Greetings
We managed to finish selecting and bagging stems yesterday! Yeah! Now hopefully the egg removal that was undertaken was not in vain and the stems will remain beetle larvae free for the next week or so (assuming the bags did not blow away in the storm last night…). My research is involving an invasive plant and the beetle that was imported to eat it.
On the downside, the chemical assay technique that I hope to employ in order to assess my plants did not seem to work. This is the reason for trial runs. I will have to look at it next week and try again. I am not sure what went wrong, but I will give it another go. It was supposed to be a simple procedure to assess tannin content of plants, but alas, I guess it was not simple enough. I do have some ideas as to what might have failed, and I do have several weeks until I actually need to have the assay work, but it is still frustrating…
So the research continues. The initial set up is finished and in a few weeks I will return to the site to add larvae and begin the experiment proper.
So little time, and so much to do.
Scott
