Learn to ID Bees-20241218_130354-Meeting Recording

December 18, 2024, 6:03PM

1h 2m 17s

Maffei, Clare J started transcription

Maffei, Clare J 0:03
Julio, we are back with Andrea Andrina.
This is our last session for 2024.
We'll come back.
What was it? January 8th or something along those lines?

Droege, Sam 0:17
Mm hmm.

Maffei, Clare J 0:19
And then we'll skip a week again. 'cause, I have to travel, and then we'll be back on the 22nd and then back to our flow.
I just want to share with everyone this we've been going since May 2021.
And we've been in the weeds for like 2 years. This time last year, we were working with DIALECTIS with.
With Joel and.
That we got through only half of those.
We gave them a break.
So that all is very cool and just wanted to thank everyone for continuing to show up it it feels really good.
And you guys are doing great.
I dsi think that was what I wanted to say and we'll.
Passages here now.

Droege, Sam 1:03
Thank you, Claire.
So Claire, we didn't discuss this beforehand, but do you want people to maybe put into the chat possible species, species groups to work on?
You know, I'm not sure that we have to.
I we we don't.
We really haven't had much of A pattern and we'll finish up, I think most of this andrina senses strictu group today.
Unless we get bogged down there.
But what do you think?

Maffei, Clare J 1:34
Always solicit requests and doing that the whole time got some good feedback though on the andrina going by subgenera and I consistently send out the two sub genus guides.

Droege, Sam 1:47
OK, we can continue doing that.

Maffei, Clare J 1:49
So if anybody has a contrary opinion, please totally share and we will adjust.
And also, if there's any groups that you have more bees because you've been watching us and maybe we didn't have enough, whatever.
That you want to send or present.
Always open to that, but I think we've gone through a lot of stuff.
We could go back through and inventory, but yeah, we're always happy to refresh or.
Do nail down on a specific species too if you want like we spent so much time on Carolina last time.
Is that what you mean, Sam?

Droege, Sam 2:30
Also, I don't know if I don't know if David, you want to make any pictoral announcements or do you want to punt on that?

Maffei, Clare J 2:31
Communicate. We're all good.

David Cappaert 2:43
Pictorial pictorial. So Sam, you're talking about stocking discover life with more and better images, right?
As a general category.

Droege, Sam 2:50
Yeah, we've been having. We've been having a a dialogue on that.
But do you want to get into to make you know, reduce some recruiting here or not at this point?

David Cappaert 3:02
Yeah. So let's do one moment of recruiting.
So I I will just say for my part over a long period of time I generate these images for various uses.
And any place I see.
Oh, that would fit into discover life.
I wanna stick it there.
So we've done a fair amount of that and I make decent photographs. I think most people would say, but there are tons of people making equally good or even better images that should be undiscovered like, but they're not because we haven't made the connection. So if we can.
I think what we need to be talking about is like a pipeline.
Like, how can we recruit more folks to put more of the material that they generate that should be in discover life to get it there?
So I can say that much for now.

Droege, Sam 3:47
OK. All right. Yeah. So just winging off that if you are, if you maintain your own site or you know someone within your group that has really good high quality pictures.
Contact me, I guess is the easiest thing to do and we'll look for a way to bulk upload and then we can add whatever attributions you want to those pictures very easily and a contact e-mail and a copyright if you wanna copyright on it. So.
So we have when people click on a species page, we get, you know, as much good detail as we can.
You know better is, you know, the more, more shots, the more.
More of the details of a particular species, pronoto collar etcetera, the better.
So let us know and I guess I'll leave it at that and you can e-mail me and or Claire and both of us and then.
We'll get into.
Andrea Fasci, how's that?

Maffei, Clare J 4:57
14.

