower with smaller petals? Studying this might be a good backup plan if it's too cold for pollinators. If you want help on making that procedure, just let me know! :)
  
  Good luck!
  
  Kate 

Hi Rey,

Thanks for sharing the procedure for your experiment! That stinks that there were no insects flying around. Along with temperature, the amount of sunlight during the day can play a big role in whether pollinators are active. What was the daylight like outside when you were doing your observations? Was it a gray day, or was it sunny?

I have a recommendation for your protocol -- instead of just observing two individual flowers, could you pick a bunch of flowers? Pollinators, especially bees, are often attracted to large patches of flowers from afar and then zoom over to visit them individually. If you're able to increase the number of flowers in each observation category (heavily-perfumed vs. natural), I think you might be able to get more pollinators to visit your flowers. How far away are you standing from the flowers when you observe them? It's good to stand around 3 feet away from the flowers so you're not hovering over the patch.

I hope these suggestions help! Let me know what happens! It looks like it's getting up to 60 degrees F in Pennington, NJ on Friday, so I hope you can get something to happen then!

Kate

Hi there Rey,

How cool! Yes, when you look at pollen really up-close, the grains have some fascinating shapes, especially when you use really hi-tech microscopes, like a scanning electron microscope. I've tried to attach a picture in the "files" section, I hope it works and you can see the shapes of the pollen grains! How did all the different species of flowers look under the microscope? Were there different shapes to their pollen grains?