BBKA Forum

Would anyone else considering taking the Microscopy Assessment this year like to share challenges and solutions? Or indeed someone who has gone through this in the past?

Here are a couple of things I'm grappling with...

Now that the syllabus says "No naked flames to be used in the Assessment", how are you heating the wax to embed your bees for dissection?

For the anatomical slides, what is a suitable method of staining sperm and the hypopharyngeal gland ?

Bob

'Morning Bob, welcome to the forum.
You can use a soldering iron to melt the wax - assuming you have it in a suitable dish first; Although they get over 200C to melt solder which is a bit warm, you can move the tip around in the wax in a few moments to make a puddle in which to place the object of your attention.

battery powered soldering iron works great, less than a tenner on auction sites.

Thank you for the welcome and the soldering iron suggestions.

I have obtained a sub-£10 battery-powered soldering iron and this works really well. You have to hold down a button for it to heat, so you can regulate the temperature and a get a nicely controlled pool of wax.

For a more regulated temperature I would use a water bath, using a small boiling ring, or simply hot water from a kettle. I have made for myself a heated plate using an incandescent bulb held in a wooden box (slightly smaller than a shoe box size) with a sheet of heavy aluminium for the top, extending out to give graded hot areas, for warming slides to dry after mounting, but also good for keeping the wax molten.

For drone sperm (and lots of other staining) I'd look up Giemsa stain and how to use it. It's a mixture of three different stains so is very versatile.
£5 for 5gms on flea bay will keep you going for a lifetime.
Another stain is Silver Nitrate which is often used for sperm staining. Look up methods via google. Again fairly cheap reagent.
I used the soldering iron method for meting small pockets of wax to embed bees in.