Bees (Hymenoptera : Apoidea) of Far Northern Ontario and Akimiski Island, Nunavut

University of Toronto Scarborough

Acronym: BUGS

Description

These specimens are bees that have been gathered from Ontario's Far North as a part of the Far North Biodiversity Project with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, and from Akimiski Island Nunavut. Akimiski specimens were gathered at the research station therein. Most of these bee specimens are bycatch from traps intended to catch biting flies. This dataset is to published in an upcoming article in the Journal of the Entomological Society of Ontario.

These specimens are bees that have been gathered from Ontario's Far North as a part of the Far North Biodiversity Project with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, and from Akimiski Island Nunavut. Akimiski specimens were gathered at the research station therein. Most of these bee specimens are bycatch from traps intended to catch biting flies. This dataset is to published in an upcoming article in the Journal of the Entomological Society of Ontario.

Geographic Description

Ontario's Far North and Akimiski Island, Nunavut.

Data quality

Expert taxonomic review and DNA barcoding were used to ensure that the species identification of each specimen caught was correct.

Methods

Trapping in Ontario’s Far North — Two ecozones of Ontario’s Far North were sampled: The Boreal Shield ecozone and the Hudson Bay Lowlands ecozone. Bees were caught in pan traps (blue, yellow, white), Malaise traps, Nzi traps and by hand netting. Malaise traps catch many flying insect taxa, and do not tend to attract one taxon over another, while Nzi traps target blood feeding Diptera such as Tabanidae (Figure 2.2). Each trap was set up in the same array at every site. One Malaise trap and one Nzi trap were located near the field camp, where the field personnel set up their tents in a location coinciding with areas that flying insects were likely to be found (e.g. a clearing in a wooded area, a streambed). A single Nzi trap was deployed

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similarly to Malaise traps. These traps were deployed for 12 hours/day for the five days spent at each site. The collecting head, a plastic jar at the top of the trap which the insects crawl into and are killed, contained 80% denatured ethanol (Ringrose 2014). Specimens were removed at the end of each day and stored in 500-ml sample jars in 70% ethanol.

Nine pan traps were also deployed near the field camp arrayed in an ‘X’ shape; traps were 2.25 m apart from each other in a 11.2-m diameter plot (Gan et al. 2009) and pans of different colours (white, yellow and blue) were placed randomly within the array, to ensure that pans would not collect bees in an unbiased fashion. Pans were charged with RV antifreeze as a killing agent and emptied on the same schedule as the Malaise trap. Upon emptying each day, specimens from different coloured pans were grouped together by colour. All FNBP insect collections are stored at the David Beresford entomology lab, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada.

Akimiski Trapping — Sampling on Akimiski Island, Nunavut, was conducted at a single site using the same trapping method as with the FNBP. The research station on the island was a small, fenced-in area where the trapping took place, approximately 50 m x 60 m (Figure 2.3). The primary vegetative cover was spruce and various shrubs on the inland side of the camp, and flat shoreline (Vezsenyi et al. 2019). All traps were deployed for 12 hours at the research station. Occasional collecting with hand nets took place at other sites on the island on an ad hoc basis. It was difficult to deploy pan, Malaise, or Nzi traps away from the fenced-in field station due to the common occurrences of polar bears on the island, which presented an element of danger to the collector, and would destroy traps. Akimiski Island specimens were placed in sample jars with 70% ethanol.

Citation

Vizza K (2021): Bees (Hymenoptera : Apoidea) of Far Northern Ontario and Akimiski Island, Nunavut. v1.1. University of Toronto Scarborough. Dataset/Occurrence. https://doi.org/10.5886/kfhmpn

Rights

To the extent possible under law, the publisher has waived all rights to these data and has dedicated them to the Public Domain (CC0 1.0). Users may copy, modify, distribute and use the work, including for commercial purposes, without restriction.

Digitised records

Metadata last updated on 2022-04-14 19:35:43.0