Tracking down pumpkin pollen & Autumn photos

The temperature has been dropping steadily since the last weekend, when I was helping my friend searching for male pumpkin flowers with viable pollen.  We traveled to two different farms outside of Ottawa, but we only got about three small vials worth of pumpkin pollen because of the recent frost.

One of the farms we visited was Saunders Farm, a popular place to go during autumn with all of its pumpkin- and Halloween-related activies.  We got to go on a hayride to look for flowers.

Burrowing Halictus bees on campus

During lunchtime, my labmate rushed into our office and announced that my supervisor was looking at many Halictus sp. bees outside the building!  I initially thought of the Colletes bees I saw more than three weeks at Gatineau Park, but these bees were just searching for nests and not mating.  I quickly stopped eating, grabbed my camera, and asked my labmate to show me the way.

Indeed, there were at least thirty bees flying on a little patch of soil just outside the building, and my supervisor apparently saw a parasitoid wasp earlier as well.  I can't believe I did not see any of this while walking by this morning.  I then sat on the ground (with my back turned to all the people walking by during lunchtime) and started taking pictures of bees burrowing into the soil.

I have many photos of bee butt sticking out in the air.

Enjoying springtime in the Arboretum - pollinators visiting squill flowers

I went to the Fletcher Wildlife Garden and the Arboretum today hoping to photograph bees visiting flowers, since I know that Siberian squill (Scilla siberica) should be flowering by now and they usually get visitation from pollinators (based on last year's observation).

At the Arboretum, there were many birds species.  Here are some of them:

Male Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) keeping an eye out for his female companion.

Soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis) pollen grains

This is what I am working on nowadays - counting soapberry (Shepherdia canadensis) pollen grains from the female stigmas that I collected over the summer.  We used the staining technique as described in Beattie 1971.

Here are some images of the crushed stigmas and the pollen grains on it.  Searching for literature, the only images of S. canadensis pollen grains was presented in Pellatt et al 2002 (see Figure 4).

Female stigma with pollen grains.

Image of pollen grains enlarged.  The length of one pollen grain is about 37 micrometers.  Photo taken with Nikon Coolpix S4100 through the light microscope.

Reference:

Beattie, A.J. 1971. A technique for the study of insect-borne pollen. Pan-Pacific Entomologist. 47:82.

Pellatt, M.G., Mathewes, R.W., and Clague, J.J. 2002. Implications of a late-glacial pollen record for the glacial and climatic history of the Fraser Lowland, British Columbia. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. 180: 147-157. Link.