Connected on 2010-05-20 19:00:00 from Hayward, CA, US
- 6:11pm
- Bugscope Team pumping down...
- 6:18pm
- 6:26pm
- 6:32pm
- 6:38pm
- Bugscope Team Making presets
- 6:43pm
- 6:48pm
- 6:54pm
- Bugscope Team Hello!
- Bugscope Team Welcome to Bugscope!
- Teacher Hi - we will be online in 10 minutes - OK?
- Bugscope Team Cool
- 7:03pm
- 7:08pm
- Teacher Are you ready for us?
- Bugscope Team Sure!
- Bugscope Team Here you can see at least one of the placoid sensilla on the bee's antenna.
- Bugscope Team They're sensory, but I am not sure if they sense self movement -- like bending of the antenna -- or what.
- Bugscope Team that is cool -- boatloads more of them
- Bugscope Team the slender setae are likely chemosensory
- Bugscope Team they smell the air
- Bugscope Team for pheromones, and the scents flowers give off
- Bugscope Team Wow, neat
- 7:14pm
- Teacher HI there - we are ready! What insect is this?
Bugscope Team This is the bee
- Bugscope Team um it's a bee
- Bugscope Team part of a bee
- Teacher thanks -we are slow tonight.
- Bugscope Team this is the antenna
- Bugscope Team one of the antenna
- Bugscope Team antennae
- Bugscope Team now you can see the edge of the eye, and to the left are the mandibles
- Bugscope Team bottom-middle we see part of the compound eye, with lots of long hairs, "setae" protruding from it
- Bugscope Team you can see the hinge on the mandible to the left
- Bugscope Team the pointy thing is part of the mouthparts
- Bugscope Team I think it is called the labrum, need to look that up
- Bugscope Team usually the glossa -- the tongue -- is underneath, but we don't see it
- Bugscope Team you can see the two forelimbs now, covered with setae
- Teacher What is the long-toothlike thing we see? Looks like a rabbit tooth?
Bugscope Team That's part of the mouthparts, what Scott thinks might be called the "labrum"
- Bugscope Team setae are the fine hairs
- Bugscope Team that is the labrum
- Teacher What is that? What does it do?
Bugscope Team According to Wikipedia, it generally serves to hold food in place during chewing by the mandibles, analogous to an upper lip
- Bugscope Team it kind of clears the way into the flower, and beneath it is the glossa -- the tongue, which we do not see on this bee
- 7:19pm
- Bugscope Team the arch above the labrum is formed by the two mandibles, touching together
- Teacher Can you drive us to the stinger?
- Bugscope Team insect mouths are sideways compared to ours
- Teacher Not the bar....the part on the insect
- Bugscope Team this is the stinger
- Teacher Tell us about the stinger...Why is it hairy? Should it be sharper?
Bugscope Team The scale bar indicates that it's approx 10 microns, so roughly a fifth the width of human hair. That's pretty sharp
- Bugscope Team it is a little hard to see, but it is plenty sharp
- Bugscope Team it cuts with a side by side motion into your skin, and the barbs ensure that it stays in
- Teacher Where is the poison in the stinger?
Bugscope Team It may be hard to see on this sample, sometimes if the orientation is right we can see the pore through which the venom is injected
- Bugscope Team there's a venom gland attached to it like a little outboard motor, and it stays with the stinger and pumps into your skin
- Teacher What are the particals on the hair?
Bugscope Team just a lot of dirt
- Teacher Why do bees die after tehy sting you?
Bugscope Team when the stinger comes out there's a big hole in the abdomen, so the bee kind of bleeds to death
Bugscope Team Apparently it's only the females who die after stinging, because the stinger is also part of their reproductive organ (the ovipositor) and it causes a mortal wound to their abdomen
- Bugscope Team it stings once and dies
- 7:24pm
- Bugscope Team not like wasps
- Teacher Lovely. thanks. So they must really want to hurt you to sting you.
- Bugscope Team a stinger is a modified ovipositor
- Bugscope Team some stingers are also ovipositors
- Teacher How do bees reproduce?
