Netting Bees
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The Very Handy Manual: How to Catch and Identify Bees and Manage a Collection A Collective and Ongoing Effort by Those Who Love to Study Bees in North America Last Revised: April 2015 This manual is a compilation of the wisdom and experience of many individuals, some of whom are directly acknowledged here and others not. We thank all of you. The bulk of the text was compiled by Sam Droege at the USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab (BIML), Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, Beltsville, Maryland, over several years from 2004-2008. We regularly update the manual with new information, so, if you have a new technique, some additional ideas for sections, corrections or additions, we would like to hear from you. Please email those to Sam Droege ([email protected]). You can also email Sam if you are interested in joining the “Bee Inventory, Monitoring, and ID” discussion group. Many thanks to Dave and Janice Green, Gene Scarpulla, Liz Sellers, and Tracy Zarrillo for their many hours of editing this manual. "They've got this steamroller going, and they won't stop until there's nobody fishing. What are they going to do then, save some bees?" – Mike Russo (Massachusetts fisherman who has fished cod for 18 years, discussing environmentalists) – Provided by Matthew Shepherd Contents Where to Find Bees ................................................................................................................................................ 2 Killing Bees to Study Them ..................................................................................................................................... 2 Nets......................................................................................................................................................................... 2 Netting Technique .................................................................................................................................................. 3 Removing Bees from the Net ................................................................................................................................. 5 Using Ice, Dry Ice, and CO2 ..................................................................................................................................... 6 Catching Bees on Flowers with Baggies and Kill Jars .............................................................................................. 6 Bee Vacuums .......................................................................................................................................................... 6 Plexiglas Bee Observer and Pollen Picker ............................................................................................................... 9 Bees through Binoculars ....................................................................................................................................... 10 Kill Jars .................................................................................................................................................................. 10 Chlorocresol Humidor ........................................................................................................................................... 11 Pinning 101 ........................................................................................................................................................... 12 Labels .................................................................................................................................................................... 15 Pens ...................................................................................................................................................................... 17 Organizing Specimens for Identification ............................................................................................................... 17 Entering Specimen Data ....................................................................................................................................... 18 Shipping Pinned Specimens .................................................................................................................................. 18 Microscopes .......................................................................................................................................................... 18 The Bee Bowl Trap ................................................................................................................................................ 21 Glycol Pan/Cup/Bowl Traps .................................................................................................................................. 27 Flower Traps ......................................................................................................................................................... 29 Trap Holders ......................................................................................................................................................... 29 1 Field Trip Checklist ................................................................................................................................................ 31 “Bee Inventory, Monitoring, and ID” Discussion Group and Announcements ..................................................... 31 Quick Bee Survey Protocol ................................................................................................................................... 31 Airplane Travel and Shipping Alcohol Specimens ................................................................................................. 32 Processing Bees that Have Been Stored in Alcohol of Glycol................................................................................ 32 Cleaning Bees That Have Gotten Moldy ............................................................................................................... 35 Re-hydrating Bees That Have Been Pinned ........................................................................................................... 36 Preparing Dirty, Dry Bees for Photography .......................................................................................................... 36 Inexpensive, but Powerful LED and Florescent Light Sources .............................................................................. 37 How to Make a Pizza Insect Pinning Box .............................................................................................................. 38 Theodore Mitchell’s Guide: Bees of the Eastern United States ............................................................................ 40 Mike Arduser’s Midwest Keys .............................................................................................................................. 40 Canadian Identification Guides ............................................................................................................................ 40 A Guide to Identifying Bees Using the Discover Life Bee Keys ............................................................................. 40 Stylopized Bees ..................................................................................................................................................... 44 Affixing bee wings to microscope slides – (Contributed by Tulay Yilmaz and Gökce Ayan) ................................. 45 Specimen Donations and Income Taxes (United States) ...................................................................................... 47 Introduced and Alien Bee Species of North America (North of Mexico) .............................................................. 47 Mini-summary of the Genera of Eastern North American Bees ........................................................................... 49 Pronunciation Guide to the Bee Genera of the United States and Canada (and Selected Subgenera) ............... 56 Glossary of Bee Taxonomic Terms ........................................................................................................................ 59 Bee Body Part Figures – Drawn by Rebekah Nelson ............................................................................................. 63 Where to Find Bees Bees are nearly ubiquitous; they occur essentially everywhere. However, in any given landscape there are usually a few good places to collect bees where they are concentrated, diverse, abundant, and easy to capture and there are many, many places where bees are difficult to find and collect. If you are interested in biodiversity, and taxonomic surveys, it will be important to discover these hotspots. In North America, in general, good collection locales will be places where floral composition is concentrated or unusual. If you are unfamiliar with an area, then exploring road/stream/river crossings, power line rights-of-way, railroad track rights-of-way, sand and gravel operations, open sandy areas, and wetlands are good places to start. In areas with a lot of development, the industrial sector often contains weedy lots and roadsides that also can have good numbers of bees. Note that just because there are few or no plants blooming (to your eye!), this doesn’t mean that there are no bees present. A good collecting strategy is to put out bee bowl traps (see sections below) in the morning, and return mid-day to good potential collecting sites that you spotted earlier that morning. Killing Bees to Study Them In bee work, we almost all are confronted