November Survey Update – Bee Progress and Undergraduate Asilid Research

Hello everyone!

We are making great headway with our 2020 bowl specimens. Dr. Goodell will be giving a talk at the Entomological Society of America meeting in Vancouver this week highlighting our work on the project. There is still plenty of work to be done and refinement of some IDs to do, so we are not ready to send out the final reports yet.

Female Andrena foraging on her host plant

I will be switching to processing bees from the 2021 and 2022 specialist bees for a few weeks. Then I hope to do a few trips to museums to access more reference specimens and meet with a few colleagues to discuss IDs of some of our harder groups. So that will take up the next few months. I will also be out of the lab for short trips and working on writing.

Undergraduate Research Updates:

Our bycatch bowl specimens are getting some attention thanks to work by Vanessa Chilcoat! She has been diligently processing, identifying, and analyzing the results of the robber flies that were accidentally caught in the 2020 bee bowls. With over 1,700 robber flies, it was no small task for an undergraduate!

Conference day, from left to right: Dr. Goodell, Vanessa Chilcoat, and MaLisa Spring

She presented a poster at the 2022 Autumn Undergraduate Research Festival at OSU. The PDF of her poster is here: Research Poster Final

We also included a small box of specimens to show people what the robber flies looked like in person.

No major updates on the hover fly project just yet, but we did finally get to hanging that poster up in the hallway!

Our hallway in the new building is pretty sparse, but we now have 2 posters on the wall. Soon, we hope to have the robber fly poster up too!

All for now,

MaLisa