HMC Internship: Bee Lab

Most high school students don’t really get this opportunity of working in a research lab but, because of the program Upward Bound I’ve been blessed with this experience. I’ve been an Upward Bound student since my sophomore year and it’s taken me places that I never thought it would. It’s helped me explore different experiences and also helped me grow as a person. This is my last summer with Upward Bound and having it end with this internship has been the greatest experience. The first day of this internship I was nervous, scared, and excited. I didn’t know what to expect on the first day. It was kind of intimidating coming in with everybody in the room presenting in their weekly meeting, explaining what they have done the past week. At first it was so much information to process that I had no clue what their experiment was about. As the week passed by I got the hang of things around the lab. The knowledge I learned from my two mentors Cassie and Melinda having a better understanding of their experiment. It was really fun having the experience working in the field and actually doing field work. I’ve never known how research is done until now, most of the time it’s just analyzing data and doing it all over again to see if there any changes. For example, we’ve done bee observations which is where we pick a patch of buckwheat and we watch for five minutes for any bee activity. Then, count the average number of inflorescences, and afterwards count the total amount of inflorescences. That is just one example of many of the things we do in the field station. Besides working in the field station, working in a lab is great opportunity to discover how to work in a professional environment.

Honey bee on a buckwheat flower. (Image copyright of Harvey Mudd College.)

This internship has taught me how to work in a professional environment by working with different people on each of their experiments. I like how everybody contributes ideas to each other's experiments and tries to fix problems they have. Most people don’t know what research is; even I had no clue what it was until now. I’ve learned so much since I have been here; the students try to include me in everything as much as possible. My learning experience has been lot of hands-on work like flying the drone, writing down data, being able to be around the bees etc. If had to choose which one was my favorite it would probably be flying the drone because I’ve always wanted to learn how to fly the drone and it was awesome. Most of the time I would spend measuring flowers and counting them which doesn’t sound exciting, but it’s one way research is done. I also learned different strategies for how to count flowers and identify what kind of species they are. Most of the flowers we run into are the same, since most of the plants are dying there isn’t much to identify. Research is really the best way for a student to create a problem and try to solve it or at least attempt to, that's what I have observed and been told how research works.

Me learning how to fly the drone for the first time. (Photo by Matina Donaldson-Matasci)

Research doesn’t always go as planned but that's a good thing. What I have learned is that if something doesn’t work then you try look for a solution. There’s always an alternative if something were to fail, and if not you can redirect your experiment to the extent that you can accomplish and get some kind of data out of it. Also, I’ve noticed that most of the time things tend to break when they are needed the most. One example is Cassie built this scale to automatically weigh beehives called a Smart Hive but the issue with that was overnight some pack rats chewed the cable so the data it was supposed to be collecting was wrong. It happened twice, but she fixed it for the third time and since then pack rats have not damaged anything. Anyways, in most research it’s about problem solving because it plays a big role. You’ve got to be open minded and sometimes you just have to go with it in order to provide some types of results in the end. For me the whole main point of research is you start off with a question and the more progress you make in your experiment the more questions you’ll have to answer.

Lastly, being able to have this experience is a taste of how college is going to be wherever I choose to go. I’m upset that I won’t be here for the rest of the summer to see the final results, but I’m happy that everybody cared enough have me in there lab to  help out as much as I could and it’s been a privilege working with them. I never thought I could work in research and actually understand especially helping to collect data. Data collection has been one of the things I’ve learned specifically how to do: for example counting flowers, first you have find the average number of inflorescences, then find the total amount of inflorescences. Also, learning scientific terms that I’ve never heard of but I’m willing to learn them and actually use them in lab. I’m grateful for the time I’ve spent here and my mentors for taking the time to have me on board and teaching me about their research.