Hi Everyone,
Hopefully you got out this past weekend to enjoy the warm weather. Soon the spring flowers will be emerging and with them, the spring bees! I know daffodils have started to sprout and my neighbors silver maple tree is already in bloom!
Mystery object:
We had a few guesses on the mystery structure from the last blog, though none were correct.
Example image of mystery object here.
The correct answer is a scale from a moth or butterfly! Scales on insects Lepidoptera can be variable and sometimes come in these ornate shapes. Scales in a single individual butterfly vary across their entire body, so scales on the head are a different shape from scales on the wing or abdomen. You can actually see a couple more scales on the image above in addition to the hand shaped scale.
These scales likely got on the bee by contamination when collecting. Oftentimes, butterflies get caught in nets, but get released. When the butterflies get caught, some of their scales rub off and get stuck in the netting, and then rub off on the next thing that touches the net.
Here is another weird scale that was found on the same bee.
This particular carpenter bee had a menagerie of scales stuck to it.
Preparing for spring sampling:
The graduate students are busy getting permits and organizing supplies for the spring season. We also have people ramping up to be ready for the specialist bee project. We did our training webinar last week, but there is still time to help out with the specialist bee project here: https://u.osu.edu/beesurvey/native-bee-survey-via-specimen-collections/120-2/
Trap nesting bees:
Another mini-project in the lab is creating tube stem nests to try to catch more of the spring mason bees in the genus Osmia. A volunteer in our lab, Brooks, has been trimming Phragmites reeds to use as stem nests for cavity bees.
Trimming Phragmites
Measuring Phragmites to be 6 inches from the node before trimming
The final result is a little over a thousand reeds ready to go
A fun surprise this morning was to find that some wasps had already emerged from the reeds that we had cut.
Can you see the wasp?
Here she is up close. She was having a fun time inspecting the reeds, but we caught her so that she didn’t keep flying around the lab.
Sorting Malaise trap samples:
We were given the bycatch from malaise traps set in 2021, so volunteers and students have been helping to pull out the bees, hover flies, and robber flies. Of course, we have also found some cool other insects while looking through those malaise trap samples. A malaise trap is like a weird tent that insects fly into and get caught. The trap gets left out for many months, with people replacing the trap canister weekly to document species changes over time.
We have found lots of cool hover flies in the traps, including dozens of ant parasite hover flies! We only had a couple of these ant parasites from our bowl traps and found more in a single sample event from the malaise traps than all the bee bowl traps combined. Or perhaps the malaise trap was just lucky and placed at the perfect spot.
Check out the antennae on this fly!
Zooming in on the face and forward facing eyes, I would not be surprised if they were a predatory fly. I think it is probably a predatory fungus gnat like this: https://bugguide.net/node/view/1370774
We have also spotted some other parasitic wasps. Does anyone recognize this wasp and know why those of us in the bee world might be concerned if we see it?
There have been lots of cute spiders, including this pink jumping spider.
This spider had a weird cephalothorax shape.
Another fun one, I believe this is a cleptoparasite of other parasitic spider wasps! I believe this is the genus Ceropales. See: https://bugguide.net/node/view/39892 and https://bugguide.net/node/view/1250619/bgpage
Since I am on a parasite kick, here is yet another parasitic wasp, in this case, a dryinid wasp that was attempting to emerge from it’s leafhopper host. Learn more about the weird pincer wasp lives here: https://bugguide.net/node/view/26938
Otherwise, we are busy in the lab going through the many thousand Lasioglossum specimens from 2020. We have been sorting them into different morpho-groups and then working on those individual groups. An example of a morpho-group would be the the Lasioglossum specimens with strong ridges on their propodeum and rough mesepisternums (Lasioglossum cressonii, L. albipenne, L. bruneri, etc). That group in particular is relatively easy to differentiate, but unfortunately a majority of our Lasioglossum bees are not in this group. We also have a group of Lasioglossum with long faces that are next up in my queue.
All for now,
MaLisa