TY2014: “Busy at BEES”

JOSEPHINE ROGERS , COLASITE MHUIRE CROSSHAVEN CO CORK

I honestly didn’t think I would enjoy myself on this course as much as I did. At the very start I was nervous enough about what we would be doing because I wasn’t very into the whole natural side of biology and was more interested in the human and ‘brain’ part of biology but I was surprised that I found a few subjects interesting from the School of BEES.

On the Tuesday afternoon we had a lecture and a practical on plants and learnt a little about GM foods and using GM in farming. I found it really interesting how you could take a gene or trait from one plant and insert it into a seed and after when the seed grew it would have that trait that it was injected with. We looked at potato that was genetically modified through a microscope and there were patches of blue on some of the potato which meant that it was infected.

The other thing I found really cool was when we grew fungi on petri-dishes and had to go through a whole cleaning method to make sure we didn’t grow a bad bacteria because the medium we were growing the fungus on could grow anything. So we had to disinfect everything and had to sterilise the equipment and do everything in a special box. We check the fungi the day after and of course mine was infected!

Over all the week was really fun. The staff were all lovely and really nice. Grace and Susan were so nice and helpful bringing us everywhere and especially looking after us for the week. The experience was great and I met loads of really fun interesting people.

The whole UCC campus and library are really cool and UCC is a really great university that I will consider applying to in the future.