I created a bag graph depicting the mean number of bee visits, the response variable on the y-axis, to 4 different flower colours (purple, pink, yellow and white), the predictor variable on the x-axis. I didn’t really run into any technical issues while processing my data, it was just a time consuming process. Since I had recorded all my raw data in my field notebook, I had to manually enter all of this information onto my computer in excel. After I entered it into excel, I then had to organize them by colour since they were entered chronologically by sample date so that more easily process the data. From there, I just calculated the mean number of visits for each colour and created a bar graph to visualize the data. I also plan on creating a table to display the flower species that were observed during this experiment. I don’t expect much difficulty in creating the table, it will just take re-organizing the data once again.
The data was sort of in line with what I expected. purple flowers had the highest mean number of visits and were actually similar to pink flowers in mean number of visits. Yellow had the second fewest mean number of visits and white had the fewest. Error bars indicate similarity between white and yellow flowers which surprised me. Based on my initial observations before I started collecting data, I had thought yellow would have been more similar to purple, and pink would have been more similar to white.
After processing and visualizing the data, I actually did notice an interesting trend that I did not expect. My observations were recorded over the period of about a month. Over that time period, the mean number of visits to purple, pink and yellow flowers decreased while the mean number of visit to white flowers increased. There seemed to be one white flower that was particularly attractive to bees which made me wonder what about that flower made it so attractive to bees. I also wondered how floral resource availability later in the season impacted bees foraging behaviour. The data I collected from this experiment leads me to believe that colour alone isn’t necessarily a strong indicator of how attractive a flower will be to a bee so I think further questions could explore other floral traits such as height, olfactory characteristics, quantity, quality and accessibility of pollen and nectar, etc. It would also be interesting to run an experiment like this over a longer period of time to see how patterns change over the course of a full season. Would I see a similar trend in decline of visits to flowers with colour and an increase of white flowers? Or was what I saw caused solely by how attractive that one species of white flower was at the end of the season?