Excel Notes

Explanation of Spreadsheets for Squash Bee Data         February 2005

 

You will see that there are two spreadsheets in the attached file.  Beneath the column headings I have entered a line of data as an example for you to follow.  Several of the columns require explanation if the data that you record in the field and enter in the spreadsheet is to be completely compatible with the data from the other participants.

 

Site identity: The intent here is that your last name can be used to group together the sites sampled in your locality.  Number them sequentially, so for example, "Cane-1", "Cane-2" etc.  That will provide a unique identifier for each site sampled in this overall survey.  You can abbreviate a long last name, just use it consistently.

 

Location: We may want latitude and longitude information for several reasons.  The simplest reason is that it would be useful to plot your general location on a map of the Western Hemisphere.  I am not seeking great precision here.  There are two possible formats.  You must format them exactly as I have done here.  I prefer decimal degrees, as that is what mapping software uses.  I can transform degrees:minutes:seconds if you obtain it from a map. Here are the two forms:

decimal degrees - this is the format commonly given by a GPS unit. In my example, it is 152.55

degrees:minutes:seconds - these are the coordinates commonly read from a map, separated by colons as I have written it.  For my example, it might be 152:29:56

 

Dates and Times: I have chosen standard formats from the choices in Excel.  Please enter them in the exact format as my example.

 

Bee Counts: I have specified some of the common genera likely to be encountered in the Americas at Cucurbita.  Obviously, you may obtain different or additional genera and species.  Collect representative voucher specimens, identify them as well as you can, and later they can be summarized and separately analyzed.

 

Note that this year, we will be counting bees per number of flowers checked, rather than per plant. Hence, for every 100 flowers you check, you might get 10 bees of one species and 5 of another. This will ease making counts at squashes whose vines intersect, making it difficult to recognize individual plants.  We can later transform our data to this basis, knowing the numbers of flowers per plant for the ones that you chose to count.

 

At the end of your field season, simply enter the data in the Excel spreadsheet and email it to me.  I will copy and paste it into a master spreadsheet that combines everyone's data.  For the few of you that do not use Excel or spreadsheets, you can mail me copies of your paper data sheets and I will enter them myself.  I will then send back out to each of you the complete data set.