History Meets Entomology...

Entomology collections are fascinating.  Because of insects' chitinous exoskeletons, they can survive for a LONG time as pinned specimens.  The insides break down and they become very fragile, but all the distinguishing characters are there. So by looking at insects collected in the past, we can monitor how populations and ranges change over time.

My project for these weeks between classes is to work on putting together a list of all the bumble bees that have been collected and recorded from Montana.  This means I'm going through the hundreds of specimens in the museum, confirming their identifications, and databasing them.  So far, there are 23 species on our list and we have bees from 46 of the 56 Montana counties.

My nerdiness comes out again... I've handled specimens and read labels on bees that were collected as early as 1897!  There are a bunch of them from the early 1900s... '02, '04, '27, '31.  As I read the beautiful tiny cursive writing on some of the labels and read about where the bees were collected, I can't help but wonder who these collectors were and what the landscape looked like at that time. Montana in 1900?  I bet the scenery was pretty wild and spectacular.

Bombus bifarius collected in 1904

My determination label looks way less interesting...

Puddling Behavior

Have you ever seen a bunch of butterflies in a puddle?  Do you know what they're doing?  They're drinking a ton of water in order to get ions, especially Na+.  It's called puddling behavior.  What's amazing is that certain species can consume up to 600X their body mass and excrete 8microliters of urine every 3 seconds for 200 minutes! They have unique digestive tract set up  for this type of thing-- during this behavior they don't try to conserve water at all, water gets sent straight through quickly in order to get as many ions as possible from such a dilute source. It is for this same reason that insects (and other animals like mountain goats) are attracted to urine. It's for the salts, not the water!

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If nothing ever changed, there'd be no butterflies.  ~Author Unknown

Bees and Keys

For the last few weeks, I've been working a bit on my patience.  Identifying bees is tough!  Here's a little glimpse.  In the picture, all of those little guys are the same family, but there are two different genera and at least five or six species.  

Each genus has it's own key.  It took me about 4 hours to ID just the top row--four species.  And I'm not really confident in any of the IDs.  :-(  Unfortunatly, there is no one here who knows the bees well enough to check.  I'm hoping to take my bees on a road trip to the bee lab in Logan, Utah to have the experts there tell me if I'm right or wrong.  Once you practice a lot with the keys and learn the characters of the bees, it's supposed to get easier.  I'm excited to get to that point. 

The keys are tough.  I'm not sure why the taxonomists feel the need to make up their own words.  For example, "wings lightly infuscated, becoming slightly more hyline apically, veins and stigma ferruginous; tegulae piceous."   That's a ridiculous sentence.  Why can't it just say, "wings with a brown tinge, becoming translucent near the ends.  Veins and stigma are reddish-brown and the tegulae are a glossy blackish/brown?!

Well... at least I'm expanding my vocabulary.  :-)

All of my insects are being added to an online database through The Ohio State University.  If you go to Hymenoptera online: http://hol.osu.edu/ you can type in my name (case sensitive): "Dolan, A. C." and hit find.  If you click on the little plus sign next to "collecting trips" it will show a map of how I spent my summer collecting 1,118 specimens!  If you zoom in on the map and click on the small "show options" link.  You can track the collector (me!) in 2014 and the little dots move/connect/bounce to show when I was in the different locations.  :-)   Below that is a list of all my insects so far-- with IDs on the ones I've identified. 

One of the many keys...

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"Try to learn something about everything and everything about something."  -Thomas H. Huxley