When I first started beekeeping five years ago, I had the idea of making a small display of pinned specimens of a honey bee side-by-side with a yellow jacket to take to Tristen’s school (he was only 5 at the time) to show people the difference in these two insects.  At some point this was going to get out of control as things tend to do with me.  I had never pinned an insect before having only been able to poke myself on occasions with pins.  At one point I even looked up on-line some short videos on how to pin insects, but I never got around to really committing myself to pinning any insects.   In the spring of 2013, I attended the “University of Maryland Native Bee Workshop” put on by the “PollinaTerps” (I love that name) and heard Sam Droege speak.  Sam is the US Geological Survey Native Bee expert.  Well after the meeting I talked with Sam about volunteering in his lab in Beltsville Maryland collecting, washing, drying and pinning bees.  It wasn’t long before I was spending several hours a week in the lab pinning over 500 bees a week.  So now I was to the point where I felt that pinning some honey bees and yellow jackets would be a simple thing to do.

Now to the part of the story on how this got out of control.  I have my bees in my back yard and I have 6 more hives at a friend’s house in PG County as he has a two acre lot, my out apiary.  I got a call one day in late spring from my friend that he had a bunch of wasps flying around his garden and would I please come and look at them and help him get rid of them.  The first thing that came to my mind was that with what Sam Droege had taught me on catching and pinning insects, I could get some of these and add them to the bees and yellow jackets I was planning on putting together.  When I got to my friend’s house (the out apiary), he had bald-faced hornets, European hornets and cicada killers all visiting a 20 foot tall oak tree stump that he had in his back yard.  The wasps were collecting the sap from the large leftover tree stump.  Well things were well under way to getting out of control.  I answered an email on the MCBA listserv from Debbie Pappas asking if someone would come over and remove a bald-faced hornet nest from her back porch and I took her up on that.  Now I started thinking that I could get some of the more common bees and the larger and more common wasps all pinned up that that would be even more fun.  So in the end, I spent most of the summer running around collecting bees and wasps for my display and enough even for multiple displays.  I spent many days in my out apiary collecting wasps, honey bee drones and workers.  I drove out to the eastern shore one day to pick up 16 honey bee queens from Bee George (thanks George!) who was requeening most of his hives at the time.  I spent one day driving out to Maria Rojas’ farm house in Poolesville to collect some not to happy paper wasps from her barn (thanks Maria), I also picked up some more European hornet there.  I spent some time standing over trash cans at Lake Needwood Park and at Wheaton Regional Park collecting yellow jackets (that was kind of awkward explaining that to people passing by).  I was asked to leave Brookside Gardens in Wheaton one day when I went in and was collecting some male carpenter bees from their collection of sedum plants (sorry Brookside Gardens).  One day in August, I caught some “Hover flies” when collecting bees for Sam Droege and thought that they, being bee mimics, would be good to add to the collection.  So in the end I had four types of bees (honey, sweat, bumble and carpenter) and five types of wasps (yellow jackets, paper wasps, bald-faced hornets, European hornets and cicada killers) and two types of flies (hover and a parasitic one).  I ordered up some insect display boxes and a couple of nice wooden display boxes and I was off to the races.  I made three really nice boxes up of specimens, one for me (the best specimens thank you) one for Brookside Nature Center (where MCBA beekeeping group meets, I belong to their group too) and one for Watkins Park Nature Center (where the BUMBA beekeeping group meets).  So now I have 12 of these black cardboard boxes for taking to any talk I do and for letting anyone else who would like to borrow one to take to a talk.  So if you are interested in getting one of these display cases for a week or so, just email me at timmcmahonbeekeeper@gmail.com and I will get one of these to you for a while.  I can’t tell you how much fun I had getting all these insects together.  I did get stung twice by some bumble bees when I was netting them, but that is the price you sometime pay when working with bees and wasps.  In the end, I love it when things get out of control!