Found in Translation

摘要

I am not known for having a green thumb and except for one year of ambitious subsistence gardening (doomed by goats), our limit for many years has been a small herb and tomato plot. I am motivated to attract bees though, and am surrounded by people who know how to do that. The USDA- ARS Bee Research Laboratory has a providential pollinator garden thanks largely to the efforts of Dr. Francisco Posada (garden photos taken by Peggy Greb, USDA-ARS) andit is an excellent refuge for both bees and researchers. To better understand all the greenery, I plowed through several papers by colleagues who are testing new ways to keep pollinators safe and well fed. These colleagues are best known for studying thebug side of the pollination equation, but they have teamed up with plant experts for a little, ughh, cross-pollination. So it is with a recent paper by graduate student Pierre Lau and colleagues at TexasA and M University. In "Seasonal variation of pollen collected by honey bees (Apis mellifera) in developed areas across four regions in the United States" {PLoS ONE 14(6): e0217294. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0217294). the team analyzed hive-collected pollen grains in California, Michigan, Texas, and Florida. Their focus was the realm of gardeners and city planners, areas with only 20-35% undeveloped land. Using pollen traps, they identified the first 200 pollen grains per sample to species or, in some cases, the next level up. Suburban California proved to be most diverse, followed by Florida, then Michigan and Texas.the authors of this open-access article provide helpful information for four divergent habitats.