Multiple lines of evidence suggest that the earliest stages of colony development are especially important for ultimate colony growth and success. For example, early season resources have disproportionate impacts on colony growth and reproductive success . Colonies grow exponentially throughout the nesting season, and the number of workers produced directly corresponds to the number of reproductives produced . Thus, queens likely benefit from being able to rapidly establish nests in spring. This also is consistent with the pattern that bumble bee species that emerge from diapause and begin nesting earlier in the spring are less likely to be declining, relative to those that emerge later in the season . This evidence, along with our finding that queen survival and reproduction increase upon emergence of the social environment, collectively suggest that intervention strategies that target this early nesting stage and promote the production and maintenance of early season workers are needed for effective conservation of this solitary nest-founding, social lineage. Bumble bees are the most economically important native pollinators in North America and play essential roles in pollination networks in wild plant communities . Early nesting queen bumble bees play a vital role in early season pollination of wild plants and crops such as blueberry, because they emerge early in the season when temperatures are relatively cool and few other pollinators are able to fly . Despite the economic and ecological importance of early nesting queens, current conservation strategies focus primarily on supporting bumble bee colonies during the social phase of their life cycle . Thus, the needs and unique biology of early nesting queens remain largely unknown and unaddressed , square pots for planting although this stage may represent a particularly important demographic stage for bumble bee populations.

Solitary queens must both forage and perform all the tasks required for colony success and reproduction, so this stage may respond strongly to environmental stressors such as diminishing or degraded floral and habitat resources, urbanization, pesticide use, and higher temperatures. Ultimately, the sensitivity of this life stage may help explain global declines in bumble bee populations .Given that workers regulate queen physiology in the ways we have demonstrated, the timing of worker emergence in the nest, as well as the maintenance of those workers, likely impacts queen fitness, colony developmental trajectories and ultimately nesting success in bumble bees. Thus, we propose that bumble bee conservation regimes should focus more heavily on the early nesting period to support the emergence and maintenance of early-season workers in young colonies. For example, ensuring ample, pesticide-free forage and nesting resources in the early spring, particularly in agricultural, urban and other degraded and disturbed habitats, is one concrete action that would be predicted to have substantial positive impacts on nesting success. Current conservation regimes often focus on mitigating stressors in mid-summer , but focusing on the early spring may be just as important, if not more important, for supporting bumble bee population success. Additionally, more research investigating the unique needs and stressors affecting early season queens is essential to developing targeted conservation regimes specific to this life stage. For example, the effects of increased environmental stochasticity , potential phenological mismatches between queen emergence and floral blooms and warming temperatures , on early season queens remain open areas for future climate change-related research. A more in depth understanding of the impacts of parasites and pathogens on early season queens, specifically , is also needed .

Our findings highlight unique aspects of the solitary nestfounding stage in social insects and underscore the importance of conservation interventions that support this early nesting period.The future happens as we imagine it into existence. This dissertation explores the public power of imagination in creating shared worlds and how the material effects of these imaginings co-constitute space. In my research, bureaucrats, gardeners and aerosol muralists are all actively inscribing space and claiming ownership over it, through their actions and material interactions; this process of cocreation defines the legality and subjectivity and economics of the people and institutions involved. The work of shaping worlds is in large part what to make visible – and invisible. These imaginings become a way of making people see – a constitutive vision. Aesthetics matter. I pay attention to the material effects of imaginings by turning to documents: photographs, pamphlets, magazines, videos, websites which contain visual representation of all kinds. These are the minions of imaginings, the workers which create the constitutive vision and birth new worlds. Imagination is no longer regarded as a synonym for fantasy or illusion but an increasingly common analytical trope in anthropology in the last few decades . It is a way to maintain a lively multiplicity and agency for the groups we study by producing systems of meaning that enable collective interpretations of social reality but allowing for the possibility to project goals and seek to attain them. Nor is imagination understood as simply residing in individual minds in the form of aesthetic considerations. Anderson uses imagination as the basis for a shared sense of belonging and attachment to a political community ; many others have used the terms to explore the categorization of human subjects so as to govern them more efficiently . In short, imagination, viewed as ‘‘an organized field of social practices,’’ can be seen as a key ingredient in making social order . However, we must avoid a clear trap in the term itself. It is no coincidence that the term “imagination” came into use just as anthropologists were straining against the term “culture” for its fixity, lack of agency, and turns toward essentialism . In my work I do not want the term to be a mere vague, holistic placeholder and to avoid the same pitfalls I have focused on the material effects or concrete processes through which imaginaries are enacted upon the world, an analytical emphasis which I’ve appreciated in the subfield of Science & Technology Studies . In STS, the concept of imagination is often combined with technology to form “sociotechnological imagination” or “technologies of the imagination” , square pots plastic referring primarily to the “diverse manners or indeed styles by which imaginative effects are engendered” . I will use a simplified definition of technology as “all aspects of action upon matter” . I find STS to be a fruitful starting point because of its rootedness in materiality . Imagination is, by nature, a somewhat ineffable concept, and I find it most useful tothink about and track imaginings through their material effects on the world. Jasanoff and Kim examine the concept of “sociotechnical imaginaries” through contrasting examples of how different state powers have created national imaginaries relating to their conception of nuclear power.

