A new poster from the School of Continuous Improvement tests whether the campus apiary's hive-weight Pollinator Index predicts wild-pollinator richness nearby, finding the two move independently across a full season.
A season of matched transects finds wild-pollinator richness near the smart hives running persistently below beds farther away, regardless of what the Index does
The campus apiary’s six smart hives feed the same number into every Sustainability update: a Pollinator Index built from how much heavier the hives get each week. A new poster from the School of Continuous Improvement went looking for what else moves with it.
A number that only goes up starts to feel like proof by itself. We wanted to know what it was proof of.
— Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Demo Quarter, School of Continuous Improvement
Dr Solberg and Dr Osei Vandermeer paired three garden beds within fifty metres of a hive against three beds further than a hundred and fifty, running fortnightly ten-minute transects across a fourteen-week season, counting every non-honeybee visitor an observer blind to the week’s hive-weight reading could identify. The Index climbed thirty-eight per cent over the season. Richness near the hives held at a median of three species throughout, against six further away, a gap already present before the Index had moved at all.
“Sensing without a comparison is just an announcement,” said Dr Vandermeer. “The far beds gave the Index something to be measured against.”
The School has folded the result into its running case that a measurement is only as good as what it has been checked against, and is recommending the floral-resource survey the poster proposes before the Index anchors this autumn’s sustainability update.
The full research poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.so11nu.