Collaborative Student Research
Electrical Engineering Contributions
Dr. James Brooks and Cory Toribio have installed solar energy to this facility. This involves a solar panel, a charge controller, some batteries, and an inverter.
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Film Students
A team of film students created a short documentary about the apiary, which can be watched below!
Collaborative Research
The Bee Project at GCC has previously participated in two mega studies through the Penn State Center for Pollinator Research: Beescape and Landscape4Bees
Beescape:
Beescape is a useful tool that shows the floral resource, toxicity due to pesticides, and nesting habitat for native bees across the United States. This information is then used to predict how well a bee colony will survive at a particular location. Through the information that we provide on the health of our hives, we can help Beescape better predict the survival rate of bees in similar locations. To learn more about Beescape go to Beescape.org
PSU Landscapes for Bees Project:
The PSU Landscapes for Bees is a project that uses a new technology called Broodminder to collect data from various hives and apiaries. Broodminder is a method for monitoring the health and activity of a hive based on its weight and temperature. Through Bluetooth equipped scales, Broodminder tracks the weight of the hive every hour through an entire year, which can provide valuable information on the health of a hive. In June 2020 we were able to install three of these scales on our hives. Our information from the scales was used by PSU to discover how landscape affects bee health. You can learn more about Broodminder at broodminder.com