The adult fly is small, up to 3 mm, has a dark brown body, small head and its legs and wings are comparatively long, looking like a mosquito. These insects feed on decaying organic matter and fungi. They are often found in greenhouses. Their larvae are up to 6 mm long, white, slender and legless, with a black head and smooth semi-transparent skin which reveals the contents of the digestive tract.

Sex determination in Sciara is a different mechanism. Sciara basically has 4 pairs of chromosomes 3 pairs of autosomes and one pair of allosomes. Some special chromosomes called limited chromosomes are present in certain stages. The zygote... [more]

Osmia lignaria, commonly known as the orchard mason bee or blue orchard bee, is a megachilid bee that makes nests in reeds and natural holes, creating individual cells for its brood that are separated by mud dividers. Unlike carpenter bees, it cannot drill holes in wood. O. lignaria is a common species used for early spring fruit bloom in Canada and the United States, though a number of other Osmia species are cultured for use in pollination.

This dataset is not published - please follow Toronto/Ft. Lauderdale conditions of data re-use.

Text credit:[more]

Contarinia nasturtii, the swede midge, is a small fly, the larvae of which infest brassica plants, causing twisting and distortion of the leaf stems and foliage including death of the growing point in seedlings, or damage to developing flower heads. It is native to Europe and Turkey, and has been introduced into North America where it is regarded as an invasive species.

Text source: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contarinia_nasturtii)

This dataset is not published - please follow Toronto/Ft. Lauderdale conditi... [more]

Eufriesea is a genus of euglossine bees. Like all orchid bees, they are restricted to the Neotropics. All species range from entirely to at least partially metallic (the face and/or tegulae), tho... [more]

Tribolium castaneum, the red flour beetle, is a secondary pest of stored grain. It has emerged as a premier genetic model organism for studies of development and pest management. A robust RNAi response at any life stage has enabled functional studies of all live stages covering processes from development to physiology. In terms of genetic and transgenic tools including genome wide RNAi screening, T. castaneum is an insect model second only to D. melanogaster.

T. castaneum is a cosmopolitan pest of wheat that is easily reared in the laboratory on a diet of whole wheat flour supplemented with 5% yeast. At ... [more]

Dufourea novaeangliae is a solitary ground-nesting bee that lives in the eastern U.S. The range of these bees is presumably limited by the availability of its only known pollen source, the pickerel weed (Pontederia cordata). This is an aquatic freshwater plant, and thus D. novaeangliae nests are often found in sandy soil near ponds and streams [1]. Most female D. novaeangliae build a single nest in a season, with the offspring over-wintering as prepupae in a cocoon [2]. In the spring, males emerge approximately one week prior to females [2], and they patrol pickerel weed flowers or nesting aggregations for recep... [more]

The alfalfa leafcutting bee, Megachile rotundata F. (Megachildae) is a Eurasian solitary bee species that was inadvertently introduced to North America sometime before the 1940s. By the mid 1950s, M. rotundata had become established in the farming regions of western United States. With the discovery of M. rotundata’s pollination impact on alfalfa seed production, early efforts to increase its populations near alfalfa fields were undertaken a few years later. Currently, M. rotundata is the most intensely managed solitary bee species in the world and is surpassed only by the honey bee for its economic impact. [more]