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Department of  Entomology
entomology.wsu.edu

Washington State University
Pullman, WA, USA

the lab blog

Yellowjackets being pesky

9/9/2024

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Article in the Spokesman Review on the apparent high density of yellowjackets in the area this year.
Cannon Barnett interviewed local pest control operators and university researchers about the high reports of pestiferous yellowjackets in eastern WA. It's hard to say why people are seeing this apparent pattern, since no one is tracking their numbers. But Dr. Chang (Gonzaga) and I discussed some biology and behaviors of the vespids.
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Image link from newspaper: Pesky Yellowjackets in Spokane have been showing up at backyard barbecues and cookouts more than normal this season. (COLIN MULVANY/THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW)
"Yellowjackets are opportunistic wasps, so when the insect populations that they prey on begin to decline in the fall, humans eating dinner outside or throwing out their leftovers can be a game-changing source of food, Murray said.
The wasp’s desperation for food can lead to attacks as well, said Gary Chang, an entomologist at Gonzaga University."  [quoted from the article]
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Radio interview -- museum + bees!

8/30/2024

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KUOW out of Seattle featured a great podcast on our MT James Entomological Collection with a focus on the bees we are processing!
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Soundside is calling! Have you listened to any of these NPR radio shows? Host Libby Denkmann and Producer Hans Anderson were great to work with. Libby and I had a conversation about the museum and how we digitize specimens -- and after talking a little about the native bees we are documenting, the direction developed into diving into the life history of the bees around us. The podcast turned out really well.
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MT James featured in the Spokesman Review

8/12/2024

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The museum team was interviewed last week for an article about our digitization initiatives. You can read the article in the Spokesman Review (the newspaper out of Spokane, WA). 
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Showing off a digitized bee specimen. I'm rather proud of the QR code labels -- you know we're the Cougs!
A reporter and photographer were welcomed to the museum for an interview of what we do here at the MT James Entomological Collection. We had a discussion on the importance of museum collections, the extent of our material, and our collaboration with the Washington  Bee Atlas. Always neat to see our museum mission out in the public eye!
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Well-deserved recognition for an extensive beetle collection, Dr. Paul Schroeder & family

7/24/2024

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The family of WSU professor and avid beetle systematist, Dr. Paul Schroeder, has donated his expertly-curated Coleoptera collection to WSU.
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Image by Seth Truscott, CAHNRS, WSU. Laura Lavine (Entomology Dept chair), Elizabeth Murray, and Alice Schroeder, wife of the late Paul Schroeder.
The MT James Entomological Museum has received the Schroeder collection of beetles. Dr. Paul Schroeder was a professor in biology and had a long-standing interest in beeles, collecting them from around the world. WSU reporter Seth Truscott discussed the amazing scientific contributions with the family in articles that were published in WSU Insider and CAHNRS News, titled "Passion for nature lives on in zoologist's bequest."

Over 140 drawers of beetles came to WSU -- they are well-curated and most are identified to species. This makes an immediate valuable impact to the collection.
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WSU museum team hosts the WA Bee Atlas

5/28/2024

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Come one, come all! Volunteers for the Washington Bee Atlas came to WSU to learn how to collect, pin, and identify bees. Karen Wright of WSDA and Shannon Collins of the Phoenix Conservancy served as organizers and hosts along with the WSU's Elizabeth Murray, Joel Gardner, and Silas Bossert.
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We had over a dozen volunteers come for the Friday - Sunday event. Many of them showed up at my doorstep Thursday night! We had some hardy campers braving the Palouse wind and springtime showers. But they got out to several sites around the area. Some volunteers were 'newbees' and were just learning to collect. Others were experienced collectors and were practicing identifying their catch to genus or species. 

