Connected on 2012-11-15 09:00:00 from Norfolk, Massachusetts, United States
- 7:16am
- Bugscope Team this morning's sample is now pumping down
- 7:24am
- Bugscope Team 2.7 x 10-4
- Bugscope Team we are going for 1.3 x 10-4
- Bugscope Team 2.5
- Bugscope Team 2.0
- Bugscope Team because the samples are fairly fresh, they are a bit juicy, and it takes a while for them to pump down
- Bugscope Team 1.9
- 7:33am
- Bugscope Team 1.7
- Bugscope Team yesterday we had juicy samples as well, and the vacuum jumped up and down as they outgassed
- Bugscope Team today the vacuum is steadily getting better
- Bugscope Team 1.6
- 7:39am
- Bugscope Team 1.5
- Bugscope Team good morning!
- Bugscope Team welcome to Bugscope!
- Bugscope Team we do not have presets quite yet because the vacuum is not quite adequate
- Teacher Hi- its Maddy- just logging in early and setting up student stations
Bugscope Team cool!
- Bugscope Team I am close to being able to start making presets
- Bugscope Team it is terrible to be playing it so close
- 7:44am
- Bugscope Team yesterday was crazy
- Bugscope Team ...
- Bugscope Team ....
- Bugscope Team ...
- Bugscope Team ....
- Bugscope Team ...
- Bugscope Team ....
- Teacher No worries about time-We will be with you for 2 hours, same presets different classes
- 7:49am
- 7:55am
- 8:00am
- Guest Hi. I'm showing my class Bugscope to prep for our Monday session.
- Teacher We are ready are you?
- Bugscope Team Hi Mrs V!
- 8:05am
- Bugscope Team Yes we are ready, Thank YOu
- Bugscope Team please let us know when you have questions
- Teacher Unable to select a preset
Bugscope Team please try again
- Bugscope Team this is the head of the honeybee drone
- Bugscope Team it has very large eyes and is also larger than the workers
- Student whats that bubble
Bugscope Team that is the compound eye, with thousands of tiny facets called ommatidia, and also lots and lots of setae, which look like hair
- Bugscope Team the setae on the eye are not branched, but the setae covering the rest of the exoskeleton are branched
- Bugscope Team the setae on the eye are thought to be mechanosensory, allowing the bee to sense wind speed and direction
- Bugscope Team mechanosensory is touch and wind sensory
- 8:10am
- Bugscope Team you can see that some of the setae are broken off
- Bugscope Team you can also see the ommatidia now
- Bugscope Team the ommatidia are individual lenses of the compound eye
- Student what is a setae
Bugscope Team setae are what we call the things that look like hairs
- Bugscope Team setae (singular is seta) can be thermosensory (heat sensing), chemosensory (smell), and/or mechanosensory, for touch.
- Bugscope Team when we look at the moth we will see lots of scales, and scales are also setae, modified so that they look like tiny feathers
- Bugscope Team they are hexagona;
Bugscope Team that should be 'hexagonal'
- Student why are they shaped in hexagons
Bugscope Team a hexagonal shape is the very best shape for closepacking of essentially round objects in three dimensions, like stacking oranges in a grocery store
- Student does it harm them when the setae breaks off
Bugscope Team not really, but they lose some of their sensing ability
- 8:15am
- Student is the comb shaped in hexagons because of the eyes?
Bugscope Team it is a kind of coincidence; it is just the best way to stack round things closely
- Student what is the dusty stuff on the eye?
Bugscope Team it is dirt and debris
- Student why is a drones eye bigger
Bugscope Team it may be because the drone needs to be able to see a bit better when it flies
- Bugscope Team you can see all of the stumps of the broken off setae here
- Student do they see in color?
Bugscope Team yes but only certain colors; they do not see red, for example
- Bugscope Team most colors look about the same -- a range of purple to blue colors will all look blue
- Bugscope Team yellow, orange, and green all look kind of yellow
- Student can they see UV colors
Bugscope Team I am not sure. I think some bees can.
