Permits and reports:
For those who applied for permits to sample bees, can you reach out to me listing when your reports to your sample site are due? I am trying to get as many kits sorted as possible to include more information in various parks reports, but as you can tell, progress has been slow. So if your permit says that you are required to turn in a report soon, please send me an email (spring.99@osu.edu).
Kit sorting progress:
Eleanor finished pinning the rest of Hearn’s kit this week. We also managed to sort 3.75 more kits this week too! A record making week, though our speed this week was partly due to the odd lack of abundance of specimens in 3 of the kits sorted. The kits we started sorting were D. Babcock (Sandusky co), D. Babcock (Wood Co – second kit), J. O’Brien (Portage Co), and C. Stanton (Columbiana Co).
So far, we have filled over 40 boxes with pinned specimens. We have pinned over 6,200 bees across that 12 kits that have been pinned! However, 1,539 of those were from one kit (J. Page in Champaign Co), which was also the first kit I sorted. Hence my extreme concern over how many bees we had waiting in our boxes. However, this week, we had our lowest number of specimens in a kit yet (and not for a lack of sampling, soap type, or loss of cups over time), with a total of only 12 bees across the entire season for Babcock’s Sandusky county sample site.
Many of Babcock’s samples had only small numbers of bees or bycatch. This kit only had two flies, though there were several springtails, ants, and a few slugs.
This is all of the petri plates of sorted bees from Babcock’s Sandusky county sample. Although there were only 12 bees, there were still probably 8+ species, including at least one parasitic species!
Of the 12 kits that have been pinned so far, the average number of specimens per kit is about 500 (unless we exclude the record high, then the average goes down to only 400 bees per kit). So there seems to be a somewhat wide variation in the number of bees that end up in different kits. Why there is such a wide variation remains unclear. There are still plenty of kits to sort through, so the record high and record low might change, but fingers crossed for my part that they do not.
Interesting bycatch:
Lots of leafhoppers, ants, and slugs this week. I did not take that many photos, but there were a few cool things. To see all bycatch photographed this week, see: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?created_d1=2020-12-07&created_d2=2020-12-11&place_id=any&subview=grid&user_id=malisaspring&verifiable=any
Inexplicably, one of Babcock’s samples had a mantid head and piece of an arm (but no other body parts) in the sample. How did this happen? That is unclear. There were also stories of other people observing mantids eating specimens out of the bowls, but this seems more likely that a mantid was getting eaten above the bowl, and the predator dropped the head.
Stanton had a colorful (and slightly iridescent) wood boring beetle. Rice for scale.
Hearn had a brightly colored grapevine leafhopper (rice for scale in the lower corner)
Hearn also had a spider with some weird tufts of hair on the top of its head.
And finally, the ant people are debating on the ID of the black and red ant, which may or may not be a really rare species and or the first specimen record ever for the state of Ohio. The jury is still out as of this writing and I need to get a specimen to an ant expert to confirm for sure. TBD.
COVID and volunteer pinning updates:
As I have hinted to previously, we have paused any additional people in the lab for a bit given how high the case numbers for covid are in Ohio. We are now averaging 10,000 new cases of Covid a day in Ohio compared to our 1,000 new cases/day over the summer and COVID is quickly becoming one of the top causes of death in Ohio. So to be extra safe, we are going to just take it slow in the lab with just Eleanor (student worker) and I. However, there is some bright news, with vaccines finally rolling out! There were several shipments of one of the covid vaccines to 8 sites across Ohio, so at least some people will start to get vaccinated. If you are able to get the two doses of vaccine and wish to help in the lab after being vaccinated, email me directly. Otherwise, we will continue to wait to have any more people in the lab to reduce risk for everyone involved.
Quick bonus edit to add a nice poster on Polistes wasps: https://twitter.com/MCAsche/status/1338501533596434437/photo/1
That is all for now,
MaLisa
Wishing you a safe and happy discovery week!
Thank you for the !
Thank you for all the updates. I find it all really interesting. Are you allowed to share where in Sandusky County the sample with low numbers was obtained? Some parts of Sandusky County are heavily agribusiness type of grain farms. I have read that these areas are ecologically “deserted areas” due to pesticide use and lack of habitat. ( not much is left in an untended or unmowed condition along the edges of the fields and the roadside edges are mostly mowed.). My collection from Sandusky County was from our yard. Which is n a small town. I have deliberately planted native flowers and trees over the past 5 years that we have lived here and reduced lawn area by about 1/3. Wondering if the results from this bee (and bycatch) collection will support the readings.
The low abundance site was at Creek Bend Farm, which is also the Wilson Nature Center. So it does look to be surrounded by agriculture, but is next to a wooded stream at least. The second lowest kit, which had around 30 specimens, was also somewhat agricultural. However, the third lowest site with about 35 specimens, was much more forested in comparison, yet still had low numbers.
And that doesn’t account for the fact that several of the other kits we have already sorted are also near agricultural land. So it is really hard to say much at this point. Once we have more kits sorted, we can do some landscape analysis to see if amount of ag/urban development/ or forest cover have any consistent impact on bee abundance. For now it is just a guessing game.
-MaLisa
We noted an abundance of Leps in our collections, and wonder if others experienced that.
There seems to be a lot of variation in the number of moths and butterflies. Some kits might have a dozen a week, but a lot only have one or two (or none). So as with everything else, it varies a lot.
I am enjoying the comments as I think my specimens had next to no bees. I hope I am wrong.
Well, we will find out! Even if there are only a handful of bees, we can still learn a lot. At least in Dean’s case, most of the bees were different species, despite only getting 12 specimens total.