The MT James Entomological Collection will be receiving the Bee Atlas specimens after they are submitted by the volunteers and are processed and recorded through Karen Wright and her team at WSDA. 
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Some of the Bee Atlas volunteers camping in tents, cars, and RVs on the Palouse.
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People really like bees: update from the WSU Insight article on bee evolution

2/2/2024

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Last summer, I wrote about the experience of being interviewed by our CAHNRS (College of Ag + more) media writer, Seth Truscott. He's informed us that the news article ended as #7 across all WSU stories in the top research coverage of 2023.
It's great -- lots of people are interested in bees! And it turns out that lots and lots of people are interested in whisky, too ... that was the #1 research article coverage out of WSU.

The summary on the WSU site (screenshot and link to the right) states: 
​Despite the occasional sting, bees are probably one of the most helpful to humans providing crop pollinating services and honey. Given that sweet deal, it isn’t surprising that a new discovery in the bee-origin story, led in part by WSU entomologist Silas Bossert, captured the human imagination. The story branched out from archeological curiosity to reach more than 200 mainstream outlets.
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MS student job advertisement: pollinators

1/19/2024

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Silas Bossert and Elizabeth Murray have an opening in the lab for a master's student project. This will involve lab work, field work, conservation, and pollinators. Please see the description in the pdf & email [email protected] with questions.
click here for a pdf of the position description
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Congrats to Hannah Cook

11/17/2023

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The Entomological Society of America's annual meeting was held in National Harbor, Maryland. Shout out to Hannah, 2nd year PhD student. She got 2nd place for her talk in the 10 Minute Student Paper Competition in the SysEB: Genomics session. Hannah's talk title was "​Bee Genome Evolution: Uncovering Variability of Genomic Dark Matter".
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We have a logo.

8/24/2023

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Is this great or what? We have a beautiful logo for our Bees of the World NSF grant.
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Our Bees of the World project members have been wanting a logo for a while, since the grant started in October of 2021. We tested out some things that never seemed quite right. But then, we were able to get Ad Fisher on board with us! They did a great job working with all of our suggestions and opinions, and we are happy to say it's been nailed down to this clean yet info-filled design. Thanks, Ad!

Now our Bees of the World team (which encompasses people from four different institutions) can use this in communications, websites, and presentations. 
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New publication on bee origins in Current Biology, and the media coverage surrounding it

7/28/2023

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New article out by Almeida, Bossert ... [more authors including the NSF Bees of the World gang, Danforth, Murray, Branstetter, and Freitas]​ ... & Pie. "The evolutionary history of bees in time and space", in Current Biology.
Comprehensive study of bee phylogeny (using UCEs), age, and biogeography. What is pretty cool is that it serves as a comparative treatment to Charles Michener's classic 1979 paper on bee biogeography. Michener posited that bees originated in Western Gondwana, but it hasn't been adequately tested using molecular phylogenies and new methodologies. Another thing that I think is amazing -- the molecular dating. I'm talking 185 bee fossils used -- and not just node calibrations! Silas did the dating analysis, using a fossilized birth-death model (in the program MrBayes), meaning he assigned fossils to clades and not to a specific node or branch.
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Highlights of the article
  • Bees likely originated in Gondwana before the breakup of Africa and South America
  • The geological history of southern continents impacted early bee diversification
  • Northward range expansions in the Tertiary impacted modern bee distribution
  • Southern Hemisphere origin of bees parallels the histories of many plant groups

We had some media attention on this, too! Kind of interesting to see how that process worked. Our College of Ag, CAHNRS, put out an article and then WSU Insider published it a couple of days later. Several internet sites picked up the story put out by WSU, such as Popular Science. Silas and I did a radio interview for Northwest Newsradio. Silas was interviewed by NPR! 

WSU distributes their news articles (like ours) on EurekAlert, so that other sites can access them for content. Some internet sites put their own 'creative' spin on it -- like the one that was titled "A team of paleontologists find fossils that could radically change what is known about bees" on Crast.net. Hm.... not exactly. This paper didn't deal with describing new fossils, but it was the most extensive use of fossil data on a bee molecular phylogeny. 
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Elizabeth, Silas, and Felipe -- three WSU authors on the paper. Silas was co-lead author. Screenshot above from the WSU CAHNRS News site, but clicking on the photo link will take you to the WSU Insider article.
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