Memories from Shoals Marine Laboratory on Appledore Island

For years, Cornell students have been spending summers studying flora and fauna on Appledore Island, Maine at the Shoals Marine Laboratory (SML). The remote field station jointly operated by Cornell University and the University of New Hampshire is one of the nation's leading institutions for marine science education, research, and outreach.

A coastal scene from Shoals Marine Laboratory.

Accessible only by a one-hour boat ride from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the island is home to migratory birds, marine invertebrates, harbor and gray seals, and the site of research for world-class faculty and students interested in ecology, marine conservation, underwater research, ornithology, sustainable fisheries, forensic science, animal behavior, and more.

Alumna Marielle Newsome Volz '07 studied biology and entomology as an undergraduate, and spent one summer researching quorum sensing in the island's bee population.

Marielle Newsome Volz '07 at work watching a bee nesting cavity.

"We wanted to study bees in a habitat that had no trees, which is where they nest in the wild. We did this to ensure that they went to our nesting cavities, and our nesting cavities only, to keep the experiment nice and controlled. We were trying to figure out how bees decided to move into a new nesting cavity," she said.

One day, the bees didn't show up to any of the nesting cavities. The students followed Thomas Seeley, Horace White Professor Emeritus in Biology, back to the main hive.

"Tom Seeley watched them doing their little bee dances. He carefully measured the angle they were dancing at, and from that got a heading. We all followed the heading and arrived on the shore of the island. And there it was—a tree trunk that had washed up on shore, and which the bees had eschewed our fake nesting cavities for. The bees had managed to outwit us and had found literally the only tree on the island! The story of the results of the study are covered in Thomas Seeley’s book Honeybee Democracy,” said Marielle.

The log that stumped the scientists on Appledore Island.