Difference between revisions of "Team:FAFU-CHINA/Practices"

Q:What is the influence of CSBV to your bee population?

A:This disease outbroke seriously in my bee farm located in Wuyi Mountain. It began from April this year with high Infectiousness and spread fast and strong.This disease is so difficult to cure that it resulted in economic loss.

Q:How do you combat this disease based on past experience?

A:If this disease outbroke more serious in the past , then they could only be used some illicit chemicals to combat, such as oxytetracycline. Most of these drugs are expensive but the effect is good, so it has become a choice for traditional beekeepers. But now with the improvement of beekeeping technologies, as well as taking into account the impact of drugs on product quality .We seldom use the drugs.

Q: What were measures you taking to reduce the loss without drug treatment?

A: Because the disease first breaks out in the general body of the bee larvae but he impact on adult bees are relatively small. Therefore, in the early stages, the hive of pest is more difficult to find. When honeycomb occurrence of disease was more serious on a board , we only could dispose of the pests on that board to prevent the transmission to other bees to reduce losses.

Q: Our project is to create a gene medicine that can inhibit viral replication and add E. coli bacteria to the syrup to feed bees.It will use bees’ habits of feeding each other to achieve the effect of prevention and treatment of disease.Then we want to know whether the E. coli we add will have effects on honey quality and safety ?

A: Actually, unprocessed honey contains various active microbes, such as yeast, E. coli and other bacteria. So there is a specified index for honey products. But our production of honey bee is essentially non-pasteurized. First, because the honey itself contains a certain amount of lysozyme, it has a bactericidal effect. Second, the quality honey which is sterilized will decline. In addition, E. coli is not the dominant bacteria in honey, so basically you can not consider security issues.

Q: If we made gene medicine products, compared with traditional chemical drugs in the market what are our competitive advantages?

A: Your generic drugs can effectively treat CSBV and has small food safety risks to human as opposed to the traditional hazards of drugs on security issues. If it is put into the market, it will certainly have a incomparable advantages with other drugs. But you have to take into account the cost and the use of generic drugs. Because to the beekeepers, what they pursue are economic benefits. So if you can effectively solve these problems, it will be promising.

Q: How Chinese bee population develops in China how?

A: Nowadays most bees Chinese beekeepers raise are Italian bees. Because Italian honey bee produce high volume honeey and has relatively cheap price to have a higher economic efficiency. While the population of Chinese bees is relatively small and product less honey.So people seldom farm them.These factors slowly caused the population of Italian bee rapidly expanding.However, the relative reduction was in Chinese bees population.

Play is a way of being, a way of learning, and a way of doing science.

Play is the most fundamental and best way of learning.

To remove the barrier between science and normal people’s life, It is our responsibility to lead people into the wonderland of science. This is a lofty ideal, and thousands of people in many fields have already been working for it for years. But this time, we need some innovations, perhaps some funs too.

Play is not only a simple process. We believe that play is actually a way of being, a way of learning, a way of doing science. So now If u ever watched the TED of Beau Lotto . You’ll know that play provides everything you need in oder to be a scientist, and that is what motivates us. If we add rules to play, we have a game which is actually what project is. And who can be better than children to play? Then we tried to spread the idea that everyone has the potential to be scientist as long as being offered an opportunity. Instead of giving a dull lesson about biology, this year FAFU-China decided to teach children how to play correctly, how to play with principles from science, and finally they will find their own way to science.

We cooperated with a semi-profit social organization Fanshu Park. Part of the reason is that they are very experienced with holding activities for children. But most important of all, we actually have a common philosophy——Playing is the best way of learning. Over the past 4 years, Fanshu Park has successfully explored a new field in Fuzhou city and organized a bunch of children and parents on it’s back. They can definitely teach us how to play with kids and give us some lessons. But we were not simply trying to teach children something. We aimed to inspire their interest in science, and make it clear that they all have a talent of doing science, for they all have a talent of playing and learning.

Fanshu Park gave us a few training so that we know how to deal with kids, besides they helped us organized ten children and provided us an activity space and facilities needed.

In 28th of August, we held an half-day activity. During the activity, we taught them everything we know about honeybees, and they did show a great interest in the small charming creature.

We taught them the structure of honeybees and they were required to use a way they want to show us what they have learned. Some kids tried to draw a picture of honeybee and some even tried to made a shape of honeybee by using plasticene.

We also taught them the difference between real honey and fakes, so that in future they won’t make a terrible purchase. This part may be a bit dull for kids, but when they were required to distinguish out real honey from fakes on their own, it seemed rather practical instead.

To illustrate that everyone has a potential of being a scientist, or a engineer, we helped them to design their own project. We helped children to solve their question on their own. Why will the honeybees die after biting a person? What is the relationship between honeybees and bumblebees? Something like that. The process of doing their project is more like a game, but we tried to add some rules in this game. We told them that they need four basic different sections to do their project, an objective, a procedure, an expectancy, and a discussion. The objective says what is the question? and why. The procedure tells you how you are going to solve the question. Expectancy is what do you think the answer for the question would be. And the discussion is, who cares?

We successfully taught them the how to play correctly and scientifically by doing this way. And we believe that in their future, the principle of playing will have a long-lasting effect in many aspects of their life.