As a favor to an entomologist acquaintance of ours, a colleague and I recently agreed to try trapping a few specimens of western pine beetle in the mountains near Beaver, Utah. I went out there yesterday to set up the traps. You can see one in the picture above—a series of black funnels with a white cup on the bottom. The trap itself wasn't too complicated, but the bait confused me. Actually, the bait was ready to go, and all I needed to do was install it, but I did too much thinking and ended up spilling the bait all over myself. Because beetles are baited with a pheromone, I was thinking that I probably smelled pretty good to female beetles for the rest of the day. (It is nice to have something going for you.) On the other hand, screwing up the bait may mean that our traps remain empty. Of course, the area that we selected for beetle trapping had only a single beetle-killed tree, so I'm not sure the beetle population would have been high enough to fill our cup anyway. We'll give it a week and see what happens.
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