Beekeepers’ preferences for flowers in the UK
Millie Charmoy

Last summer, I was lucky enough to be accepted onto a UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunity Placement) project looking into beekeepers’ preferences for flowers. The work, hosted by a PhD student, worked towards giving a voice to beekeepers in Europe. Due to the rising costs of beekeeping, honeybee numbers have stagnated and their essential role as pollinators for both crops and wild plants is threatened. Increasing floral diversity in the landscape could begin to ease this pressure but we first need to find out which plants beekeepers want to see in the landscape.

Unlike many other UROP projects, I had the opportunity to work on my project remotely. This flexibility enabled me to work from Cornwall where I visited cafes to work each day and kept in contact with my supervisor with biweekly Teams meetings. My work involved processing a pre-existing raw data set in Excel and collecting information on the traits of plants and crops of particular interest in each country. This included flowering times, flower colours, shapes and scents as well as many others. These traits were recorded for plants which beekeepers had reported they use, avoid and those that they would like to see more of in the landscape.

The research then moved on to analysing the data I had developed, I was nervous to begin this process as I had very little experience in R, but with guidance from my supervisor and a few ‘crash courses’, I built confidence and successfully reached a set of conclusions:

• Beekeepers are less likely to use crops with early end flowering dates.
• They were less likely to avoid crops with early start flowering dates.
• They were more likely to avoid plants that start flowering late and that finish flowering late.
• There were no clear trends amongst the plants that beekeepers used or wanted to use, at least among the traits we were able to get data for.

Throuhhout the project I developed many transferrable skills, the main one being my proficiency in R which is a program widely used in professional academic research. This became an invaluable skill which I then used to analyse my data for my dissertation project the following year. As well as this, I was exposed to the difficulties with data handling and the necessary steps needed to process large data sets. Finally, I had the opportunity to present my project at the UROP conference, developing my confidence in public speaking and scientific presentation skills.

Many thanks to Tom Breeze for the opportunity and support during the project!