- Student can bees tell if it is day or night
- Bugscope Team yes I just looked it up -- bees can see in UV
- Student do bees see colors we can not see
Bugscope Team yes they can -- we cannot see UV without aid, like with a blacklight
- Student .
- Student how large are the facets
Bugscope Team you can see the scale at the lower left on the screen; it reads 50 microns. it looks like the facets are about 30 microns (micrometers) wide
- 8:21am
- Bugscope Team a micron is the same as a micrometer. micro in this case means one millionth; a micrometer is one millionth of a meter
- Student what's a tarsi?
Bugscope Team tarsi are what the forelimb segments are called; the last 5 or so segments of the arm
- Bugscope Team bacteria are often 2 microns long, or 2 micrometers; a micrometer is one thousandth of a millimeter
- Bugscope Team all of the tarsal joints we see give the limb flexibility -- a better ability to bend
- Bugscope Team the claw is at the end of the final tarsomere, the final tarsus
- Bugscope Team there is another preset of the claw from the other side
- Bugscope Team the honeybees are small compared to the bumble bee
- Student why are the segments shaped like arrows
Bugscope Team that is cool, isn't it? that shape seems to be best for giving the limb the most flexibility in movement
- Bugscope Team this is one of the claws from the front
- Bugscope Team we can see lots of bristles that are also mechanosensory -- they allow the bee to feel when it is grasping something
- 8:27am
- Student why is a claw hooked
Bugscope Team the hook shape gives the claw more strength, like when you bend a piece of paper and it can support something better that way
- Student what do they use the claw for?
Bugscope Team they use their claws much like we use our hands -- to grasp and hold onto things
- Student whats in the middle between the claw
Bugscope Team we can see bristles that bend when something is caught between the claws and allow the bee to sense when it is touching and grasping something
- Student is there setae on the bee's claw?
Bugscope Team yes there are
- Bugscope Team there is also a portion of the claw that is hard to see but is sticky
- Student how long is a bee's leg?
Bugscope Team maybe it is an average or 5 mm long
- Student whats the claw made out of
Bugscope Team it is made of chitin, which is a hardened protein kind of like our fingernails
- Student how large is the pollen baskit
Bugscope Team it is 2 or 3 millimeters long, on the hindlimbs; I did not see any good ones this morning
- Student how much pollen can a pollen basket hold?
Bugscope Team the bees really can pile it on; it looks like maybe 5 microliters, hard to tell -- like a small droplet of water in size
- Bugscope Team bees and other insects, as well as many other arthropods, have exoskeletons made of that same protein -- chitin
- 8:32am
- Student how many joints does a bees leg have
Bugscope Team haha I am not sure; about eight?
- Student why are bee's covered in body hair
Bugscope Team the body hair helps them hold onto air when they fly -- it gives them a kind of bouyancy in the air; but it also helps them keep their temperature stable; it also, of course, helps them feel their environment when the hairs connect to nerves beneath the cuticle, or chitin
- Bugscope Team this is cool
- Bugscope Team now we see four or five segments of the moth's antenna
- Bugscope Team the things that look like ruffles potato chips are scales
- Bugscope Team moths, butterflies, silverfish, mosquitoes, and very few other insects are covered with scales, which are actually modified setae
- Bugscope Team also, most insects are very sensitive to smells in the environment
- Student Why do the antenna need to bend?
Bugscope Team it is good to have them be flexible for flying, but they also need to be bendable so the insect can touch things with them and collect chemical information that way as well
- 8:38am
- Student we see a circle, what is it
Bugscope Team that looks like some kind of debris, or dirt; you could go to a higher magnification to see it better
- Bugscope Team because it is so small, although it looks kind of like pollen, I think it is a mold spore
- Student what are the lines seperating theantennae
Bugscope Team if I understand which lines you are talking about, those were the borders of the indvidual segments of the antenna
- Bugscope Team this is cool
- Bugscope Team we know that these are pollen from a stargazer lily
- Bugscope Team pollen comes in lots of shapes and different sizes
- Student is this more than one grain of pollen?
