Today’s special guest blogger is Jess Vickruck, a PhD candidate at Brock University. Jess studies twig nesting bee diversity and the impacts of nest choice on their biology.
When I first started my master’s project, my intention was to look at how nest choice affected fitness in twig nesting carpenter bees (genus Ceratina, family Apidae). Little did I know that along with twigs full of bee larvae I would also get up close and personal with numerous uninvited house guests who all had one thing in mind – Ceratina are delicious! Although my supervisor continually reminded me that my thesis was about the bees and not the species that eat bees, I wrote up the data, and lucky for me it appears in the 2010 edition of the Journal of the Entomological Society of Ontario.