Tag: week two

Happy Fourth of July! Week 2 was a success! I mostly worked in the lab this week, but we did spend one day in the field.

On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, Sam, Estany, and I worked on pinning bee samples from Boardman from August 2014, and we finished! Which means that we only have one more month of bees to pin from last year, and then we move on to working on this year’s samples! Sam and I also repainted 163 pan traps on Monday and Tuesday. We had to chip all of the old spray paint and primer off of the cups, and then prime and spray paint them again. It was very tedious and time consuming, but now we are ready to put out traps at Boardman in two weeks!

On Thursday, Sam, Lauren and I left the station at 6:00 am to go out to the Zumwalt for the day. We collected all of the pit fall traps that we set out last week, and Lauren did more vegetation surveys. It was really interesting to see all of the critters in the pitfalls as we processed them… lots of spiders, beetles, and grasshoppers. I’m excited to have a closer look at them in the lab. Unfortunately, a couple of the sites that we put out at the Zumwalt are located in areas where several ranchers graze their cattle. At the three lower sites many of the pitfalls had been pulled out of the ground—or stepped on in some cases. Another problems that we encountered was that because it has been so hot lately, most of the pitfalls were dried up. Overall it was a good day in the field though! We finished before noon and headed back to the station that afternoon.

And since it is a holiday weekend, we got Friday off! I ended up washing the station cars early on Friday morning before it got hot outside, but then I left to go visit family in Washington for the Fourth of July!