Abstract Why should anyone care? What am I adding to current knowledge?

1. Vegetations Effects on Bees Yoletci Lopez, Kelsey McKinney, Apollo Day, Jazmine Brown, Vanessa Zavala-Zimmerer, Miguel Lozano, and Sierra Scott Author’s affiliations/addresses go here • Abstract • Why should anyone care? • What am I adding to current knowledge? • Do I need to explain methods? • Have I told them what I found and recommend? • Is my font no smaller than 24pt? Is my title at least 36pt? • Could someone get the general idea of my poster from this section alone? Methods To collect the information about the bees to use we first needed to collect the bees using special traps designed for insects. To make the traps we started with plastic cups and painted one third blue with a paint mixture comprised of 16 oz of fluorescent blue pigment, or 16oz of fluorescent yellow pigment, and 1 gallon silica white paint. Then give the plastic cups 2 to 3 coats of each color to get them right. The bowls need to dry out for 2 days or else they will stick to each other when they are stacked. To get the traps to work you need to mix 1 ml of Blue Dawn dish soap with 2 liters of water, then fill the cups until there is 1 cm of empty space left. Then the traps need to be set out for 24 hours to catch insects. The process for the insects after they are caught is fairly lengthy but simple. The equipment needed during this process is a small mason jar, a yard of fine mesh, a hair dryer, small paper towel balls, insect pins, and a box to pin them in. The mason jars should have a circle of mesh replacing the airtight lid by hot gluing the mesh onto the screwing part of the lid. The mason jars should be filled with about 20 paper towel balls. To begin the first step is to rinse off your insects by filling a small cup halfway with clean water and swishing the insects around. Then we empty the cups filtering out the insects and repeating it to make sure the insects were properly rinsed. The modified mason jars are then filled with the insects and used to dry them. The hair dryer is used to blow cold air on high while the mason jar is shaken 100 times. Once your insects are dried then it’s time to pin them, the insects need to be pinned down with the pliers while the pin goes into the right side of the thorax until the insect is 1 cm from the top. The last step is to pin them into the box and label them, the label should be at the bottom of the pin while the insect is facing to the right. The labels should include the name of the person that caught it, the date it was caught on, and the color of the cup that it was caught in. • Results Continued • Have I kept my results simple but effective? • Are my graphs readable from four feet away? • Have I included all of the necessary information to reach the conclusions? • Have I used more figures than words to convey my point? • Do I have too much or too little information on my graphs? • Did I use the appropriate graph type to get my information across without resorting to some fancy graph type that distracts from the meaning? • Have I used colors in my graphs that clash horribly with my poster? • Discussion • Here is the space for interpretations. What do you think your data means? Be sure to discuss WHY you think your data means what it does. • Conclusions • What really important things did my group learn from this? • Are all of my conclusions supported by my data? • Did I show data that does not have anything written about it in the conclusions. Double-check that you have the right information in both areas. Introduction Urbanization has arguably taken over the world since the start of the Industrial Revolution. As buildings, skyscrapers, and  neighborhoods were constructed, nature was being destructed. This is urbanization at its most ruthless. This is urbanization at its most ruthless. It is almost impossible to imagine that the world has lost millions of species, about 99%. Even today animals are diminishing by the minute due to urbanization. San Diego is known for its small city environment with a small hints of nature around it. Although the local park may feel like a jungle to those who have never seen a real forest, San Diego is actually categorized as urban. Infact San Diego has increased in urbanization starting in the 90’s. According to conservation.ca.gov, “In San Diego County, 12,437 net acres were added to the urban category...During the 1996-98 cycle, the amount of urban land increased by 4,322 acres. On average, the county gained about 7,000 acres of urban land per update during the ‘90s”. Urbanization may prove to be useful to the human population, but other species such as the bee species are slowly dying away. Evolution is the process by which a whole species changes over long periods of time. In the past, bees have had no problem evolving as their own environments changed over time. Urbanization is growing at a faster rate than bees can handle. Because of this, their adaptations to a non-urban environment will not work for the new environment, the city. Bees are an important part of the environment. They pollinate plants to help them grow and provide us with fruit and vegetables. Bees pollinate fruits such as peaches, apples, cherries, strawberries and nuts such as almonds.  