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/
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.
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.
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.
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
Flower: Claytonia virginica, Spring beauty
Bee: Andrena erigeniae, specialist bee
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.
What about Tradescantia pollen?
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
Hi Carl,
Sam’s photo setup is really cool! We are hoping to have a simple solution that does not involve as much editing and stacking, which takes a lot of processing time that I am hoping to avoid. We had a blog post a few months ago where James Lundberg used a very similar setup and process to Sam’s, but similarly time intensive. See: https://u.osu.edu/beesurvey/2021/10/26/oct-24-progress-updates-and-specialist-bee-project-pinning/
And we will be in touch about your remaining bees.
Best wishes,
MaLisa
the pink pollen is from Spring Beauty (Claytonia virginica), the bee – I’m guessing is Andrena erigeniae.