It was a ruff week....

BUT THIS DOG HELPED. LOOK AT IT. (PC: RICHARD OCHOA)

This was such an eventful week, just filled with lots of different emotions. It started off real great, I did a lot of service and was on top of my studies. Then some news came out that caused me to feel both extremely happy but also extremely sad. I can say that this week definitely ended on a good note however, not only because of this dog, but because I was in good company the entire time.

I finally decided on a topic to pursue for my HCP, and that is bee culture and behavior. I will focus my research on the social life and roles of bees, most likely your common honey bee. Bees are often over looked as pests, but there is a lot more to them, including their vital role in agriculture and their complex social traits.

So far, admittedly, I have not done as much research as I probably should have so far. I was able to find some pretty good sources as a basis, but I only briefly went over them. I only spent about three hours researching this week, in a span of two days in the library. This definitely was not enough, and I now know I will have to start spending time each day. Also, I will use the library databases more, as I really only used google scholar this week.

When looking up some sources on google scholar, I tried searching the keywords "bee behavior" and "bee behavior." These did not result in very many sources that would be useful to me. I did, however find some good articles when I searched "social bee." These sources discussed the social aspect of bees, which was exactly what I was looking for.

One of the sources I found was an article on honey bee sociogenomics. This article explains how sociogenomics are used to understand honey bee social life. The second source I found was a book titled "The Wisdom of the Hive." This book discusses the social physiology of honey bee colonies. This book seems more promising than the first article because it does not involve as much science and biology. The book was written by Thomas D. Seeley, a professor who has taught at Harvard, Yale, and Cornell. Seeley has received much recognition for his work on swarm intelligence and animal behavior. Something I thought was really cool was that Seeley has a species of bee named after him.