After a conservation team completes its field season, it is importance to reflect on what went well, and what were some accomplishments worth celebrating. WPC’s Bumble Bee Recovery Program had a great team this year! With hard work and dedication, we had both a successful spring monitoring season and conservation breeding program. Additionally, despite the pandemic affecting most of our typical outreach events, we were still able reach a wide audience. Let’s look at some highlights.<\/p>\n
1.\u00a0 WPC’s new specially-designed Bumble Bee Conservation Lab<\/strong><\/p>\n We created and established a Bumble Bee Conservation Lab at African Lion Safari, just outside of Hamilton, ON. We have been able to collaborate with several organizations in the past, but this is the first year we\u2019ve had our own proper dedicated space, with WPC staff members dedicated to maintaining and caring for the colonies full-time. We were closely monitoring our colonies and the lab environment from May to mid-October. We took detailed notes on our colonies, including the number of eggs, workers, males, and gynes (\u201cnew queens\u201d) they produced and how much food they ate. We also ran mating trials between August and October, and now are currently overwintering gynes. The team was excited to witness how successful the new lab is for breeding bumbles.<\/p>\n For more information on WPC’s Native Pollinator Initiative’s mating and overwintering methods, please refer to the November 2021 blog “Beyond workers: mating and overwintering bumble bees”<\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div> \n