Serious Beesiness

I was browsing around Youtube when I came across an interesting video by Sam Droege. It describes how to preserve invertebrate in, of all things, hand sanitizer. While not exactly a scientific method, it allows the specimens to be handled more roughly, a good characteristic when showing it to the public. The past two times I preserved specimens at home was with alcohol and thus, I’m really looking forward to trying this. Now all I need is to find a nice dead bug.

I went on to explore his channel and realised that he is the head of the bee inventory and monitoring program at the U.S. Geological Survey. After preserving the bees, he takes photographs of them and started a photo catalogue of the different bee specimens. By taking hi-resolution shots of bees and its specific body parts, it allows researches from far away to identify the species they have. I think having a photo catalogue together with a traditional identification key will be really useful in helping both scientists and the public to identify bee species. Bees play a very important role in the ecosystem by acting as pollinators. Many agricultural crops depend on bees for pollination. According a study, Gallai et al. (2008) estimated that insects, of which bees are the main pollinators, contributed to about €153 billion of food production. With the Colony Collapse Disorder in the United States and in Europe, this easily available source of information might be useful in solving it. Here are a few images taken by him:

Photos courtesy of USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab

References:

GALLAI, N., SALLES, J.-M., SETTELE, J. & VAISSIÈRE, B. E. 2009. Economic valuation of the vulnerability of world agriculture confronted with pollinator decline. Ecological economics, 68, 810-821.