Working with a live specimen

On Friday I found this potter wasp (one of the small, solitary nesting wasps) running around on the landscape contractor's bright green car. I thought I'd have a crack at identifying it to species using just a hand lens, which turned out to be an arduous way to spend a Saturday...

Step 1:  Put wasp in tube into the fridge to anesthetise

Step 2: Take out the book on solitary wasps

Step 3: Turn to first key in book, take chilled wasp out the fridge, start keying...

It seems that everything pretty well matches the family Eumenidae, which takes me to the next part of the book...

Step 4: Keying from the Eumenidae, following on until we get to couplet 7, which is over to the next page.

Oh no!

Ah jeez.

Step 5: Get stool from kitchen, retrieve tiny wasp from ceiling.

She's back in the tube and she's angry.

Quickly, to the next page....

It looks like she's an Ancistrocerus! We are getting there.

Step 6: Continuing on to try to get her down to species...

Hmm, a groove or step on 2nd ventral plate.... Is this it?

To me it looks like there is a step, but then a bulge. It's very difficult to get a decent picture in the hand and at the correct angle. Even after putting her back in the fridge for a while, she simply warms up again very quickly and dashes about.

Might she be Ancistrocerus nigricornis?

I'm just not sure whether this is simply the normal join between two ventral plates on the abdomen. Looking ahead in the rest of the key, it refers to the underside of the 2nd ventral plate, but my pictures are not clear enough. This is where we get stuck without using a microscope and other preserved specimens for comparison.

For many small invertebrates, photographs can only really take you so far in terms of identification, so I'll be told by entomologists that I should have kept the specimen. But seeing as I have a backlog of other material to microscope...

See ya Ancistrocerus sp., back to caterpillar hunting you go. 

Indoor aculeating

Yesterday, a last minute opportunity came up to go on an aculeate identification workshop (bees, wasps and ants). As I'm still feeling keen about bees, I jumped at the chance.

The course was run by the Bees Wasps and Ants Recording Society (BWARS) and held in the British Entomological and Natural History Society classroom at Dinton Pastures. It focused on using written keys to identify solitary and spider-hunting wasps; at first I felt pretty daunted, but the course tutors Mike Edwards and Graham Collins encouraged us to get cracking and just see how we got on.

Ectemnius wasp abdomen

Ectemnius wing - these features can vary between species, so are useful in working out which group a particular wasp belongs to

At first I made a lot of mistakes with the keys, continually coming to the wrong name and having to start the process again. Apparently that is the best way to learn, as I became increasingly familiar with the key anatomical features for identifying bees and wasps down to the genus level.The relaxed atmosphere allowed us to get on at our own pace and no question was deemed too amateurish or silly.

I even had a go at keying out and pinning some of my own specimens from last year's malaise trap. My pinning is a bit off-centre and badly angled, but practice will make perfect and hopefully this specimen will still be identifiable.

My first pinned specimen - a Ruby-Tailed Wasp (Chrysis spp.)

There was a fun moment when I met Ryan Clark, who I follow on twitter. I only realised we were in the same room on the same course after he replied to my tweet!

The bug inside me grows for getting to know solitary bees and wasps, so next I am signing up to BWARS!