Droege, Sam 4:58
OK.
Alright, so I'm going to share and Andrinathaspi is part of this group of andrina. The sense of stricter group.
So the subgenus that is also called andrina and.
Why I'm there PowerPoint.
I want this screen to come up. There we go.
OK.
So you should see the andrina female guide here, and rather than so you can see this particular character that we're looking at at the moment, I did a search.
You can always.
Find very quickly if you know like oh, there's some detailed couplet or groups of.
Characters in their participants here in the guide somewhere you can always click on has and then do a word search like. So I did has it opened up.
Who knows?
Maybe 200 plus different couplets, some of which are very specific like this one, and then you can type in a word, do a word search.
So I just typed in fastp I dropping the one I end, here we go.
So it's a good way to to shortcut a lot of identification work.
Once you become super familiar with.
The guides and the species knowing that OK.
It's either this or that.
Let me just go and look up any detailed information within discover life in the in the keys, and without having to step through the keys. You're always welcome to do that, but with a large guide like the andrina one, it can be time consuming. OK, so here you.
Can see some of the players.
These are all within that andrina sense of stricter group, but not every one of them.
I don't know that there's any one thing that tied these together, but.
They were designated by the algorithm here called RESOLVE.
In the program that these were super similar and deserving of a longer treatise on separating in them out and the characters that help with that.
So here we have andrina.
So we've talked about these others within the context of their males having.
Mandibular processes.
So here's Mandibularis Rufus Ignatius. At the same time. However, when you're looking at just females, you don't necessarily know that.
The males have any kind of mandibular tooth, unless you have both species. Both genders in your collection. So and and and that leads to some confusion, particularly when you talk about onesie, twosie kinds of things.
So andrina Fasci is a northern species. I'm not.
I don't believe we have any records for Maryland, although it's possible in Western Maryland, there could be a specimen or two waiting for us.
It's mostly a northern thing, so I don't see that much.
'Cause you don't see that much in the way of northern material, but we're gonna look at that now and.
What we will see, the key thing here and Spencer you can pipe in here at any point.
Or Sarah. I see you to a couple Northerners in there on your struggles with SBI and the rest of this group, so.
We're really talking about separating this these three here, not so much. Carolina, which has a lot of distinctive features as we saw last time.
So here's the key.
And this is what we often do is we highlight using caps the AV or a character that is largely restricted within a couple of or yeah, a feature within the character of several species that largely is distinctive will capitalize.
So here you can see bidentate.
So the label process being bidentate is going to be unique to fast BI.
Next this group.
So the rest of these have either.
A simple meaning that the line of the border of the labral process is smooth and or it's cut into as if by a small semicircle.
So we would call that a marginate or sometimes we would call it slightly a marginate, giving you some options to play around with. And and often you're scoring them for more than one thing. Might be, well, simple.
Possibly slightly imagining, so you would score it for both. Anyway, you end up down here and Fastbi has and we're gonna pull it a specimen onto the microscope stage here and take a look at the sometimes tricky to see identateness of the SBI just because there's a lot.
Going on down there and like we've seen in several.
Adrina species. The fact that it's bidentate.
Can be partially hidden by the angle in which one looks at the.
Structure. Alright, let's see if I can find this now.
And we're going power, yeah.

Maffei, Clare J 10:10
While you.
While you are setting that up, Matt has a question.

Droege, Sam 10:15
OK.

Maffei, Clare J 10:15
I heard Rufus Ignatius is more associated with bogs and wetlands, and that's bi from drier habitats.
Is that the case?

Droege, Sam 10:23
I am going to ask the New Englanders and any Canadians of that group to answer that.
So go ahead.

Spencer 10:35
I'm working up in Vermont, where the SBI are both fairly common.
The first thing that is sort of like all of the Nice mix northern hardwood forests, but also on a lot of the fun bog plants.
And then tasbi in Vermont at least, is somewhat localized, but.
And the habitat where maybe I find it most would be like.
Steep mount.
Elevation steep hills that are? Yeah, a little bit drier.
But it shows up in gardens and.
Probably in wetlands as well.
The the easiest way to tell them apart.
Outside of the microscope up here, though, is that the SBI is a summer bee, like June and July, and Rufus Ignatius early May, maybe early June, but.
They almost don't overlap in phonology.
From what we found in Vermont.

Droege, Sam 11:41
That's a good one.
Also when my when we see roof of signada to some extent down here in the western part of the state.
Not super commonly, but around, but I think all the records are deciduous.
Woodlands, you know, in the woods kinds of things, not lounging around in the borders or outside.
So I think that matches your phenology kind of thing, like it's hitting.
The spring vernal bloom, perhaps?
The Rufus Ignati and then the spice doing something else.
What do we know?
I'm not sure but.
So anyone else with some additional observations of the SBI in particular, but also RUFO Signada?

Sara Bushmann 12:31
Sam, this is Sarah.
I'd have to look, but I'm pretty sure that I get those two species from the same collection same time of year, same survey.

Will Peterman 12:40
Run.

Sara Bushmann 12:42
In the blueberry fields.
So of course, you know, there's that spring.
Huge flush of flowers and it may be pulling.
And and the fields are surrounded by woods.
So I think that that might be a unique situation that pulls in a whole bunch of different bees to get this.

Droege, Sam 12:58
Mm hmm.

Sara Bushmann 12:59
Very short lived.
Flowering so, but yeah, I I I haven't seen a distinct separation necessarily.
Between those two species in Maine, so we're in Maine.

Droege, Sam 13:14
OK.
Yeah, yeah.
And that makes sense in it.
So all these things could essentially be true depending on which environments you're spending most of your time on. And as you mentioned, blueberries are a woodland and edge. Under normal circumstances, blueberries are occurring throughout all the woods, but in sort of a repressed state.
And they are also.
Out in.
Burns and fields and open areas where they really need to be in order to produce fruit. And of course, they're in Maine, in particular, in these barrens are highly manipulated, and I think I've seen a bunch of your material in the past from the blueberry areas and you.
Also, getting things like Bradley Eye and.
What else?
Carolina in those same areas.
Sarah yeah.

Sara Bushmann 14:15
Yes, those are definitely.
We'll get all those in the blueberry fields during bloom.

