All my articles, videos and work are funded by my teaching and sales of award winning bumblebee nest boxes, solitary bee boxes, and wormeries.
Artificial nest boxes for bumblebees were recently studied by Gillian Lye for Stirling University. Out of 736 artificial nest sites, only 23 ( 3.1%) of these showed any signs of bumblebee occupancy and many fewer gave rise to successful colonies.
Her PhD research work has now been published and a copy has been made available which you can download here as it has now been published and is available as a pdf……..http://bit.ly/a0WaCO
It does involve a lot of reading though!! But does make for very interesting reading.
Do you want to help bumblebees?
Take part in an experiment this summer. Steph O’Connor is continuing Gillian Lye’s research throughout the summer of 2010 aided by Toby the bumblebee sniffer dog!!
She will be monitoring nests to find out things like how big nests become, how many nests produced males and queens and why some nests die.
You can help too. If you find a bumblebee nest in your garden, or anywhere you can visit regularly, this information will be invaluable to Steph’s study.
Contact Steph at Stirling University: stephanie.oconnor@stir.ac.uk
Read more articles about bumblebees.
Read more articles about the bumblebee nest box
For more information and to help save bumblebees join the Bumblebee Conservation Trust at Stirling University
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