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We collect a lot of bees and ants in my lab. With such tiny creatures, you have to have a specimen in hand for accurate identification. And those specimens become a forever-record of a research project.
These specimens make our work traceable: Anyone can come behind us and make sure we identified them correctly. Or, if some future ant biologist realizes that what’s now called one species is actually a mixture of two different species…we can go back and see which one we really had. They become a resource for other researchers who may want to use the specimens (or their DNA) to answer questions that we haven’t even thought of. We deposit examples of these specimens in museum collections, where they will stay for as long as civilization lasts.
Given all this, it’s important that our pinned specimens be perfect! But pinning bees and ants is detailed and fussy, and you do it under a microscope, where (barring fancy tech) no one else can really see what you’re doing. That makes it hard for a new insect-pinner to watch and learn, and for a veteran insect-pinner to offer real-time feedback to the learner.
We weren’t satisfied with any of the video tutorials we found online…so PhD student Michelle Kirchner made a new one. This is how it’s done!