Droege, Sam 14:22
Yeah, it's. I mean the whole system is an interesting one because like down here, we have the same thing, different sort of environmental conditions, very acidic also. But more on that. La, La, La Pine.
End of the spectrum to pitch pine, but lot of these areas have a huge understory of huckleberries and we may have like here a potuption. I think we have probably close to 10 different vaccinium.
And ghee Osaka species.
Doing all and many other a bunch of other erracies shrubs.
So just that whole, what do what does the erratic shrub community do with all these andrina and other species of bees? Is really interesting in terms of how they partition it.
You can just look up the the bees that are using vacciniums to minimize, which doesn't even really look like a blueberry bloom in traditional sense.
It's more open and dangling, and then you have Melita and.
Pantaginous and all kinds of different things on there, all within the same genus.
Anyway, lots.
It's fun, right?
This is what make bees fun. There's so much complexity.
In these systems.

Maffei, Clare J 15:39
I'm gonna read just a little bit more from the chat.

Will Peterman 15:39
Yeah, I'm.

Maffei, Clare J 15:42
Is Matt.
Says he's not able to get on the mic, but in Arkansas, right?
That's AK. We get lots of fast BI in South facing grass forb slopes in June on potentia.
There we go.
And other things just don't have a handle on Rufus Ignati.
And then Spencer knows how to unmike if he wants to contribute the Rose comments.

Droege, Sam 16:07
This is.
OK.
So that was in Arkansas.
I'm. I'm actually kind of surprised.
I think I don't think of pardon.

Spencer 16:14
It's Alaska. You just eat, clarified in the chat. It's Alaska.

Maffei, Clare J 16:17
Thank you.
Sorry about that.

Droege, Sam 16:19
Oh well, ask me, OK.
I'd like, wow, that's crazy. But Alaska totally makes sense, OK?

Will Peterman 16:25
Yeah, is do I have a mic? I can't tell.

Droege, Sam 16:26
The old.

Will Peterman 16:30
OK. Thanks.
Oh yeah, I I'm a Puget Sound lowlands.
We get them both in disturbed habitats.
The same sites.
But wildly different phonology.
Rufus Ignatius mid-april Fastpass is mid-july.

Droege, Sam 16:49
Yeah, interesting.
And also when you have that Big West Coast East Coast, I believe with Fast Bi there's what is it, West Coast specimens are darker.
Is that the the story?
And who knows if there is?
They are are not a different species.

Will Peterman 17:07
Yeah, until somebody runs the DNA. I just follow the key.
But yeah, they're they're they're pretty dark.

Droege, Sam 17:11
Yeah, yeah.

Spencer 17:12
I saw that mentioned in Discovery life, in my experience.
The Vermont specimens are are distinctly darker and hairier than rufous egg. Nada. So they've got, like, a brown hair wash sort of over the whole body, particularly on the abdomen. Whereas with Nada doesn't really have much hair to speak of on the abdomen.

Droege, Sam 17:21
No.

Spencer 17:32
And the thorax can often be less hairy.
The one that throws me for the biggest loop up here is mandible Aris.
Which sort of looks like a thespi in the general hair and colour, but then is flying in even before Rufus Ignatius. From our view records, it's a really early scrubby sort of warm, messy habitat.
But we only have a few of them.
It seems like we're from northern edge of their range.

Droege, Sam 18:04
Yeah, I don't know.
So macoupinensis, which is also within that group but easier to tell apart, is a a Willow specialist and I'm not sure what people really don't know about mandibularis, but it fits that the the the clade of this particular subgenus of Andrina seems to be doing quite a lot.
Of different things and has spread themselves way out phenologically.
I had that general sense that Mandibularis is mostly forced, but using a lot of different kinds of.
Plants and I often am tricked by mandibularis too. When I'm keying it out, it seems particularly generic and.
You know, it does have a a complete.
So here we're looking at the SPI.
Here's that nice cut out when you bend it over. So I'm looking at it a little more straight on rather than straight down, but mandibularis would have a a complete.
Sing simple labral process there and not this cut out.
It also I forget I I don't wanna say we can move it to check.
I might as well do that that.
SBI tends to have.
A color of the phobia that's more white and I could have this wrong though, and the others often like Rufo signada in particular, seems to have a very, very much dark hair.
Internals. Now we've got a lot of glare on this.
I really need to change the lighting.
I'll temper it down so I can't quite tell whether actually I'll look at the other specimen I have, but I have a generally lighter color and manipulars I believe has more.
Yeah, it totally depends.
Like I can change the angle on this and get the upper part to be completely white.
Believe Manibularis has more of a 2 tone to it and but is in between and you often end up looking at that labral process for something definitive.
And in the female right?
You don't have the mandibular tooth on there. Now, this one has its mandibles open. We go back.
Here you see a mandibularis.
It has mandibularis with this tiny tooth, which is really obscure.
We saw that at the last time we looked at it right near the articulation.
So that's where the mandible is joined to the head.
It's basically like a hinge and.
But a lot of sometimes I don't really see it. And here it says Stasi manipulated without a basal tooth.
Yes, probably.
But it's just this tooth here in mandibular is so small that it becomes difficult to work with. And this is a character I believe that is used by, I want to say Mitchell, and I'm not sure if.
Wally Laberge's treatment also did the same.
That you needed to find it with a tooth. But I find it very difficult to find.
So up here, if we look at manipulars again, mail area moderate to SBI Mail area also moderate.
So that helps to define, oh, I probably am looking at a hindering a sense of stricter group or similar.
Label process entire.
That's going to separate it out tiny tooth.
Possibly useful as a secondary thing, but otherwise there's not much here that's separating these two, except for those kinds of characters.
But anyone else got anything?
To add for the separation of those two, I'll put a different.
While you're doing that, I will reposition this so we can see it more straight down.
In general, what's going to be sort of obvious when you're at that? What species of Andrina am I looking at here at all? You're going to see that the pronodo collar is.
Sharply faced.
So there's corners to it. You're not going to see it right now because we're looking straight down in the hairs. But it does have sharp corners. We've looked at that quite a bit.
So that's a good character.
It's got it and it's got a.
A really big maler space, usually entering to have none.
For the group and a not a long head.
And from there you have to go in and start keying things out.
I'm going to knock. You can see that this is sort of the presentation while dirty and with too much.
Oh, I can add some more light this direction.
You don't think I'll get it to?
Well, the problem is is I'm using a reflector.
A ring light and anything glossy is gonna show up like this. Let me.
Take a second and bring the lighting back down.
And I'm not sure why I'm not able to do that.
Do that.
True.
What is going on here?

