Week Two

Today was filled with many different tasks. The photo above is of me completing a mite-wash. This is the process of finding a rough estimate on the amount of mites in a colony. We placed the frozen bees in a strainer and bucket (w/ soap and water) and shook the strainer until the mites drifted to the bottom. Afterwards, we counted the amount of bees that we shook.

My day started with learning how to collect pupa for injection. I had to carefully cut the cappings off the the cells and pluck the pupa out. The hardest part is not damaging the pupa as we take them out of their cells.

This is a picture of some of the pupa I collected and injected with experimental viruses.

Tomorrow we have to collect and inject over 2,000 pupa for a study. Wish us luck!