More than $15 billion a year in U.S. crops are pollinated by bees, including apples, berries, cantaloupes, cucumbers, alfalfa, and almonds. U.S. honey bees also produce about $150 million in honey annually (Sass). Although bees aren’t usually seen as being incredibly important, without them all of those fruits and nuts wouldn’t be around(Amos). Without bees, plants would not be able to flourish and make food for humans (Nativeplants.msu.edu). Bees are the main insect pollinators, so without them, humans would not be able to have the vegetation that we need to live (Nativeplants.msu.edu). “It has often been said that bees are responsible for one out of every three bites of food we eat. Most crops grown for their fruits (including vegetables such as squash, cucumber, tomato and eggplant), nuts, seeds, fiber (such as cotton), and hay (alfalfa grown to feed livestock), require pollination by insects “ (Nativeplants.msu.edu). Unfortunately the chance of losing all of those crops seems more and more likely to happen with the decrease in the bee population lately. One of the reasons for the decline in the bee population is urbanization. Urbanization affects bees because urbanization means that there’s a loss of natural habitat which is where bees thrive(Nature Precedings). San Diego is the seventh most urbanized and dense city in the United States. It has a population density of a little over 4,000 people per square mile(Newgeograpy.com). We have had a massive impact on our environment, not only are we affecting the air with our burning of fossil fuels but we are accelerating the extinction of most wildlife(Howard). One of the largest effects of us on the environment is urbanization, it is the cause of most of the extinction in the world by forcing the animals and creatures out of their habitat(McKinney). Some factors in San Diego that have been the reasons for the modernization of  land like rural areas and deserts turning them into urban areas are overpopulation, food productions (which may sometimes contain chemicals), traffic, solid wastes, housing, homelessness, air, soil and water pollution which have also caused a huge impact on the flora and fauna(water.tkk). One of the most common bees is the Honey Bee which its name has been given for their honey-hoarding behaviour(Oleg Kozhukhov). They were introduced to North America by the European colonists and are native from Asia and the Middle East(Oleg Kozhukhov). Some important facts about them are their ability to adapt to many different climates and place conditions and their important role in agriculture and providing pollination to plants(Oleg Kozhukhov). They use the pollen collected and mix it with the nectar converting it into protein-rich food to feed the larvaes and the members of their colony. This means that for bees who live in a human environment finding flowers to collect pollen and nectar would be more difficult than for bees who live in a really tropical environment(University of Arizona). The reasons why pollinators are so important is because without pollination plants wouldn’t be able to reproduce, if bees would disappear, most of the insect pollinated plants would be gone with them. Urbanization has affected San Diego in many ways, it started to skyrocket in 1996 (Oldfield). Urbanization is still effecting our world today in many ways, but people are not fully aware. One massive impact of urbanization is on the bee population. Most don’t fully understand the effect of the diminishing population of bees. The mapping has shown that since 1990, “San Diego County has lost 12,493 farmland acres and 14,525 grazing land acres” (Conservation.ca.gov). Although San Diego has lost much of its farm and grazing lands, 69% of land in San Diego is still classified as low-density "ranchettes," wetlands and brush or timber lands unsuitable for grazing(Conservation.ca.gov). Urban areas account for 15% of land in San Diego(Conservation.ca.gov). Results Every piece of data is very valuable to the results that we create by analyzing it. If you look at the data that we gathered you can see that there is a massive diversity in the plant life for students yards. This means that we can properly look at each yard with a certain amount of bees and compare it to others to see if there's a comparison with the different plant life and the amount of bees that are in the area. Unfortunately it's very difficult to get any data that isn't affected by other variables such as location, time, or weather. There isn’t much we can do about that except look a enough data that those variables won’t even matter. The significance of these results is that we can urge citizens to plant the species that attracted the most bees in an effort to increase the diversity and amount of bees in San Diego. One hypothesis was that, flowering plants will attract bees. After analyzing our data, it is confirmed that the percentage of flowering plants does not exactly correlate to the number of bees that everyone caught. As you can see in figure 4 the amount of bees caught seems to increase as the percentage of flowering plants increases. However, after the percentage of flowering plants surpasses 40 %, the number of bees caught declines. So far our group is puzzled as to why there is such a far drop but we do have some guesses. We believe that it may be because we categorized our flowering plants differently. It may also be because bees thrive in an environment that is moderately vegetated. Another hypothesis was that a higher number of different species of plants would attract different species of bees. But through further study and analysis of the data collected, we have found that the number of plant species within a yard does not seem to have a significant effect on the number of species of bees collected within a yard. In using the data we did gather we can get a very detailed idea that the plant diversity doesn’t correlate with the amount of bees caught. It depends more on location and which plants are in the yard that just having a massive amount of diverse plants. • Acknowledgements • Have I shown who helped me with this, including funding, teachers, and other outside help?