Our first week started out with a weekend with two days of snow and a down pouring of hail, frost on the ground and a low of -2. Our trap needed a few repairs but we continued with the project. Our aim was to hope the cold weather did not kill all our insects. We made a goal of 1…………. glad to say we got 8 mosquitoes and a small spider. YEAH. Students look forward to our daily checks!
It was a windy day at Inglewood School, but a little teamwork work goes a long way. Even as we were setting up the trap, a few flying insect found their way to the bottle attached to the trap so we must be doing something right. We are looking forward to attaching the bottle on Monday and the anticipation of possibly catching a new species is pretty exciting. Our only request is that you name the new insect after our School .
Who needs Pokemon Go when you have a Malaise Trap???
Onanole school has begun. We had staff from our Neighboring Riding Mtn National Park help us get our trap set up.
The goal of the Malaise trap is to investigate insects in the environment of our school’s yard. We are excited to study the bugs and compare them to other schools across the Nation using their DNA barcode. We hope to learn what species of insects live in this area compared to other schools.
The trap set up went well today at lunch time. The tent poles and mesh parts were set up with ease while we had to hammer the pegs into the tough ground to keep the strings tight and the tent sturdy. We then put caution tape around the trap to protect the area. The location of the trap is next to the school’s turf and basketball net off to the side of the school yard.
We are super excited to see what we will collect – can’t wait till tomorrow!
Written by: Amy & Anna (Grade 9 students)
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.
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!
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.
This is a small portion of the class that got to set up the trap this week! We worked very efficiently when setting up because we were all so excited to take part, and wasted no time to catch some exciting bugs!
Working hard or hardly working? I can say we did both. We had some laughs even though it was cold out and everyone was excited to get see the final product.
The picture on the left is a student with a bug that we found in our tent. In the picture on the right was later that day after set up we already found some bugs that we caught. You can say we’re off to a good start! 
These are the hard workers of the day with the beautiful final product of the malaise trap. Us posing with our tools. Can’t wait to receive new discoveries on collecting different bugs in the near future:)
We caught the “Hannah” and “Celina” bug!
Wait! We caught a lot more bugs at the trap… a whole tent full of them!
Here is a photo of the beautiful and snowy scenery here right by our school. This spot is where our trap will be located and where all the action will take place. We’re hoping the amount of trees here will attract some interesting bugs to share with you.
This is our Biology 11 class selfie. We’re standing on 3ft of snow, right where our trap will be. You can tell how excited we are for this big project by the smiles on all 29 of our faces (not even the whole class). The picture on the bottom is the class pretending we are bugs. We’re so pumped to start this project that we started BUGGING out in hopes to bring some goodluck our way.
“The bug bloggers” posing on the tent location. The snow has taken over our trap’s location, but hopefully it’ll melt. We’ll be ready though because we have our lab coats and goggles on, ready to get the job done. The snow isn’t bringing us down! We are ready to get down to business and to get to some serious bug hunting.
We really enjoyed this program. We especially enjoyed our second week. During the second week the sky was overcast and it rained periodically. During the second week we caught almost 3 times as much as during the first week. During the first week we only approached the first line of the bottle but during the second week we made it up to almost the third line. That helped us construct our own hypothesis about how the weather affects insect collection. We hope you enjoy our selfies and we look forward to the results!
As the first week ends, Mrs. Rose-Wideman’s class at St. Ignatius of Loyola is excited to report that 50 insects have been collected. New additions include: a cricket, a large grasshopper, spiders, and more black flies. We look forward to seeing what we will catch next week.