- Bugscope Team here we see three grains together
- Student Where the pollen?
Bugscope Team it came from some flowers someone brought us a long time ago
- Student why does the pollen have ridges
Bugscope Team the ridges help make it stronger, and they also help it cling to things like bee setae
- 8:44am
- Bugscope Team pretty nice looking
- Bugscope Team 20 microns on the scale at the bottom of the screen -- that is 10 bacteria long
- Student why is there so much pollen in the summer?
Bugscope Team in the winter many plants are dead or dormant, so there are no flowers
- Student Whats the line connecting the ridges
Bugscope Team that looks like web, almost; we are not sure what it is
- Bugscope Team the bee might have sting someone since it's missing its stinger
- Student does the hair stick to the pollen or does the pollen stick to the hair
Bugscope Team haha. Both!
Bugscope Team bee setae are known for having multiply forked tips, and it is said to help pollen cling to them
- Bugscope Team some pollen grains like ragweed are great at sticking to anything. It has a lot of spikes to make it easy to latch on anything
- Student do young workers have stingers
Bugscope Team yes they do
- Bugscope Team all workers are females and are made from fertilized eggs. Drones are males and are made from unfertilized eggs. So if the queen ran out of males to mate with, she would start making males
- Bugscope Team workers have barbed stingers that do not get stuck in other insects when they sting them, but they get stuck in mammalian (like humans) skin because it is thick
- Bugscope Team the queen has a stinger as well, but it does not have barbs like those of the workers
- Bugscope Team the drones are males, and males do not have stingers
- Bugscope Team so you can tell a drone because it is larger, it has a rounder abdomen with no stinger, and it has larger eyes
- 8:49am
- Student What part is underneth that hole
Bugscope Team the whole thing we are looking at is the abdomen
- Student What is the stinger made out of?
Bugscope Team it is made of thick chitin
- Student how is the queen bees stinger diffrent
Bugscope Team it is smooth, compared to the barbed stingers of the workers
- Bugscope Team a stinger is also, in many insects, an ovipositor
- Bugscope Team chitin is what their exoskeleton is made of. Their wings are made of it too, but a slightly thinner version
- Bugscope Team an ovum is an egg, and eggs are also called ova; so an ovipositor is a egg depositor
- Student What are those little bumps
Bugscope Team those are pores where setae were sticking out. At some point, maybe after it died, the hairs fell off
- Student How long is the stinger on the worker bee
Bugscope Team I think it is 2 to 4 millimeters long -- long enough to stick in our skin
- Student wich sing is stonger a queen bee or a worker bees sting
Bugscope Team I am sorry -- I don't know
- Guest Hi everyone! I am showing my class the Bugscope website in preparation for our session Monday. We are really looking forward to it! Thanks for letting us observe today. You are all asking great questions.
Bugscope Team Hi Mrs V!
- Student What is this
Bugscope Team this is the junction between two wings on one side of the bee -- the fore- and the hindwing
- Bugscope Team the curvy things we see running down the center of this view are called hamuli
- Bugscope Team these hook the wings together when the bees want to fly, and then they can detatch them to fold their wings in
- 8:54am
- Bugscope Team one big pair of wings help support their body better
- Bugscope Team if bees lived in open spaces with lots of room they might not need to have four wings, but when they live in very small spaces it is helpful to be able to fold their wings up
- Student What causes ccd?
Bugscope Team some people think that it is because pesticides are used on corn so insects will not eat the crops, and when corn is made into high-fructose corn syrup, it retains the pesticide and maybe even concentrates it. Honeybees in traveling colonies are often fed high-fructose corn syrup, and the pesticide residue affects them.
