Connected on 2010-05-20 19:00:00
from Hayward, CA, US
- 6:11 pm
- Bugscope Teampumping down...
- 6:18 pm
- 6:26 pm
- 6:32 pm
- 6:38 pm
- Bugscope TeamMaking presets
- 6:43 pm
- 6:48 pm
- 6:54 pm
- Bugscope TeamHello!
- Bugscope TeamWelcome to Bugscope!
- TeacherHi - we will be online in 10 minutes - OK?
- Bugscope TeamCool
- 7:03 pm
- 7:08 pm
- TeacherAre you ready for us?
- Bugscope TeamSure!
- Bugscope TeamHere you can see at least one of the placoid sensilla on the bee's antenna.
- Bugscope TeamThey're sensory, but I am not sure if they sense self movement -- like bending of the antenna -- or what.
- Bugscope Teamthat is cool -- boatloads more of them
- Bugscope Teamthe slender setae are likely chemosensory
- Bugscope Teamthey smell the air
- Bugscope Teamfor pheromones, and the scents flowers give off
- Bugscope TeamWow, neat
- 7:14 pm
- TeacherHI there - we are ready! What insect is this?
Bugscope TeamThis is the bee
- Bugscope Teamum it's a bee
- Bugscope Teampart of a bee
- Teacherthanks -we are slow tonight.
- Bugscope Teamthis is the antenna
- Bugscope Teamone of the antenna
- Bugscope Teamantennae
- Bugscope Teamnow you can see the edge of the eye, and to the left are the mandibles
- Bugscope Teambottom-middle we see part of the compound eye, with lots of long hairs, "setae" protruding from it
- Bugscope Teamyou can see the hinge on the mandible to the left
- Bugscope Teamthe pointy thing is part of the mouthparts
- Bugscope TeamI think it is called the labrum, need to look that up
- Bugscope Teamusually the glossa -- the tongue -- is underneath, but we don't see it
- Bugscope Teamyou can see the two forelimbs now, covered with setae
- TeacherWhat is the long-toothlike thing we see? Looks like a rabbit tooth?
Bugscope TeamThat's part of the mouthparts, what Scott thinks might be called the "labrum"
- Bugscope Teamsetae are the fine hairs
- Bugscope Teamthat is the labrum
- TeacherWhat is that? What does it do?
Bugscope TeamAccording to Wikipedia, it generally serves to hold food in place during chewing by the mandibles, analogous to an upper lip
- Bugscope Teamit kind of clears the way into the flower, and beneath it is the glossa -- the tongue, which we do not see on this bee
- 7:19 pm
- Bugscope Teamthe arch above the labrum is formed by the two mandibles, touching together
- TeacherCan you drive us to the stinger?
- Bugscope Teaminsect mouths are sideways compared to ours
- TeacherNot the bar....the part on the insect
- Bugscope Teamthis is the stinger
- TeacherTell us about the stinger...Why is it hairy? Should it be sharper?
Bugscope TeamThe scale bar indicates that it's approx 10 microns, so roughly a fifth the width of human hair. That's pretty sharp
- Bugscope Teamit is a little hard to see, but it is plenty sharp
- Bugscope Teamit 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 TeamIt 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 Teamthere's a venom gland attached to it like a little outboard motor, and it stays with the stinger and pumps into your skin
- TeacherWhat are the particals on the hair?
Bugscope Teamjust a lot of dirt
- TeacherWhy do bees die after tehy sting you?
Bugscope Teamwhen the stinger comes out there's a big hole in the abdomen, so the bee kind of bleeds to death
Bugscope TeamApparently 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 Teamit stings once and dies
- 7:24 pm
- Bugscope Teamnot like wasps
- TeacherLovely. thanks. So they must really want to hurt you to sting you.
- Bugscope Teama stinger is a modified ovipositor
- Bugscope Teamsome stingers are also ovipositors
- TeacherHow do bees reproduce?
Bugscope Teamthe queen lays eggs
- Bugscope Teamdouble!
- Bugscope Teamlike on a parasitic wasp
- Bugscope Teamsorry, I didn't see scott had already said all that :)
- Bugscope TeamMost bees are just "workers", essentially asexual, as they are never meant to reproduce
- TeacherHow are they eggs fertilized?
Bugscope TeamThe queen bee mates with several of the drone bees
- Bugscope TeamI 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 TeamI believe they can also reproduce parthenogenically
- Bugscope Teamthis is a spiracle on the abdomen of a fly
- Bugscope Teamand as Scott said, usually they fly elsewhere so they're not mating with their own brood
- TeacherWhat is a spiracle?
- Bugscope Teaminsects, 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 Teamyou can see microsetae and setae here
- 7:29 pm
- TeacherCan you drive to the eyes of the fly??
- Bugscope TeamThey 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 Teamthe microsetae can form a pattern on the body that other insects recognize, and they may help insulate the body
- Bugscope TeamThey 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 Teamwe can always drive, but please note that you can as well
- Bugscope Teamthis is a female fly
- Bugscope Teamthe eye facets are called ommatidia
- TeacherWhy do the eyes look like honey combs?
Bugscope Teamone reason they look like honeycombs is because that shape -- the hexagonal shape -- is the most efficient shape for close packing of round things
- Bugscope Teamthey are individual lenses
- TeacherDoes that mean they can see really well?
