This week I was back on the road as an entomologist helping with field trials in Idaho and Washington. Monday morning after a trip to the bank to deposit our fundraiser money, I was on my way to Wendell Idaho to check on the fly program I have going at a mink farm there. The mink kits are growing like weeds. When I arrived they were mixing up the food for the week. There must have been 150 five gallon buckets full of eggs and protein mixture in the warehouse. I took these photos of the black and white kits.
After the short visit to the mink farm I was on my way to Boise to spend the night before flying to Spokane in the morning. It was $500 less to fly to Spokane WA from Boise than from Salt Lake City and I was able to visit the mink farm both going and returning.
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| Australian Walking sticks on blackberrry bush in Dr. Hansen's lab |
My flight left Boise at 7:40 am and arrive in Spokane at 7:32 am, gained 8 minutes. Of course my phone got lost looking for the address of the lab so I gave back the 8 minutes gained plus another 20. I was going to Spokane to visit with Dr. Laurel Hansen and to start a wash off study with our Demand CS product vs. Bayer's Suspend Polyzone.
We ran the wash off study at the baseball diamond at Spokane Falls Community College. Here is the set up with the simulated rainfall coming from the rain gutters on the side of the building. We placed our treated boards along the base of the wall and turned on the rainfall.
The rain event lasted 20 minutes and delivered 0.3 inches of rain. We let the boards dry and took them back to the lab for a bioassay.
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| Carpenter ants being sucked up for the bio-assay |
Back in the lab on Wednesday I was able to ask Dr. Hansen about an ant photo that my friend, Elder Ward Yorgason had sent me from Bolivia. Dr. Hansen identified the ants as leaf cutter ants. I've shared that info with Elder Yorgason. (his sister used to send me weird insect photos from Mexico while she was on her mission).
Dr. Hansen's assistants had prepared 15 sets of ants by vacuuming them from a colony and placing them in 6 inch petri dishes. These were then inverted on the boards and the ants were left on the treated surfaces for 30 minutes.
As hoped, the ants on the untreated boards and the Suspend Polyzone boards were not affected when they were first placed on the boards. The ants on the Demand CS board started to run around immediately.
All the ants on the Demand CS board were dead within 30 minutes. Ninety minutes after first being placed on the Polyzone board about 20% of the ants were still alive. Demand CS obviously holds up better to rainfall than Suspend Polyzone. Can't wait to see what the results of this test are after 5 rain events.
While we were at the baseball field setting up the test I asked if they had minor league baseball in Spokane. I was told that the Spokane Indians is the local team. I checked and they were playing Tuesday evening so after we sorted the ants I drove to the ballpark to purchase a ticket for the evening. It was typical minor league baseball, lots of fan involvement, good food, and an error filled game. Spoken won 3 to 2 with the help of Boise's 4 errors.
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| Lake Coeur D'Alene |
Wednesday we were done by noon so I decided to drive to Coeur D'Alene to see the lake. I learned that there are about 700,000 people that live in the area between Spokane and Coeur D'Alene. The lake is beautiful and surrounded by cabins of all sizes and descriptions. On the way back to Spokane I was surprised to drive by the Spokane LDS Temple. So on this trip I drove past 11 LDS temples (Timpanogos, Draper, Oquirrh Hills, Jordan River, Salt Lake City, Bountiful, Ogden, Brigham City, Twin Falls, Boise, and Spokane).
Thursday morning I was up early for a 6 am conference call with Greensboro. That lasted 6 hours, then I was off to lunch at Pizza Hut and a flight from Spokane back to Boise. From Boise I drove to Twin Falls and was in my hotel room by 8:30. Friday morning I was back at the mink farm to change the monitoring cards and to make an application of the fly granular bait. Then I drove home. It was a long and eventful week for the entomologist.
