Monday was a relaxing lab day. Lauren taught Keelie and I how to pin bees from last week’s collection. The bees go through quite the beauty regiment. To begin pinning the bees we must wash them and dry them. We do this to remove soap residue that is acquired at capture. To wash the bees we empty the collection bag into a meshed covered glass container filled with clean water and swirl. After they are washed and free of soap, we drain the water out. With the mesh cover over the jar I use a hair dryer to dry the bees.
Once the bees are have forgone their spa day we begin to pin the bees. We keep the bees organized by site and label them with tags. This process is quite time consuming!
The majority of my week was spent measuring morphology of the rusty crayfish captured last week. I measured claw width, length, finger length, palm length, and width. On the body I measured the length and head length.
The pitfalls from Boardman were picked up on Thursday. Picking up pitfall entails removing the containers that where dug into the ground. First you use water and a sieve to rinse the insects and debris of dirt. Once this is complete you put the contents into a whirlpack (fancy plastic bag) with ethanol to preserve all insects. This task can be very messy.
