The weather in Fort Nelson, BC has been abnormally warm for September – usually we have snow and have dipped below 0 degrees! Students in Mrs Tofflemire’s Biology 11 class are super keen about our new project and always ask to check the trap to see what new insects have found their way into the sample jar. We have captured around 100+ insects this week. Fingers crossed that weather continues to be warm and sunny next week for even more sampling 🙂
Hi All,
Here in Menifee, CA it was blazing hot Monday morning when we put up the Malaise trap but then the clouds came rushing in. By the late afternoon a wind storm had hit and it was blowing our Malaise trap around. It rained through Tuesday and Wednesday and finally cleared up on Thursday. Today it was a pleasant 30C with no wind. We didn’t collect many insects this week, possibly because of the wind and rain, but we did catch a huge moth. I’m looking forward to next week and I hope the weather continues to be nice so that we can catch many more insects then.
Have a nice weekend,
Nick Reeves
Associate Professor of Biological Sciences
Mt. San Jacinto College
We are reporting in the neighbourhood of about 100 insects caught … what will week 2 bring?
Perhaps more bugs???
Although the tent was a bit twisted up from our strong winds, our bug count still increased to an astonishing 95 insects. This amount of insects caught surprises us because of the decline in temperature, we did not expect to catch this many. Our conclusion for week 1 is that bugs are still here even when we think that it’s too cold for them.
Today was another windy, damp day. We have actually caught a fair number of bugs, but they are mostly little bugs and a lot of what look like the same bugs.
We think we recognize flies, maybe mosquitos, what we think are mayflies, and something like fruit flies.
We took a picture of the bugs we collected and looked at it on the SmartBoard. The flies are easy to recognize; the rest are harder to tell!
