Last week we finished sorting a record 10 kits and started on a 11th: A Ballinger (Butler county), S. Devine (Ottawa County), D. Baker (Green County), J. Smith (Highland County), M. Forquer (Ottawa County), S. Kishman (Erie County), R. and C. Goodpaster (Guernsey County), L. Hughes (Monroe County), L. Hughes (Washington County), J. Poremski (Stark County), and started on K. Elliot (Monroe County). That puts us up at 75 kits completely sorted! Oddly, several of these kits had only a handful of bees per weekly sample, so our number of bees pinned did not increase as dramatically. We are just over 29,200 bees pinned and databased. This coming week we will be packing up supplies for the move to the new lab, so it is unclear how much progress we will make.
Despite the huge increase in number of kits sorted, we had a consistent number of bees pinned.
A different graph that I haven’t shown on blog previously, this is the progress with the total number of kits. We have 130 kits turned in, though there are probably 10 more kits that I still hope to get from people eventually. You can see that some weeks we only make it through a few (or no) kits. So we are at least half way done and if we keep up last weeks speed we might even finish sorting and pinning in a month and a half.
An example week from a kit with only a few bees. Most of the kits still had at least a handful of bees each week, but were otherwise very quick to sort given how little was in them.
Bycatch updates:
J. Smith had a cool fruit fly with colorful wings.
M Forquer had this walnut husk maggot fly, which also had some uniquely patterned wings and colorful eyes. Check out that long ovipositor at the end that she uses to lay eggs! See also: https://bugguide.net/node/view/15266
Ballinger had this uniquely spotted aphid that had somehow managed to not get squished.
Guess that organism:
Drumroll for the answer to our mystery organism last week:
This structure? It is an antennae! It was from Richards kit several weeks ago.
Several people correctly guessed that the insect order was Coleoptera (beetles), with Laura correctly determining that the structure was the antennae of a male Phengodes beetle. The larvae of the beetles eat large millipedes and are also known as railroad worms or glow worms. Learn more about these beetles here: https://bugguide.net/node/view/9382
The sample had several large adult males. They were too large to photograph with the microscope camera, so this is taken with a cell phone.
Helping in the lab in the age of Covid:
We had five 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.
Our volunteers were helping us from the classroom down the hall. We were doing our best to keep up with their rate of pinning!