Feb 6th – snow days, ID updates, and attempting different imaging systems

Hello everyone!

We got snowed/iced out the last two days of last week, but that did not stop our progress. I made sure to take home a box of bees on Wednesday and crossed my fingers that I didn’t lose power. That seems to have worked, as we only had a slight flicker of the lights occasionally. Hopefully you all were able to stay warm and dry over those fun few days.

As for ID progress, I made it through most of the remaining Andrena with only about 150 hard specimens left. I briefly worked on the bees from the specialist bee project, which has a reasonable 1,700 specimens compared to the 53,000 from the bowl trap project. But we also had way fewer people contributing bees to the specialist bee project, so it is not surprising that we have fewer specimens. The species composition of things collected with nets versus things collected with bowls are very different, so both methods have been worthwhile. The hard to ID Lasioglossum bees make up under 10% of the netted specimens compared to almost 40% of the bowl trap specimens. But we definitely got some species that were only collected with one method and not the other.

If you are looking for a challenge for 2022, consider signing up to help with the specialist bee project, which involves more targeted sampling of bees directly from flowers and has been yielding interesting results. We will be hosting an online training for the specialist bee project on March 1st at 4pm over zoom, but it will be recorded for those who cannot make it. See more here: https://u.osu.edu/beesurvey/native-bee-survey-via-specimen-collections/120-2/

This is a female Triepeolus specimen that I photographed years ago. The bees are often black with white hair bands and variable colored legs.

During the snow/ice storm, I focused on our pizza box full of Triepeolus specimens. These are parasitic bees that sneak into other bees nests to lay eggs into their pollen provisions. They can be very odd looking bees and are often about the same size as a honey bee, though some can be a bit larger depending on their host.

This is one of our better looking pinned specimens of Triepeolus. If you look closely, you can see the white coloration is actually appressed hairs instead of coloration on the integument. That also means that the hairs can rub off, which makes them harder to identify when the specimens are really worn.


Specialist bee project – pollen observations

Another fun difference between the bowl samples and the specialist bee samples is just how much pollen is still stuck to the bees collected with nets and vacuums. Because we did not have to wash the things collected with nets or vacuums, they have many more interesting things sticking to them, to the point where it gets kind of funny just how covered they are.

Also note that below are several photos of bees who are not specialist bees, but were visiting flowers that are hosts of specialist bees. We just collected any bee that was visiting the correct floral host, but that does not automatically make it a specialist.

Since we know what flowers the specialist bee samples were collected from, we can make some educated guesses about what the pollen might be on the bees. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this Squash bee has some nice big pollen grains from squash stuck to it. They remind me of lemonhead candies, and look delicious if they were not so small.

This is one of the bigger pollen grains that is stuck to a Carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica), which looks similar to a coronavirus. These are actually Hibiscus pollen grains!

Honey bees are generalists, but might forage on one plant type per foraging trip, which might explain why most of this pollen looks the same. These pollen grains are much smaller in comparison to the squash and Hibiscus pollens. Another cool thing to note is the hairy eye trait that is present in only 2 groups of bees in Ohio – honey bees (Apis) and cuckoo leaf cutter bees (Coelioxys). I do not know why those are the only two groups that have really hairy eyes, but it probably makes their vision slightly harder when their eyes get covered in pollen.

Meanwhile, in direct comparison, this ligated sweat bee (Halictus ligatus) got absolutely covered in Asteraceae pollen, but thanks to the eyes lacking hairs, that is one of the few places on it’s body that remain mostly pollen-free.

Finally, the last pollen I want to show you is this pale pink pollen on this specialist bee. Anyone want to take a guess at the flower and bee pair? This is an early spring species that is relatively common.


Imaging system updates:

Most of the photography of pinned specimens on this blog is either taken with the Leica microscope camera or most of the recent images are taken with my cell phone through the microscope viewfinder (all of the pollen images above). This yields blog worth images, though perhaps not images that I would want to publish in a paper. Therefore, we are considering using different imaging systems to try to photograph at least one specimen of each species.

For those of you who remember back to one of our August updates, we got a preview of an automated image system that takes exceptional images. I left out that the lab down the hall has an older version of that system, which they have graciously allowed us access to. However, being the older version means that it has some technological limitations from almost 2 decades ago.

This is the older Hirox imaging system, which allows us to stack images together and hopefully make a clear, sharp image.

We tried a couple lighting adaptors to get a better view of the specimens. We had difficulty seeing things on the screen, so it was hard to pick the “best” option. This was an image taken with a variable light adaptor that put the light at an angle. It made the pitting on the scutum very obvious from a distance, but the reflectance was a bit glaring.

We also tried a few diffusers to make the lighting better, with this one having the long diffuser.

We played around with the settings a bit to get to this image and also swapped out for a shorter diffuser. I like this one the most as you can see the pitting on the thorax really well without too much glare.

The importance of light angle was most obvious in the face shots when placed right next to each other. The glare of the angled light makes it hard to see details in direct comparison.

I also wanted to compare how well my cell phone did through the microscope compared to the angled light. We don’t have a good way to diffuse the microscope light, so the scope versus angled light is probably the best comparison to see details.

So where does this all leave us? Well, I’m not sure yet.  The stacked shots from the old machine are not quite what I had hoped and also almost less detail than what I can do with my cell phone. Though my cell phone won’t stack images, but does get a similar amount of detail with a single image.

All for now,

MaLisa

6 thoughts on “Feb 6th – snow days, ID updates, and attempting different imaging systems

  1. Pale pink pollen in early spring… Spring Beauty and its miner? Neat close-ups of the different kinds of pollen stuck to the bees. Sometimes I’ll sprinkle sunflower pollen onto food like a garnish. The bright yellow looks nice against dark foods like beets.

  2. Hey MaLisa, another great post. I have to confess I have about 10 or so bees that we collected for the specialist bee project. I’m pretty sure they are not the specialist bees but still want to get them to you. I’ll be in contact.
    Have you thought about reaching out to Sam Drogie. He seems to be the master of bee photography

    Carl

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