Saturday, October 17, 2009

Final Collection -- Sun, Oct 18 or Mon, Oct 19

The weather's holding strong for tomorrow (Sunday) and Monday, with both days expected to be warm and sunny. Please perform Collection #4 -- our last! -- whichever of these days works best for you.

Again, thanks for your continued participation through our inaugural collection season. We will be sure to let everyone know our findings when the identification and analyses are complete. If all goes well, we should have preliminary results by year's end.

Happy collecting!

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Collection #4 coming soon!

I know it feels like winter, but - believe it or not - we're planning collection #4! It looks like there's going to be a window of sunny warmth this Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday so we hope you'll be willing to collect bees one last time. We'll send out an email as Sunday approaches, so please keep your eyes on your inboxes for updates!

Also, thank you all for your participation in our pre-CAPS survey. Don't forget that we're going to be asking you to complete a post-CAPS survey after collection #4. We'll out send instructions and a link in a few days. We hope you'll be willing to participate once again.

In the meantime, send in those bees!

Friday, October 2, 2009

Community Garden Pictures

A huge thank you to Helena P. for sending these great pictures from several of our community garden collection sites. As you probably know, we have about 50 households collecting bees for CAPS this summer. What you may not know is that we're also lucky enough to be collecting bees at ten community gardens throughout Chicago including South Shore Cultural Center, Ginkgo Organic Gardens, and North Park Village.

Enjoy Helena's beautiful pictures!











































Thursday, October 1, 2009

Send in those bees!

Thanks to all of you who participated in collection three! If you haven't done so already, please be sure to send in your bees (and flies and gnats) and data cards as soon as you can.

We're hoping to have all of our bees pinned and semi-sorted by Thanksigiving or so in order to send them off to our bee identification specialist. That means that we should have some good photos and good data soon!

Before we wrap things up for the summer, though - and I know it doesn't feel much like summer this week! - we're planning to have a collection four in October if the weather cooperates. We're also going to ask you to complete a post-CAPS survey in the coming weeks. So keep your eyes on your inboxes for more information. In the meantime, send in those bees!