Master Project
“The Birds and the bees - facultative feeding of birds on dead honeybees“
_Background
_Birds: Several bird species have been observed to occasionally use
honeybees as food source, like great tits, blue tits, and sparrows.
These species mostly feed on dead honeybees and have no apparent
negative consequences for the bee colony.
Bees: Especially at the beginning of the year dead bees are removed by
younger workers (undertaker behavior). This behavior is also more
frequent in unhealthy colonies as a mechanism to limiting prevalence of
diseases. During the season the majority of old bees just do not return
from their flight (self-removal behavior). Both behaviors lead to dead
bees outside the colony.
Birds + Bees: Regardless if the majority of dead bees ends up at
distance (self-removal) or more in the vicinity (undertaker) of a
colony, there is a continuously “production” of dead bees. Dead bees
offer a nutritious (e.g. many amino acids) and easy to access food
source for birds, especially at the beginning of the year when
undertaker bees remove the dead bees that accumulated during the winter.
_Aims and methods
_The projects aims to quantify the anecdotal description of the behavior
of birds feeding on honeybees. This will be accomplished using camera
traps at several colonies and live observations with event logging
software. Additionally the project offers a divers set of angles that
can be perused, depending on the student’s interest. Among them are:
potential modulators of bird visitations (urban vs rural landscape,
colony size and health); “dead-bee traps” to quantify where the majority
of dead bees are discarded; calculations of the potential large scale
ecosystem effect (public bee keeping data, literature survey); include
other mammals (mouse, bear) that may benefit from human beekeeping.
_Work environment
_The project will be performed in the vicinity of Uppsala, Sweden. The
Department of Ecology offers a friendly and divers environment. It has a
strong background in bird ecology, bee diseases with good contacts to
Swedish beekeepers, and modeling of data the student will benefit from.
_Project time frame
_The project is intended as master project, which is 20 weeks full time
and equivalent to 30 credits at my university (it could be possible to
do it as a Bachelor project of 15 credits and 10 weeks). As this is a
project with field observations we are constrained by the activity of
the bees, which is around April to around September. The project has one
part that is fixed (camera traps at colonies and some live observations)
and another part that depends on the students interest. Otherwise how
the student would like to organize the project is up to himself/herself
(e.g. sampling this summer, writing the thesis in the winter). However I
would suggest am examination date end of the year or early next year.
There is no need to start in April, but the latest is July.
_Requirements
_Driver’s license. Experience in the statistical software R is meriting,
as are field work experience.
_Contact
_Jörg Stephan ([email protected])
--
JörgG. Stephan
PhD
*Sveriges**lantbruksuniversitet
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences*
Department of Ecology
PO Box 7044, SE-750 07 Uppsala
Visiting address: Ulls väg 16, 75651 Uppsala
Phone: +46 018-67 24 08
Mail: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
Web site: stephan-joerg.webnode.com <http://stephan-joerg.webnode.com/>
www.slu.se/ecology/jorgstephan <http://www.slu.se/ecology/jorgstephan>
