Hello! Remember the Bug Blog? Back in the youthful, carefree days before statistics and organic chemistry? Well, it's back up and running, and here is the latest installment.
UW Extension Science Means Public Speaking: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Cranberry Industry
(Apologies for the title)
I just spent a frigid winter day at a conference center in Steven's Point at another cranberry growers' meeting. I'm not sure why I'm always inspired to post after these meetings- maybe its just a chance for me to sit back and reflect on my life and think, "wait...what?" I still sometimes find it strange that I am fully submerged (get it?) in this world of marshes, but friends, I have drunk the cranberry juice. That became quite clear to me today.
Here I was in the "clicker session", where a huge roomful of growers used new-fangled technology to answer questions posed by the UW- Extension folks about how their farms operate and what they want to know more about. Their answers pop up on a screen in front. I was, yes, on the edge of my seat waiting to find out what the most problematic pest was this year. Was it sparganothis?! Flea beetle?! Tipworm?! (It was cranberry fruitworm in case you are curious....)
I was very interested in whether people were using neonicotinoid pesticides during bloom. And I was scribbling down notes like "Crimson Queen is a cross of Stevens and Ben Lear [who knew?]" "8 pollen tetrads delivered to a flower leads to the best yields"
This was similar to other meetings that I've been to, except for one key detail:
Yup. I've gone from listening to people talk about cranberries to giving talks on them myself. Thank you to all of you who sat through the endless iterations of my presentation. It went very well.
I was not sure that it would though. The anxiety began....well two months ago when I learned of my impending public speaking gig. The fear was at a moderate level until this morning, when I walked from my conference center hotel room to the enormous space where we were to present that afternoon. With hundreds of soon-to-be-filled chairs. A room so big that it required TWO screens for the powerpoint presentations, one of each side of the cavernous space. That's when my adrenaline began to spike.
It continued to slowly climb through the morning session, especially when I found myself in a room that looked like this:
Probably about 300 baseball-capped, sweatshirted (one promoting "SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS"), bored- looking growers. And my terror grew...
First, there was the lunch full of useful advice from my more experienced fellow students such as,
"You don't have to eat the cranberry sauce on the table, but make SURE you at least put some on your plate." Then, one more quick practice to myself.
By the time the presenter before me was up, my heart was racing so fast, I thought I might get up there and just faint. But somehow, I didn't. As soon as they introduced me, and I got instructions for the clicker, all of my childhood theatre returned and I thought "Oh. I know how to do this." And I did, and according to others I looked completely comfortable. Granted, I can barely remember the talk, but apparently it went pretty well and my first presentation is over! I'm not sure if people were terribly excited about inconclusive results about the discerning tastes of little caterpillars on cranberry varieties, but I'm hoping for some earth-shattering data to present next year.
Tune in next time (really, I swear) for the next episode in which we maybe find out: did Erin's cranberry plants survive the Polar Vortex?! How many more sparganothis fruitworm can possibly fit in the incubator before they revolt?! And, of course, do different varieties of cranberries show different levels of host plant resistance towards the three most economically important pest species to the cranberry industry?!
Get excited.
UW Extension Science Means Public Speaking: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Cranberry Industry
(Apologies for the title)
I just spent a frigid winter day at a conference center in Steven's Point at another cranberry growers' meeting. I'm not sure why I'm always inspired to post after these meetings- maybe its just a chance for me to sit back and reflect on my life and think, "wait...what?" I still sometimes find it strange that I am fully submerged (get it?) in this world of marshes, but friends, I have drunk the cranberry juice. That became quite clear to me today.
Here I was in the "clicker session", where a huge roomful of growers used new-fangled technology to answer questions posed by the UW- Extension folks about how their farms operate and what they want to know more about. Their answers pop up on a screen in front. I was, yes, on the edge of my seat waiting to find out what the most problematic pest was this year. Was it sparganothis?! Flea beetle?! Tipworm?! (It was cranberry fruitworm in case you are curious....)
I was very interested in whether people were using neonicotinoid pesticides during bloom. And I was scribbling down notes like "Crimson Queen is a cross of Stevens and Ben Lear [who knew?]" "8 pollen tetrads delivered to a flower leads to the best yields"
This was similar to other meetings that I've been to, except for one key detail:
Yup. I've gone from listening to people talk about cranberries to giving talks on them myself. Thank you to all of you who sat through the endless iterations of my presentation. It went very well.
I was not sure that it would though. The anxiety began....well two months ago when I learned of my impending public speaking gig. The fear was at a moderate level until this morning, when I walked from my conference center hotel room to the enormous space where we were to present that afternoon. With hundreds of soon-to-be-filled chairs. A room so big that it required TWO screens for the powerpoint presentations, one of each side of the cavernous space. That's when my adrenaline began to spike.
It continued to slowly climb through the morning session, especially when I found myself in a room that looked like this:
Probably about 300 baseball-capped, sweatshirted (one promoting "SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS"), bored- looking growers. And my terror grew...
First, there was the lunch full of useful advice from my more experienced fellow students such as,
"You don't have to eat the cranberry sauce on the table, but make SURE you at least put some on your plate." Then, one more quick practice to myself.
By the time the presenter before me was up, my heart was racing so fast, I thought I might get up there and just faint. But somehow, I didn't. As soon as they introduced me, and I got instructions for the clicker, all of my childhood theatre returned and I thought "Oh. I know how to do this." And I did, and according to others I looked completely comfortable. Granted, I can barely remember the talk, but apparently it went pretty well and my first presentation is over! I'm not sure if people were terribly excited about inconclusive results about the discerning tastes of little caterpillars on cranberry varieties, but I'm hoping for some earth-shattering data to present next year.
*********
But this is a blog about bugs and not play-by-play accounts of stage fright. So here are some things I learned about bees today:
- There are 25, 000 species of bees currently known, and 90% of them are solitary
- Currently, there are about 2 million honey bee hives rented out across the country for pollinating crops. 1 million of them are for the almond industry alone.
- These honeybee hives are placed on trucks and shipped around the country from California to Texas to Florida to Wisconsin and during their journey are fed nutrient-poor corn syrup.
- Honeybees are notorious nectar theives- that is, they will often circumvent the gene transferring pollen by lapping the nectar from a hole in the side of the flower instead of from the front.
- Bumblebees also are social bees who live in hives in abandoned animal burrows. They are much smaller in number than honeybee hives and over the winter, only the queen survives.
- And I'll harp on this once again: Neonicotinoid pesticides kill crop-pollinating bees by scrambling their little bee brains. Yet they are still widely used in the US...
By the way, for those of you who want some almost completely unrelated internet distraction, here is a website I found while searching for this image
Get excited.
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