Monday was a relaxed lab day after last week’s hot field days. I started the day off going back further in my literature search on the crayfish and snails. I went all the way back to 2000’s. The literature search only took me the morning to complete so I began pinning bees for the rest of the day. I started on the restored sites from Broadman, OR that we collected last week. Bee pinning always seems to be a simple task but takes longer than I expected.
After two days of continuous bee pinning I began a new task. This task was to organize bees from Sandy’s research at Starky. Bees from her research in 2014 and 2015 have been identified all the way to the species. She sends the bees to an expert out of Utah who identifies these thousands of bees. When these bees are sent back they are not completely organized so my task was to sort them by species. I placed each species into their own unit trays within wooden boxes. These bees are saved for Sandy’s reference collection. This task was actually pretty neat. I got to look at all the bees and get an idea of what kind of bee they are. Some of these bees were beautiful. My favorite bee so far is the Hoplitis fulgids pictured below. I base this selection solely on my favorite colors, blue and green.
On Friday we went back out to Boardman, OR to pick up the pitfalls. This was luckily a quick day and only took the morning to complete. It was hot out there again. It was great to know that we will only have one more cycle of data collection out there!
