Last few days of the course

The second half of the course (Feb 26 to Mar 1) was dedicated to bees. We learned and received a lot of resources, although the identification keys for bees are either too old or too complicated for us to identify the bees as easily as we'd liked. Nonetheless, the instructors from the Packer Lab are extremely helpful and knowledgeable, and are in the process of making bee identification much precise and accurate, e.g. for the genus Megachile.

I didn't take too many photos for the remainder of the course, but here are some:

A list of the most common genus in the family Apidae.


Went outside during lunch break on the second last day. This is the Central Experimental Farm.


Snowy weather for the majority of times here in Ottawa.


Where the course was held.

This afternoon, on our last day, we had the opportunity to tour the Hymenoptera collections in the building.

A collection of bumble bee nests. The nest in the bottom left corner was from Ellesmere Island high up in the Arctic Circle. Amazing!


More collections.

On the desk was a map of Canada, and in front of me was Yukon, the place I will be in less than 3 months.


History of CNC.

My first time videotaping using the Nikon S4100. The leader briefly mentioned one of the first collections from the Arctic, the Arctic Expedition.

It was snowing pretty hard today. Hope it gets better tomorrow for us to drive back to Peterborough.