Hello again!
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have been hard at work on Lasioglossum identification in the lab. We have made good progress over the last few weeks, but still many more to go. We have made a visible dent on the number of Lasioglossum boxes though! Of all the 2020 bees, we have identified ~39,000 to species with ~14,000 bees to go. This will still take several more months since it is the hardest bees that remain.
This is our Lasioglossum shelf progress as of this week! We made it through a row and a half in a month. We have another tower with more Lasioglossum, but still nice to see such visible ID progress.
This was our progress a month ago. A huge difference!
Maps:
Since our dataset is so large thanks to many collectors across the state, we are able to create some very interesting maps for species ranges. We haven’t decided on the final map type yet, but even using some basic mapping software to throw data onto a map leads to interesting results.
4 species in this genus seem to be across most of the state. But look at this species in the same genus:
For some reason, we were much more likely to collect this species in the eastern and southern parts of the state compared to the other common species.
The more maps we make, the more we start to think that some species might be range restricted. This species seems very much restricted to SE Ohio.
Or perhaps this species, which is in a different genus, but seems to not be found in most of SE Ohio.
Meanwhile, there are a few species that were only found at one or two sites, so they will not be easy to draw any conclusions (other than that they are uncommon in Ohio)
Anyways, that is all I have to report for now. Back to Lasioglossum ID for me!
-MaLisa