Thank you so much for working with our group these past weeks. I have learned so much just by interacting with you. You seriously inspired me to take a horticulture degree as my minor in college. I hope that you have great rest of your day!

These pictures are diagrams that we had drawn and labeled for both the Violet and the Dandelion.

The question that we are asking is do flowers of a certain color receive more insect visitors than others? Our hypothesis is if we observe a purple violet and a yellow dandelion flower, then the purple violet will have more insect visitors, due to the color difference. The materials we need for this part of the project is very simple, we just need a stopwatch to make sure that we look at all the flowers for the same amount of time. We will also need paper and a pencil to take tallies of how many insects visit each flower within the 10 minutes. Our independent variable is the type/color of the flowers that we will observe. The dependent variable will be the amount of insect visitors that visit each type/color of flowers.

Picture number one is the sheet that we collected all of our data on. The second one is our labeled and titled data table. The third one is a picture of the dandelion violet that we looked at for the 10 minutes under the microscope. The fourth is the violet under the microscope. The fifth and sixth are both of the flowers in their natural habitat. Thank you for working with us on this project, I've learned new things that I never would have thought about while doing this project.

Our conclusion: Purple violets do have more insect visitors than yellow Dandelions.

Yesterday, we went outside and looked at whether violets or dandelions had more insect visitors. We began to notice, that there wasn't very many insect visitors on either of them at all. We looked at both the violet and the dandelion for 10 minutes to get all of our data. I figured that splitting those 10 minutes into 2 sets of 5 minutes would make it easier on all of us. MaKayla was the time keeper and Josh and I were looking at the flowers and collecting our data. 

~Blue Violet (purple)

    *The first 5 minutes: We only saw one fly land on it for just a tiny millisecond. Josh and I began to realize that the flies and beetles would either be flying or crawling around them, but not necessarily be landing on them that often. Even if they landed on them it was almost like they saw us or something and would fly/crawl away before we could get a picture of them. I guess in a way, maybe they were shy.

    *The second 5 minutes: We on saw one fly, yet again it flew away before we got a chance to snap a picture of it.

~Dandelion (Yellow)

    The first 5 minutes: We saw zero insects land on them, flies were flying around them , but wouldn't land on them.

    The second 5 minutes: The same as the first 5 minutes.

ERRORS: The time keeper didn't tell us when they started the timer over every 5 minutes. We also didn't know how many minutes we were already in to until after they were over. The grass had just been mowed right before we went outside. In which resulted in it becoming hard to find actual violets that were in tact to look at. The dandelions however, were definitely in tact more than the violets. The dandelions were in a secluded little flower bed in the middle of our schools parking lot. The weather yesterday was very gloomy, with lots of cloud coverage, and for some odd reason it was kind of chilly outside too. Lastly, I'm not sure if this has anything to do with how many insect visitors we had, but it was very loud outside too. The lawn mowers were roaring and there was also quite a lot of chattering between classes. I also wasn't aware that we needed to take a picture of our sampling sites until now, but I did get pictures of the plants in the ground and under the microscope!

Alrighty so after we got collected all of our pollen slides, we were left with 5 slides. The first picture is slide A, the second is slide B, third is slide C, fourth is slide D, and the fifth picture is slide E. Like I said they were all labeled bleachers and we figured that labeling them with letters would make it easier!

We came to the conclusion that there is more pollen higher up in the atmosphere, than lower in the atmosphere. On April 1, we set our pollen traps up on our football stadium. We had 3 replicates of pollen traps. On April 2, we collected our pollen traps and stained them with Calberla's Solution and found that there was more debris than pollen on April, 3. We noticed that there was a lot more debris on our pollen traps than pollen. I definitely think that there is a better way to collect pollen. From where we put them on our football stadium, we ended up losing 2 of our traps. We are thinking that someone took them because on April 1, our school had a soccer game. We also unfortunately still had other errors. When we went to set our pollen traps, it was so cold that we just put them wherever we could put them as fast as we could. We also put on our slides that they were all going on the bleachers, but after we had already set them, I had realized we put some in other places than the bleachers. There was like 3 out of 7 of them that weren't on our bleachers and the rest were. We still got quite a lot of interesting data even after our errors.

We researched a Violet and a Dandelion today and a found out so much that I didn't know!

*Violets~ The common name that a Violet has is Blue violet. Its scientific name is Viola sororia. The Life Cycle of a Blue Violet is that it comes together in big clumps/colonies in forests, fields, and any area that humans are in. It grows mostly during the spring and summer time, and some even in the winter time. During the winter time, the stems grow underground. Blue Violets grow from year to year, depending on the soil's temperature. In forests, there is more light during the first few weeks of them coming out. Their leaves turn yellow and die in the fall due to cold weather, the amounts of rain, and the lack of rain. Fun Fact~ Fungus and herbivores can also kill violets off quickly.

*Dandelions~ The common name of a Dandelion is Dandelion. It's scientific name is Taxacum officinale. The Life Cycle of a Dandelion is that it can grow from sea level to high mountains, so basically anywhere humans live. They do well because it's leaves make it difficult for grazing animals to eat them, also Dandelions are below most lawnmower blades. For the most part, the come out in the spring and fall. Fun Facts~ Dandelions are in the sunflower family. Their seeds produce asexually, which makes since that they go dormant in the winter and their roots stay alive. That in itself makes it to where they can get a jumpstart on growing when it becomes warmer outside.

1st picture is our bar graph that shows our data, the 2nd picture is our conclusion paper, and the 3rd picture is where we collected all of our data

I agree that rain and dew will probably affect all the treatments equally.  How about sunlight and wind?  Will there be more wind or stronger wind higher up?

Have you made a hypothesis graph?

I sure can, we were thinking about 2 replicates maybe? Do you think we need to do more than 2 replicates or does 2 sound like it's enough?

Our experimental design:

Our independent variable would be how high we put our traps. The dependent variable would be how much pollen we collect. Our general procedure for our data collection would be 3 different traps. We will set the pollen traps in our football stadium during our second block class. One pollen trap will be sat at the lowest, highest, and middle point. We will count the pollen grains by putting our findings under the microscope and count. In order to count each pollen grain, we will look at it at 100x magnification.

We meant to ask is there more or less pollen higher up in our atmosphere?

Let's divide up this question into higher elevations (like mountaintops or the Tibetan Plateau) and higher altitudes (really far off the ground).  You're right that for both of these, there is less oxygen and it is colder and drier the higher you go.  At high elevations, trees can't grow and you mainly get grasses.  This means that, if you were to set out pollen traps at different elevations, the types of pollen in your traps would be different and the amount of pollen would also be different.

How do you think the amount of pollen and types of pollen would change if you sample at different heights off the ground?  Why?

If the corn's pollen is heavy, then how did it get 80 meters above the ground?

Corn pollen is heavy for pollen; it's still very small and very light.  It likely traveled that far up in altitude due to wind currents.

How is corn ever pollinated?

Technically, corn is considered wind-pollinated.  However, unlike some wind-borne pollen that travels very far, corn pollen just drops.  The tassels at the top of the corn stalk are the male flowers, and the baby corn cobs are clusters of female flowers.  The corn silk is the style of the female flower.  Given what you know about corn silk, how long would you expect the pollen tubes to grow?

Good experiment!  I'm not able to see all of your experimental design.  Can you post it in the updates?  How many replicates are you going to have for each treatment?