Maffei, Clare J 24:13
Do you wanna return to like where we can see the whole application and maybe just rerun live?

Droege, Sam 24:20
Yeah, let me try that.
I'll hit escape.
Maybe I oop, I can jump out with escape. OK and now.
Make this a little darker.
See if we can see this a bit better.
Here we go.
So it just has these.
Hints of bands, but very light and open.
I think mandibular has largely the same kind of thing.
And.
You can see there are, as was mentioned, dark hairs in a midst, either light hairs or reflections that make them look like in there.
And I don't have much more to add except that.
At Mandibularis slash thaspi is often something that people spend a bunch of time looking at, and sadly I don't have any males and I believe the males are.
We'll take a jump over there or more.
Also a little problematic.
It wouldn't have a tooth because.
It is not a tooth species.
And there's pic.
Let me just take this.
Pick. We're doing pretty well right now, OK?
Just like this and try to figure out what's happening there.
Got some errors coming up but I don't know how to fix them and I don't know if that's your call anyway.
But you're you're doing pretty well. We seem to be seems to be behaving. So thank you. Pick.
Not a problem. Bye bye.
All right. Now it'll probably stop working, OK.
Let me go back.
We're gonna do what we talked about last time for the males here.
We're in the male guide at this point.
Control F must be.
And I'm not seeing a specific character, which means that probably it's keying out based on the general characters of the species not having a formation at the base. In other words, not having a tooth.
Probably having a almost certainly a bidentate label process having the sharp pronotable collars and then following through with the guide as a whole.
Does anyone have any?
Mail.
Well, not manipulars cuz that's got a tooth. But let's say fast Bi comments.
Get another species out frizzed up.
OK, I'm not hearing a lot, so I think that that sort of approach generally works.
Andrina frigida. And then we have.
The uncommon and I only have one specimen clarkella. Both of these are northern species.
I want to say frigida is.
A Willow specialist.
Someone could confirm that?
That would be great.
And it's also one that we I believe it's frigida is one that has been noted for Marilyn.
We're in the middle of writing up the bees of Maryland, District of Columbia has been noted for Maryland, but.
We have.
Yet to find it again.
It's been about 100 years since there's been any records.
We do look at Willow, but it might be, I believe this species is out extremely early.
In most places.
So we'll take a look here.
Maybe we'll do some keying on it. We don't have a lot a great sense of.
As a species.
So let's take a look at the faces. Pretty distinctive.
Go back to the female, then we'll go back to.
Elements here.
A very, very dark.
Facial fovea, which is striking.
And let's go and see if we have in the females here.
We'll start with that.
A go to has.
And look at.
OK, Frigida, rufo, signata.
So we were talking about Rufo Signata.
In the last session and noting that it has very, very dark facial fovea also.
So here, when we're separating these particular two we have.
Differences in the clippiest pitting and mostly touching and frigida.
Lower half almost entirely dulled.
So a lot of times when andrina, it's very useful to look at the Clippy as in fact it's one of the.
Forward facing characters in Andrina guide to look and see whether the Clippers has got dulled areas only around the base, no dulled areas.
In other words, it's all shiny.
Or it's entirely dulled, and that's useful in terms of broad cut points for the characters, but it's also useful in comparison to other specimens that you might have just looking at the clippius and comparing.
The patterns.
Between several specimens can be illuminating just by itself.
So looks like the lower half dulled high density microscopic lines.
And there is only a small area that is shiny by implication here along the rim malor space short.
So a lot of these have pretty long ones, less than 1/4 of the width of the base of the mandible, and the opposite here is true.
So the head is going to be a little bit longer because it's got a mower space much longer and we have the clippius much more reflective and shiny.
And the pitch never touching.
So we got a lot of head issues here.
Let's jump back to my specimen and we'll take a look at the clippius, which should be relatively dull with the exception of a small part right at the rim and lots of overlap or touching this of the pit.
So we can see.
Pretty firmly here.
Lots of pitch.
Many of them are touching.
And there is a small list of shiny areas there, right at the rim.
Everything else being highly inscribed by microscopic lines, tessellate or whatever descriptor you want to use for that.
But that's pretty we can pull out Rufus Ignati, but better to probably just move on.
This appears to be a complete label process.
It's not useful in separating those two here, but just in contrast to the last one.
This line here can be useful in some species.
So we have a raised line that runs down often unpitted down the center of the clippius.
So just another one of the clipple patterns and configurations that are useful in separating species. Even if you don't know what they are looking for this raised line.
Or often it's simply an unpitted line, so there's pits on either side in a remaining area that is unpitted.
This one actually looks a bit raised in addition to.
Minute area not being pitted. As you can see as it goes down.
OK. And when we look at the head as a whole?
It's difficult without measuring things, but a lot of what we're doing in discover life is in broad strokes, looking at whether the heads are wide or long and other features are done in comparison. And if you were to compare that to Ruffo Signata, you would see that this.
Is a much.
Let's call it rounder equilateral.
Shaped head.
So it's not as long and the Mailer space, which is often.
A correlate changing it to show you the Mailer space is often a correlate of head length.
So if you have a long head, usually more often, most of the time I think have a long Mailer space because something has to get longer and it seems like the eye doesn't get longer.
But the area between the mandible and the bottom of the eye is one of the features that gets longer.
Sometimes there's compression of the head and you don't have it as wide or broad of a surface area between the compound eyes.
So here it's a little bit tricky to see.
Let's see if we can zoom in a tiny bit more.
So first of all, no articulate, no little tooth here.
So here's the two articulations. So that's where.
The mandible hinges into the head of the bee.
And then there's a muscle attachment.
It's a little murky to me right here.
It's probably that at this point here, and this seems to be unusually swollen, so I'm not quite sure how to classify that particular Mailer space.
I'm gonna swap it out, see another specimen with the hope.
That we see.
A clearer presentation of the Mailer space here.
It's a bit bit similar, so there's the articulations and there's something going on here that seems to be a little bit larger than normal.
Here's the eye.
And then there's a rim around the eye.
So there is a banded area and then this space in between, so it's noticeable as it is in all the senses strict to species, but it's not as.
Long so we would use the width of the mandible as it a comparative tool.
It's not as long.
Some of the others.
So when you're keying something out like this and that's your only specimen, this becomes difficult because is it long or is it not long?
Is sort of open to question, but if you had Rufus Ignat next to you, you would see how much longer it is in comparison.
But having single specimens is problematic.
So that's why ultimately having a collection at least of your regions, bees over time.
And then going back and reviewing them, because you'll realize, oh, I was.
Making some mistakes here and there.
Everyone does that.
I was just looking at some of my earlier mistakes today, but they can be updated.
So yeah, go ahead.

