Social Media Compaign
What is good about Twitter?
The advantage of Twitter is that it is a social media. People from all of the world can share information on social media. As a social media with a large user base, such as Twitter, it contains many informations. For our research on animals science, we can find many researches, news, or problems with animals through Twitter. For myself, I chose bee as the species I want to study on because of some interesting tweets I read from Twitter. Twitter also provides some interesting topics for me to do more research on in the future. For example, I saw some tweets about the effect that pestcides can have on bees, and then it leads my research on pesticides by using Academic Search Complete. Twitter is really a good tool for me to study bees.
Social Media Campaign Tweets
Social Media Campaign is an activity that we have for our writing 39c class. What we did for this campaign is to use Twitter to find problems and solutions about our selecting animals. The goal of this assignment is trying to raise awareness about the animals we chose to our audience, and learn more about the two organizations we chose that are closely relate to our chosen animals. We also need to advocate through Twitter to tell our audience to save the animals.
This page shows some of our works that we have done through twitter. More work with Twitter can be found under "Blog" section. You can go to my Day-by-Day SMC from this link.
(you can click on the tweet images to go to the original tweet)
Two Best Tweets of this quarter
I chose this tweets as one of my best tweet throughout the quarter because this tweet is about a video I found on Public Broadcasting Service. This video is the best video among all the videos I found. This video is only two-three minutes. I like short videos because it is not too long to make me boring. Even though this is a short video, it briefly introduced bees' hives and their way to communicate with each other. It provides a good overview for people to want to know bees. Thus, I like this tweet so much!
I chose this tweet as another best tweet of me because it is my first try to advocate my audience to sign a petition on twitter. I never had a tweet in the past to advocate my audience to sign a petition. I know now that people can advocate others to sign petition though twitter. The petition's goal is to urging EPA to make a law to ban the use of pesticides. I signed the petition myself first, and then I added the petition link in this tweet for my audience. It is a pity that I cannot see how many people signed the petition through the link I provided.
Two Organizations
The first organization I chose was Bumblebee Conservation Trust/@BumblebeeTrust. It is an organization that mainly tries to help bumblebees. This organization is a charity organization. They provided many useful information about bumble bees on their website. For example, they have articles about "identify a bumblebee", "Gardening for bumblebees", and etc. I think this organization really helps people to know bumblebees and know how to save them. Bumblebee Conservation Trust also provides volunteer works, or other activities for people to study about bees in the reality.
The second organization I chose was HONEY BEE HEALTH COALITION/@beehealthorg. This is an organization that cares about honeybee's health, and they try to do something to save honeybees. Their mission is to help honeybees and other pollinators "in the context of productive agricultural systems and thriving ecosystems". Honeybee Health Coalition provides many ways that about how we can save bees, such as "Hive Management", "Forage & Nutrition and etc. They also conducted their own research study/project in order to better protect honey bees. This tweet is a video about one of their project called "The Bee Understanding Project". The information about all of their projects is available on their website.
Two Problems of Bees
This tweet is about one problem that bees are facing-climate change. This tweet explicitly says that climate change is a factor that can affect bees pollination activities. However, a more precise way to describe the problem is that bees are sensitive to temperature changes. I have tweeted many other tweets that talk about how too hot or too cold environment will bring harm to bees. This is a huge problem because people cannot stop climate change immediately and control the world temperature.
This tweet is about the most severe problem that bees are facing now, which is pesticides. Pesticides are believed to be the most trivial problem about bees. Pesticides can cause bees, and many farmers are still using pesticides on their crops. Bees will probably die if they pollinate on crops with pesticides. However, I chose this tweet not only because it said that pesticide is a important problem, but it also mention other problems, such as parasites, and loss of habitat. I think this tweet kind of summarizes all main problems that bees are facing now.
Two Solutions of Bees
The Penn State Extension provides some solutions of the pesticides problem of bees. I chose the solution "select a material that has a lower toxicity to bees and a short residual toxicity" because I think this is the most reasonable solution. In my mind, it is not very reasonable to ban the use of pesticides on crops, since some pesticides indeed help the growth of crops. I think ban all pesticides is not effective. However, the solution that using less toxic pesticides is very effective and reasonable.
This is a solution that provide by EPA. EPA has a plan called Managed Pollinator Protection Plans to help bees away from pesticides. This plan gives local states right to decide what to do based on their situations. EPA monitors their process of protecting bees away from pesticides. I think this plan helps bees in some way but not much because this is only a plan but not a law. It is good to see that EPA started o take some actions to help bees. I hope EPA can come up with some better laws, not just plans, in the future to keep bees away from pesticides.
Infographic
This is my infographic. This infographic is about problems that bees are facing right now. I made this infographic because I did not see many places that have a summarized version of bees problems, thus I decided to make an infographic that summarizes all the main problems I found about bees. Among all the problems, the most surprising one is "feeding food". Bees' health will be affected if they are fed with artificial syrup instead of the honey they create. I cannot imaging this problem in the past.