[Pollinator] Cleaning Dried Bee Specimens

[Droege, Sam]

All

We have been working on this problem for years....who wants to take a
picture of a bee specimen with bad looking hair?  No one.

We like the process outlines below (be sure to see the before/after
picture) and have used it successfully with 100+ year old specimens.

Have fun.

sam

=======================

Rewashing Old Bee Specimens so they are Clean and Fluffy and Good for
Picture Taking

Old, dried ugly specimens, even those decades old can be revived using the
following procedure:

* Pull tags off specimen
* Drop specimen into centrifuge tube or vial with HOT water with high
concentration of dish soap
* Shake for about a minute...more if super goopy and matted
* Dump into hand
* Wash under hot running water
* Put on paper towel to pull off water
* Drop in Tube of acetone
* Shake for around 30 seconds
* Drop on paper towel and blot off excess Acetone
* IMMEDIATELY take to a station that allows you to blow compressed air on
specimen
* We use a latex hose that connects the lab's compressed air nozzle on a
lab bench and then connects to the extracted top of a lab wash bottle...the
type with a long tube that goes through the cap into the bottle.....attach
the latex tube using a binder clamp or it will slip off
* Turn on air a SMALL amount
* Use your the wash bottle nozzle to blow air on specimen
* Note:  If you blow air directly from compressed air fitting the wings
will shred
* Blow until hairs are dry and separated
* For best results do under a microscope
* See
https://www.flickr.com/photos/usgsbiml/36504352635/in/dateposted-public/
for a good before/after example

========================
Killing Methods

Outside, after grieving for days,
I’m thinking of how we make stories,
pluck them like beetles out of the air,

collect them, pin their glossy backs
to the board like the rows of stolen
beauties, dead, displayed at Isla Negra,

where the waves broke over us
and I still loved the country, wanted
to suck the bones of the buried.

Now, I’m outside a normal house
while friends cook and please
and pour secrets into each other.

A crow pierces the sky, ominous,
clanging like an alarm, but there
is no ocean here, just tap water

rising in the sink, a sadness clean
of history only because it’s new,
a few weeks old, our national wound.

I don’t know how to hold this truth,
so I kill it, pin its terrible wings down
in case, later, no one believes me.

      - Ada Limon
-- 
*Why Did you Mow My Flowers? *
*- Bee*
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