Hi again! As mentioned in the last blogpost, I will now tell you about the field-set up on APPLECORe.
At the 13th of May, the four of us (me, the project manager, a technician and the projects PhD- candidate) travelled to eastern Norway for field set-up. We had to get out this day specifically, to be sure that we arrived before the flower buds opened.
We travelled by plain from Bergen to Oslo, hired a rental car and drove to Scandic Drammen. Yup, I got to stay at a hotel and even got my own room, not bad for fieldwork, huh? The next day (after eating at the breakfast buffet ofc😉), we travelled to the field site in Svelvik, about half an hour from Drammen. Here we met with a representee from Norsk Landbruksrådgivning (NLR), who showed us the farmers field site. After wandering around for a bit, exploring the area, we started prepping the site.
We split the team in half, where I was designed on the team that put out the flower exclusion cages on the apple trees, the other team started out mapping out the site. To control which pollinator that visits the flowers, we put bags around a cluster of five flower buds (see picture below). Later, we will remove the bags and watch each flower and see which pollinator comes in to pollinate. When the pollinators arrive at the flower, we will put a tube above, so when it has done its job, it will fly right up and get captured in the glass. Then, we will remove the flower that has been visited, remove the petals and store it in a plastic tube. Each session will last about an hour, and we will continue coming back to the cluster until all the five flowers has been pollinated.
Bud with flower exclusion cage
After putting the bags on the apple trees, and the other team had mapped the site, we travelled back to Oslo, and then back to Bergen again. Now we were ready to go out to field the following week.
-Keep following if you want to hear more about my days in the fields!