Intro to the blog, stingless bees, and a visit to Reserva Biológica San Luis

I will admit up front that my dad came up with the title of this blog, tropical derelict being a term that he often uses in reference to himself. The noun derelict, not to be confused with delinquent, means "a person without a home, a job, or property." Yes, it's hyperbolic, but it is true that in the coming months I will be away from home and technically unemployed.

From late January to early May, I will be living in southern Nicaragua and volunteering with Paso Pacifico, working on a project supporting the raising of stingless bees (a practice called meliponiculture) and helping with their Junior Rangers environmental education programs. Part of this will entail helping youngsters collect data on the nesting behavior of yellow-naped amazon parrots.

I have been reading up on stingless bee ecology and stingless bee keeping, as well as trying to observe the bees here in Monteverde. My first memory of stingless bees is a failed attempt at extracting honey from a nest in an old guava tree when I was about seven years old. This involved putting a balloon on the end of a section of PVC and climbing the tree, with the intention of sticking the tube into the nest and celebrating as honey flowed into the balloon. The actual outcome was that the bees swarmed around my head and tangled in my hair, gripping individual hairs and pulling on them (this is a classic defense mechanism for stingless bees). I proceeded to run home and pour cold water over my head to dislodge the bees... My enthusiasm for stingless bees has not diminished, but my approach has become a bit more sophisticated.

Pollen of Inga punctata, a leguminous tree.

One of my hopes for my work with the meliponiculture project is to assess the floral resources that the bees are using. This would both provide evidence for ecosystem services (say, the pollination of crops such as coffee, bell pepper and citrus trees) and detect plants that might be worth integrating into agroforestry systems for the sake of honey production.

Pollen of Sida sp. a malvaceous herb.

In addition to observing flowering plants to see if they are visited by stingless bees, I hope to make a pollen image library for the plants in flower during the time that I am in Nicaragua. In the past few days I've gotten hooked on looking at pollen under a microscope, and at left you can get a glimpse of the diverse shapes the grains come in.















Here are some photos from a hike in "Chepe Rojas," a reserve protecting a piece of the middle-elevation forest that has become scarce on the Pacific slope in the Tilarán mountains.

Stream crossing at Quebrada San Francisco.

Tree frog camouflaged on a rock along the bank of theSan Luis River.

Vanilla vine (Vanilla planifolia) growing wild on a guava tree
in the San Luis reserve.

I will leave you with a video of "mariola" bees (Tetragonisca angustula) coming and going from a hive in San Luis. Cute, right?