you might want to look into biohacking communitys, avoid those primary talking about steroids, red light and nutrition and you will find the real gems.

There will be people able to help you. Those communitys are scattered deccentraly all over the web in all social media platforms.

And there are some people working on amazing projects!  

*Sigh*

Social media and I don’t get along.  I even hate Reddit, I’ll probably just keep doing research.  I’m already a member of two online communities and I don’t think I really want to be a part of any others.

@foggygoofball make a trowaway account, nobody in the biohacking community minds that. For some it is even part of security.

@genesis You seem to have some experience navigating the communities, do you have a suggestion for where to start?  I don’t have Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or telegram or anything of the sort.

What were you aiming to get from mapping the pheromones? That might change how you’d approach it.  

@squirrel i am assuming that you dont have an intimate knowledge of vespid physiology, but what im attempting to measure is a purely hypothetical signal derived from cuticular hydrocarbons (waxy substances on the surface of the thorax)which indicate a “queen like” signature.  the goal is to be able to mantain  a captive population without worrying about ‘hard coded” genetic switches triggering winter hibernation within a controlled environment.  this should ensure a robust, year round  breeding population and allow for continuous producion of viable queens for creating new colonies.

the particular chemical signature exhibits a strong correlation to fertility/infertility in yellowjackets and I’m trying to conflate the conditions surrounding the rise in this signal with succesful nest founding behaviour without diapause (hibernation).   this is going to be a multi year project, i’m hopeful that i’ll eventually be able to aquire some dna to cross refernece based on the invasive hawaiian poplulation of vespula pensylvanica which are polygynous (multiple quens) vs monogynous populations that are forced into diapause via environmenal conditions that exist locally in my region.

I know that i can build a proper spectrometry rig for basically the cost of a raspberry pi SBC and  a thermal imaging sensor.  gas chromatography might cost a little less than the thermal imaging sensors, but i’ve yet to have any good community input (though i have found couple of awesomely simple designs.)  since my last post here, i’ve been diving into the possibilty of starting a ‘hobby lab’ for arachnid phenoyping and breeding pedigree, but thats a different project entirely and i’m not sure that it has much bearing on my wasp farming.

@foggygoofball wasp physiology no, analytical biochem yes. This is really interesting, do you have captive wasps already?

@squirrel Nice!  I’m a window washer by trade, never went to university and have no connections in academia, basically all of my questions that I’ve emailed to entomologists, molecular biologists, and chemists have gone unanswered.  I’ve been hoping that someone might take notice. 

To answer your question, no I do not have a captive population yet.  I thought that I had a vendor lined up that could offer me various wasp foundresses, but he quietly removed all mention of them from his website after I emailed. 

I’m currently in r&d mode.  I’ve designed and 3d printed some novel traps for live capture and isolation of wild queens, and I’m currently working through the research literature (what little there is) surrounding captive rearing conditions. 

It’s still going to be a couple of months before I am able to actually go out and capture my specimens, spring doesn’t really come here until April.

What type of biochemistry do you typically work on?

*Edit* Do you have any experience in designing PCR primers?  Again, this is for the tarantula project, not the wasps.  Do you have experience working with chitinous samples?  From what I’ve read they tend to be rife with polysaccharides and PCR inhibitors.

@squirrel I hope I didn’t scare you off by telling you I was a window washer, I had industrial rope access and high angle rescue certificates, and I also have a background in electrical engineering.

Anyway, I’ve narrowed down my choices.  I think I need to build a scanning monochromator.  By using a single indium gallium arsenide point sensor and a halogen bulb combined with a couple of precision apertures and a stepper motor to rotate my diffraction grating, I think I can get good enough data for reflectance spectrometry on live specimens.

Not at all, I just don’t visit the forums all that often 😉 

These days I make educational resources, unfortunately I have a degenerative autoimmune condition and had to take (very) early retirement from research. Before was a matrix biologist, so purification, structural analysis and function mapping proteins.

@squirrel I am sorry to hear that.  I know how hard it can be to live with a disability as I was similarly forced into early retirement due to a degenerative autoimmune condition.

Is your insurance taking care of you?  I’m lucky to be supported by my wife, since the Canadian government doesn’t actually give me enough money to live.

My financial situation is rather tight, but I’m trying to figure out a way to finance an Oxford nanopore system for in house genomics work.  I think that I’ve got a solid plan for verifying COI barcodes against ribosomal DNA, but in order for it to work I will need the long read capacity nano pore can provide (~6 kilobases).   Perhaps once I get enough specimens and data collected I could identify some reliably conserved regions that wouldn’t be susceptible to the NUMT problems that plague COI techniques and streamline the approach, but for now there simply isn’t a wide enough range of data across different genera.

It turns out that tarantulas have a fascinating genetic makeup, most have a genome about double the size of a human’s, and sex determinism is based solely on the x chromosomes (some species can have up to 13 distinct pairs of X’s!)  Since they build up large numbers of mitochondrial transcriptions in to non coding regions of the genome, traditional COI barcodes will often over or under represent the diversity of various species.  I only have experience in a high-school bio lab, but I’m always eager to get hands on.

All that is an aside though, that’s my winter project for the next few years.  I’m fully engaged in the wasp rearing now.  Just waiting for a day when my children and my body will permit me to do an hour of woodworking in order to get a few nest boxes built.

@foggygoofball luckily I’m in the UK so we have what’s left of the NHS (which reduces medical bills) and I set up an online business so I can still work, I just had to get a bit creative about it! Keep us updated on the project!

@squirrel I’m in Canada so the medical bills aren’t the issue.   My medication costs over a thousand dollars a month, but I pay nothing out of pocket.

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