Maffei, Clare J 35:53
The stamp while you have that on deck, Spencer observe that he finds the phobia frigida more black versus distinctly brown in Rufus Signata.
And I'll also just nudge folks on the species page with Rufus Ignatio.
We have some really good diagrams and a picture that I believe is from David. While Frigida we are short on pictures so far Northern friends want to send us a specimen or two or send them to David they will.

Droege, Sam 36:09
OK.

Maffei, Clare J 36:21
Be populated.

Droege, Sam 36:23
OK, so, so, Spencer said.
The face is flatter and Rufo Signata has a more humpy clip. Am I getting that right?

Maffei, Clare J 36:34
That's not what was said. The phobia for jadav more black versus distinctly brown.

Droege, Sam 36:38
More black, not black.

Maffei, Clare J 36:40
Yes.

Droege, Sam 36:42
Elderly, OK.
It is. Oh, so they're even more black than it is. Very noticeably black than Rufus Ignati.
Yeah, that's a dark pit.
OK.
So I do have, I think because the specimen I have for clarkella is a female before I jump to the frigida males.
I said to have fewer noticeable characteristics and also being aware of time. Let's jump to the but of course that should be where we spend our time. Is in the hard ones.
But Clark Hella is such a first of all. It's a lovely bee.
And also has very distinct when you see it, it's like that is I've. I've remember that one.
So let me see if I can get it.
Into focus.

Maffei, Clare J 37:38
While you're getting it, I forgot to read two others.

Droege, Sam 37:41
In.

Maffei, Clare J 37:41
I apologize, Spencer also observes.
Frigida and Clark Ella are on Willows in Vermont fairly frequently.
Frigida is almost always the first bee of the year, often in SAP buckets.
That's real early.

Droege, Sam 37:53
Oh.

