CITIZEN SCIENTISTS

The Wild Pollinator Count is on again this spring, and a flower-filled garden like KerinLea Hall’s garden at Cressy (above) would be a good spot for some counting as it’s buzzing with insects.

Count organisers, who are based at the University of Armidale, are asking people to observe and count pollinating insects on plants in gardens, bushland or even the local park. Watch a flower for 10 minutes and count how many insects visit.

Upload the numbers recorded for each observation to the Wild Pollinator website (wildpollinatorcount.com) where there’s also an online resource of photos to help identify insects. At the end of the count period individual counts are tallied to build up a picture of pollinators in Australia.

This is the 11th count since the project began in 2015 and, while honeybees remain the most commonly observed pollinating insects, there are many others recorded, including native bees, flower wasps and butterflies.

The count finishes tomorrow, but will be on again in April 2020. There is also a wild pollinator count running year round on iNaturalist for those who want to continue to document their observations with images of insects and the flowers they visit.

Quiz answers 1. True Grit 2. High 3. CoCo Vandeweghe 4. Saturn 5. Botswana 6. Theresa May 7. Walt Whitman 8. Euro 9. True 10. Drambuie 11. Four 12. 18th and 19th 13. Sherlock 14. Rowing 15. Machu Picchu 16. Florence Nightingale 17. Wax 18. Nicaragua 19. 20. False 21. A staircase 22. Dick Cheney 23. Painting 24. Geelong Cats, Collingwood Magpies 25. Peru 26. Kylie Minogue 27. United States 28. Eight 29. Berlin 30. Season one

Target word answers: DEFENSIVE, define, dene, dense, dine, endive, envied, even, evened, fend, fiend, find, fine, fined, need, neve, nide, seen, seine, send, seven, sine, snide, vein, veined, vend, vendee, vine.