It's busy out there, very busy! It does not help that it is raining. But it is also very busy in here! At the moment I have two work experience students working in one of the cocoon ends sorting some British material and hopefully extracting localities data to be used for UK recording schemes. Two of our regular visitors have just turned up and they are straight away into recurating their group that they are working on (Agromyzidae). And I am about to spend the afternoon identifying British mosquitoes. We have to quickly identify the mosquitoes that we sampled last year that have been in the deep freeze ever since. This will involve us identifying them on blocks of dry ice or freezer blocks to ensure that there is no degradation of any virus DNA that the mosquitoes may have. I believe that we are going to have cold fingers

There was a meeting here last week for European Mycetophilidae several  workers. It is always nice to meet the people whom you have been corresponding with for a while and read their papers. Its a good opportunity to swap material and receive back material. One of them has donated some fungus gnats from Japan and I have spent the whole morning so far trying to enter all of the new data onto our database. I have only entered four of the 13!! oh well. The database is a vast and complex interactive entity (it is living!!) which is full of oddities that were migrated across when we finally combined all of the many different museum databases. This means though that we are cleaning constantly and so even the small entries may take time due to all of the different modules (i.e. the taxonomy, the collection event, the site where collected) that need to be edited. When you look at the online database you will find many mistakes- we are trying to clean but we have millions of entries .

We had another Dinosnores at the weekend and I think that it went well. It was very different this time as I was by myself and I had no one else to abuse on stage! I don't think that the first talk was as good but i loved the next two. The kids were really quite knowledgeable and this always helps. We had some live stick insects this times as well, the Anisomorpha, which exude and sometimes squirt a nasty toxin. They didn't do anything this time though... The male was attached to the adolescent female waiting for her to mature - a strategy that I am glad that most humans don't employ.....

And I am doing a Nature live tomorrow on my favourite insect (fly ) I have a soft spot for the robber flies but I keep getting sidetracked. I will get out some of the new material from French Guiana as i think that people will be amazed at how much variety there is in a sample.

Oh and I have a very large number of volunteers for my new material .