Maffei, Clare J 37:53
And Sarah Bushman, Frigida found in they're also found in the blueberry fields found foraging on blueberry.
Ditto. I remember that was for, but fast Bi am Rufus Ignatius. So blueberry fields early B.

Droege, Sam 38:09
Interesting. So just a couple observations.
One is that.
Mike Ushalan I always mess his name up. Sorry Mike.
Forest Service Georgia. You makes canopy traps out of simple white plastic buckets.
Let's call them port or half gallon size, plain white buckets, and he fills them with soapy water or burbling glycol.
And he puts veins on top, which I believe he makes himself.
And we've done this too.
And then just ropes them up into trees and catches unbelievable numbers of bees.
And we did too.
We can confirm this.
And.
So the fact that you have huge numbers of acres, unless they all went to the plastic pipe, horrible technique of set buckets throughout New England, I just wonder if.
That bears investigation, I guess the.
Galvanized set buckets.
Do they use those still versus the five gallon bucket?
But there could be a lot of bees in those buckets. So it's question Mark there. And I also will note that my daughter, does the SAP run for a farmer in.
Rhode Island. And so I'm gonna have to get her to pull out all the bees.
So note to self.
OK.
So there's this pattern of two. Clark. Ella. This is another northern species.
It runs down the northern part of the Appalachia, but not that far. And you can see distinct black on the back, a white T1 area and these really fluorescent.
Orange. Yellow. Really orange tibial sections in here.
And and some of that I believe also is expressed in the hair. If you had a better specimen hair on the.
4X and we'll put it on its side.
And then there's quite dark hair throughout the head too, so you have, like, a Milwaukee ensus on steroids here.
I'm going to just present that because it's usually one of those things like, Oh my gosh, what is that?
I don't really.
You don't have to really spend too much time before you figure out the species, but does anyone else want to mention anything about Clark? Ella.
Is this something I have almost no experience with? So any notes on their Natural History are of interest to me at least.
Do people even see this very much up there, up there in New England?
I don't know that it runs far West, though. Go ahead, Spencer.

Spencer 40:59
We find Carkela sort of in the colder willowy swamps of Vermont in the mountains, fairly commonly, almost all females. I've only ever identified a couple males.
And one fun Natural History note that'll be published fairly soon is that it appears that Nomadavalida is a carkela eater.
They've shown up together a handful of times in the range pretty overlapped.

Droege, Sam 41:19
Oh, very cool. Yeah.
Yeah. So that's interesting about valid. And I wonder if it's also using some other things that I think we have a couple of Western Maryland records and I don't know what's going on to the South of something we've called valida, but it still could.
All fit together. It was tricky.
Numata. That's cool.
And.
So I I could look this up, but is it a?
Is it thought to be a Willow specialist? Yeah.

Spencer 41:56
I've only ever seen it on.

Droege, Sam 41:58
OK.
Very good.
So I'm gonna, yeah.

Maffei, Clare J 42:02
Matt can confirm it's quite common in Alaska.
First be of the season late March to April, mostly on the 1st Willows and it might snow on them after they've emerged.

Droege, Sam 42:11
OK.
Say it one more time.

Maffei, Clare J 42:16
Might also get snowed on.

Droege, Sam 42:19
OK. And I believe Valada runs all throughout that Northern Biome, so that makes a lot of sense. All right, I want to return before the end here.
To look at Maleficent.
The only specimen that I have of the last three here with.
Deals.
And see what?
Again, this is just outside of my box in terms of experience, but let's run to the mails.
Let's we're in the has area as is, but let's see if Frigida has anything going on here.
It shows one, but that's just the name of the specimen.
So it does not.
While I take a looky loo at what appears to be only one frigida.
Specimen. When I'm seeing dark hairs along the inner eyes.
White hairs elsewhere.
I'm seeing some pretty pretty long hairs throughout pretty underneath the mandibles.
That's pretty interesting.
So very hairy bee as as is its opposite gender.
I don't see anything in particular.
As a standout, it has the the usual features of a a noticeable malar space, probably listed as not as long as the others in a very crisp.
Corner to the property O triangle. Not purportedly trying. What am I talking about?
The pronodum.
And a pretty wide cheek.
I'll put this under the microscope.
And we can run.
The.
Light on it until we run out but clear and I have to split right at our 2:00 point.
But we'll have fun at the end.
So here you see.
Pretty wide head. Really long.
White hairs on this species.
As usual, probably does not show up as much as.
The females in terms of captors here you see this. These bands, which occurs regularly in other species too, but often adds a distinctive element to the identification.
It's got dark hairs running around the eye.
The backside has white the front very much massively has white hairs all over, but these are dark hairs throughout these areas that line it.
Speak up, anyone. If you have some, like. Oh, it's obviously has this too and will start the guide as the countdown continues.

Spencer 45:20
Yep, up here at least early in the spring, I find the the dark hairs inside the eyes are pretty distinctive and quite obvious.

Droege, Sam 45:30
So most of the others in the species you're seeing are pretty much entirely pale faced.

Spencer 45:35
Linear is the exception and like from a specimen in the hand, the amount of hairs on the thorax seems to be pretty safe.

