The Southern Hemisphere is quickly approaching winter, meaning a slow down in all invertebrate life. The decrease in invertebrate activity is directly linked to the decrease in temperature and shortening of day length, which causes most invertebrates to go into either diapause or hibernation in order to avoid the unfavorable conditions of winter. The lower invertebrate abundance and species diversity during winter makes it interesting for entomologists, but also very challenging as we lack our required daily dose of bugs to find. However, we all know that the insects require this "resting" period to maintain strong and healthy populations, thus all we can do is exercise patience while we wait for spring to come around again.

Late autumn and winter is when I focus on other projects, such as learning how to program, automation and my insect collection curation. This year I'm focusing on attaining accurate and naturally simulated living conditions for my ant colonies. I'm aiming to achieve this goal through the use of a Raspberry Pi Pico to control the heating, lighting, cooling and ventilation of the enclosure. At this stage I have successfully automated the heating aspect, and I will soon be adding the cooling and ventilation as well. To see more on this make sure not to miss this week's video!

Weekly Top Shot: Painted perfection!

The latest Video: It's still the same as last week!

What the Buzz about Bee Day?

Today is #WorldBeeDay and we discuss whether you should even care about bees. We look at bees and their likeness to see what the Buzz around Honeybees, wild ...