Bee painting 1

In order to track certain individuals during my experiments, I need to be able to identify each bee. This is impossible by just sight as they all look about the same. One of the common ways to do this is by marking with special bee paint, seen here in nail varnish pots. Depending on the marking complexity, you can either directly brush the bee with the nail varnish brush, or you use a yellow pipette tip to make smaller markings. 

It's a very difficult skill but I seem to be improving quite quickly! The trick is to wait until the bee is feeding for a few seconds and then you should be able to paint it without it making too much fuss. However, it doesn't always work and some bees brush off the paint, some run away after only a few dots, and some turn out to be males (which can't be used in the experiments). I have also had a few near misses with angry bees, where they have stung the pipette tip (but thankfully I let go before they reached me). 

What I feel should take a couple of hours is currently two days work, and I think I'll be doing the same until the end of the week. By then, I should have almost all the bees marked, as well as an idea of which ones are the best foragers (there's no point in choosing a lazy bee for your experiment as waiting for it to visit all the flowers will take too long). 

I'm hoping that my plants will be flowering by Monday so that I should be able to start experimental set up and hopefully get some results by the end of next week! 

P.S. notice the bee in between the nail varnish pots trying to escape!