Progress, building our honeybee equipment!

 Here it is, already past mid-February!  In less than 6 weeks, the 1st week of Apr. will be here and that's when the 2 honeybee "packages" are scheduled to arrive.  Each "package" will have a new queen and about 3,000 to 5,000 workers.  They're being shipped from CA to here in WI, where we will pick them up & take them to our hive boxes to start our new hives.  So!  We've got to have our hive boxes ready!  We plan to start our hives with 2 supers each.  We've been making our supers (based on drawings available on the Internet) and frames to go into each.  At the right you can see a group of "medium" sized Langstroth supers containing home-made frames for bees to use to make their brood- comb and honey-comb.  The top super in the left stack also has a cover that consists of a clear plexi-glass panel so when it is on the top of a super, you can look down into the hive while minimally disturbing the bees.  (This is potentially, especially useful in WI in the winter, for hive inspections while retaining some of the heat from the bee cluster...)  On the top of the stack of supers on the right, are top or "outer covers".  Three are stacked there, with aluminum nailed on top to protect the hive from excessive weathering.
   At the right in this photo, you can see an empty super sitting on a "bottom board that has a removable screen panel.  This will allow us to monitor for bee mites.  More on mites in another post.













And... I've been making frames.  Frames hang within each super and provide structure from which bees will make their comb.  Since we are using supers which will each hold 10 frames... and so far we have 22 supers built and ready for bees (not just the 2 packages we have ordered, but also for wild... "feral"... bees we hope to entice into additional hives), we will need a lot of frames.  We did buy 50 commercial frames, but we've made 70 additional ones so far... so we only need to make around an additional 100 frames or so (!!).  The photo below, shows the assembly, of about 5 at a time (after the parts have been cut on a table saw).  Each frame consists of it's top & bottom & 2 sides, which are glued & clamped.  (Commercial frames have a more elegant shape, but these hand-made frames ... we believe... will work fine.)  When the glue is set, then ~ 2 inch long hardwood "bumpers" are glued near the top on the sides of each frame.  (You can see them in the frame I'm holding at the left...)  These bumpers hold each frame away from each adjacent frame to maintain the "bee space" (3/8 of an inch) between frames so bees can move easily between the comb they'll be constructing.

More, on all this, in another post!

Building Our Own Beekeeping Equipment

Here is the plan.  After beginning our parts review... we believe we can build, at least part of our own equipment.  BeeSource has lots of instructions and we've begun to review our plans.  More on all of this, soon!

Honey Bees...!

Certainly the most raised insect (... other than maybe fruit flies), is the honey bee.  Among the amazing things in my life would have to be the fact that although I've helped others with honey bee raising activities, I've actually not raised honey bees myself.  My intention is to make that change in 2012.  A friend of mine & I intend to set up our own hives, so we'll have info on this quest to share with you along the way.   Meanwhile, if you are interested in knowing more about why one should be interested in bees, check out info on Marla Spivak, a Minnesota bee researcher and MacArthur "Genius" who was on Public Radio recently.  More on the quest to raise bees, soon!

UV light trapping

 A method of attracting moths (& many other insects including beetles, leaf-hoppers, katydids, some types of wasps & other things, too), is to use a light source (either UV or mercury-vapor) in front of a white or light blue sheet like you see below to the left.  In this case, the light is powered by a small generator.  More often, I tend to use small batteries.  You can see a battery in a black, water-proof box in the picture at the right, which shows a UV light in the center of a plastic baffle over a cone funnel.  The sheet system is good when you can monitor the light continually or periodically during the night & the advantage is that nothing need be collected or one can collect only specimens which might be of particular interest.  The funnel system over a large killing jar is often used when taking samples of sites in which all or a majority of specimens that come are being collected or when multiple sites are being sampled on a single night and attending each light is not possible.

Specimens can be sorted in the morning and either be temporarily placed in containers that can be covered & kept chilled in coolers for transport (& I've inserted a picture below showing specimens I sorted into 3 large plastic petri dishes) or they may be  "field pinned".  Field pinning is a way to help protect specimens from damage they might suffer during transport or storage before they can be properly "spread" &/or labeled.  One way to do field pinning is to get each specimen on an insect pin & then place each on a 1" foam sheet.  A method I've used is to then place these foam sheets in large, clear plastic boxes for transport.  A "head" label with location, date and other info (such as the temperature range at night or habitat characteristics) is kept with each group of specimens.  Later, specimens can be dried and given individual data labels and placed in museum drawers for data collection, record keeping, long term storage or for donation to a museum.  

The proper care of each specimen helps ensure it will be of maximum value to ecologists or taxonomists 5, 25 or a hundred years from now.  More on museum collections, another time.

