Day: October 3, 2022

Categories
Eastern Australia travel Western Australia

The end of the Australian Buzz Bus… for now

As we return to Brisbane to drop off the Buzz Bus, we stop for a celebratory ice cream and a dip in the Pacific Ocean in the beautiful coast of Eastern Australia. Surfers float waiting for bigger waves and signs on the beach warn potential swimmers to look for another place to dip their toes as the list of potential dangers is long here. It is early and few people have descended on the beach yet. The gorgeous Pandanus hold on to the shallow soil between the rocks and sand. The water is cool and the sun harsh and we chat the time away. By the time we return the Buzz Bus at Brisbane airport we have driven more than 2,600 km in Eastern Australia alone.

I am excited to go back home in Sweden after three weeks away from my family. It has been hard to keep up with news at home, and I had barely been there three weeks since our big move from Scotland. The Australian trip has been amazing. So long in the planning and delayed for years, and it somehow has now passed so fast.

I have learned a lot about the plants, wildlife, and people of Australia. The mysterious continent has lived up to my expectations of natural wonder, and David and Daniel, my project collaborators and travel partners, have been amazing. Spending three weeks driving and working in the constrained space of a campervan brings its challenges and rewards, and I feel we have built our friendship and shared so many fun and amazing experiences together. Thanks guys!

Now the slog of the return trip begins. The distance I must travel to go back home, including several flight connections, amounts to 19,631 km.

The end of the fieldwork component of the project means the start of the next phase. We will have to identify the species we studied with the help of Australian bee experts. I will have to process and analyse the thousands of buzzes we collected and to do that I need to write and refine methods that enable to recognise buzzes automatically. It will be some time to do these analyses and then we get a chance to test our hypotheses and make inferences of what we have found in this project. At the end we hope to have a paper to tell others about our scientific discoveries. Each part, from the conception of the project, to fieldwork, analysis, and write-up, has aspects that I love. Doing science is fun, and I certainly feel lucky that I get to do this for a living. Thanks for funding this expedition to Australia National Geographic!

Categories
Eastern Australia flowers

The last stretch

30 September. This is the last stretch of the trip. The last chance of finding bees before starting to wrap up this expedition. It has been a mixed bag for finding bees for studying vibrations. Perhaps is the cool, rainy days we have encountered, or Spring, or trying to cover too much ground, or any other reason that makes field work in a new continent hard. But it has been a blast and somehow we have managed to scrape a few measurements in bees across Australia. Today is our last push and the bright sun and blue skies with relatively little wind are promising.

We leave Hervey Bay after exploring some Solanum torvum growing behind the campground. We drive down the Bruce Highway and Daniel has an inspired suggestion to get off and explore a side road. With the corner of my eye I spy a large shrub with bright yellow flowers in a spike. ‘Stop here’, I ask Daniel who pulls over near a farm. We climb down to the river bank where I saw the plant and confirm is the (exotic) Senna didymobotrya with large, buzz pollinated flowers. Within seconds we hear the deep buzz of a large carpenter bee (Xylocopa sp.) above our heads. With some tricks and patience we sample a few bees including Xylocopa. We are thrilled of this strike of luck to locate the bees that will allow us to close the trip with more observations.

A farmer comes by intrigued by our excitement at a weedy plant and we tell him about the Buzz Bus, he allows us to go deeper up the river bank to look for more buzz pollinated flowers of Solanum and Senna that he says are plentiful here. ‘Just watch out for the carcasses of the feral pigs we shot last week!’, he warns us. We find many bees of different species and collect buzz after buzz in our mobile lab. This is the most productive day of the whole Eastern trip!

The day has been a complete success, and we pull over late in the afternoon on our next campsite at the edge of a pine plantation. How here to cut down Eucalyptus forests to plant Scott Pines (Pinus sylvestris), while the rest of the world cut their native forests to plant Eucalyptus?

The usual brush turkeys watch us set up camp, and we spend the evening cooking, measuring and photographing bees. A pair of kookaburras huddle together above our heads as the sun sets. The campsites light up their fire pits as the darkness quickly engulfs everybody. Tomorrow we head to Brisbane to return the Buzz Bus and end three weeks of wonderful fieldwork.