Bugscope Team the queen lays eggs
- Bugscope Team double!
- Bugscope Team like on a parasitic wasp
- Bugscope Team sorry, I didn't see scott had already said all that :)
- Bugscope Team Most bees are just "workers", essentially asexual, as they are never meant to reproduce
- Teacher How are they eggs fertilized?
Bugscope Team The queen bee mates with several of the drone bees
- Bugscope Team I have heard that at least in some species the queen flies fairly far away to mate so that she is mating with a male bee far from her own hive and not related to her
- Bugscope Team I believe they can also reproduce parthenogenically
- Bugscope Team this is a spiracle on the abdomen of a fly
- Bugscope Team and as Scott said, usually they fly elsewhere so they're not mating with their own brood
- Teacher What is a spiracle?
- Bugscope Team insects, and many other arthropods, breathe using spiracles, which can be opened and closed and let air into the tracheae that are the internal airlines for the body
- Bugscope Team you can see microsetae and setae here
- 7:29pm
- Teacher Can you drive to the eyes of the fly??
- Bugscope Team They don't have lungs to force air into and out of the body, nor do they use their circulatory system to transport oxygen (thus why their blood isn't red, it lacks oxygen carrying hemoglobin)
- Bugscope Team the microsetae can form a pattern on the body that other insects recognize, and they may help insulate the body
- Bugscope Team They rely on passive diffusion of air into those spiracle holes, which is part of the reason why their body size is limited, and we don't have dinosaur sized insects; diffusion just isn't as efficient as breathing with lungs
- Bugscope Team we can always drive, but please note that you can as well
- Bugscope Team this is a female fly
- Bugscope Team the eye facets are called ommatidia
- Teacher Why do the eyes look like honey combs?
Bugscope Team one reason they look like honeycombs is because that shape -- the hexagonal shape -- is the most efficient shape for close packing of round things
- Bugscope Team they are individual lenses
- Teacher Does that mean they can see really well?
- Bugscope Team Compound eyes are a simpler design than mammalian eyes, both in terms of physical requirements and neurological processing
- Bugscope Team so we see that repeated in nature, and when people with fruitstands make piles of oranges, for example
- Bugscope Team they also make it easier to have a super-wide, almost 360-degree field of view
- Bugscope Team they do not always see the same colors we do
- Teacher why do they need so many eyes?
Bugscope Team Think of it less as a lot of eyes, and more like one eye split into many pieces. The compound eye design means their eyes don't have to be round like ours, and they take up less space
- Bugscope Team sometimes they see in the ultraviolet as well
- 7:35pm
- Bugscope Team one things that is helpful about having compound eyes is the excellent peripheral vision they give the insect; also, the images they collect in the brain update very quickly, so they sense motion much more quickly than we do
- Teacher what is this?
- Bugscope Team that is why it is hard to swat a fly. but the fly and the bee can also sense the air you're moving when you go to whack it
- Teacher hey, what is the source of electrons in an electron microscope?
Bugscope Team in some microscopes there is a tungsten filament that must be replaced fairly often
Bugscope Team Most electron emitters are fundamentally lighting rods working in reverse. What differentiates them are the techniques (heat, electrostatics, etc) that are used to enhance the production of electrons
- Bugscope Team this is a cranefly -- they look like mondo bigboy mosquitoes, but they do not bite
- Teacher why does it have such a monster-sized nose?
- Teacher cooooool
- Bugscope Team our microscope has a field-emission electron gun, and the way electrons come off of it is a little more complicated
- Teacher what other kinds of things do you guys like to look at under the microscope?
Bugscope Team we train grad students and postdocs, mostly, to do their own research using a variety of microscopes
- Teacher i bed pennies look gross
Bugscope Team if they're dirty they do
- Bugscope Team the monster nose probably helps balance the head -- adults usually eat nectar from flowers and sometimes do not eat at all
- 7:41pm
- Bugscope Team the SEM is used to look at geological samples, plants samples, pollen, bone, silicon samples that people make themselves, bacteria, nerve cells, blood cells, etc.
- Bugscope Team we work with the self-healing polymer people, the flexible silicon people...