- 9:00am
- Bugscope Team that is said to be one potential factor in CCD; not the only factor
- Student does the coler have any significance
Bugscope Team not sure what you mean...
- Student the coler of a bee
Bugscope Team does the color of the bee have any significance in CCD? I don't know; if you have heard something about that I would like to know about it
- Student thank you for your time alot
- Student We learned a lot
Bugscope Team that's great to hear!
- Student thank you for your time we leand a lot
- Student thank you for letting us use your microscope
- Bugscope Team Thank You for connecting with us today!
- Student Thanks for answering our questions. I have one more but not enough time to say it
Bugscope Team what is it?
- Student g'bye
- Student Thank you for your time
- Bugscope Team Bye!
- Student good by
- Bugscope Team bye
- Student Thank You
- Bugscope Team you had very good questions, and we enjoyed working with you!
- 9:11am
- Bugscope Team claw!
- Student it looks like a crab claw
- Bugscope Team yes it does!
- Student crab
- Bugscope Team there is a tendon inside the part just past the claw that pulls to close and releases to open the claw
- Student what are the hairs
Bugscope Team the smallest hairs are microsetae; the larger hairs are bristles and mechanosensory setae
- Student is the leg cut off?
Bugscope Team no this is the tip of this leg
- Student what is the spiky stuff?
Bugscope Team those are hairs, or setae. They help the insect feel what is going on around it
- Bugscope Team the setae, or bristles, in the center of the claw opening, are to allow the bee to sense when something is in its grasp
- Student do the spikes hurt?
Bugscope Team they won't hurt us. They are too small. They don't hurt the insect either
- Student what is the claw used for?
Bugscope Team it's kind of like the same things we use our hands for - to grasp and hold and cling to surfaces
- Student how long can the claws grow
Bugscope Team they don't grow anymore once the bee is an adult; in some insects they can be much longer
- 9:16am
- Student do the spikes get pollen on them
Bugscope Team yes they do! some hairs are great for getting pollen to stick to them, and sometimes the pollen like to stick to anything. Other things like to stick to the hairs sometimes, like dirt
- Student how is this formed?
Bugscope Team just like with people and other animals, other insects, genes control how body parts are formed
- Student Doe anything on it's body use it to smell?
Bugscope Team yes for sure! some of the tiny setae we see are chemosensory
- Student Why is the eye so scary
- Student Why is the claw look so spiky
Bugscope Team it is kind of spiky...
- Student Does the queen bee do as much work as the worker bee?
- Student does the honeycomb shape have anything to do with the bees?
- Student What makes the eye so hairy?
- Student It's so big!!!
- Student How is a queen born
Bugscope Team the queen becomes a queen when she is fed a greater quantity of what is called Royal Jelly\
- Student what would happen when the queen dies
Bugscope Team if the bees sensed the queen was dying they usually prepare another fertilized egg to be queen by giving the egg/pupa lots of royal jelly. If the queen suddenly dies without warning, the bees will try to throw a bunch of royal jelly on a ffertilized egg and hope she becomes a queen. If she doesn't become a queen, then the colony won't last very long without a queen
- Student this is very gross!
- Student Are those hairs on the eyes?
- Student why is the eye hairy
Bugscope Team it is hairy for thermoregulation, and also for sensing wind speed and direction
- Student how do they pick out the queen
Bugscope Team there are always larvae that may be turned into queens if the queen dies, so they are kind of in waiting
- Student how fast can they fly?
- Student What does ommatidia mean?
Bugscope Team ommatidia are the individual facets of the eyes, individual lenses
- Student Do drone bees get kicked out for a reason?
- Student how many lenses in the eye
Bugscope Team there are thousands, probably 5 to 7000
- Student how do they get hexagon shaped eyes
Bugscope Team hexagon is the best shape to fit the curvature of something round, so to fit the maximum number of ommatidia in that space you need hexagons
- 9:21am
- Student how many bees are in the world
Bugscope Team there are said to be 20,000 species of bees in the world
- Student Why does the eye have hexagons on it ?
