Weekly Reflection

This reflection is for the week of April 4th, 2011.

Last Wednesday, I took some images of tracheal mites. In the process of doing so, I noticed one trachea that was particularly packed with mites.

So here's the deal with tracheal mites. They live in the main trachea of honey bee workers, sucking on their blood through the tracheal walls and also mating and reproducing in there. Sometimes it gets crowded. These pests can be very destructive to the worker bees.

Here were the original images:

Using the mighty tablet (and Photoshop), I made three images into one!

Conveniently, there was an air bubble surrounding the trachea on the microscope slide. It acted as nice guide for trimming away the background (it looks like a thick black line around the trachea). The final is a tiff with transparency. Can you see all of those mites?

Here's an image with a mite outside of the trachea, so you can see it more clearly.