Last week we finished sorting 4 kits: G. Piper (Coshocton County), P. Lowe (Morgan County), C. Kimmel (Gallia County), J. Bugner (Seneca County), and started the kit by D. Heistand (Darke County). We are over 24,673 bees pinned and databased!
We also interviewed several potential new student workers, so we should be hiring a few to work in the lab soon. Our current student workers have been busy with finals and other obligations, so they have not been in as much. But in a few weeks our lab should be really bustling (and everyone will be fully vaccinated!)
Another update is that our lab will be moving to a new building soon and we got to check out the new facility! There is still a decent amount of construction to be done, but we should be in the new space by the end of June.
I also dropped off a batch of bycatch insects to the Triplehorn Insect Collection where hopefully other researchers will use them to learn about the wasps, ants, and other weird bugs. I also dropped off the spiders, so lots of fun things being shared with researchers.
Bycatch of the week:
There were several fun non-bee finds this week!
Helping in the lab in the age of Covid:
We had three volunteers in our lab this week! We greatly appreciate their help processing specimens. I know everyone wants to go out and enjoy the nice weather now, so any help is greatly appreciated.
Wondering how you can help speed up our process? If you would like to come to the lab in Newark, there are several tasks that people can participate in. We will mostly have people start with pinning bees, but people can also be trained to sort bees from bycatch in samples, label specimens, or other lab tasks.
You do not have to be a collector to help out in the lab. You also do not have to help for the entire timeslot for a particular day, so if you are only interested in helping out for an hour or three, that still works. No one is obligated to spend the whole day pinning bees.
Want to see how to get vaccinated against Covid-19 in Ohio? See the vaccine distribution website here: https://vaccine.coronavirus.ohio.gov/
All for now,
MaLisa