We sorted 8 kits this week and started on a 9th: M. O’Donnell (Jefferson), R. Fromer (Warren), A. Mackey (Vinton), C. Thompson (Columbiana), L. Glade (Greene), E. Heiser (Coshocton), E. Robinson (Cuyahoga), K. Salvagno (Morrow), and started the kit by V. Eichof (Richland).
We also had a record number of bees pinned this week courtesy of our student workers! Several of the kits from this week were very large, but they were able to keep up with our sorting progress. They pinned over 4,100 bees just this week! That brings our total number of bees pinned to just shy of 37k. We have sorted 92 kits and have another 44ish kits to be sorted. At our current rate, we will hopefully be done sorting specimens in the next month and a half! Then we can move on to focusing entirely on identifying all of these specimens and I will work on sending interim reports to all of the collectors.
We still have not beaten our record for most number of bees at a site (holding strong at 1539 bees from Cedar Bog). Our second and third highest abundance sites were by people who did multiple transects at their site (H. White in Ashland and D. Winstel in Delaware) and thus had significantly more sample effort. No other kit so far has gotten over 1,000 bees, with the average number of bees collected still around 400 bees per kit (median number of bees per kit is only 320). Only 6 kits have gotten fewer than 50 bees, but even those few bees can still tell us a lot about what species are present in an area.
Bycatch:
Lots of fun little things this week!
There were lots of the tiny snails this week. I have misplaced my grain of rice in the move, so you will have to suffice for a small carpenter bee for scale instead (which is conveniently almost the size of a grain of rice). These little vertigo snails were found in Glade’s kit, but we have now found similar snails in many kits.
It’s a wasp! It’s a bee! No! It is a hover fly?!?
Robinson had this lovely hover fly that makes a great wasp mimic! With these bold patterns of black and yellow, it is easy to overlook the single pair of wings, large eyes, and short antennae that help indicate this is actually a true fly (and therefore harmless to us).
Another insect that really throws off people are these tortoise beetles! The larvae of these weird beetles are equally interesting, as they glue their poop to themselves as a poop shield! They wave around the shield of poop disturbed. Who wouldn’t stay away when someone is waving a log of poop the size of their body at you? This was from Mackey’s kit.
See a short video on tortoise beetle larvae here:
Upcoming events:
June 19th (Newark, Ohio) – Infirmary Mound Park Bioblitz – See more about the Bioblitz here: https://www.facebook.com/events/4622035604491199
and sign up for a team here: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/10c0c49a8a82da7fecf8-bioblitz
June 21-25, 2021: Pollinator Week Webinar Series: Webinar talks from 12 – 2 EST each day. See list of talks here: Pollinator Week Flyer 2021 and register here: https://www.zoomgov.com/webinar/register/WN_5giJkARITpWt2weciXAo2g
Identifying Andrena:
A few people have asked me about keys for identifying things. Here is a copy of a version of an Andrena key that I have been using that I found easier than the discoverlife key. Note that it is a bit dated at this point so some species are no longer considered valid and others have been described since then, so it is not a perfect key. Andrena Key
All for now,
MaLisa