Droege, Sam 45:46
Yeah. So Carlini, I would be similar in terms of those hairs, but it would have a much longer.
Vertex distance, so that would be the distance between the lateral aselli and the back of the head.
And I would say in general well.
Could be about the same size.
Maybe it average larger and a neat thing about carlinii is if you look underneath on the sternites at the very end.
Of the abdomen. I guess it would be S7, maybe S8.
I'm not 100% sure, but it presents has this little orange brush and none of the other melanin have that. I'm not even sure I put that into the guide, but if I have any questions because usually the characteristics of those black hairs are patently obvious.
If I have any questions though, because the specimens goopy or something else, I flip over and look at the.
Underside.
And that does not the case here.
With Frigida and in fact also frigida appears to be have.
S.
Well, Essex is ambiguously turned up, but it looks like the corners will show this.
This is a pretty good character, so let's focus on differences with.
5 wise so over time, knowing about the habitat and the time of year and places.
Is strong evidence.
In your identification.
Stream. Right. We're flipping back.
Looking at the sternites so the underside of the B and we're looking at the very end, which in males is a useful area a lot of times to concentrate on.
Because particularly some groups have very sharply downturned when you're looking at them this way, they'll be upturned edges sometimes, like in this flat screen. It's a little bit difficult to see.
But what you can see here in Frigida is. Maybe we'll turn it to the side, but this this is the plane of the sternites.
So a lot of species this back part does not depart significantly from the same plane. In other words, it's flat throughout and many others.
There's a very crisp upturned area or downturned that lines this edge and sometimes.
That upturned area can end up with points.
On either side like this does, although it's hard to see here, but we hopefully will get a different look. Points on either side.
Dog ears.
Cat ears, whatever you might want to call them that are pretty distinctive.
And useful and helpful in confirming the species.
So we have moved that.
Character now to the front page and by the way we can move any character we we have control, shall we say.
Over the front page of the.
Of the guides, lot of hair down here.
I'm not sure how well we're gonna be able to see things.
So this this right here I believe is the part of what we would call S8.
Which in Andrina is useful sometimes, mostly when it's very, very different from the norm, so you can't see it from this direction.
But S8 this projecting thing the end is has different shapes.
And in several species, if it particularly adrina erigenia, it's completely forked.
So it's like a Big Y at the end and many of the others. It's somewhere between imagenaid, slightly toothed or.
Convex and so.
Not that useful.
And this is this is what would have that orange tuft in the Carlini, and also would probably not have these white hairs.
What I'm looking for is this area through here. That would be the rim of T6, but it is so occluded by hairs that really can't pull it.
Pull it out.
So which makes it, you know, not the best of the characters.
So let's go back here.
And take some more walking through the guide.
So start and we know that this particular specimen, well, we'll just use Vermont as a placeholder where it was found.
The thing I'm not sure where this one was. I'd have to look it up.
So Vermont and we know it's in the spring.
Wait a minute.
I have it here. This was Massachusetts.
And it was April 8th.
So we'll just put April pretty generic month for all spring. And Drina, I'm gonna skip the body length for now.
Both the so Clippy assist is another great character within the males, which always seem to be like scary. I think from a lot of people, but a lot of times there's yellow somewhere on the face.
This has no yellow and when we hit.
The search button.
We can get rid of that.
We start narrowing it down.
Uh oh, it might be in misbehaving mode here again.
We have a weird.
Open bar that keeps showing up on my screen that is in the way. OK, well, let's look at, well, discover. Life is thinking about participating.
Let's take a look at.
The vertex and it's going to be somewhere between 1:00, so a lot of times you get a vertex from down to 55, so you get a vertex that's about one.
But you know when you have something that's about one that's never an exact thing, right?
So it's almost always I'm going to score on either side of one because it could be a little above. It could be a little below.
Where's this box again?
And cheek with I'm gonna skip label process.
Take a look there.
And looks entire.
Let's see.
First of all, is so a lot of what I do when I'm working through the guides. I'm looking over here is the thing.
I think it is still in there and if not, I'm going to as it disappears then I might spend a little extra time on the character.
Did I get it right?
Did I interpret it and then be open to the fact that maybe it isn't?
What I think it is.
So here frigida.
Still is following along and you know we can watch what other species are doing at the same time.
These mandibles are.
You know, in that moderate to long.
Part of the universe.
So I'm gonna score it for both 'cause. I don't want to.
Be.
Overly restrictive and that's the usefulness of. See, I'm down to 19.
That's the usefulness.
I don't have to.
So there's a distinct corners and you can see only 69 species have that.
I don't want to overly restrict things as I go along because I can always go back and uncheck something and see what happens.
But once a species is off the list, then you don't get it back.
So it's better to be conservative as you walk through at least the first time.
Soap Odile triangle. Looking again at that and I see there's a tiny tiny basal fringe.
It's not absolutely 0, but it's nearly zero and I have a category of 5 to 50% here.
So that is.

Maffei, Clare J 54:39
Two-minute warning my friend.

