New Paper!

In Darrell Moore's lab at East Tennessee State University in 2007, we wrapped up an interesting little project looking at what temporal information honey bees pay attention to when forming a time memory for food availability (Edge et al., 2011). We were using yellow squash flowers (Cucurbita pepo), which have a very stereotyped nectar pattern. Darrell suggested we look for a plant with a different temporal pattern of nectar secretion, so I started measuring sugar concentration in the nectar of nearby trumpet flowers (Capsis radicans). Andrea Edge then came on board, and she and I led this crazy, labor-intensive project over three years. The results turned out not to be anything close to what we expected. It turned into a very plant-centric study on speciation and pollination syndromes. After arriving at the University of Manitoba, Anne Worley, a true pollination ecologist came on board, and we finally made sense of the results. THIRTEEN years after we started, this thing is finally in press in Ecological Entomology.

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