During the second week with the Malaise trap, the weather has been quite nice and our bug catches have been decent. Our group enjoys this new learning experience and has been having fun participating in this wonderful experiment! We have now caught over 100 bugs!
So far, we have trapped about 40 bugs, but they are pretty small. The weather has been cold, windy and rainy, so our bug catch is down. We are hoping for more bugs and better weather. Finding a new species around here would be awesome!
Today in Eastern Ontario, Iona Academy students participated in the Virtual Bio bus tour! We are pretty pump up about finding all the cool bugs that were described in the webinar.
Here is a view from our pond behind the school yard. Can you see our trap?
Today, as we were approaching the trap, we saw a little bird (chickadee) inside the trap. We we approached, it took off to fly, but kept hitting the net trying to escape! How cute that was:-) Too bad we never had our photographer near by!
On the other hand, we saw we caught more diversed bugs such as a bumble bee, spiders, lady bugs and others we did not know the name. Again more flies ( I guess it is because we are close by a dairy farm).
Weather was 15 degrees and partially cloudy. Very little wind!
Can you find a lady bug?
Well, isn’t this a surprise! This photo was taken Monday morning. The snow covered our set up, but we were quick to the fix.
As you can see, here in Nova Scotia we aren’t having much luck – the poor weather we’ve been having has prevented us from catching many bugs. Thankfully we’re allowed to keep our tent for an extra week (yay!) so lets hope the weather starts to spring up!
First snow, now rain! Tuesday had light flurries in the morning and rain in the afternoon here in Guysborough. This made for a sad and cold biology class. This is a picture of one of our classmates trying to keep dry.
Brrr… It’s cold! Here is some of the class battling the weather, on the hunt for some interesting bugs!
Tuesday: we caught a GIANT fly
Wednesday: we caught a SPIDER!
We are glad we get another week to collect because we haven’t had a day free of wind yet! We’ve had gusts around 30 km every day, with one day up to 55km! Our collection level is still around 1 (if the floating bugs are included).
Before we went down to the pond, we stopped to see our Malaise trap. Our Malaise trap is set up in Milo’s backyard. We have caught some bugs, including a bumble bee.
Even though it snowed on the weekend, all the snow had melted. It was sunny and warm when we went there on Monday.
When we went to the pond, we saw leeches and dock spiders. I found some garbage and put it in our bag because then it won’t harm birds and other animals. We also saw beetles.
Daily Temperature
Cloud coverage
Catch Volume ( How many bugs were found)
Notes ( Trap Disturbances )
Although we did collect some bugs today there wasn’t a very large increase in the number of bugs collected.
Daily Temperature
Cloud coverage
Catch Volume ( How many bugs were found)
Notes( Trap Disturbances)
Marshall here from SilverHeights P.S and today it was a lousy 60% cloud coverage and a temperature of 17 degrees. We were happy to take a semi-selfie with our trap. we caught around 20 to 30 bugs in our trap but the last 2 days there was a little spider that would build a web right around the hole of the trap. (without hurting the spider) we have to remove the web with a stick. Well hope to post soon with a picture of the spider. And I also used all my time to post this, Marshall.
Well its been a cold, spring season. We had 5cm of snow on Tuesday…brrrr We have some insects in our bottle but not alot. It looks like the temperture will be climbing next week !!