They define national sociotechnical imaginaries as ‘‘collectively imagined forms of social life and social order reflected in the design and fulfillment of nation-specific scientific and/or technological projects.’’ Imaginaries, in this sense, at once describe “attainable futures and prescribe futures that states believe ought to be attained.” However, Jasanoff has been more interested in the effects of imagination at the national level or at a global level, in an attempt to explain how scientific representations of the natural world acquire a hold on people’s beliefs. I would like to apply their use of the term to describe the imaginings of city governments, for example, but also preserve its use for much smaller entities, more suitable to the scale of the ethnographic work I undertook. So for instance, I discuss the imaginaries of formal entities such as nonprofit organizations, but also less formal groups such as homeless or scavenger populations. Imaginaries are not simply dictated by the nation or city state – these groups are simply one among many competing to materialize their imaginings. Neither does imagination reside only in the strivings of the individual mind. The concept has the potential to bring together the collective yearnings of a group which shares a collective set of values, andarticulate the process of moving a shared vision into material reality. I appreciate the concept because of its preservation of the possibility of individual subjectivity while honoring the power of the collective to effect change; these poles are held in productive tension within the concept of imaginaries. Some STS theorists feel strongly that the technology, the material process, engenders the imaginary, not vice versa . If this were the case, it would be through the act of digging and harvesting and creating fences that the gardener’s imaginary would be produced. Through the act of walking the pre-dawn streets, sifting through recycling bins, the scavenger’s imaginary would coalesce. I feel that the creation of the imaginary is more of a mutual process, where material and discursive processes co-produce imaginings; in this way I am closer to Jasanoff. Imaginaries encode collective visions of the good society and they “project visions of what is good, desirable, and worth attaining for a political community; they articulate feasible futures” . They are not simply master narratives, which are often extrapolated from past events and serve explanatory or justificatory purposes. Imaginaries create the future. These imaginaries map the world in ways similar to those described by Ramaswamy in The Land of Lemuria, in which she traces the history of the fabled island of Lemuria, a place thought by most to be akin to the sunken island of Atlantis. It has never been corroborated scientifically, yet it is taught as factual history in Tamil schools and firmly embedded in Tamil identity as their flooded homeland.Lemuria’s shape morphs dramatically as its place-makers work to map a vanished space. Similarly, each of the groups I worked with imagine their own world into existence, based on their identities and needs, which are often at odds with the worlds constructed by others who may share their space yet inhabit an entirely different lived experience. Some are already mourning lost spaces, while others are busily unleashing their imaginings on the spaces around them. These worlds layer over one another and rub itchily at their points of contention. Ramaswamy can be grouped with other scholars of what I will call imaginings of destruction. In these ranks we can include Joe Masco, who explores nuclear imaginings demanding new forms of governmentality to deal with altered interactions between nature, nuclear waste, and people in New Mexico. Another scholar who tracks the aftermath of destruction and its effects on the imagination in Japan is Lisa Yoneyama in Hiroshima Traces. This work examines how struggles over memory and history are expressed materially in the cityscape through processes of urban renewal and how the manufacture of space attempts to produce only subjectivities which emphasize societal stability . My work fits into this line of material imaginings of destruction because the blight-inflected conversations I document include the ultimate threat of eminent domain: gardens are frequently bulldozed in the name of development and murals disappear under a coatof gray paint overnight.Spatiality emphasizes the production of space, its discursive and material practices, and its related cultural understandings . A focus on spatiality is rooted in a belief that changing one’s material surroundings can change the way a person thinks or acts – a surprising common denominator for many of the actors in my research, who may disagree wildly on almost any other subject. The devil is in the details: how and when and in what ways? Space provides an essential lens in thinking about race and class in an urban context because histories of racism, exclusion, and limitations of mobility result in tell-tale patterns on the landscape. As Laura Pulido notes, “An appreciation of spatiality . . . encourages greater attention to race, as it is one of the key social forces shaping our cities ” . These marked spaces are more than just a backdrop to the lives of the people I worked and talked with and observed; these spaces are active players in and of themselves. Cultural geography has been criticized for a focus on “dematerialized and desocialized geographies” . Space as an analytical tool must be grounded in theories of power and how it manifests materially as well as in discourse. In my work I focus on transformations of space but attempt to temper its abstractions with a blend of materiality and imagination. Imagination provides the specificity, the heart, the motivations, the detail necessary to understand motivation.