- Bugscope TeamCompound eyes are a simpler design than mammalian eyes, both in terms of physical requirements and neurological processing
- Bugscope Teamso we see that repeated in nature, and when people with fruitstands make piles of oranges, for example
- Bugscope Teamthey also make it easier to have a super-wide, almost 360-degree field of view
- Bugscope Teamthey do not always see the same colors we do
- Teacherwhy do they need so many eyes?
Bugscope TeamThink 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 Teamsometimes they see in the ultraviolet as well
- 7:35 pm
- Bugscope Teamone 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
- Teacherwhat is this?
- Bugscope Teamthat 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
- Teacherhey, what is the source of electrons in an electron microscope?
Bugscope Teamin some microscopes there is a tungsten filament that must be replaced fairly often
Bugscope TeamMost 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 Teamthis is a cranefly -- they look like mondo bigboy mosquitoes, but they do not bite
- Teacherwhy does it have such a monster-sized nose?
- Teachercooooool
- Bugscope Teamour microscope has a field-emission electron gun, and the way electrons come off of it is a little more complicated
- Teacherwhat other kinds of things do you guys like to look at under the microscope?
Bugscope Teamwe train grad students and postdocs, mostly, to do their own research using a variety of microscopes
- Teacheri bed pennies look gross
Bugscope Teamif they're dirty they do
- Bugscope Teamthe monster nose probably helps balance the head -- adults usually eat nectar from flowers and sometimes do not eat at all
- 7:41 pm
- Bugscope Teamthe 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 Teamwe work with the self-healing polymer people, the flexible silicon people...
- Bugscope TeamPretty 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 TeamTEM = Transmission Electron Microscopy, SEM = Scanning Electron Microscopy
- Bugscope Teamthis is the proboscis of the female mosquito
- Bugscope Teamthe cutting mouthparts are usually inside, and we only see the other ends of them here
- TeacherWhat are the scaly things on the side of the stinger
Bugscope Teamthey're scales, like moths and butterflies and silverfish have
- Bugscope Teamscales 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 TeamOn 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 TeamKind of how you use baking flour to keep dough from sticking to things
- Bugscope Teamas Chas says, what makes the wings of a butterfly feel slick is the scales that you are rubbing off
- 7:46 pm
- Bugscope Teamthis is one of the antennae of the moth
- Bugscope Teamyou can see scales on it as well
- Teacherummm... we
- Teachernot getting an image \
- Bugscope Teammoths can sense minute quantities of pheromones in the air
- Bugscope Teamhit refresh
- Bugscope Teamrefresh your browser
- Bugscope Teamdid that work?
- Teacherthanx
- Bugscope Teamso here on this part of the antenna are lots of chemosensors
- Bugscope Teamwow
- Bugscope Teamthe reason the image is so bright is that the electrons are building up in those fine setae and cannot go to ground efficiently
- Bugscope Teampartly because the tip of the antenna is so far from the stub
- Bugscope Teamthis is broken
- Bugscope Teamthe other antenna has a little rabbit ear here
- Teacherso their antennae are hollow?
Bugscope Teamyes lots of the limbs and other features are to a large extent hollow
- TeacherIs there fluid inside normally or air?
- Bugscope Teamthere are muscle attachments and nerve attachments inside
- 7:51 pm
- Bugscope Teamthere is usually hemolymph inside -- the juicy inside of an insect
- Bugscope Teamhemolymph does not circulate like blood
- Bugscope Teamthis is cool
- Bugscope Teamthose clips are called hamuli
- Bugscope TeamI think some of them do have a crude, tube-shaped system to pump fresh hemolymph onto the brain, but that's about it
- Bugscope Teamand what they do is clip the fore- and hindwing together in some four-winged insects like bees and wasps
- Bugscope Teambees and wasps all have four wings, unlike flies (Diptera), which have two, plus a haltere
- Teacherwhat are the flat specs on the wings?
Bugscope Teamthose are microsetae
- TeacherThat llok like nails
- Bugscope Teamit is more efficient for bees and wasps to use essentially two wings to fly, so they clip the hind and forewings together
- TeacherWhat is this?
- Bugscope TeamI 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 Teamthis is a spine on the leg of a rolpoly
- 7:56 pm
- Bugscope Teamand the spiny things around it are urticating hairs from a spider
- Teacherwhat are the hairs for?
- TeacherAnd the sticks?
- TeacherWhat is the sphere looking thing
- Teacher?
- Bugscope Teamspiders 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 Teamif you take the mag down you can see where we are and likely figure out what those bumps do
- Bugscope TeamI think they help the rolypoly get a grip on the dirt or whatever it is walking on
- TeacherHow mnay segemts do they have in all?
Bugscope TeamI think they have 14 legs, but some may have more, and it looks like they have 15 or 20 segments
- Bugscope Teamrolypolies are isopods, and they have pointy little toes that are all the same
- TeacherThank you we are signing off
- Bugscope Teamthey are not insects, which have six legs, a head, a thorax, and an abdomen, generally
- Bugscope Teamthey are crustaceans...
- Bugscope TeamThank You!
- 8:02 pm
- Bugscope Teamhttp://bugscope.beckman.illinois.edu/members/2010-029/
- Bugscope TeamBye!