Bugscope Team oops Cate just answered that, below
- Student why do they need a queen
Bugscope Team the queen is responsible for laying the eggs, from 1000 to 2000 per day
- Student can a little bee sting?
Bugscope Team yes
- Student Did the queen lay drone eggs?
Bugscope Team yes. Drones are unfertilized eggs
- Student Why are queen bees the biggest bee in the colonie?
Bugscope Team the queen has to be large so she can hold all of the eggs inside her and then lay them
- Student How many eggs does the queen lay in a day?
Bugscope Team 1000 to 2000
- Student Who makes the honey ?
Bugscope Team the workers do
- Student do quueens leave the colony?
Bugscope Team sometimes when they are young they fly out; sometimes they do not come back, and they establish another colony somewhere else
- Student What does decenoic mean?
Bugscope Team I believe it means 'ten,' as in decenoic acid
- Student where do royal jelly come from
Bugscope Team it is said to come from the salivary glands of worker bees
- Student how does a queen be get her unusual size?
Bugscope Team she grows because she is fed a lot, and also because her genetic makeup allows it
- Student when the bees put royal jelly onan egg ho does it change the egg
Bugscope Team it activates genes that might normally be dormant
- 9:27am
- Student What is that?
Bugscope Team this is a cluster of pollen grains. The background is carbon tape
- Student how many bees can be in a colony
Bugscope Team in the Spring there can be 10,000 to 15,000, and in the Summer there can be 50,000 to 60,000.
- Student what is the average life span of a queen bee
Bugscope Team I think it is usually said to be 4 to 5 years
- Student why does that look like a brain
Bugscope Team the surface has those cool raised structures on it that make it look superficially like a brain
- Student do queen bees eat anything other then royal jelly
Bugscope Team as far as I know no they don't
Bugscope Team one reference I read says that once they become queens they are fed nectar
- Student what is the average lifespan of the drone bee
Bugscope Team about 50 days
- Bugscope Team workers are said to live 1 to 4 months
- Student does the queen bee do as much work as a worker bee
Bugscope Team she does a different kind of work and is also quite busy
- Student ;
- 9:32am
- Student why do bees collect pollen
Bugscope Team they eat the pollen for food
- Student is pollen used to make honey?
Bugscope Team no the nectar they collect from the plants are
- Student how does the pollen wear off on the next flower without the bee knowing?
Bugscope Team the pollen is all over the bee, not just in its pollen basket; so it is not aware of every grain of pollen in its hair
- Student how big is a queen bees heart?
Bugscope Team I have not found a good answer for that
Bugscope Team I imagine it could be a millimeter or so long
- Student how big is the bee when it is first born
Bugscope Team it is almost the full size it will become, but it is small and folded up\
- Student how many times a day to bees go out to collect nectar
Bugscope Team it depends on the weather; I don't think they stop, on a good flying day
- 9:38am
- Student Why do bees like sugars?
Bugscope Team it's almost a chicken and egg story; the flowers produce nectar, which is sugary, to attract the bees; but also, sugars have calories in them that get turned into energy
- Student what happens when they run out of their supply of pollen? can't find any more pollen?
Bugscope Team they travel in search of it; in some cases the queen will fly out for new territory
- Student is bee honey bee vomit
Bugscope Team kind of. They do have to regurgitate the nectar a few times to get it to honey consistency. It is stored in a special second stomach for this
- Student how big do the bees wings get?