Droege, Sam 54:40
OK, alright. Can we get there? And so when we look at, so I'm down to a small number including a lot of our friends here.
And so if I'm looking at the abdomen, which is the last, usually the last several characters, and I see.
Yeah, the sternites too.
So I see a very granular presentation.
I can make out some pitting, but I'm not 100% sure on that, and there are very weak hair bands.
These are all ambiguous characters that, except for the granularity, so I know it's granular.
I don't know if that helps, it really didn't.
And IA saw things that could be absent.
Or it could be sparse or something in between.
Let's just so we're just gonna experiment.
And when I do.
Sparse the sparser ones. It disappears. And.
If I do absent, they all remain in there, so I don't.
I haven't really gained anything again and the hair bands are so nebulous here that.
I'm not sure how it'd be scored so in these particular case I would not.
I would not bother to answer these two questions here because I'm not sure they're presenting in a different in a different way, and that's a nice thing. I just go on to another character now here.
On sternum 6, when I'm looking at this again, this will be interesting.
I'm a little bit unsure whether there's dog ears on the sides or not 'cause of all the hair in that area.
So it's not, it's not reflected across the entire margin as we saw before. So it probably is.
Gets eliminated and it did.
It's either flat or with distinct teeth, which is odd, so it with flat everything stays in with the distinct teeth.
Ergenia stays in, but everything else goes away.
So again, we're down to here. Now I can hit simplify.
But what I also can do is knowing insider knowledge. Well, I know it's not Clark, Ella 'cause. We just were looking at that.
I know it's not Carolina 'cause. It doesn't have a long face.
I know it's not aerogenia because it doesn't have a forked S8 Iron Throne.
I.
I'm not 100% sure frigid in not 100% sure mandibular, so I know it's not that because it doesn't have a tooth, as does Trident underneath the.
Mandible. So now I'm down to these two. And now when I hit simplify, it's just going to give me characters that split those.
To I'm looking up here.
I don't see anything specific for separating those two out, so that leaves me with.
Characteristics.
That.
I want to get rid of this little bar.
So I do have S8, but when I'm looking at these things.
These two specimens, the two species remaining, are scored for weekly and margin eight. One is scored for margin 8, one is scored for entire.
This doesn't give me a lot of content.
It's in. That character is gonna be that helpful because none of those are extreme cases, so I've got.
A.
The facial quadrangle.
I take a look at this and I'm looking at this thing. As you know, in my book it is very broad and so we see frigida indeed pops out doing that.
I'm gonna take it off because I wanna go through here and see.
If I've got several characters that line up with Frigida you know because when you're down to two specimens using discover life, it means they've got a lot of similar aspects. At least the in the suite of all these characters.
So it's useful.
To.
To continue to go through.
So here's Mallor area minimum length, so short between one and two times the I ring moderate.
So absent is not on there.
Moderate, but not more than that, but less than 1/5.
That seems to fit pretty well. I'm not sure that what's gonna separate out here, but it is does give me frigida again when we look at clippy's hairs dent throughout partially.
And then only dense.
Laterally and sometimes towards the middle, and partially obscuring the face.
So when I'm looking at this, this has got clearly super dense.
Here, so hit that again.
It gives me frigida.
When I look.
So we're really kneeling the IT is frigida case here. So clippius dole throughout shiny and center and dulled along the edges.
And we are dull throughout, so I'm not sure we need to go any further, OK.

Maffei, Clare J 1:00:16
You got 60 seconds and I'm gonna cut you off.

Droege, Sam 1:00:20
All right. Let's just say we have lots of evidence that it's frigid.
In particular, we have a little label that says it's frigid.
But I'll stop there and ask for questions and anyone else with insights into the males of fastbi and harkelo largely would look similar, I think to be very distinctive female.
But and then what? Andrina or something else do people? People must speak and give us indications of what?
To do next.

Spencer 1:01:01
I want to hear more about Andrina Trident.
That's another one that's giving me trouble.

Droege, Sam 1:01:06
Yeah. So we covered Trident's a couple weeks ago, but when I'm looking at which is common, it's it's maybe the most common of the tooth mandibles, male andrina in our woods.
So it is definitely a woods species, strongly associated with Woodlands.
It has a relatively short, so I'm talking about the females as a relatively short.
Facial phobia.
Also very black, so the facial phobia, I don't know. I believe in compare. I'm working off memory in comparison is.
Does not extend down as far.
Now how far it goes, I'm not 100% sure, but a lot of times I can just see that smaller black facial phobia and know that I'm working with Tritons there.
Those and it's got.

Maffei, Clare J 1:02:02
Don't have to go home.
But I am so I'm just gonna stop the recording.
Eric also has some comments.

Droege, Sam 1:02:08
Yeah, I can continue my.

Maffei, Clare J 1:02:09
You guys can keep chatting.

Droege, Sam 1:02:11
My visitors are not here yet.

Maffei, Clare J 1:02:12
Hi. See you guys next year.

Droege, Sam 1:02:13
OK.
Thanks Claire.
Thanks so much.

Maffei, Clare J stopped transcription