Project Reflection
During this project the whole class had the choice to choose from four different subjects, these subjects were Colony Collapse Disorder, Mega fires, Human-Bear conflict, and Trash in the pacific ocean. Each one of these related to how the environment around us is being affected in negative ways, however this negativity will also affect us. So i decided to choose from the Colony Collapse Disorder subject because it was all about the disappearance of the honey bees in the US. I found this important and interesting because honey bees are worth millions of dollars to the government and without them Albert Einstein once said we would follow and die with them. So what I did was research what the problem was and why the problem was occurring. After that I made three separate management plans that were to be a suggestion to help the bees current situation. After doing so I wrote down the cost of how much all of the resources would be required, examples would be sugar powder and even letters to send to other states and people. So after collecting all that I needed I put all of my work on a poster board and put pictures that showed what was going on in the ecosystem.
Strongest Management Plan
My strongest management plan I believe would be the Varroa mite plan because I believe that they were the largest problem for the bees at the time. This plan was the strongest because there were many ways to rid of the mites, some of them were expensive and some cheap. so to save money for those who were willing to help the bees situation I decided top choose the plan that was effective against the mites and both very cheap for people. This plan was to dust the mites with sugar powder, at least twice a year so that it was somewhat effective. The sugar dusting would kill the mites or lead them out of the hive to a different place. This method had a 50-95% chance of killing the mites, so the sugar powder would be effective and at the same time very cheap for the people that could help. So without the mites the bees would have s much better chance against extinction because the mites have the ability to suck the nutrients out of the bees and if one reaches a hive it will reproduce and kill a entire hive within weeks.
Skills
Skills that I developed during this project would be learning how to keep my evidence clear during the project, for example I had to keep it simple of how much powder to use and when during the year. This was very difficult because a lot of research was required and how to find the reasonable amount of sugar to use took very much time and thought. There was also the program named Excel that we used, this was very helpful in the process of typing down the resources that we needed for our topic. This program was a useful skill because it allowed us to organize our work into neat sections that would allow ourselves and the audience to understand the context. Another skill was finding and reading scholarly articles, this was a skill because they were an important part of our research for they had large amounts of information in them. This was a difficult skill to learn because the documents are very sophisticated and can be useful in future projects.
Knowledge of Project
The largest things that I learned about ecology through this project would be different things such as how it is being affected and why this is important for me to be learning about it. I learned about hoe the environment is being affected because the research and articles all showed that without the bees humans would suffer largely. And even Albert Einstein said that is the bees were to fully disappear then humans would follow four years later, this showed that there should be concern in the situation. This then showed that the project was important because I should be worried about the Honeybee CCD for there are many different things that the bee do for us. From deeper research I learned that honeybees pollinate all of our food and without the pollination billions of dollars would be lost and communities would collapse. So the project truly drove me to put in the effort to learn about what is really going on and what the consequence would be if the subject were to be dropped and left behind. And in dong so I learned a great amount in what had to take place so that this subject and other terrible kinds of ecological issues did not affect us largely.