Category Archives: Spring 2015

Your Samples are Arriving!

Hello School Malaise Trap Program Participants!

We are happy to say that we have received almost all of your Malaise trap samples for the Spring 2015 program! The rest of the samples are on their way, and we can’t wait to see what you have all collected.

Once your samples arrive at BIO, they go straight to our Collections unit, where they will be sorted by insect Order. As you can see from the pictures below, this can be quite a long and meticulous process.

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That’s a Wrap!

Here is the difference 3 weeks made… Wow! Shania George and I (Meagan Kettley) had a blast keeping track of our findings, the bug tent, and our class. Here is a photoset of two pictures; one from the beginning and one from the end.
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Here is a picture of our classmates packing up the tent. Sad faces all around as we packed up; the class really enjoyed checking for bugs everyday. It was an exciting class project.
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Our class cannot wait to hear back about the project. We hope that some of the bugs we caught are unknown bugs or rare bugs in our area. We think that it would be interesting if we found a new type of bug in our area, and if we find any endangered bugs, then we would like to do something to protect them.

After two weeks of unfortunate weather, and an extra week to make up for it (thankfully week three had gorgeous weather!), we found a whole bunch of bugs!
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Thank you for checking out our blog, and thank you to the School Malaise Trap Program for this incredible opportunity!

Silverheights Blog 2

What a day, good news is looks like over 50 bugs, and with a temperature of 33 and a cloud coverage of about 3%.  BUT there my not be any disturbances but the trap seems/looks to be collapsing. We had an entomologist from Scientist In Schools who asked us for tour of out trap/program. She took a look our trap and she was quite surprised of our progress. The last couple of weeks have been quite a few great ones and we hope to take part of this EPIC opportunity in future weeks.

Signing off,

SilverHights P.S

Final collection day at Landmark Collegiate

Today it was 6 degrees outside, the coldest day this week. The rest of the week has been sunny and around 20. The ticks, flies and bees were beginning to reveal themselves around here. Today was also the last day of the collection experiment so we took down the Malaise trap. Our jar was quite full of bugs having all shapes and sizes inside!

Our trap was placed beside trees and weeds to attract the most bugs possible. Our school yard is unique because it literally has nothing on it besides a couple of baseball backstops.  Our town used to be a swamp which must have contained lots and lots of bugs but today it is dry and we currently have a fire ban in place.

I wonder how the biologists will sort out all the bugs because some of them are extremely small or in pieces. I also wonder how they will put our data to good use.

I find it kinda funny that some Alberta schools were getting snow. I’m thankful that I live here in Manitoba where the weather has been fairly stable and nice.

– Alain

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Our final catch for week 3 – (not quite as much as weeks 1 &2)

Coming to an end :(

Here is some of the students patiently waiting for some bugs to fly in, in hopes for a successful final week with the bug trap.

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Here is some of our bugs in the bottle! Hooray! Finally we had a beautiful end of the week with our tent, being luckier than ever!

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And now its sadly come to an end. Time to pack it up and move it out!This is a student getting ready having final moments with the tent while packing up.

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