Bugscope Team they seem to be 9 mm to a centimeter in honeybees, but there are lots of species of bees, and bumble bees are larger, for example, and have larger wings
- Bugscope Team there is a Bombyx pensylvanicus bumble bee on the stub today
- Student How fast can honeybees fly
Bugscope Team I have read 15 to 22 miles per hour\
- Student Why do the wings have hairs and spikes
Bugscope Team the smallest hairs are microsetae, which help give the bee a better ability to hold onto the air in flight; they also keep the wings from sticking to a flat surface when they are wet; the curved things we see now are hooks that help hold the wings together in flight
- 9:43am
- Student can you see threw the wings
Bugscope Team yes you can
- Student how thin are the wings
Bugscope Team they are on the order of 30 microns, probably; a micron is a thousandth of a millimeter; a micron is also called a micrometer, which means 'a millionth of a meter'
- Student What do the wings consist of.
Bugscope Team they are made of chitin, the same as the rest of teh exoskeleton; it is a tough protein similar to our fingernails, and also like a shrimp shell
- Student How do you know all these things about bees
Bugscope Team after years of doing bugscope and talking with other full entomologists Scot and I are like junior entomologists at this point
Bugscope Team haha That is right!
- Bugscope Team bees and wasps have four wings; flies have only two wings
- Bugscope Team bees and wasps both connect their hind- and forewings together when they fly
- Student do the wings brake easily
- Bugscope Team that is what the hamuli are for
- Bugscope Team this is interesting
- Student Why can a queen bee keep stinging without dying.
Bugscope Team the queen bee does not have barbs on its stinger like the worker bees do
- Bugscope Team if the stinger is not barbed, it can be inserted and taken out without getting stuck
- 9:48am
- Bugscope Team when a worker bee stings a mammal, which has fairly thick skin, the barbs bet caught in the skin and the stinger plus the venom sac get torn away
- Student how big is a stinger
Bugscope Team it can be a few millimeters long, and in some insects much longer, as in centimeters, depending on what it is going to sting
- Student why do drones not have stingers?
Bugscope Team stingers are really ovipositors. Males don't do lay eggs
- Student What are barbs.
Bugscope Team barbs are sharp elements that stick out of the shaft of the stinger; they help cut on the way in but make it harder to pull out
- Bugscope Team an ovipositor is used for laying eggs, and many insects have a combination ovipositor/stinger, but they are all females
- Student What are the circles
Bugscope Team those are pores where hairs used to be but at some point, most likely after it died, they fell off
- Student What is the thickness of the stinger
Bugscope Team it varies, of course, but it is likely 50 to 75 microns, close to the width of a human hair
- Student does the queen bee feel any pain
Bugscope Team yes she does; feeling pain is good because it warns the animal that what it is doing might be dangerous
- 9:55am
- Student what is the difference between a worker bee's stinger and a queen bee's stinger?
Bugscope Team the queen bee's stinger has to be large enough to lay eggs, and that is by far its primary purpose; it does not have barbs or spines on it that hold it in. the worker's stinger is used to sting, of course; it does not lay eggs; the worker can sting other insects without dying, but when it stings a mammal, like us, the stinger gets caught in the skin and the whole apparatus gets pulled out of the bee, so the bee bleeds to death
- Bugscope Team a barb is what you find on a fish hook; it goes in easily but does not come back out so easily
- Student what is the average life of a drone bee
Bugscope Team about 40 to 50 days
- Student do the drones make milk substace in there glands?
Bugscope Team I don't think so; they do not collect nectar or pollen, although they feed on it
- Bugscope Team cool a stinger!
- Student Thanks for your help thanks for your time
- Student Thanks for your help!
- Student thanks! i learned a lot!
- Bugscope Team the stinger has different arts that help it cut into your skin by sliding side by side
- Student thank you for all of your information on bees
- Student thanks for your help!
- 10:00am
- Teacher Thanks! I'll see you tomorrow
- Student thanks!
- Student Thanks for everything!
- Student how do the drones get is names?
Bugscope Team it is an old word and may be an imitation of the noise they make when they fly, but it is also said to mean idle or lazy
- Bugscope Team thanks for all your great questions. Hope you have fun
- Bugscope Team Thank You All!
- Teacher One more session for us tomoorow have a good day-Maddy