- Bugscope Team Pretty much anything you don't need to see *into*. SEM is mostly for seeing the surface structure of things. TEM is for looking inside/through things
- Bugscope Team TEM = Transmission Electron Microscopy, SEM = Scanning Electron Microscopy
- Bugscope Team this is the proboscis of the female mosquito
- Bugscope Team the cutting mouthparts are usually inside, and we only see the other ends of them here
- Teacher What are the scaly things on the side of the stinger
Bugscope Team they're scales, like moths and butterflies and silverfish have
- Bugscope Team scales are kind of analogous to feathers on a bird, but their most important function may be to help the insect that has them get out of spider webs
- Bugscope Team On reason to have scales is that they're loosely attached, they're why butterflies and moths feel dusty, so they will come off if the insect gets stuck in a spider web and free it
- Bugscope Team Kind of how you use baking flour to keep dough from sticking to things
- Bugscope Team as Chas says, what makes the wings of a butterfly feel slick is the scales that you are rubbing off
- 7:46pm
- Bugscope Team this is one of the antennae of the moth
- Bugscope Team you can see scales on it as well
- Teacher ummm... we
- Teacher not getting an image \
- Bugscope Team moths can sense minute quantities of pheromones in the air
- Bugscope Team hit refresh
- Bugscope Team refresh your browser
- Bugscope Team did that work?
- Teacher thanx
- Bugscope Team so here on this part of the antenna are lots of chemosensors
- Bugscope Team wow
- Bugscope Team the reason the image is so bright is that the electrons are building up in those fine setae and cannot go to ground efficiently
- Bugscope Team partly because the tip of the antenna is so far from the stub
- Bugscope Team this is broken
- Bugscope Team the other antenna has a little rabbit ear here
- Teacher so their antennae are hollow?
Bugscope Team yes lots of the limbs and other features are to a large extent hollow
- Teacher Is there fluid inside normally or air?
- Bugscope Team there are muscle attachments and nerve attachments inside
- 7:51pm
- Bugscope Team there is usually hemolymph inside -- the juicy inside of an insect
- Bugscope Team hemolymph does not circulate like blood
- Bugscope Team this is cool
- Bugscope Team those clips are called hamuli
- Bugscope Team I think some of them do have a crude, tube-shaped system to pump fresh hemolymph onto the brain, but that's about it
- Bugscope Team and what they do is clip the fore- and hindwing together in some four-winged insects like bees and wasps
- Bugscope Team bees and wasps all have four wings, unlike flies (Diptera), which have two, plus a haltere
- Teacher what are the flat specs on the wings?
Bugscope Team those are microsetae
- Teacher That llok like nails
- Bugscope Team it is more efficient for bees and wasps to use essentially two wings to fly, so they clip the hind and forewings together
- Teacher What is this?
- Bugscope Team I am not sure what those specific microsetae do, but one thing may be to help prevent wings from flattening and sticking to a wet surface
- Bugscope Team this is a spine on the leg of a rolpoly
- 7:56pm
- Bugscope Team and the spiny things around it are urticating hairs from a spider
- Teacher what are the hairs for?
- Teacher And the sticks?
- Teacher What is the sphere looking thing
- Teacher ?
- Bugscope Team spiders do not like to be bothered because they are quite fragile and can easily break, so they often have urticating (itching) hairs that they release if you get too close
- Bugscope Team if you take the mag down you can see where we are and likely figure out what those bumps do
- Bugscope Team I think they help the rolypoly get a grip on the dirt or whatever it is walking on
- Teacher How mnay segemts do they have in all?
Bugscope Team I think they have 14 legs, but some may have more, and it looks like they have 15 or 20 segments
- Bugscope Team rolypolies are isopods, and they have pointy little toes that are all the same
- Teacher Thank you we are signing off
- Bugscope Team they are not insects, which have six legs, a head, a thorax, and an abdomen, generally
- Bugscope Team they are crustaceans...
- Bugscope Team Thank You!
- 8:02pm
- Bugscope Team http://bugscope.beckman.illinois.edu/members/2010-029/
- Bugscope Team Bye!