Insect Trapping Methods

There are many techniques people use to collect insects and many of these are best to collect only specific taxonomic groups.  For example, when beetles fly and then run into something, they may either alight on an object or fall to the ground.  Flight intercept traps that look like the one here, can be very effective.  In this case

I have simply stretched plastic sheeting between metal posts and placed elongated plastic bins (that are commonly sold in hardware stores to soak wallpaper) on the ground & then dumped in about 2 inches of water to which I have added about a tea-spoon of liquid anti-bacterial dish-washing soap.  At least once each day, I pour the water through a small net (like you would use for aquarium fish) and then empty the net into a small white dish (like a margarine container) that contains 70% alcohol.  Take a look at the picture below:

If you look carefully, you'll see a paper label, written in pencil (so it won't dissolve in the alcohol) with a date in June 2005.  In the alcohol you'll see lots of insects including some large rove beetles & click beetles along with lots of flies (especially some big Tabanids) but other things as well.  This one dish likely has over 70 or 80 things in it and they are a very diverse group of things.  I'll pour specimens in alcohol into small jars (I use baby food jars) from 1 trap's harvest for a 1 or 2 day stretch, and then put them in 5 gal. plastic boxes that transport nicely in my car.  I can then store the boxes easily until I get the chance to mount the specimens weeks or months later.

A flight intercept trap is based on the idea that many insect drop when they fly into something.  Many other insects do the reverse; they fly upwards when they fly into something.  A trap that relies on this behavior is a malaise trap.  Pictured below is one, showing a screen "apron" along the top edge that slopes upward.

At the top of this is a funnel that leads up into a large detachable jar.  This trap is especially effective to sample many kinds of flies, bees and wasps.  In one place in Wisconsin, up in an area of the Chequamegon forest, I trapped over 1,000 horseflies and deerflies in 1 day. 

Background on Gynandromorphs & Inter-sex Mosaics in Insects

I promised I would offer an explanation of the Promethea inter-sex adult, shown in the photo I posted in Nov.  Read on:   The term "gynandromorph" literally means part female (gyn-) and part male (andro-).  You might ask how such a thing can happen -- well, here's the answer.  Stick with me here, as this requires some significant explanation!!

All sexually reproducing organisms begin existence as a single cell, a zygote, which is a fused sperm and egg cell.  This cell then divides and divides, eventually making all the different cells in the body.  During the process of cell division, some cells obviously become different from others (a process called differentiation) and ultimately a cell's development becomes determined at some point, that is, it enters a developmental pathway that determines what it will become (a muscle cell, a nerve cell, a cell lining the intestine, etc.).

In humans, the earliest cell divisions are indeterminate, which means that the developmental pathway is still flexible for all of the cells.  An interesting side benefit of this is that, if one of these early cells happened to be destroyed, the end result is that it has virtually NO effect on development, since the other cells are still "flexible" in what they can become.

On the other hand, each cell division in insects, from the zygote on, is completely determinate, which means that decisions about what a cell will become are made with each division.  The decisions that are made with the earliest cell divisions are as follows:

• 1^st division (of zygote) determines left and right sides
• 2^nd division determines front and back (at this point, there would be 4 cells
• 3^rd division determines top from bottom (at this point, there would be eight cells

If an insect cell were damaged after the third division, say the lower back right cell, you would end up with seven-eighths of an insect (missing the back lower right part of the abdomen, for instance) if development could proceed fully.

       

What does this have to do with gynandromorphs? Sex is determined, in both humans and Lepidoptera, by sex chromosomes called the X & Y chromosomes.  In humans, an individual that is male will have X & Y chromosomes, whereas a female will have two X chromosomes.  In Lepidoptera, the situation is reversed -- XX is male and XY (or simply one X and no Y) is female.  I should point out that it is the number of X's that is important.  In Lepidoptera, an individual with just one X (and no Y) is going to be female.  Any individual with two (or more) X's will be male.

When cells divide, one complete copy of all the genetic information (DNA) is passed to both cells, or, in other words, before the division there are two complete copies of DNA in each of the chromosomes, which are attached to each other before division.  These two copies of the DNA in each chromosome are then separated during cell division.  Occasionally, the two copies of a particular chromosome do not detach from each other during cell division (called non-disjunction), and the end result is that one of the cells will end up missing an entire chromosome, which is typically lethal to the cell.  The other cell (that gets the unseparated chromosome) may be unaffected, or normal, though problems can occur in this cell as well.

However, if a non-disjunction occurs in an X chromosome in an individual that is XX (male in butterflies/moths), that would mean that one of the cells in this division would end up with one X chromosome, while the other would end up with two (or three) X's.  In other words, one of the resulting cells (and all cells that came from that cell) would be female, while the other cell (and its descendents) would be male. 

So, if you have a non-disjunction in an X chromosome in an XX individual during the first division of the zygote, then you will end up with an individual that appears half male (on one side) and half female (on the other side).  This is called a bilateral gynandromorph.  The non-disjunction can occur during later divisions, however, giving you a smaller portion of the body/wings that looks like one sex and a larger portion that looks like another.  It can even happen more than once during development, so that you end up with patches of female and male scattered around on the individual, resulting in what is called a mosaic.  VERY bizarre!  & often very spectacular when you see this in butterflies or moths in species in which the adults display sexual dimorphism.

Inter-sex Promethea

The photo below is of an adult promethea that emerged in Wisconsin in July 2010.  It has both male &  female elements within it's wings.  More on this specimen & how this can occur, on a post I'll make soon. (Note: This photo was taken by friends of mine, Tsutomu & Masako Nakatsugawa, the day before I deposited it in the New York State Museum in Albany, NY.)  As you can see, the fore-wings are even of slightly different shapes, consistent with the male form on the left and the female form on the right.  Meanwhile, the left hind wing is mainly female and the right, both male & female.