Tag: beetober

• Inktober #5 – binoculars

  Today’s #inktober word is #binoculars. Well, that was easy one 🙂

  Binocular microscope is very useful tool when you want to identify bees. Many bee species are, unfortunately, hard or impossible to identify to species without looking at them in magnification. That’s one of the reasons why entomological work involves much catching and killing. However, field identification of bees is increasingly more popular (thanks to, among others, many wildlife photographers and citizen scientists), and I believe it will be more and more developed, as new diagnostic traits visible in live specimens will be sought, allowing to identify more species without killing or even catching. Fingers crossed 🙂

  

  October 5, 2024

  bee, bees, beetober, inktober, insects, justyna kierat, nature, nonhoneybees, wild bees, wildbees

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• Inktober #2 – discover

  Each year new bee species are described. There are also discoveries of new species for a country or region. On the cartoon you can see the ivy bee (Colletes hederae), whom you might remember from my older blog posts. This species is currently expanding its range in Europe, and discovered in the areas where it has never been seen previously. But there is also a quite interesting story of its discovery as a new species. It was described as late as 1993, even though it is a species living not in remote tropical areas, but in well-studied areas of Europe. It simply was thought to be a strange, late-flying individuals of other Colletes species, with a soft spot for ivy. Thanks to Schmidt and Westrich it was raised to the range of species.

  

  October 2, 2024

  bee, bees, beetober, inktober, inktober2024, nature, wild bees, wildbees

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