Well, this was officially the last week of my internship! I’m going to continuing helping Lauren out for the next week and a half or so, though!
Lauren was gone all week, Estany and I were on our own for the most part, but we got a lot done and had a lot of fun!
On Monday and Tuesday, we finished pinning all of the bees that we have collected! After next week, we’ll have one more set of samples to pin from the Zumwalt, but as of this week we are completely caught up with all of the samples that we have.
After we finished pinning, the next step was to enter all of the bees into an Excel database. We got all of the data entered on Tuesday, and so far we have collected a total of 11,068 bees! 8282 (53.97% of the total) of those bees are Agapostemon! I mentioned in my previous post that Lauren, Sam, Estany, and I all made a bet about what percentage of out bees were Agapostemon, and it turns out that none of our guesses were even close to the actual percentage. However, my guess was still the closest, so I get a free Blizzard! I guessed 70%. Estany guessed 74.79%. Lauren guessed 80%. And Sam guessed 85%. While we were pinning it definitely felt like there were a lot more Agapostemon than there actually were. Either way, we are all very glad to be done with pinning.
For the rest of the week, Estany and I worked on sorting through pitfall samples. We have both decided that this is by far the smelliest job that we have done all summer. The mixture of invertebrates, dirt, vegetation, ethanol, and leftover antifreeze does not produce the most appealing smell.
It takes about three hours to sort through one pitfall. We separate out all of the spider and wind scorpions from the pitfalls for Lauren’s research, and we also take out all of the other invertebrates in case somebody wants to use that data in the future. Each sample is sifted three times at least. We put the sample through a sieve initially to remove some of the dirt. Then after picking out all of the invertebrates that we can, we sift it again and look for more. We do that at least one more time, sometimes two more. Doing pitfalls gets very tedious after doing two or three in a day, but it is also really fun and fascinating to find the spiders and wind scorpions.
Overall it was a pretty fun week! We got so much work done and got do some new stuff too. Also I took care of Lauren’s jumping spiders while she was gone this week!
Next week, Lauren, Estany, and I will be going back to the Zumwalt for our last set of field work for the summer!
